A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy
A centenary-year anthology of Mailer's most incisive writing on American democracy, edited by J. Michael Lennon and John Buffalo Mailer. Drawn from his novels, narrative nonfiction, essays, interviews, letters, speeches, and talk-show appearances, published and unpublished.
A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy is a centenary anthology of Mailer’s political thought, edited by J. Michael Lennon and John Buffalo Mailer and published in 2023 by Arcade Publishing (a Skyhorse imprint; ISBN 9781956763591; 312 pp.). Taking its measure of Mailer’s “grand theme,” the book gathers his “most incisive — and sometimes remarkably prophetic — commentary on American democracy and what must be done to safeguard it,” drawing on both published and unpublished sources: the great works of narrative nonfiction and the novels, but also essays, interviews, letters, speeches, and talk-show appearances. It includes remarks on every president from Franklin Roosevelt through George W. Bush, and correspondence with several.
The volume frames democracy as Mailer’s lifelong subject — from The Naked and the Dead to his last work — and reads his attention to “soft fascism,” racism, poverty, and a “complacent citizenry” as a standing diagnosis of the American experiment’s fragility.