I smell a bunch of vultures circling what they assume will soon be a corpse to pick it clean to the bone.
well, i'm not going to feed them. mockingbird was an OK book, but why all the fuss all these years and above all why all the fuss now? carson mccullers was no balzac or trollope (meaning not very prolific) but for me everything she ever wrote (well, maybe not her grocery lists) was better than anything harper lee ever wrote, and i sincerely doubt this book could change that opinion.
Unknown Sherlock Holmes Story Unearthed - Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...sing-sale-unearthed-lying-attic-50-years.html An unknown Sherlock Holmes story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for a fundraising sale as been unearthed after lying in an attic for almost 50 years. The 1,300-word tale starring the famous detective is part of a book of short stories created to help raise money to build a new bridge in the Scottish town of Selkirk after it was destroyed in 1902. The famous author, who visited the area often, decided to help locals by contributing to the 'Book o' the Brig', which was sold at the three-day bazaar two years later. Walter Elliot, 80, was given the 48-page pamphlet by a friend more than 50 years ago and had forgotten about it until recently after looking in his attic. The two-and-a-half page story, titled 'Sherlock Homes: Discovering the Border Burghs and, by deduction, the Brig Bazaar', is about the sleuth and Watson's trip to the town. It is believed the story - about Holmes deducing Watson is going on a trip to Selkirk - is the first unseen Holmes story by Doyle since the last was published over 80 years ago.
If you want to start with the new canon stuff it is all coming out now. Since Disney purchased Star Wars, the old extended universe is gone and they are starting anew. There are two novels already out. A New Dawn which ties into the Rebels animated show and Tarkin. There's also Heir to the Jedi which was released today. It's first person perspective of Luke Skywalker right after A New Hope takes place.
geez, that dust cover looks straight out of the 50's. cool and lame at the same time; makes the whole thing seem like a mockingbird ripoff. which is probably all it is.
2015 Pulitzer Prize awards... Fiction: "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr (Scribner) Drama: "Between Riverside and Crazy" by Stephen Adly Guirgis (Theatre Communications Group) History: "Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People" by Elizabeth A. Fenn (Hill and Wang) Biography or Autobiography: "The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe" by David I. Kertzer (Random House) Poetry: "Digest" by Gregory Pardlo (Four Way Books) General Nonfiction: "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History" by Elizabeth Kolbert (Henry Holt) Music: "Anthracite Fields" by Julia Wolfe (Red Poppy Music/G. Schirmer, Inc.)
We must have lost it in a crash, for verrily, well I remember the gallumpfery of our hubble bubble regarding the reading habits of Colonial Williamsburg. Some of you fart-catchers asserted the paucity of materials available to the populace, others said you were rabbit catching with a dead ferret to even guess. But now, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vaul..._books_sold_at_the_williamsburg.html#comments A list of books available through the post c1760... The "History of Greenland" a bit of a surprise, though not quite so much as "The History of California."
Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’ May Have Been Found Earlier Than Thought - N.Y. Times http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/03/b...ound-earlier-than-thought.html?ref=books&_r=0
Go Set a Watchman gets a trailer. Too funny... http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/go-set-a-watchman-harper-lee/1121151104?ean=9780062409850 Halfway down the page...
The Wall Street Journal and the Guardian published the first chapter of Go Set a Watchman today. The fanboy/girl community is going to take a hit... http://www.wsj.com/articles/harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman-read-the-first-chapter-1436500861 One of the things that has always confounded me about To Kill a Mockingbird is that Harper Lee was early on quoted, you know, when she was still talking about Mockingbird, as saying that it was a love story. I've never seen that, but this opening chapter shows that maybe this could be where that conceit comes from.
Slate's Katy Waldman thinks Go Set a Watchman is beautiful. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat...s_excerpted_a_week_early_in_the_guardian.html Without giving away any spoilers, I would respectfully disagree.
Michiko Kakutani, N.Y. Times book review: Harper Lee's ‘Go Set A Watchman’ Gives Atticus Finch A Dark Side http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/b...atticus-finch-a-dark-side.html?ref=books&_r=0
We've already given this Watchman book way more time and trouble than it's worth. At least the lawyers and such could have waited until Harper Lee was dead before desecrating her.
I've been looking forward to this book more than the Harper Lee book... Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross MacDonald. I knew from their writings and their biographies that they were fans of each others work. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/b...on®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0 Ms. Welty and Mr. Millar {MacDonald's real name} would meet on several occasions — once in her hometown, Jackson, Miss. — but they seemed to speak most directly through the written word. They commiserated about bad reviews. (“Just let this man go to hell & forget about him,” Ms. Welty advised.) They traded notes on authors. (Mr. Millar dismissed “The Wings of the Dove” as “a novel of seduction told in purely cerebral terms.”) They spoke rather too much about birds and rather too little about politics. They dedicated books to each other. They raided each other’s unconscious. “I dreamed I was sending you the dream I was dreaming,” Ms. Welty wrote, “and that as I dreamed it you got it.” ... No troths are officially pledged, but in the fragments of an unfinished Welty story (astutely appended by the book’s editors, Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan), a woman’s feelings for her married lover come to the fore: “He was looking down at my own face as if he saw something to love there. ... He was putting his arms around me. I had no power to keep me from holding just as tightly to him. I was embracing him, too.” As for Mr. Millar, he once said to Reynolds Price: “You love Eudora as a friend. I love her as a woman.” This is a more emotive register than the dry-ice Lew Archer would have permitted himself, and you can sense in these pages that Archer’s creator is either finding new colors or rediscovering old ones. Mr. Millar had a Ph.D. in literature and, as he admitted, “I left the academic world to write popular fiction in the hope of coming back by underground tunnels and devious ways into the light again, dripping with darkness.” The darkness was deeper than he knew. As early as 1976, he was repeating himself from letter to letter, struggling to complete a screenplay and copping sheepishly to “a failure of the memory function.” By the time Alzheimer’s disease had been diagnosed in 1980, the darkness was near complete. Ms. Welty continued to correspond until it became clear that no one was listening. She saw him once more, briefly, before his death in 1983, and outlived him by 18 years. History, in this context, is written by the letter writers, so it’s no surprise that the villain in this thwarted-love scenario is Mr. Millar’s wife, Margaret, shown variously opening his mail, tying him down with demands and hurling abuse at him even in the throes of his dementia. Because Margaret Millar was also an accomplished writer of psychological thrillers, we can be grateful that the book’s editors give her a chance to speak, too. In a 1982 letter to Ms. Welty, she recounts the ordeal of having her husband brought home after wandering in traffic. “He asked me if I had a room for him, he didn’t know who I was or my name. He had never done such a thing before, and of course has no memory of it. I wish I could forget as easily.” And then this coda: “A long, cold summer. Some of the locals are blaming Reagan, which is meteorologically unsound but psychologically tempting.”
I have only read the first chapter (which wqas released on the internet) and the reviews. I do plan to read it. Mockingbird is one of my favorite books and as an attorney, Finch of course is how we like to see ourselves. Yet I love the idea he was made human. Mockingbird was basically Scout as a little girl idolizing her father (though as I recall, the novel's opening suggests that Scout and her brother were many years later discussing the events). Watchman takes place with Scout as an adult, who has now seen more of the world and can see her father in a more adult light. And maybe the fact that Atticus, the good and decent attorney and father supporting the Klan IS the real story. That Jim Crow was supported by people who otherwise were good and decent is one of the real tragedies of Jim Crow. Lee touched on this in Mockingbird. Think of the Ladies Missionary Society. They were genuinely concerned about helping people in what today we call "The Third World" but some were heard by Scout later at Tom's trial calling for his hanging. Or the Cunninghams in the lynch mob -- the Cunninghams were described earlier in the book as good, decent, church going, hard working folks, not at all like the Ewells. Yet there they are in the lynch mob, and one of the Cunninghams ends up defusing the situation. So maybe it just makes the novel and Atticus more human.
Long-Lost Fitzgerald Story Finally Published - N.Y. Times http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/07/31/arts/ap-us-book-f-scott-fitzgerald.html?_r=0 NEW YORK (AP) — A year before F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, he completed a short story about a hard-drinking writer diagnosed with cardiac disease. "And as for that current dodge 'No reference to any living character is intended' — no use even trying that," Fitzgerald warns at the start of "Temperature," an 8,000-word piece dated July 1939 that is receiving its publishing debut in the current issue of the literary quarterly The Strand Magazine. Presumed lost for decades, "Temperature" was written while the author known for "The Great Gatsby" struggled to find work in the movie business and hoped to revive his fiction career. His screenwriting contract with MGM had expired and twice in 1939 he had been hospitalized because of alcoholism. Set in Los Angeles, "Temperature" is an antic story of failure, illness and decline, common themes in Fitzgerald's work. The narrative is consciously cinematic, with such lines as "And at this point, as they say in picture making, the Camera Goes into the House." The protagonist is a 31-year-old writer, Emmet Monsen, whom Fitzgerald describes as "notably photogenic," ''slender and darkly handsome." Circling around the self-destructive Monsen are medical authorities, personal assistants and a Hollywood actress and estranged lover who gets more estranged all the time.
Is this otherwise unrelated article on the environmental roots of Frank Herbert's Dune, http://www.salon.com/2015/08/13/dun...ts_sci_fi_masterpiece_were_ahead_of_its_time/, is this tidbit: Yep, this Chilton: Absolutely amazing the number of truly great books that needed 20 or 30 publishers/editors/agents to see it before being picked up.
Also, September 15th (and this date is circled on my calendar) is the release of Brian Selznick's newest entry into the form he has created, The Marvels.
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was rejected 22 times (the novel was originally Catch-18, but he started to increase the number in the title with each rejection. That worked out well for him. Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance went through well over 100 SASE's before finally making it into print between two hard covers...
Science-Fiction Prize Is Awarded To Chinese Writer For First Time - N.Y. Times http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com...t-time/?module=BlogPost-ReadMore&version=Blog The Chinese writer Liu Cixin has won the 2015 Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel. It is the first time the prestigious prize has gone to a Chinese writer and the first time that multiple finalists were originally written in languages other than English, the World Science Fiction Society announced. The award is for “The Three-Body Problem,” which was published in English last year by Tor Books and is the 1st volume of a trilogy that has been a major best seller in China. The story, set against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, involves a secret military project that sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. The signals are received by an alien civilization that is on the brink of destruction and decides to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The English translation of the 2nd volume, “The Dark Forest,” was published by Tor in early August. The 3rd volume, “Death’s End,” is set for release next year.
Never heard of it: Sounds interesting, to I put a hold on it through the public library. I'm 12th in line... so apparently word is out, which is cool.
The Girl Who Outlived Her Creator - NPR http://www.npr.org/2015/08/27/43491...d-her-creator-salander-returns-in-spiders-web Lisbeth Salander is back. The latest book featuring the infamous girl with the dragon tattoo is being published internationally today, and will be out next week here in the U.S. But this 4th book in the Millennium series has a new author — the man who created Salander, Stieg Larsson, died before the books were published, and never had a chance to see how popular they would be. The man chosen to write the new book, The Girl in the Spider's Web, is David Lagercrantz. He's written several biographies and a novel based on the life of the British mathematician Alan Turing. But he's best known for ghostwriting an autobiography of a popular Swedish football player that was a huge best-seller in Sweden. In The Girl in the Spider's Web, Lisbeth Salander and investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist are reunited when an autistic child with an extraordinary talent for drawing and a photographic memory witnesses a murder. The plot stretches from the Silicon Valley to the coast of Sweden, and pulls in both the NSA and the Swedish security police.