Mark Seal explores the ongoing legal battle between Harper Lee and Samuel L. Pinkus, the latter of whom is said to have “’engaged in a scheme to dupe Harper Lee, then 80-years-old with declining hearing and eye sight, into assigning her valuable TKAM [To Kill a Mockingbird] copyright to [Pinkus’s company] for no consideration,’ and then created shell companies and bank accounts to which the book’s royalties were funneled.”
Where’s Atticus When You Need Him?
Tilting at Political Office
"He represents a failure of empiricism — an unreliability arising not from the absence of rationality, but from the stubborn complexity of perception. This, I would argue, is precisely how the 2016 election went down." In an article for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Aaron R. Hanlon argues that Cervantes' classic provides the perfect framework for understanding contemporary America, concluding that "Don Quixote is such a player in US politics that he might as well run for office." Our own C. Max Magee read Quixote not long after founding the site, deeming it "essential to all who wish to understand 'the novel' as a literary form."
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Tuesday New Release Day
New releases this week include the much-hyped The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume I. Also out in nonfiction is President Obama's picture book Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (author of Seabiscuit), as reviewed by the New York Times, Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, and, for hip-hop fans, Jay-Z's memoir Decoded.
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Strong Misgivings
Recommended Reading: Three poems at The Rumpus by Dean Rader.
The Library of Babel
Ronni Abergel has created a library of people, where users can borrow humans instead of books on any subject. The concept was launched in Denmark in 2000 and has since spread to more than 70 countries.
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A Horror Master’s Horror Comics
Stephen King is working with Dennis Calero to publish a free, weekly eComic entitled "Little Green God of Agony." Readers can check it out on his website. Over at PopMatters, Dominic Umile looks closely at the comic’s emergence, as well as the author’s interest in the horror comics genre.
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