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?
The Naval Academy’s Reading List for Life
What does it mean that so many faculty members at the United States Naval Academy have recommended Ayn Rand’s work on the “Reading List For Life?”
Fireproof Books
AbeBooks points to clever fireproof editions of Farenheit 451 and Stephen King's Firestarter. (Thanks Laurie)
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Get Shorty
Want your writing to have punch? Want your readers to believe you? "The five-word sentence as the gospel truth...Express your most powerful thought in the shortest sentence," Roy Peter Clark writes in The New York Times. Sorry that every sentence in this post is more than five words.
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Read Yourself Civilized
In the latest issue of The Boston Review, Elaine Scarry reviews Steven Pinker's
The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker argues that literature, by bolstering man's empathy, has lead to huge reductions in worldwide violence, a thesis that sounds dangerously close to the absurd pop-science of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal.
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Life in Letters
“To age is to understand that the powers of total recovery are gone, are no longer anticipated (except by those who, having lost their marbles, no longer know what to anticipate).” The epistolary legacy of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, and Elizabeth Bishop offers invaluable insight into the process of growing older, writes Robert Fay for The Atlantic. See also our own Lydia Kiesling on the narrative possibilities of leaked emails.
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