ICYMI: Earlier this month, it was announced that Harper Lee would publish a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird, her sole publication in 55 years. The public reaction to that announcement has ranged from delight to skepticism to indignation - with good reason. At 88 years old, Casey N. Cep weighs in for the New Yorker here. See also: a look into the scandal and lawsuit regarding TKAM in Vanity Fair. Also at the New Yorker: Joyce Carol Oates reviews The Whites by Richard Price, writing as Harry Brandt. “The Whites doesn’t race so much as lurch and careen along, often with little breathing space between frenetic action sequences, emotional outbursts, and sheer surprise..." It is a crime novel of "conscience, fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity" Oates says, suggesting a crime drama that is more than just a crime novel.
On the Millions, a look at the last lines of classics including Philip Roth's Everyman: “He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing. Just as he’d feared from the start.”
Mark Spitz wrote a whole book about all that is "twee," aptly titled Twee, calling the phenomenon "the most powerful youth movement since Punk and Hip-Hop." (A movement characterized, for those who don't know, by "owl-shaped cushions, bird-print textiles and kitten ephemera...Cotton candy, gluten-free acai berry cupcakes and quinoa fritters with probiotic goat yoghurt," and more, reviewer Anna Katharina Schaffner says.) Read the review at the Times Literary Supplement.
Plus Zadie Smith on diary-keeping for Rookie Magazine. Her verdict: Don't.