Harper Lee’s New Cover Revealed

People magazine today revealed the cover of Harper Lee’s new novel, Go Set a Watchman. It is the author’s second novel, the first since the publication of her debut, To Kill a Mockingbird, in 1960. From People:

Publisher HarperCollins, planning for a hit, will print two million copies for the book's July 14 publication date, a spokeswoman tells PEOPLE. 

HarperCollins president Michael Morrison says the book jacket was meant to evoke Mockingbird's now-iconic look: "It draws on the style of the decade the book was written." 

You can see the full piece here. We’ve previously written about Go Set a Watchman here and here.

New Sherlock Holmes Story Discovered

We’re beginning to wonder what on Earth could be next! First the To Kill A Mockingbird prequel was announced. Then a lost Dr. Seuss manuscript was uncovered. And now… a long-forgotten story by the master himself, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Scottish historian Walter Eliot has discovered a short story written by the Sherlock Holmes creator in support of a rebuilding project for a local bridge. From The Telegraph:

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.

Mr Elliot, a great-grandfather, said: “In Selkirk, there was a wooden bridge that was put up some time before it was flooded in 1902. The town didn't have the money to replace it so they decided to have a bazaar to replace the bridge in 1904. They had various people to come and do things and just about everyone in the town did something.”

What Doyle did was donate “Sherlock Holmes: Discovering the Border Burghs and, by deduction, the Brig Bazaar” for inclusion in a book of short stories published to conceder with the fund-raising bazaar.

You can read the complete story here.

New Dr. Seuss Book to be Published in July

February 2015 may well be remembered as the month lost works by beloved authors were uncovered. First, of course, the To Kill a Mockingbird prequel, due now to be published this summer. And now a lost (or perhaps discarded) Dr. Seuss book, What Pet Should I Get? has come to light. From The New York Times:

Random House has announced the publication on July 28 of “What Pet Should I Get?,” the story of a brother and sister searching for the newest member of the family. The manuscript had been in a box that was discovered in the home of Dr. Seuss (otherwise known as Theodore Geisel) in the La Jolla section of San Diego, shortly after his death in 1991, and set aside. In 2013, Mr. Geisel’s widow, Audrey, and longtime secretary and friend, Claudia Prescott, went through the box and found the nearly complete manuscript, along with other unpublished work. 

Cathy Goldsmith, the vice president and associate publishing director at Random House’s children’s publishing division, said in a statement that the book seems to have been written between 1958 and 1962, given that the brother and sister are the same as those in “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish,” which was published in 1960.

Are there ethical questions at play here? Probably. Theodore Geisel, who wrote as Dr. Seuss, was a notorious perfectionist. It’s quite possible this is a work he did not think was up to snuff, else why not submit it to his publisher himself? Though when he died in 1991, Geisel had left no specific instructions regarding the fate of What Pet Should I Get, we can’t help but be reminded of the debate which sprung up prior to the publication of the Nabokov novel that was ultimately published as The Original of Laura in 2008.

Whatever the case, a brand new Dr. Seuss book will be published in July, the first one since Oh, the Places You’ll Go! came out in 1990, the year before the author’s death.

Harper Lee’s Controversial Second Novel

Her debut novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1960. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most beloved books in the English language. It sells in excess of three quarters of a million copies each year. And yesterday’s announcement that a second novel by Harper Lee would be published this coming summer nearly broke the Internet.

Go Set a Watchman will be published July 14. HarperCollins will come out of the gate with two million copies and we no longer have to wonder what the top selling book of 2015 will be.

Lee announced through her publisher that she wrote what will be her second published novel before the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird. She said the book, “features the character known as Scout as an adult woman, and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout.”

The announcement, as well as the author’s quotes regarding publication of the book, came entirely through her publisher.

“I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn’t realized [the original book] had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years.”

Since Lee is now 88 and somewhat infirm, suspicions of foul play have been loud and pointed. “Be Suspicious of the New Harper Lee Novel,” a Jezebel headline advised.

Tonja Carter, Harper Lee’s attorney since Alice Lee retired at the age of 100, acknowledges that the author—who was left forgetful and nearly blind and deaf after a stroke in 2007—often doesn't understand the contracts that she signs. "Lee has a history of signing whatever's put in front of her, apparently sometimes with Carter's advice," Gawker reported last July. 

“The existence of ‘Go Set a Watchman’ was unknown until recently, and its discovery is an extraordinary gift,” said HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham in a statement.
But was the gift willingly given?

But in an interview with Vulture, Lee’s editor, Hugh Van Dusen, asserts his confidence that all is as it should be.

Vulture: It’s easy to be skeptical about her willingness to publish a book that had been forgotten for 55 years.  

Van Dusen: You mean was she unwilling to have it published? No, no, no, no. We would never do that. She’s too valuable an author to fool around with that way. It would never happen. We wouldn’t dare do that.

Further, Van Dusen seemed confident that there would be no breaking news on the topic. “I don’t think anything there's going to be anything more revealing than what's in the press release,” he told Vulture.

Considering Lee’s reclusive reputation, her advanced age and just how venerated Mockingbird has been, it seems unlikely we will ever truly know if Lee had intended for this lost manuscript to be found and published.

What we do know: those of us who have loved To Kill a Mockingbird are going to enjoy seeing Lee’s vision of a fully grown Scout. And those of us who love books can rejoice, as well. Any time a book-related announcement can raise so much dust we are reassured that reading and book culture are alive and well.

Dueling Jungle Book Films Get Ready for Production

There are currently two film projects based on The Jungle Book, the collection of short stories written by Rudyard Kipling, in pre-production. Andy Serkis, who played the CG-created Gollum character in the Lord of Rings films, will direct a live action Jungle Book for Warners.

The stories center on Mowgli, an orphan raised by wolves. The boy befriends Baloo the bear, Bagheera the black panther and the ferocious tiger Shere Khan. The stories were originally published in magazines in 1893 through 1894.

Disney is working on a live action Jungle Book which is currently in casting. Jon Favreau (Elf, Iron Man) will direct. From The Hollywood Reporter:

Putting Serkis in the director's chair is outside-the-box thinking, yet not far-fetched. Jungle Book would be Serkis' feature directorial debut after directing second unit on Peter Jackson's The Hobbit movies, the third of which Warners is due to open in December. Some of the shoots involved the creation of elaborate and lively action sequences. For example, Serkis helmed the widely praised barrel-chase sequence in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. 

Jackson entrusted Serkis with the job after Serkis developed a command of CG technology through his acting work not only in LOTR, but also in Jackson's King Kong, Steve Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin and the new Planet of the Apes movies.

And Warners’ version, at any rate, is likely to be a darker Jungle Book than those whose experience of Rudyard Kiping’s stories are based on Disney’s 1967 animated classic.

Warners is sticking closely to the source material, which is darker than most people know, seeing as how most of the knowledge of the material is distilled from Disney's 1967 animated classic. The Warners movie hopes to explore life-and-death issues and be true-to-life in portraying animal behavior. Hiring Serkis, who has pioneered lifelike animal behavior and characterization with his performances in such movies as Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is seen as an important first step.

Tolkien Translation of Beowulf Will Debut in May

Though the manuscript has been talked about for years, J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of the old English epic poem Beowulf will be published in May.

“The translation of Beowulf by J.R.R. Tolkien was an early work,” says the author’s son, Christopher, who also functioned as editor of the book, “very distinctive in its mode, completed in 1926: he returned to it later to make hasty corrections, but seems never to have considered its publication.”

But as special as a Tolkien translation of Beowulf would be, there’s more to this book even than that. “This edition is twofold,” says Christopher, “for there exists an illuminating commentary on the text of the poem by the translator himself, in the written form of a series of lectures given at Oxford in the 1930s; and from these lectures a substantial selection has been made, to form also a commentary on the translation in this book.”

And another treat, yet: the book also includes the story “Sellic Spell.” Written by Tolkien, it suggests “what might have been the form and style of an Old English folk-tale of Beowulf, in which there was no association with the ‘historical legends’ of the Northern kingdoms.”

National Book Award-Winning Invisible Man Banned for “Lack of Literary Value”

There can be a great deal of power in a single voice. But is that always a good thing? The end result of a single parent’s complaint make us wonder. Here’s what happened: The parent of a grade 11 student in Randolph County, North Carolina wrote a detailed grievance to the school district about Ralph Ellison’s National Book Award-Winning novel, The Invisible Man.  In part, the grievance said:

The narrator writes in the first person, emphasizing his individual experiences and his feelings about the events portrayed in his life. This novel is not so innocent; instead, this book is filthier, too much for teenagers. You must respect all religions and point of views when it comes to the parents and what they feel is age appropriate for their young children to read, without their knowledge. This book is freely in your library for them to read.

According to The Huffington Post:

As the school district's policy requires, the parent's complaints lead to votes on the school and district levels. Both held that the book should remain available to students in the library. However, in a 5-2 vote, the school board voted to ban the book, with one board member, Gary Mason, stating, "I didn’t find any literary value."

Mason's blunt assessment however, runs counter to decades of intellectual criticism of the novel, which won the 1953 National Book Award for fiction, beating out Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and John Steinbeck's East of Eden.
In 1995, writing for the New York Times, Roger Rosenblatt praised the novel as a masterpiece.

"Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," which won the National Book Award in 1953, was instantly recognized as a masterpiece, a novel that captured the grim realities of racial discrimination as no book had, " Rosenblatt wrote. "Its reputation grew as Ellison retreated into a mythic literary silence that made his one achievement definitive."
Including the book in its list of 100 Best English Language Novels since 1923, Time literary critic Lev Grossman also expressed great admiration for Ellison's work.

And now students perusing their school libraries in Randolph County, North Carolina won’t have access to the book. How can that be seen as anything but sad?

Seven Lessons From One of Literature’s Leading Ladies

Kiera Knightley starred
in the 2102 film based
on Tolstoy’s novel.

As the world settles in to celebrate Leo Tolstoy’s 185th birthday, The Huffington Post takes a close look at Anna Karenina, one of the late Russian author’s masterworks, and pulls out seven life lessons. Slightly thin in spots, but throughly fun. They observe, for instance, that “Romance and true love do exist!” (Thank goodness! We were wondering.)

Anna Karenina is, obviously, a tragedy. A woman risks everything she has, including her own life, in pursuit of true love, and the pursuit is ultimately fatal. But there is a good deal of happiness amid the traumatic happenings of this book.

You’ll find these and other lessons here.

Remembering “The Lottery”

I wasn’t very old the first time I read “The Lottery.” Maybe 12 or thereabouts, having stumbled across the story in a University English literature textbook my older brother had left behind and unattended at a time when my family was only just discovering that nothing was safe around me: I’d read anything that wasn’t nailed down.

All these years later, I can see the scene so clearly in my mind. As clearly as though I first read the story yesterday.

A fine early summer day. A comely town square. A rich and gorgeous portrait of life in a bucolic American town. And something’s going on. Something mysterious and intense. You can feel it ripple through that clear, middle American summer’s day. It’s gorgeous. The sun touches your shoulder. People know each other and are friendly. Yet you can feel the vibration of fear; faint at first, but getting stronger the more deeply into the story we travel.

Writer’s Almanac tells us that “The Lottery” was published in The New Yorker on this day in 1948. It would take some time before author Shirley Jackson’s life was ever the same.

Hundreds of readers wrote to the magazine, many of them wanting to cancel their subscriptions because they were so upset by the story. Jackson later wrote: "On the morning of June 28, 1948, I walked down to the post office in our little Vermont town to pick up the mail. I was quite casual about it, as I recall — I opened the box, took out a couple of bills and a letter or two, talked to the postmaster for a few minutes, and left, never supposing that it was the last time for months that I was to pick up the mail without an active feeling of panic. By the next week, I had to change my mailbox to the largest one in the post office, and casual conversation with the postmaster was out of the question, because he wasn't speaking to me."

Part of the trouble, it appeared, was that she hadn’t taken many pains to hide the fact that, in many ways, the town she’d set the story in was based on her own Vermont burgh. But it was more than that, too. Jackson’s writing was so vivid and the story so calm yet escalatingly awful, it was hard to look away.

A month after the story came out, Jackson answered the outcry with a response in the July 22, 1948 edition of The San Francisco Chronicle. It’s possible it was not her intent to fan the flames with her words, but that isn’t obvious when you read them:

Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.

Jackson was prolific and produced an astonishing body of work considering the fact that she died at just 48. She wrote six novels, a handful of children’s books and scores of short stories. Even so, that relatively early story nudges out all of her other work, though her two last novels -- The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) -- brought her a fair amount of acclaim. But nothing would have the impact and influence of “The Lottery,” still fresh and breathing all these miles beyond.

Book Titles That Weren’t

As almost everyone knows, a rose by any other name is still a rose. Even knowing that (and knowing it well), if someone were to try to tantalize you with a book called Something That Happened, what would you think? Well, you probably wouldn’t think about the literary mastery of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Something That Happened just lacks that essential snap, does it not?

There are more examples of classic books with original titles that missed the mark. Many of them.

The working title of Jane Austen’s beloved Pride and Prejudice was First Impressions and Frances Hodgson Burnett magical children’s classic The Secret Garden was originally entitled Mistress Mary. (“Mistress Mary Quite Contrary...” Any connection?)

Good old Philip Roth apparently had not one but three preferred titles for the book that would become Portnoy’s Complaint, none of them good: The Jewboy, Wacking Off, or A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis. (Clearly, the editor responsible for the name change should be thanked for that one. If nothing else, one can’t imagine Wacking Off would have had quite the same panache on the shelf.)

The heavy lifting here was done by the Huffington Post who dug up 24 classic books that ended up with titles mostly pretty far from the ones originally intended. You can see all of them here.

JD Salinger Film Will Solve Mystery

Catcher in the Rye author, JD Salinger, has long been a source of myth and mystery. But one of the big questions remaining about the reclusive author, who died in 2010 at the age of 91, is this: what’s taken Hollywood so long to get to the story of hiss life?

Whatever the reason, the silence has ended: with the upcoming release of an indie documentary called Salinger, the gates of privacy and silence are being lifted and it seems as though you can expect to be hearing a lot about Saligner from here on in, at least for a while. From The Guardian:

Called simply Salinger, the film is the brainchild of Shane Salerno, who has spent nine years writing, producing and directing the project, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money. The move is a major shift in career for Salerno, best known as a writer of mainstream blockbusters such as Alien vs Predator: Requiem and Armageddon.

But the promise of lifting the lid on the life of one of America's most revered writers has proven a massive lure to Hollywood. Salinger has been bought up by independent film mogul Harvey Weinstein after he reportedly saw a private screening of it at 7.30 on the morning of the Oscars. Even though the screening did not apparently include all of the film's most confidential revelations, he snapped it up immediately. 

In fact, so impressed have its backers been with what Salerno and his team have uncovered they are also releasing a TV show based on the documentary and have struck a deal with publisher Simon and Schuster to bring out a book called The Private War of JD Salinger.

Taking a page from his subject’s style, filmmaker Salerno is stoking the fires of public interest by not giving interviews and not giving air to rumors of previously unknown about affairs Salinger might have had and unpublished books he might have written. However, when the book was announced, , Salerno said that the “myth that people have read about and believed for 60 years about JD Salinger is one of someone too pure to publish, too sensitive to be touched. We replace the myth of Salinger with an extraordinarily complex, deeply contradictory human being.”

Harper Lee in Fight for Mockingbird Rights

Sad to hear that 87-year-old Harper Lee is having to sue to regain control of the rights to her classic and only novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. Reuters reports:

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "To Kill A Mockingbird," Harper Lee, on Friday sued her literary agent, claiming he tricked her into assigning the copyright on her book to him.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Manhattan against Samuel Pinkus, the son-in-law of Lee's long-time agent, Eugene Winick, who had represented her for more than 40 years. When Winick became ill in 2002, Pinkus diverted several of Winick's clients to his own company, the lawsuit said.

To Kill A Mockingbird was published in 1960 and has sold over 30 million copies world wide.

Jack Kerouac: Cover Designer

When his first novel, The Town and the City, was published, Jack Kerouac was unhappy with the cover his publisher had graced it with. He was unhappy enough, in fact, that he put pencil to paper and sketched out his ideal design.

Kerouac’s design was rough, but deeply detailed and included not only his own image, but his last name repeated several times on the pavement of the road included in the drawing.

The author liked his sketch so much that when he sent the manuscript to to be considered by A.A. Wyn in 1950, he included his sketch along with the following note:

Dear Mr. Wyn:
I submit this as my idea of an appealing commercial cover expressive of the book. The cover for “The Town and the City” was as dull as the title and the photo backflap. Wilbur Pippin’s photo of me is the perfect On the Road one … it will look like the face of the figure below.
J.K.

Apparently, Wyn wasn’t impressed enough with either the illustration or the work to take it on because the book wasn’t published until five years later when it was published by Viking who really should have take Kerouac’s advice. The cover they stuck on the book must have made Kerouac despair. Even so, if you want one of those ugly first editions, plan on spending around $7000. Double that -- or more -- for a signed copy.

Just can’t get enough of On the Road? The film was adapted for the screen in 2012 and directed by Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries, Dark Water). The movie version was produced by Francis Ford Coppola and stars Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams, Danny Morgan, Alice Braga, Elisabeth Moss, Kirsten Dunst, and Viggo Mortensen.

Pride and Prejudice at 200

Two hundred years after Jane Austen penned Pride and Prejudice, the regency comedy of manners has never had a larger following or longer legs.

If you weren’t sure about this before, you can be now. Yesterday marked the 200th anniversary of the book’s publication date and the international outpouring for Austen’s most famous creation was breathtaking.

If you’re an Austen fan, you can still jump on the bus. The Guardian offers up some new takes on a classic here, while The Huffington Post mixed it up fast and slick here and Slate gives us the very best of the many, many P&P covers here. The Vancouver Sun’s Pete McMartin tries to explain the enduring qualities of this now-ancient story while both the BBC and the CBC try to answer the same question with video segments.

It’s possible that The Telegraph gave the whole issue of P&P’s 200th the widest berth, with a piece called “30 great opening lines in literature,” that merely begins with Austen. Though, upon consideration, the first line of Pride and Prejudice doesn’t go very far to explaining the enduring nature of this classic: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

And so we dance.

A Birthday for Brontë

Anne Brontë, the youngest of the famous Brontë sisters, was born in Yorkshire, England, on this day in 1820. According to The Writer’s Almanac:

She was meek and more religious-minded than Charlotte or Emily and little is known about her life compared to the lives of her sisters. As a child, she was closest to Emily, the youngest of her older siblings. Together they played with toys, made up stories about them, and began to write them down. They created an imaginary world called "Gondal," which provided the setting for the first of Anne’s known poems, "Verses by Lady Geralda" (1836) and "Alexander and Zenobia" (1837).

Though less modest of the sisters’ publishing efforts get the most play, Anne poetically participated in an early example of self-publishing. The efforts of the sisters were not well rewarded.

In the summer of 1845, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte found themselves at home together without work. They decided to put together a book of poems they'd written over the past five years. They told no one what they were doing. Anne and Emily each contributed 21 poems and 19 were Charlotte’s. The sisters agreed to publish under pseudonyms and Charlotte arranged publication of The Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell through Aylott & Jones, at the authors' expense. The cost of publication was 31 pounds, 10 shillings—about 3/4 of what Anne's annual salary had been as a governess. On May 7, 1846, the first three copies of the book were delivered to the Brontë home. The book received three somewhat favorable reviews and sold a total of two copies.

After the lackluster sales of their book of poems, the talented trio turned their efforts to writing novels. And though Anne would see some success, she was always overshadowed by her older siblings.

The sisters turned to writing novels. Charlotte’s The Professor and Emily’s Wuthering Heights reflected both Gothic and Romantic ideas. Anne was more of a realist and began Agnes Grey—based on her experience as a governess—with the words, “All true histories contain instruction.” 

The three manuscripts made the rounds of London publishers for a year. In the meantime, Charlotte wrote and published Jane Eyre (1847). Two months later, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were published, in December of 1847. Most of the reviewers' attention was given to Wuthering Heights and the wildly successful Jane Eyre.

Still, it was as a novelist that Anne would receive her widest recognition and her second novel, 1848’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was a success right out of the gate, though it would also bring controversy.

The heroine, Helen Huntingdon, leaves her husband to protect their young son from his influence. She supports herself and her son by painting while living in hiding. In doing so, she violates social conventions and English law. At the time, a married woman had no independent legal existence apart from her husband. It was later said that the slamming of Helen Huntingdon's bedroom door against her husband reverberated throughout Victorian England. 

In the second printing of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë responded to critics who said her portrayal of the husband was graphic and disturbing. She wrote, "Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers? O Reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts—this whispering "Peace, peace," when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience."

Anne Brontë died of tuberculosis in May 1849, a year after Emily’s death.  “While on her deathbed,” says Writer’s Almanac, “Anne’s last words, whispered to Charlotte, were, ‘Take courage.’”

The Writer’s Almanac, a terrific resource, is here.

American Classics to be Replaced With How-To Manuals

Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird will be replaced in US classrooms by 2014, according to The London Telegraph. And what will replace them? Non-fiction texts aimed at getting students ready for the workplace. From The Telegraph:

A new school curriculum which will affect 46 out of 50 states will make it compulsory for at least 70 per cent of books studied to be non-fiction, in an effort to ready pupils for the workplace. 

Books such as JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird will be replaced by "informational texts" approved by the Common Core State Standards.

Suggested non-fiction texts include Recommended Levels of Insulation by the the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Invasive Plant Inventory, by California's Invasive Plant Council.

The piece is here.

Before Vampires Sparkled

Abraham “Bram” Stoker, the Irish writer who created Dracula in 1897, was born 165 years ago today. Though we try to keep our eyes on birthdays, this one was particularly difficult to miss as it’s been commemorated by Google doodle.

Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847 and though he wrote a dozen novels and armloads of short stories, it is his fifth novel, Dracula, for which he is most remembered.

Since everyone knows that Google is actively engaged in taking over the world, it’s no wonder at all that clicking on the doodle takes visitors directly to Google Books where you can surf all of Stoker’s novels or learn a bit more about this very interesting author.

Fiction: The Little House Books: The Library of America Collection by Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Caroline Fraser

In 2012, books are easy and everywhere. They are downloadable and sometimes disposable. And even while the world goes mad and the book world rocks on its heels, there has never been a time where the entire planet has been more literate. And I can’t imagine there’s ever been a time when we talk about books quite this much.

Into this climate of literature that is easily and inexpensively available, books that are beautiful and special begin to make more and more sense. Some publishers are answering this call, producing lovely and precious hardbound versions of books that will likely mostly sell electronically.

Over the past few years, The Library of America has been picking up steam in bringing to market an increasing number of books so lovely and well thought out they seem precious. The nicest of these I’ve seen has been the recently published collection called The Little House Books, which of course brings together all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novels that focus on that familiar Little House on the Prairie as well as some related writings. Included in the collection are: Little House in the Big Woods (1932); Farmer Boy (1933); Little House on the Prairie (1935); On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937); By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939); The Long Winter (1940); Little Town on the Prairie (1941); These Happy Golden Years (1943), and the posthumously edited and published The First Four Years (1971).

Published in a charmingly bound two-volume set, The Little House Books includes a newly researched chronology of Wilder’s life and career and some historical notes.

Missing, from my viewpoint, was an essay by editor Caroline Fraser, that might have offered contemporary comment on the work she has here bound together. Other than that, The Little House Books offers another opportunity for those who loved these books as children to gift them beautifully to a new generation of readers. ◊

Linda L. Richards is the editor of January Magazine and the author of several books.

Fiction: The Sea Is My Brother by Jack Kerouac

First, let it be understood that Jack Kerouac’s first but-until-now-unpublished novel, The Sea Is My Brother was never actually lost. And, having never been lost, it can not now be found. Kerouac himself never tried to get the novel published. In fact, by all accounts, he didn’t really think much at all of the work. In Kerouac by Ann Charters, she quotes the author as saying that the book was “more an example of handwriting than of a novel.”

Though all of this may be true and, in fact, probably is, The Sea Is My Brother is still a worthwhile journey if for no other reason than to visit with proto Kerouac and see the embryonic writer -- a 21-year-old merchant marine when he wrote the book, 14-years-before On the Road -- struggling with the style we would later come to identify him by. And struggling here as much with ideas as with getting them down, something we see again and again in the prose.

Slowly, now, Everhart began to realize why life had seemed so senseless, so fraught with fully lack of real purpose in New York, in the haste and oration of his teaching days -- he had never paused to take hold of anything, let alone the lonely heart of an old father, not even the idealisms with which he had begun life as a seventeen-year-old spokesman for the working class movement on Columbus Circle Saturday afternoons.

Read in isolation, I can’t imagine that anyone would think The Sea Is My Brother is a terribly good book. And one wonders if Kerouac would have cringed to see it in bookstores and libraries now, alongside the more cleanly crafted works he would later create in a style that would come to be all his own. That said, for his admirers and students of his style, the book is a worthwhile read, if for no other reason than to spot the glimmers of the manic genius he would later release with such skill.

Fiction: Jane Austen Made Me Do It: Original Stories Inspired by Literature’s Most Astute Observer of the Human Heart edited by Laurel Ann Natt

If we are at the zenith of Jane Austen-inspired hysteria, then Jane Austen Made Me Do It (Ballantine) is its nadir. Not the mania or madness of the Austen-inspired zombie stories popular late in the last decade or even the gentle Austen-solved mystery stories more recently come to the fore. Jane Austen Made Me Do It is Austen as applied right now.

The publication of Jane Austen Made Me Do It is intended to loosely mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Sense and Sensibility. It features the work of a few authors very well known to those who write in Austenland, as well as a few known to everyone. In an introduction, editor Lauren Ann Nattress explains:

The short-story anthology contains twenty-two contributions exclusively commissioned from popular and bestselling authors who have excelled in fiction inspired by Austen or other genres and who greatly admire her talent. Each will readily admit, “Jane Austen made me do it!”

And so we have the work of Stephanie Barron, Lauren Willig, Adriana Trigiani, Maya Slater, Jo Beverley and more than a dozen others contributing, as the subtitle promises, “original stories inspired by literature’s most astute observer of the human heart.”

With billing like that, really, what more need be said?