Harper Lee's new novel Go Set a Watchman is a bolt from the blue | Books | The Guardian Harper Lee Harper Lee's new novel Go Set a Watchman is a bolt from the blue With To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee arrived a fully fledged novelist – then after this brilliant start, disappeared from view. A second book will find many eager readers Harper Lee in 1963, a year before she stopped speaking to the press. Photograph: AP Harper Lee Harper Lee's new novel Go Set a Watchman is a bolt from the blue With To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee arrived a fully fledged novelist – then after this brilliant start, disappeared from view. A second book will find many eager readers Tuesday 3 February 2015 12.50 EST Last modified on Wednesday 4 February 2015 08.25 EST Share on Messenger Close One rarely gets a high-voltage shock in the literary world, a jolt from the blue. But the news has emerged that 88-year-old Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has discovered an earlier and unpublished novel of hers, Go Set a Watchman, and that it will be published soon.

It’s not a sequel but one that she actually wrote first. It deals with many of the same beloved characters, such as Scout and Atticus Finch, 20 years after the events that occur in her famous – and only – novel, referring back to them in passing. Apparently she submitted this first novel to an editor who suggested she might think about trying again, focusing squarely on those flashbacks to life in Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression. Lee decided this editor had a good idea, and she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird , which appeared in 1960, when the author was 34. It was a career-ending debut – but not in the usual sense. Lee won the Pulitzer prize for fiction: an astonishing bit of precocity. The novel sold extremely well and became a classic Hollywood film only two years after its publication. It has since sold millions and millions of copies and is a staple of the American school curriculum. In fact, my youngest son graduated from high school two years ago in Vermont, and he recently complained that he’d been “forced” to read To Kill a Mockingbird in each of his final six years of school.

That’s overkill, perhaps, but the book remains a model of its kind, a vivid tale that unfolds over three years (1933 to 1935) in a dusty and exhausted little village in Alabama. Harper Lee to publish new novel, 55 years after To Kill a Mockingbird Read more The story centers on Scout, a tomboy, and her brother Jem. They have a dreamy friend called Dill, who comes in the summers to stay with his aunt. Dill was loosely modelled on Harper Lee’s dear childhood friend, the writer Truman Capote . (And there have always been rumors that Capote had some hand in writing it, which seems unlikely, as the style is so very different from anything by him.) Scout’s widowed father, played by Gregory Peck in the film, is an honourable man, and a lawyer as well – a stunning coincidence. Indeed, I knew one young man who became a lawyer just so that he could stand in the shoes of Atticus Finch, who seeks justice for Tom Robinson, a local black man accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell. It’s a fairly simple novel, a tragic story of racial politics in the old south.

(And it’s especially sad that these politics still seem to haunt the US, as seen with the recent killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson .) Lee is, indeed, a gifted novelist, who seems to have been born whole, without needing to “develop” in the way most young writers do. I’ve read the novel many times, and always marvel at its stylistic force, its sensuousness, its quiet generosity (very like Dickens) – each character is so fresh and distinct. I also admire its narrative fluency, as events give way to events in a seamless fashion. The voice of young Scout combines with the voice of the older Scout, with the tension between past and present quietly maintained, employed to render irony and perspective. The child’s innocence is always undermined, however quietly, by the elder Scout’s edge of wry wisdom. This dual perspective makes it possible for a child of Scout’s age to have some grip on the unfolding horror of the trial at hand. Harper Lee returns with a new novel – let the alternative title race begin Read more Lee has a gift for weaving the fabric of smalltown life, with tangible period details, an acute feeling for the colors, the sounds, the smells of everyday living.

There is a sly humor in Scout’s voice that has always been attractive for young readers, and the stark racial drama of the rape and the palpable injustice of the community has very little in the way of ambiguity. This book intentionally teaches a blunt lesson, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a relief, in fact, that the novel is so well written, with a persuasive subtlety that, more than half a century later, still can move a jaded reader like myself, who might prefer to read Toni Morrison or William Faulkner (I do) but still finds something to love in To Kill a Mockingbird, which I first read in high school only a few years after its first publication. Lee remains a woman of mystery. Not unlike JD Salinger , who disappeared from view and ceased to publish novels after a brilliant start, Lee simply stopped giving interviews to the press in 1964. She ignored the literary world entirely, going about her business, whatever that was, for the rest of her life. Of course she had no need to make a living: To Kill a Mockingbird made her rich.

However, it’s important to note that not every writer feels compelled to write book after book: I dip my eyes shamefully to the floor as I write this. But each writer is different, and there is simply no point in saying that one way is better than another way. It’s important to celebrate a fine American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which has introduced half a century of American students to the pleasures of fiction. It has always offered countless schoolteachers an opportunity to discuss the issue of racism and injustice in the United States with young people who may not have had the opportunity to think directly about such things. It seems unlikely that the publication of another novel by Harper Lee at this stage will make a big difference to anyone, although it will certainly find curious eyes, like my own, eager to read it. And why not? Lawyer says author is a ‘strong, independent woman’ upset about reports of being duped and having to defend her decision-making about long-awaited sequel Published: 8 Feb 2015 Go Set A Watchman · Harper Lee · Book Review Go Set A Watchman is a mixed bag of nostalgia and end-of-childhood awfulness · Book Review · The A.V.

Club Share Tweet Harper Lee’s new novel, the much anticipated and much-written about Go Set A Watchman, is a difficult book. A lot of questions still surround it. Is it actually a sequel to Lee’s classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird, or just a curious appendix to that work? Did the writer, who famously vowed never to publish another book after her first, even want it published, or was its release the product of a literary executor taking advantage of the author’s advanced age? Maybe the most pressing question for readers is: How should one read this book? Some commentators and critics believe that Watchman should be read as a singular work, apart from Mockingbird, in spite of the fact that both books deal with the same characters and settings, some 20 years apart. This approach is tempting. Atticus Finch, one of the most beloved characters in the history of English literature, who in Mockingbird appears as a stalwart champion of racial equality, is depicted in Watchman as an aging segregationist, paranoid about the civil rights movement. For many, tracking this drastic change is less like watching a character develop than a sort of literary trauma. To put as much distance as possible between the two Atticuses has immediate appeal.

As an admirer of To Kill A Mockingbird, I hate to see as great a character as Atticus Finch undergo such a bizarre upheaval. Likewise, I understand and sympathize with the argument that the events of Go Set A Watchman cannot be thought of as contiguous with those of the timeline of Lee’s other book, that it offers an alternate timeline with totally different characterizations. But having read Watchman, I don’t think this argument holds water. The raw material of the two books is the same, though what Lee does with that material in either book is drastically different. Like all the characters from To Kill A Mockingbird that reappear here, the Atticus Finch depicted in this new book is the same one we all read about in middle school. The mannerisms, the speech patterns, and physical attributes all correspond. When the reader learns that Atticus’ views have changed with age, those changes are clearly drawn within the same personality he’s always had. The way Go Set A Watchman overturns the mythos of Atticus Finch is as deliberate a plot point as anything that happens in To Kill A Mockingbird. In other words, this is a sequel, even if it wasn’t originally written as one.

Read by itself, Go Set A Watchman is a good, if somewhat conventional, book about a woman coming to terms with the illusions of her childhood. But read in the way I’m suggesting, as a sequel, this is a heartbreaking tale, much sadder than the author could have possibly intended. Lee no doubt wrote Go Set A Watchman meaning to disenchant the legend of a certain father’s goodness, the subject of the book’s first few chapters. What Lee actually achieves, by way of the dubious publication of this book, is almost to undermine goodness itself, or at least one of the all-time classic American moral archetypes. The book involves Scout Finch, now grown and going by her given name, Jean Louise. She is a woman in her late 20s, who returns from New York to her family home in small-town Alabama to find that everything has changed. Her story is both uneventful and full of metaphor and meaning, in the way most visits home seem to be.

She reconsiders the marriage proposals of her sometime sweetheart, Henry Clinton; she fights with her snobbish Aunt Alexandra, who is given a much more central role in Watchman than she had in Mockingbird; she looks in on her old caretaker, Calpurnia; and she remembers her childhood friend, Dill, and her brother, Jem, now dead from a sudden heart attack, in flashback scenes. The real reason for Jean Louise’s visit is to check in on her aging father, Atticus, a locally famous lawyer and former civil servant. His arthritis has slowed him down somewhat and made him more fragile, but he’s the same old Atticus, ever gracious and brimming over with homespun charm. That is, until a painful revelation. Atticus figures in Jean Louise’s life in much the same way he has for generations of readers of To Kill A Mockingbird, as a paradigm of morality. “Integrity, humor, and patience were the three words for Atticus Finch,” she says during one of the novel’s many flashbacks to her childhood days.

But the unshakability of his character, and thus her own sense of right and wrong, is cast into serious doubt when Jean Louise follows Henry and Atticus to listen in on a Citizen’s Council meeting. From the same courthouse balcony where young Scout had watched her father defend a wrongly accused black man, Jean Louise now watches both Atticus and Henry sit beside a guest speaker who spews horrible, racist rhetoric. Both Henry and Atticus seemingly sit in tacit assent. Jean Louise is devastated. For the rest of the novel, she views her beloved Maycomb County through a grotesque funhouse mirror. In a most heart-breaking passage after Atticus calls her by her childhood name, she thinks to herself, “Don’t you ever call me that again. You who called me Scout are dead and in your grave.” Her anger soon turns to self-reflection. A good portion of the novel deals with a sort of inward emotional inventory. Did she repress a racism that had always been there, or did her family change over the years? At one point in this rumination, she decides she must be to blame.

“My aunt is a hostile stranger… Hank is insane, and Atticus—something’s wrong with me, it’s something about me.” Finishing Go Set A Watchman, I was left questioning how to think about the novel. Its power is undeniable, but that power also seems like the product of an unnatural experiment. Lee’s writing is in fairly good form, that is, apart from some dialogue that runs on too long and some awkward phrasings that no doubt would have been cleaned up, had the manuscript been allowed the normal editing process. (Lee’s literary executor has said in an interview that the novel required only light copy editing, which now seems another piece of evidence that the publication of the novel was a rush job predicated on a pay out.) Then again, any consideration of the novel’s quality seems insignificant in light of what the fact of it means—the death by inches of a great character, because someone decided to play fast and loose with an artist’s best intentions.

Review Roundup: ‘Go Set A Watchman’ disappoints – EW.com NPR, Harper Lee’s ‘Watchman’ Is A Mess That Makes Us Reconsider A Masterpiece by Maureen Corrigan “Go Set a Watchman is a troubling confusion of a novel, politically and artistically, beginning with its fishy origin story. Allegedly, it’s a recently discovered first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, but I’m suspicious: It reads much more like a failed sequel.

There are lots of dead patches in Go Set a Watchman, pages where we get long explanations of, say, the fine points of the Methodist worship service.” The New York Times, Review: Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’ Gives Atticus Finch a Dark Side by Michiko Kakutani “One of the emotional through-lines in both Mockingbird and Watchman is a plea for empathy — as Atticus puts it in Mockingbird to Scout: ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.’ The difference is that Mockingbird suggested that we should have compassion for outsiders like Boo and Tom Robinson, while Watchman asks us to have understanding for a bigot named Atticus.” The Washington Post, In Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman,’ a less noble Atticus Finch by Natasha Trethewey “Watchman is compelling in its timeliness.

During the historical moment in which the novel takes place, in states such as Georgia and South Carolina, legislators had begun to authorize the raising of the Confederate flag over the statehouse or the incorporation of it into the design of state flags as a reaction and opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision — thus inscribing the kind of white Southern anxiety dramatized in Lee’s novel. …. Perhaps the best thing about this book is that it gives us a way to look at history from a great distance. It has been 61 years since the Brown decision, and now we have the hindsight to see the larger impact that Lee’s characters could not quite see: an outcome, as Warren suggested — that ‘desegregation is just one small episode in the long effort for justice.'” Los Angeles Times — Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’ reveals a darker side of Maycomb by David L. Ulin “It would be a mistake to read Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman as a sequel to her 1960 Pulitzer Prize winning To Kill a Mockingbird. Despite its potential for drama, Lee develops her story through long dialogue sequences that read less like conversation than competing arguments.

There is little sense of urgency and key aspects of the narrative — Jean Louise’s naïvete, for one thing, her inability to see Maycomb for what it is — are left largely unresolved. If I’m hesitant to level such a criticism, it’s because, although Go Set a Watchman comes marketed as an autonomous novel, it is most interesting as a literary artifact.” BBC, Go Set A Watchman: Book Review by Lucy Scholes “Whether feelings of disillusionment with Atticus or Watchman’s technical flaws will tarnish the prowess of Mockingbird, only time will tell. Separating the two novels intellectually is easily done; but to invest in this emotionally is a harder task. But while Mockingbird undoubtedly remains the literary superstar, as Atticus remains its hero, Watchman presents a more nuanced study of racial prejudice.

In light of recent tensions in America – despite the passing of what we often assume is 60-odd years of progress – this is perhaps a more timely and important portrait than we would like to admit.” The Wall Street Journal, Book Review: In Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’ Atticus Finch Defends Jim Crow by Sam Sacks “On one hand, this abrupt redefinition of a famed fictional character is fascinating. Atticus’s ideas about gradualism and states’ rights were commonplace in the midcentury South—a similar attitude is expressed in William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1948), for instance. His provincial convictions and bigotries actually make him a truer, more representative figure than the bespectacled icon of To Kill a Mockingbird. Yet for the millions who hold that novel dear, Go Set a Watchman will be a test of their tolerance and capacity for forgiveness.

At the peak of her outrage, Jean Louise tells her father, ‘You’ve cheated me in a way that’s inexpressible.’ I don’t doubt that many who read this novel are going to feel the same way.” The Guardian, Go Set a Watchman review – more complex than Harper Lee’s original classic, but less compelling by Mark Lawson “A few passages exactly overlap between the two books, principally scene-setters describing Maycomb, Alabamian history and local folklore such as the comical legal consequences of the intermarriage of the Cunningham and Coningham clans. A handful of paragraphs alluding to the Robinson rape case in the 1930s (though with one crucial detail changed) were expanded to hundreds of pages in To Kill a Mockingbird. Encountering these seed sentences, it is hard not to feel some awe at the literary midwives who spotted, in the original conception, the greater literary sibling that existed in embryo. If the text now published had been the one released in 1960, it would almost certainly not have achieved the same greatness. This is not so much due to literary inferiority, but because Go Set a Watchman is a much less likable and school-teachable book.

It belongs to the genre in which prodigals return to find their homeland painfully altered; disillusioned by the “Atomic Age”, Scout has notably lost the sassy swagger that makes her childish I-voice in Mockingbird so compelling.” The Telegraph, Go Set a Watchman, review: ‘an anxious work in progress’ by Gaby Wood “Though the views that propel it are more radical than those of To Kill a Mockingbird, in genre terms Go Set a Watchman is barely a novel at all. It contains several passages of undigested shouting, of the kind a student might write in a political pamphlet. The climactic scene, in particular, involves a detailed discussion of states’ rights that will be virtually unintelligible to non-American readers. And it’s bookended, rather half-heartedly, with sentimental scenes designed to obscure this and sell it instead as a love story. Lee has not yet learned how to hide what she knows, and the book is weighed down with literary references. A cat is named after an obscure Victorian poem. Jean Louise quotes Matthew Arnold under her breath, and muses about Wordsworth as she’s mowing the lawn.

The explications of Maycomb’s mores – the most transparent vehicle for Lee’s self-described ambition to be “the Jane Austen of south Alabama” – are overworked and underpowered.” The Independent, Go Set A Watchman – book review: A rough draft, but more radical and politicised than Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird by Arifa Akbar “It does not undermine Mockingbird but it makes a reassessment of that story absolutely necessary. Set-text students may now look for signs in that book for Atticus – the racist apologist (when he forces young Jem to read aloud to the openly racist Mrs. Dubose? When he asks Scout to step into the shoes of the lynch mob who want to attack the black defendant, Tom Robinson, in jail?). In the end, this is the most shocking aspect of Lee’s novel, published 55 years after she was advised to discard it and focus on the children’s story instead – that we will never be able to read Mockingbird in the same way again, and never see Atticus in the same light again.

It is the end of innocence for that novel, and its simple idealism.” Time, Go Set a Watchman Review: Atticus Finch’s Racism Makes Scout, and Us, Grow Up by Daniel D’Addario “Watchman is alienating from the very start: Readers will be dispirited from the first chapter, with the revelation that, in the years between Scout’s childhood and her return to Maycomb, Ala., at 26, her brother Jem has died and her father Atticus has grown infirm. This burst of exposition, as with other clumsy moments of plotting and sporadic jumps back in time, works only because the characters are already famous; a romance between Jean Louise (Scout has embraced her legal name as an adult) and a newly introduced character, Henry Clinton, told in a third-person voice close to Jean Louise’s own thoughts, is less successful yet.” Related Stories Go Set a Watchman – Read & Survive “Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.” ― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman Go Set a Watchman is a novel by Harper Lee published in 2015.

After 55 years we now have a sequel to famous To Kill a Mockingbird. I read ‘To Kill a Mockingbird first time in 8th grade and I loved it, it was warm, deep and humorous even if it dealt with serious issues like rape and racial injustice. Writing was beautiful and Lee’s thoughts in that novel “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” & “I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.” can speak for themselves. Go Set a Watchman left me confused. I finished reading it only few days after Lee had passed and I somehow had very high hopes for it. In general, I enjoyed the story and I was happy to read again about Maycomb and all the characters: Jean Louise, Atticus, Jem, Calpurnia… again. However, Go Set a Watchman seemed more like a draft of a novel than actual novel. And I think that was what I didn’t like. Everyone had told me it was a “sequel” and how great it was and there was all this hype around it.

And true, writing was amazing and there were many great lines I have quoted here in this post, yet it was just a draft! There was NO depth I wanted there to be. “Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.” ― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman The fact that Lee wrote this before she wrote ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and how it is just a draft of it explains a lot. Also, in my opinion, it shows how much she developed as writer and how much, how work she put into writing, or let’s say editing ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. “A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them.” ― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman I MISSED LEE’S WRITING SO MUCH and her great mind too. That might sound weird but with books, I think we always get into authors’ heads. However, this just isn’t a sequel (well…except plotwise & characterwise maybe) and it’s in no way a finished !! or ready novel and I don’t know why they ever published something like this claiming it was.

I think, if publishers would have marketed this as a companion book or some kind of a “bonus material”, it wouldn’t have disappointed so many readers or have received so many negative reviews. 3/5 stars Tips Naturally, you MUST read To Kill a Mockingbird first if you haven’t already, because this won’t make any sense to you + if it’s been a long time, you should have a glimpse at To Kill a Mockingbird to remember what happened. 2. Don’t expect a sequel! Or finished novel! Expect a draft-ling that will make you love To Kill a Mockingbird and Harper Lee even more. Seriously I wonder if publishers and marketers had read these books or did they just think of the money they’ll make. 3. Every single Harper Lee fan should read this! Why? See tip #2. 4. If you have a possibility and you’re English is good enough, read it in language it was written. This Alabama dialect makes it more authentic in both of novels. 5. It’s not too long, about 300 pages. It might be difficult to get started but it quickly sucks you in.

“If you did not want much, there was plenty.” ― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman Have you read Go Set a Watchman? What did you think of it? NewsDepth: Harper Lee to Publish Second Novel 55 Years After "To Kill a Mockingbird" | ideastream Harper Lee to Publish Second Novel 55 Years After "To Kill a Mockingbird" Author Feb. 4, 2015 at 7:30 pm Ideastream E-News Sign up today! There's one very respected book that if you haven't read yet, you probably will by the time you graduate high school. Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird is widely considered to be a great American classic. But the 88-year-old Pulitzer prize winning novelist who wrote it has only published that one book - until now. This summer, Lee will publish her second novel, Go Set a Watchman. Although a sequel to her more famous work, Go Set a Watchman was written 50 years ago, before To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel was thought to be lost until it was rediscovered last fall.

Lee said she hadn't realized it survived all these years, but is delighted that readers can now enjoy her first novel. Ideastream E-News No, ‘Go Set A Watchman’ Is Not A Sequel To ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ No, ‘Go Set A Watchman’ is Not a Sequel to ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ James Joyner · Tuesday, July 14, 2015 · 32 Comments Keith Collins and Nikhil Sonnad provide strong evidence that the “sequel” to Harper Lee’s classic novel was merely a bad first draft. Go Set a Watchman , released worldwide this week, was initially portrayed as a long-lost second novel by Harper Lee. But reports leading up to its publication have made clear that Watchman is more accurately seen as the early first draft of Lee’s classic work, To Kill a Mockingbird, which won the Pulitzer Prize for its depiction of racism in the deep south of the United States during the Great Depression. As it turns out, many passages can be found in both of the books, almost word-for-word.

Watchman takes place two decades after Mockingbird, featuring many of the same characters but a different narrator and some starkly divergent themes. Most notably, Atticus Finch, the moral hero of Mockingbird, turns out to be an unapologetic racist in Watchman. Lee handed in the manuscript of Watchman in 1957; her editor, Tay Hohoff, described it as ”more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel,” guiding a wholesale revision of the novel into Mockingbird, which was published in 1960. It’s not clear that Lee, now 89 and ailing, ever intended to publish Watchman as a separate book. All of that was pretty clear months ago but the “long-lost second novel” meme has somehow overtaken the facts, most notably with the Finch controversy. Follow the link to see how much overlap there was, as well as other evidence that Watchman was just a poor draft of Mockingbird.

Go Set a Watchman and five other sequels that should never happen | Hannah Jane Parkinson | Opinion | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close Penguin has announced that Harper Lee, 88, has written a sequel to the universally loved, Pulitzer prize-winning, and much studied-at-school To Kill a Mockingbird – 55 years after it was first published. Lee’s second book, Go Set a Watchman, was written first, and To Kill a Mockingbird was born from its flashback sequences. The sequel, whose title is taken from a biblical quote, tells the story of the same characters from Mockingbird, featuring a grown-up Scout now living in New York. Instant reaction to the announcement has been mixed. While many fans of such a seminal novel are delighted, others, who have treasured the tale of the charismatic lawyer Atticus Finch fighting racial injustice in the American deep south, are not best pleased by the thought of a sequel. Some works of art are so beautifully realised that they should be left alone. Here are five others that should never be touched.

Some Like it Hot OK, so it isn’t absolutely perfect – it’s famously possible to make out Marilyn Monroe reading her lines from cue cards off camera – but it’s as damn perfect as a film can be. Plus it ends at exactly at the right moment – with its protagonists sailing off into the distance. Imagine a modern-day sequel, in which Spats Colombo and his gangsters end up tracking Joe and Jerry down on Facebook, with the two of them having to go into witness protection – or worse. Or Sugar would probably end up dumping Joe, because seriously, who could live with a person who plays the saxophone? I guess it’d be nice to think Jerry and Osgood would move to the UK and get married now that same sex marriage is legal, but what are the chances they’d stay together? Pinterest The Great Gatsby One of the greatest books ever written (although, might I recommend Tender is the Night as even better?), I understand that F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel ends on a somewhat depressing note, but there’s no possible sequel that could right those wrongs. For a start Gatsby has been killed, so someone else would have to be equally as great; and nobody throws parties like Gatsby.

Admittedly the other characters are either majorly dull (sorry, Nick), spoiled and tiresome (Daisy) or racist (Tom). I might read a stand-alone novel about Jordan though. She was always the best. #Feminism When Harry Met Sally She’d spend her whole life faking orgasms due to the side effects of the Prozac she takes Nora Ephron’s gold-standard rom com simply can never be improved upon. I dread to think what could happen this many years down the line. First of all, Sally studied journalism, which means that she’d probably now either be a) unemployed or b) working at an online news organisation churning out click-bait with headlines consisting only of rhetorical questions? She’d be depressed, spending her whole life faking orgasms (a la famous restaurant scene) due to the side effects of the 40g of Prozac she takes daily. Harry, meanwhile, will have stopped wearing adorable sweaters and now never puts the seat down. Like, ever.

Pinterest The History Boys Alan Bennett’s play is so massively popular – award-winning, sold-out runs on the West End and Broadway, also adapted into an $11m-grossing film – because of its feelgood rags-to-riches (well, state school to Oxford) story of meritocracy. At the end of the play, the audience already gets to see what has become of The History Boys after their Oxford careers. We really don’t need to see a sequel envisioning their school reunion. Akhtar would have been fired from his job as headmaster due to poor performances in GCSE league tables and falling foul of Nicky Morgan’s most recent diktats; Timms’s drug habit would go into overdrive and he’d end up tragically overdosing in the toilets of a Wetherspoons; journalist Scripps would endure a sudden fall from grace; and Dakin would be the subject of a Daily Mail splash – Tax Lawyer Done for Fraud. See, sequels are bad news. Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) Unfortunately, we were too late to stop this particular travesty.

While not a sequel as such, we by now surely all know the story of what happened to Elias Garcia Martinez’s Ecce Homo painting from 1930. It is the story of why it is important to not tamper with a work of art which is perfectly OK as it is thank you very much. Is Harper Lee's 'Go Set a Watchman' bound for the 'Interstellar' trap? - LA Times Is Harper Lee's 'Go Set a Watchman' bound for the 'Interstellar' trap? Harper Lee Steven Zeitchik Contact Reporter Have the standards for 'Go Set a Watchman' been set too high by the legend of Harper Lee? In news that delighted anyone who ever went to school, read a book or walked outside, “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee revealed Tuesday via her publisher that she had written another novel featuring Scout and Atticus Finch. “Go Set a Watchman,” penned in the 1950s, was recently discovered by the ailing writer’s attorney, would be published this year and focuses on the main characters decades after the powder-keg events of “Mockingbird.” As a rule, we don’t like seeing our favorite fictional characters grow up.

Few of us remember “Jo's Boys” (Louisa May Alcott’s follow-up to “Little Women” nearly two decades later) and most people might wish they could forget “Heidi Grows Up,”--including author Joanna Spyri, who was long dead when the translator “discovered” manuscripts on which to base the new book. But the Lee news played differently. She and the book title jumped to the top of Twitter and stayed there all day. Fans and many in the book community gushed with excitement. Even some of those who were skeptical — and given the timing of the discovery by the attorney, Tonja Carter, just a few months after the death of Lee’s sister and protector Alice Lee, there was plenty of reason to be — were still excited. “And yet, and yet. A new Harper Lee novel!” wrote Katy Waldman in Slate’s Browbeat blog. “May the Atticus Finch in our souls help us fashion our feelings into the right and appropriate response.” It was easy to understand the enthusiasm. There are two things that have been eternally true about Lee. Her writing about Scout Finch’s escapades is great, and there isn’t enough of it. This news spoke to both points.

Here was an icon whose well was long thought dry now saying, essentially, “There’s more where that came from.” That statement, of course, is common in another realm of pop culture. Hollywood often takes work from decades before and fashions new elaborations from it. And we’re usually duly skeptical. When the announcement came that Harper Lee's second book will be published in July, 55 years after her acclaimed "To Kill a Mockingbird," people took to Twitter to express their thoughts and make a few jokes. Here are what some authors had to say. Some came up with their own name for the sequel.... (Brittny Mejia) Do we just cut writers more slack than filmmakers? Or is there something more specific going on with Lee? The author has always been revered for her first novel, but she’s also been revered for another reason: She didn’t write another. That fact of one book and nothing more has lent her an air of mystery. It allowed her to live in that rare space in which she, and we, never know the shoulder-slump of a follow-up. That’s an especially potent phenomenon in the modern media world, where the joy of anticipation is almost always preferable to the reality of consumption.

Teased into a frenzy by the carefully doled out promotions of new movies and TV shows — and given just enough raw materials to build our own fantasy version from them — we can’t but be let down by the final product. A film trailer is often better than that which it is intended to promote. “Interstellar” is the best movie of the year until it comes out. The way to avoid this trap for already beloved figures s is to not offer anything concrete, ever. That's not feasible for prolific, ambitious artists, or most of us, for that matter (even the most one-and-done directors usually try a few more things before hanging it up). But it’s essentially what Lee has done (possibly for other reasons — or possibly not, given that she’s reputed to have once said she didn’t publish another novel because there was nowhere to go but down). Lee has, in effect, given us the joys of absence , letting us remember how much we liked “Mockingird” allowing us to draw between the lines without any new colors to spoil the picture. The announcement of a second book with only scant details of what it's about actually plays right into this, since it gives us a few more crayons with which to keep coloring.

Whatever we imagined Scout could be, would be, might be, will now be served up, and because we don't know what that is--because Lee has kept silent for so long as what that could be--we imagine a feeling comparable to the one we felt the first time around. But it's almost impossible to imagine the book delivering on all that. As exciting as it is to think that a work of “Mockingbird’s” lineage, and even quality, awaits, there’s also a precedent, in our movie theaters and on the page, that the adventures of beloved characters aren’t quite as good the next time around, in part because most creators have trouble catching lightning twice. True, “Watchman” was actually written during the same period as "Mockingbird." In fact, Lee wrote it before “Mockingbird” (the latter was an attempt to satisfy the publisher who liked the flashbacks but didn’t care much for the adult Scout). That actually makes “Mockingbird,” in Hollywood terms, a prequel, just one that happened to be published 55 years before the original. But will it matter? A new Lee work comes into this world, after nearly six decades of fond memories, cultivated and grown unfettered.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" as we experience is a great book, but it's also a near-bulletproof fantasy of what a book and its author should be, one that almost no new novel could match. After the "Watchman" news broke, Time writer Anne Strauss wrote on Twitter: “Can Harper Lee's second book outdo one of the best books ever?" That’s a very high bar to set for any novel, and especially one with characters we already have some long-held ideas about. It's possible “Go Set a Watchman” will turn out to be a great work of literature. But it will have some awfully stiff competition. Few books can outdo the one we’ve written in our minds. Why Brilliant Books is offering refunds to customers who purchased Go Set A Watchman » MobyLives Why Brilliant Books is offering refunds to customers who purchased Go Set A Watchman by Alex Shephard Brilliant Books’s storefront. The publication of Harper Lee‘s Go Set A Watchman has been controversial.

But while many have raised questions about Harper Lee’s involvement in the book’s publication, the role of her lawyer Tonja Carter, and the merit of the book itself,few have made explicit arguments about the novel itself—that may be because there are still so many unanswered questions, or it may be because the book is an enormous hit (it has sold well over a million copies since it was published just over two weeks ago). Brilliant Books is something of an exception. An independent bookstore located in Traverse City, Michigan, the bookstore released a statement shortly after Go Set A Watchman was released condemning its publication and offering refunds to customers who felt duped: We at Brilliant Books want to be sure that our customers are aware that Go Set A Watchman is not a sequel or prequel to To Kill A Mockingbird. Neither is it a new book. It is a first draft that was originally, and rightfully, rejected. The book, and some of the characters therein, are very much a product of this era in the South. We suggest you view this work as an academic insight rather than as a nice summer novel. This situation is comparable to James Joyce’s stunning work A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and his original draft Stephen Hero.

Hero was initially rejected, and Joyce reworked it into the classic Portrait. Hero was eventually released as an academic piece for scholars and fans—not as a new ‘Joyce novel’. We would have been delighted to see Go Set A Watchman receive a similar fate. It is disappointing and frankly shameful to see our noble industry parade and celebrate this as “Harper Lee’s New Novel”. This is pure exploitation of both literary fans and a beloved American classic (which we hope has not been irrevocably tainted.) We therefore encourage you to view Go Set A Watchman with intellectual curiosity and careful consideration; a rough beginning for a classic, but only that. The statement quickly went viral, partly because it was arguably the harshest criticism of the book’s publication to date and partly because it came from a retailer. I talked with Brilliant Books’s owner, Peter Makin, about the publication of Go Set A Watchman and independent bookselling. What led you to release the statement about Go Set A Watchman? Had you been following the story for a while, or did something happen in store that led you to release it? We had been disappointed in the way the book was marketed from the beginning.

We knew the history of Go Set A Watchman and it wasn’t congruent with the marketing: “Harper Lee’s New Novel” “with many of your favorite characters from To Kill A Mockingbird.” The real eye-opener was from a loyal paying member, who had only become aware of the reality over the previous weekend. She was saddened. She explained that TKAMB was her favorite book of all time and she had been so looking forward to reading GSAW, but now she knew it wasn’t the book she had been led to believe it was. I immediately apologized, and offered her a refund, which she accepted. I realized then that we needed to offer the same thing to all our customers, of which there were dozens across the country, and explain why. Hence the opinion piece. What have your conversations about Go Set A Watchman been like over the past five months, both internally and with customers? Internally, we were bemused by the urging of HarperCollins for booksellers to hold midnight readings, screenings of the movie, all manner of inducements, to get the book sold on day one. Add to that the strict embargo that excites the public, but gives booksellers a wry, knowing smile.

Maybe we’re cynical, but it all pointed to a desperate attempt to get folks to buy the book before they realized what it actually was. In the statement, you call the publication of Go Set a Watchman “shameful” and “exploitative.” Would you like to expound about that? Do you think the publication of Watchman is unique, or do you think it points to large issues in the publishing world and literary culture? Exploitative and shameful in that the publisher claimed this book to be something it wasn’t. It isn’t “Harper Lee’s New Novel”. They also used the line: “with many of your favorite characters from To Kill A Mockingbird.”, which seems a shameful lure of an unsuspecting reader thinking they’ll have yet more TKAMB. Joe Nocera in The New York times put it best . We believe GSAW should have been an academic piece for scholars and fans, as we said. Not marketed as the next big thing. But I do think this whole episode points to a much larger issue in the publishing world. There’s a much repeated myth that independent bookstores are thriving. They aren’t.

Some might be, and yes, there are more of them than ever, but that increase in capacity isn’t matched by an increase in overall book sales at independent bookstores. Also for bookstores in the rep circuit, GSAW is something that had to be embraced enthusiastically. Imagine if you will, that your small bookstore is about to host yet another HarperCollins author, allocated to you by your HarperCollins rep, and whose expenses are paid by HarperCollins. If this happens regularly you are unlikely to be in a position to decline GSAW, let alone advise folks against buying it. This is why we decide long ago to avoid reps. We don’t get authors, but we do get independence. We also get to buy virtually everything by you guys, as we do for Europa, for example. We appreciate when imprints and smaller publishers deliver consistent quality in content and presentation. But I don’t think any rep is ever going to advise that we use our budget to do that. Have you been surprised by the response to the statement so far? Yes! It has been overwhelmingly positive, humbling and touching. What was especially surprising is the response from the UK and Australia, as we well as national media here.

Are you still selling Go Set A Watchman? We are still selling it. We are a bookstore, so we wouldn’t not carry it, but we do explain to folks what it is, so that they buy it with their eyes open. What other books are doing well for you this week? What would you recommend customers read instead of GSAW? That would depend on the individual. We try hard to understand what the specific reader wants, then we’ll recommend a book. We tend to avoid the pile-em-high approach. We trust each other’s judgements and try to refer folks to the right bookseller. Tell me a bit about Brilliant Books. How long have you been open? What makes you unique? We opened in the village of Suttons Bay (pop 600) in 2007, and moved to the big town Traverse City (pop 15,000) in 2010 We are a 21st century bookstore. I had never worked in a bookstore, but I knew what it was I loved about them. I also knew what I hated.

In a previous life, I traveled frequently and endured too many airport bookstores piled high with ‘bestsellers’ and last year’s mediocre offerings presented as “new releases”. My disappointment that land-based bookstores were rarely that different made me determined to create a haven for literature, the classics, the best of every genre, an intelligent bookstore where the kids section isn’t full of Disney tie-ins and pop stars. Our staff is proud that we are a truly independent, independent bookstore. We are committed to our readers, not the preferences and enticements of our suppliers. We can select and display whatever we choose. There are no authors we ‘must’ carry, and many you’ll find only here. It’s that reader focus and commitment to intellectual integrity that makes us unique. We believe that in the 21st Century the reader who prefers a tangible object wants a space of knowledge and comfort that reflects that luxury. This is where we believe the ABA and traditional booksellers get it very wrong. Rather than considering what a 21st century retail reader wants, there’s an apparent desire to force the old ways to keep working. Which leads, for example, to bookstores being encouraged to increase their margins by carrying more non-book items.

Thus, in our mind leading to their eventual demise.

Question: Go Set a Watchman is the 55-years-after sequel to what famous work?
Answer: To Kill A Mockingbird