More Harper Lee leftovers

[Horace]

Harper Lee's estate has published some of her writings they found at the bottom of a wastebasket. It hasn't been well received.

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When your favorite writer dies, they will leave behind all kinds of literary litter: half-finished novels, rough drafts of acclaimed work, gorily intimate diaries. If all that happened to fall into your lap, what would you do with it? Burn after reading? Before? Or would you want to share it with the whole world?

The Harper Lee estate has decided: Publish and be damned. On Tuesday, it posthumously released some of the author’s “previously unseen stories and essays”—even though the To Kill a Mockingbird author was famously deliberate about what she put into the world. Even though the last time her rough work was published, in 2015, it did untold damage to her legacy. Even though, reviewers agree, none of the work in The Land of Sweet Forever is any good.

“I myself would rather be torn to pieces by a pack of feral cats than allow people to lay eyes on the deformed abomination that is an early draft of one of my novels,” writes Kat Rosenfield, in today’s Big Read. But as a reader, she understands what it’s like to love an author so much you want everything from them. And to adore the world they’ve built so much that you long for another way into it. In her essay, she asks what’s more important: the dignity of a storyteller—or the demands of their fans? —Freya Sanders

[Mik]

I read both To Kill and Go Set A Watchman, the first better than the second, but the moral ambiguity of the second was important I thought.

[Horace]

A careful reading of TKAM reveals a message against racism. That's my favorite part of the book.

[Mik]

Wasn't just racial though. It had to do with prejudging people you don't know. I think GSAWM is a worthy, if not quite as friendly, sequel. It shows the conflicts that inevitably arise with standing against prejudice.