HarperCollins has published an enhanced eBook edition of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
The company released the normal To Kill a Mockingbird eBook back in July 2014. The enhancement features on this digital book include a radio interview with Lee, footage from the 1962 film adaptation, audiobook clips performed by Sissy Spacek, and snippets from the Hey Boo documentary with appearances from Oprah Winfrey, Tom Brokaw, and Anna Quindlen.
According to The Associated Press, “HarperCollins spokeswoman Tina Andreadis says the new Mockingbird edition had received 6,500 pre-orders, far more than for the usual ‘enhanced’ book. She says the publisher has sold 80,000 copies of the regular eBook, a figure comparable to print sales. Total worldwide sales exceed 30 million copies since the book’s 1960 release. Both eBook editions are priced at $8.99.”
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Still life and bread crumbs, by Anna Quindlen, is a recent novel that moves at a comfortable pace, fully engaging the reader with characters whose lives seem to follow a script of diminished expectations, which we recognize from our own experience of the world, but the characters seem unique enough to maybe prove us wrong. At the same time, we might feel it would not be very literary if the writer allowed things to finish up too nicely, with our admired protagonist still on her feet unbowed by all the challenges, but if she doesn't exactly win, surely she must show some true grit. The so-called Hollywood ending. Think Rocky and on through Rocky-4. Unfortunately, we also have dark premonitions from reading the classics, think Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, that everything is just going to turn out horribly. And yet, when done well, with a feeling of genuineness in plot turns and attention to intelligent language, it could turn out to be fine, and the reader might feel a little bit ennobled by the time spent with these characters. What actually does happen?
In Still Life... Rebecca had been a renown photographer in the art world and her work had been featured in galleries and covered by art critics nationwide. The title of the book is taken from one of her most famous photographs. However, her career has lately been in decline, she is now 60 yrs. old, and her agent hasn't been selling many of her photographs. With her income falling off, and the financial burdens of paying expenses for her mother in a care facility, while also attempting to help her son, Peter, a recent college graduate, she's beginning to become worried about solvency. Divorced from her philandering, Oxford-educated, professor husband since Peter was a boy, she needs to cut her living expenses--by renting out the expensive New York City apartment she owns and moving to a less expensive setting. Like this rustic rented cabin in rural upstate New York. The new place has been badly misrepresented to her and is quite primitive, but Rebecca is determined to see it through, at least for a while.
Like many such locales, it has its share of characters and they are mildly interesting. The gruff roofer, Jim, who helps her keep her house intact, becomes a fairly well-developed character and an interesting counterpoint to Rebecca's character. In addition to his trade, he's a volunteer environmental worker as well as a subsistence hunter--a unique combo, perhaps. Jim also has a bi-polar younger sister whom he is trying to help as she copes in survival mode at her trailer home nearby in the woods. A key turnaround experience for Rebecca occurs on her daily walks in the forest, where she begins to find strange little sites, each exhibiting crude wood crosses, accompanied by some small object, like a doll, or an athletic trophy, and she artfully records each of these sites on film. The mystery is eventually revealed, and the photo collection becomes a key to her reentry to her profession. Her relationship to Jim goes through several wrenching turns--he is sixteen years younger--but always the relationship seems so well done by the writer.
The author taps into a number of universal themes in constructing this story:
- A decline in professional recognition of a story character, whether in arts, business, or academia (usually in that order of severity) as she ages.
- The challenges to physical and mental well-being of a story character displaced into a very altered environment.
- An Autumn-Spring romantic relationship of two story characters.
- A social class hurdle existing between attracted story characters.
That comprises a formidable list, and so Quindlen is able to tap into the psyches of a great many readers with it, and she does it very well.
Filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy has created a new documentary about celebrated author Harper Lee entitled Hey, Boo: Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird.
According to Shelf Awareness, the film will feature interviews with Anna Quindlen, Tom Brokaw, James McBride, James Patterson, Wally Lamb, and Oprah Winfrey. Some of those celebrities can be seen in the trailer embedded above.
Initially, the film will have a limited release in New York City and Los Angeles starting May 13th with a nationwide release to follow. Last year, Murphy published Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird for the book’s 50th anniversary.
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In this week’s issue of Newsweek, the prolific author and Newsweek columnist, Anna Quindlen, weighs in on the future of reading. She makes one of the strongest, and most eloquent, points I have heard when debating the future of the hardbound book vs. electronic readers.
The invention of television led to predictions about the demise of radio. The making of movies was to be the death knell of live theater; recorded music, the end of concerts. All these forms still exist- sometimes overshadowed by their siblings but not smothered by them. And despite the direst predictions, reading continues to be part of the life of the mind, even as computers replace pencils, and books fly into handhelds as well as onto store shelves. Anton Chekhov, meet Steve Jobs.
Anna Quindlen’s sixth novel, Every Last One, will be released on April 13th in hardcover, digital and audio editions. Also, I read this article in the hard copy version of Newsweek when it landed on my desk this morning. Anna Quindlen’s article was referenced on the cover. Would I have discovered it in Newsweek’s online version? Who knows.