BBC's adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover will see Constance take control of sex

The BBC's new adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover will see its female star in control of sex scenes, its writer has hinted as a response to exploitative TV nudity











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In Case You Want to Get Your Book Published

Two writers meeting at a café, both having won a literary award this year for unpublished work, one of us for her stories, the other for her memoir. We got together because each recognized the other as a writer to reckon with. Two women, we discovered, who spend time writing and rewriting books that take years to ripen. We are, as my new friend said over lunch, "at the ragged edges of the publishing world." In other words, nowhere.

The next day, both of us wrote up our conversation:

Vicki DeArmon: Platforms Be Damned

A friend and I, both on the ragged edges of the publishing world when it comes to our writing where small successes and awards accumulate to no greater end, both former publishers of small presses, commiserated over lunch.

We weren't published in the way we wanted to be published, both novels still gathering moss at an agent's or in a drawer waiting for time and energy to complete. What were those obstacles that kept us from our success? We debated. Was it modesty or rather, a tendency towards arrogance? Was it lack of contacts, or the inability to use the contacts we have? Was it the erratic nature of our work, which over a lifetime hadn't been thematically focused, but spread instead like the delta approaching the ocean, scattered, wide, and erratic? Was it simply our baby boomer age? It was hard to know.

But then we were not the relentless doggers of agents or opportunities we needed to be. We eschewed writing conferences or receptions where important people congregated. When elbows should have been thrown, we retreated, preferring instead to write, even without any audience in sight. We had not erected a multilevel social media platform from which to spring, our identities glittering in the sun as we spiraled into the world. No one was 'following' us certainly. Our trajectory was not that of the Olympic diver but more like that of a hermit hiding in a back cave.



Ironically, marketing and promotion are areas of expertise I have employed for other people as well as book publishing companies and bookstores to great success over the last 30 years. Doing it for myself seems brazen and horrible--ridiculous, I know, that I can't extend myself the same courtesy. So much easier to open the drawer to that waiting manuscript and write, platforms be damned.

Where do all the hermit writers go in today's world? I'm dreaming the perfect publishing house for my friend and me, The Hermit's Press, home for all those reclusive writers who can't find a hold in the publishing world. The publisher would seek us out, flashlights lighting up dark caves. Once discovered, all we'd do is write, never promote or tour. In fact, it would be a strictly non-touring publisher this Hermit's Press. Just by publishing a book under the Hermit's Press name, people might know that it was worthy. Reputation rather than promotion would guide our success.

A writer can dream can't she?

Renate Stendhal: Just in Case



Why would I get published now? I asked my new friend. What have I recently done to deserve it?
Yes, I have five published books, four in the old publishing world, one in the new circus of DIY publishing with Amazon/Kindle. But I've not done what the expert strategists tell you to do: repeat and repeat and then repeat again what you've already written. "Einmal ist keinmal" -- once is as good as never. Pick a topic and/or style and stick with it so it will be the snowball growing into the famous avalanche. Beat your drum in every way you can (but keep your age out of sight). Drop your daily crumbs of FB to the birds. Make friends with zillions of strange birds just in case. Invite everyone to like you, then do it again. Thank everyone who stops by to like you by liking them just in case. Share the cat videos, baby videos, the wise-cracks of the day with your zillions. Beat the treacherous algorithms of FB by boosting your posts, your droppings. Be hip and do Instagram, like your kids do. Tweet and twitter your brains out and count, count, count. Count the Likes, count the Friends, count the Fans, count the Followers, even if you can't for the best of you make out who's who just in case.

Claim your real estate in the cybersphere. Be a blogger, feed the frenzy, opine several times a month, a week, a day. Take writing classes, go workshop at workshops, show up at literary conferences and attend salons, be a presence at the ABA, an enthusiast at Litquake, go to readings and chat up your local bookstore once a month. Make contact, gather contacts, count your contacts. Read the how-to columns of authors who've made it, read the mistake columns of authors who once upon a time failed, but not any more. Read five new bestsellers on book marketing, take a marketing workshop, take it again as you won't get far. Prepare to write a 6-page marketing plan in your book proposal. Research 600 agents, send your query to 60, then another 60 just in case. Count 60 weeks for a reply, then thank everyone who rejected you, just in case. Just in case what?

In case someone finds you note-worthy in case someone wants to read you in case someone likes what you wrote in case someone wants to publish you maybe you never know. No, I've not done anything to qualify, nothing to stand out among the millions of writers doing just that, all of that just in case. All following the same marketing advice, all doing the same 12 steps to publishing, the same social media. All those millions sharing the same hope of getting there... and perhaps forgetting there that their troubles, in case they succeed in getting published, have only begun.

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The Fastest Growing Group in the U.S. Is Also the Most Invisible

Asian Americans are the fastest growing group in the United States today. Their history in the U.S. is deep-rooted, and spans five centuries. But it's a history that many people don't know that much about.

In her sweeping, powerful new book, The Making of Asian America, Dr. Erika Lee, Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, considers the rich, complicated, and sometimes invisible histories of Asians in the United States.

I sat down with Dr. Lee recently, to ask her about her own history, and why it's important to move beyond the past.

Congratulations on the new book. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? How did you become interested in this field?

Absolutely. I'm sixth-generation Chinese American. I grew up in the Bay Area; where, now, according to the latest statistics, one in every four people is Asian American.

But when I was growing up, none of this Asian American history, this understanding of: 'well, where does my family fit in American history?' was there. There was a black hole. There were gaps in the classes I was taking, and what we were talking about, even as a family.

I was taking a summer school class at UC Berkeley, on California history. It was one of those classes you take, to rack up credits over the summer. I was going to school at Tufts.

In the class, we covered the usual topics, the Gold Rush, and so on, and then we got to this lesson, that was called the Anti-Chinese Movement. And I remember wondering: what is this? What is she talking about? I'd never heard of it before.

What was that Movement about?

Chinese people were harassed. They were discriminated against. They were driven out of towns, and then they were excluded from the country.

I started wondering why hadn't I heard this before.

At that time, I was a history major, but it wasn't because I planned on doing this.

You didn't plan on becoming a professor?

I didn't know that job even existed, being a history professor of Asian American studies.

But from that moment, I started questioning what was being shared, and what wasn't; what was being talked about, and celebrated in American history, and what wasn't.

Those questions led me to explore, and poke, and push. Eventually, it became very clear that this is what I wanted to be doing professionally.

Did you go back to your family then and say, 'hey, did you know about this?'

I did. I realized that my mom had been buying the early classics in Asian American history all along. They were on our bookshelf in the living room. But we didn't sit through, and look at them together.

It took a long time for me to talk to my grandparents about this. On the one hand, I had a gregarious, open grandfather who, when I interviewed him for my college, oral history project, said: "You know, I had to come in as a paper-son. This is how I did it. This is how I got around the government."

And then I had a grandmother--whom I write about, for the first time, in this book--who would clam up at even the slightest question.

I then did archival research to trace the three generations of her family, that none of us had really known about. We now know why she was so reluctant to talk about her family history, of course.

Why?

Because of the loss. The choices that her own family had to make during Exclusion. The abandonment. The ways in which Exclusion tore her family apart.

So I understand that much better now.

It's part of the silences within a family that can get passed down with generations. They mirror the silences in American history.

This reminds me of something a friend was telling me last week. She spoke of the trauma, in her Native American community, that's inherited; how there's a silence around the past, and almost a kind of shame. Is that similar to what you're talking about?

Absolutely. I can only speak about my family, but I do see patterns with other Chinese American families, that can perhaps be extended to other Asian American families, too: that the first generation forgets.

Forgets?

They consciously forget. They erase. The close up, and hide the past.

The second generation needs to fit in. They need to assimilate.

My parents grew up in the 40s and 50s, during the height of conformist America. My mom would say: "I'm American first, and Chinese second."

That was very common for her generation.

Why?

The Japanese were being interned, forcibly incarcerated. I think you had to say that. Today, I think it's the same with South Asian Americans, and Muslim Americans. You have to continually prove your American-ness, your patriotism, to this country.

But what does that cost? What are the legacies, then, for the next generation?

So it's quite an American story, actually, that many can relate to.

You dedicate this book to your students.

Yes. I took that summer school class over 25 years ago, and so much has changed since then. There are tenured professors in this field. There are more books. Documentary films. There are historic landmarks. Fred Korematsu Day. We've come a long way.

But?

But every semester, I'll teach one of my classes, in American history, and I'll have one of my students come up to me and say: "Professor, I had no idea this happened!"

And it's not just my students. It's older Americans. It's students at Harvard. It's museum docents. I mean, we're talking a broad range of people.

My reaction used to be: "I know! It's too bad, isn't it?"

But now, after twenty years of doing this, I feel angry.

Why?

I think it's getting a little ridiculous that Asian Americans remain so invisible, so passed-over. My hope is that there will be fewer people who say 'I never knew this happened.'

I would love for this history to be saturated, and become fully part of American history, and not just in May, when it's Asian American History Month.

How did you approach the writing of this book?

The book actually started out much smaller. That initial, 'a-ha' moment, learning about the Anti-Chinese Movement when I was younger, has always been a part of my research. Over the years, it expanded to include consideration of anti-Asian movements. It expanded to anti-immigrant movements, both past and present; to xenophobia, and now, to debates over immigration more globally.

So those have been some of the core questions for me: who's in? Who's out? Who gets to decide? What's the importance of that? What are the stakes? How do we exclude through law, through politics, culture; through everyday slights?

Where, would you say, does Asian American history begin?

With Columbus. Who would have thought? I've never thought of myself as writing a traditional, American history that begins with Columbus. But for Asians in the Americas, it begins when Europe and Asia and the Americas get connected. And for that, we have to go back to Columbus.

It seems like it would be easy to get stuck in the past; to write about historical injustices, and just stay there. How do move beyond that?

The model in ethnic studies scholarship is: victimization and agency. So there's a lot of that. I pull up stories of everyday people; not just the major court cases we've heard about. I try to bring out the humanity, and the courage of everyday people.

But that's not enough anymore.

Why not?

What I felt I had to do, especially in the later chapters of the book, where I talk about the contemporary state of Asian America, is to really highlight the very complicated place that Asian Americans hold in the United States right now.

There's this great diversity within the community. There are the 'model minorities' and there are those who are living in intergenerational poverty. I ask the question: what does that really mean? To have Asian Americans at two different poles: very privileged, and also in poverty? Between black, and white; foreign, and American?

We have to see that whole picture, because that is the reality; to be able to encompass those contrasts, and then to figure out how all of this works together.

And how does that work together at a time when there's continuing income inequality? When civil rights for some groups have stalled, or even regressed?

I try to lay all of that out, in a way that isn't just a celebratory history.

I'm hoping it gets people really thinking about where we are. We are at a crossroads. There are choices to be made. And our history is a really important part of understanding, and informing, some of those choices.

The Making of Asian America will be published on September 1, 2015.



*Author-image-credit: Mark Buccella

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Azar Nafisi on why we need to cherish rather than ban books

The author of the controversial Reading Lolita in Tehran tells us about the books she read when she was growing up in Iran that taught her important lessons about defending human rights

Throughout my childhood and teen years, even much later when I had children of my own, my mother worried that I had my head in the clouds, reading too many stories, neglecting real life and its problems. My take on having one’s “head in the clouds” was different from my mother’s, for me it meant having a place of one’s own, somewhere like Alice’s Wonderland, or what I later named The Republic of Imagination. A place on earth, in our own backyard that might help us get to the clouds and all sorts of other wonderlands, existing all around us and yet invisible to the naked eye. I wanted to go there in order to return to my own home refreshed, armed with a new perspective, prepared to confront “life and its problems.” For what is a wonderland but a new and magical version of our everyday reality, rescuing that reality from the dust of habit and complacency, what is the Republic of Imagination except the version of reality as it should or could have been?

Continue reading...

The Writerly Benefits of Getting a Dog

This post was co-authored by Jon Steele, an award-winning journalist and author.


Steele, a fellow expat writer in Switzerland, wrote this heartwarming article for last week's National Dog Day. He shares how his dog helped him survive writing the last book of The Angelus Trilogy and work through the remnants of PTSD from his many years as a video journalist in warzones.

The Writerly Benefits of Getting a Dog
There are two things I tell people about writing mystical noir fiction. One: It's the closest thing there is to madness this side of medication. Two: It's lonely, and you need all the friends you can get. I'm lucky enough to be married to my best friend, a woman who knew me as a front-line cameraman for British TV News in the Middle East and elsewhere. In fact she more than knew me; she was my producer for six years. Her name is Afnan.

Back then, she knew I was fairly barking already; so watching me jump careers from PTSD-laden cameraman trying to save the world by shooting pictures, to author writing books about PTSD-laden angels trying to save all that's left of paradise by killing bad guys, made perfect sense to her.

Afnan was used to the long days of silence while I was locked up in my writing room. Now and again she'd stick her head through the doorway and say, "You haven't talked to me in three days." So I would talk to her for as long as she made me talk. Then I'd go back to work. If she was out and about, (running a media production bureau in Paris, or off on a business trip) she would always call me around noon. I only answer phone calls from Afnan. Ever. I'm afraid of talking on the phone. I don't know why, but it started after I quit TV news in 2003. The usual midday conversation with Afnan was thus:

"Hello?"
"Did you eat lunch?"
"No."
"Stop what you're doing and eat something."
"Okay."
I'd hang up and go back to work. Twenty minutes later she'd call again.
"Hello?"
"I said, stop what you're doing. Go Downstairs. Get something to eat. Now."
"Okay," and this time I would do as instructed.

Afnan had watched me hammer out books one and two of The Angelus Trilogy, through good days and bad days. Truth is, she was reading me like a book. She knew I was working through a lot of emotional baggage in the trilogy.
During book two I hit the wall. I had a character trapped in the tunnels deep under Paris. It was dark, there was no way out. I didn't realize it then, but I was writing about myself. PTSD had me by the throat and would not let go.
I couldn't write for four months. It was one of the more painful periods of my life, but it passed. So as I geared up for book three, Afnan announced that she was bringing in some extra help.
"What sort of help?"
"A dog."

Afnan had been cruising the internet and spotted a mutt named Toby in Amman, Jordan. She showed me his picture. Toby was in desperate need of rescue. He had been physically abused and was half his proper weight. He's part Havanese and was supposed to have elegant long hair, not fur, with a fluffy tail. But Toby had a mass of matted hair like he'd been born with his paw caught in an electrical socket, and he had a tail like a rat.

"You need a friend," my wife explained.
"I have friends."
"You need a special friend."
"What sort of special friend?"
"One that requires your focused attention every day, several times a day, or else he'll pee on your leg."
"Excuse me?"
"Jon, you're going to be spending a lot of time alone again. You know how that one works. Having a companion dog will take the edge off."

Et voila. Afnan flew to Jordan to get the dog named Toby. (Having previously filed the proper import papers, provided blood samples for rabies tests, and secured an official Swiss Pet Passport.) As it turned out, Toby had been so abused he was more screwed up than me. He needed more than a few hours a day; he needed me every minute of my day. Luckily, living in Switzerland, your dog can go everywhere with you (except grocery stores and hospitals) as long as it has graduated Swiss Doggie School. That meant I had to spend every day training myself to train him.

As Toby settled in, we developed a rhythm throughout the day, and I got back to work - slowly. Too slowly. But unlike book two, I didn't panic at the meager pace of my daily word count. I didn't have time to think about it. I was too busy walking Toby through the vineyards morning, noon, and night. Also, each day, we took a long walk through the forests and farms just over the hill from the lake. We'd see cows and horses and sheep and foxes. I didn't talk, Toby didn't bark. We just walked in silence, listening to the sounds of the world.

I watched him a lot.

He liked to stop and smell the earth and plants and scents drifting in the wind. Sometimes he looked at me, and wagged his tail. It was out there, during those silent walks with Toby, that I heard the voices of my characters louder than ever before. Scenes played out in my eyes, and the plot of the story was made as clear as the road I was walking with my dog. And though the writing-it-down part was slow, I did not fear hitting a wall because I wasn't alone. There was a battered angel at my side. I remember the day he revealed himself to me.

Toby always slept next to my writing desk as I worked. Once, while in his deepest nap, he had a nightmare. He trembled and cried in his sleep; he moved his stubby front paws as if trying to claw out of some terrible place. I remember, one day, watching him for long minutes. I reached down and petted his side, "It's okay, boy. No one will hurt you now." Toby licked my hand, laid down his head and sighed, then he went back to sleep.
I was suddenly overwhelmed that this dog's presence in my life was very much like one of those "lines of causality" I write about in my books. Toby was meant to be in my life, at this very moment. Giving him comfort through his nightmare opened the door for him to get inside my soul and render me comfort, too; much more and far deeper than I had given him. I cried that day. Actually, I wept. Something I had not done in a very long time.

Not long after after, I was writing a section in the story where Jay Harper, the last warrior angel on planet Earth, is given a cup of herbal tea to help him cope with the flood of memories coming back to him. I wrote it thus:

Harper sat up against the wall, took the tea, had a sip. "What's in the tea?"
"Essence of ornithogalum umbellatum."
"Tastes flowery."
"It is. Star of Bethlehem, it's called. I added a spoonful of organic honey to sweeten it. Drink it."
"Orders from the cop?"
"Nope. It's a homeopathic doodah Karoliina whipped up for me once. In the real world it helps dogs adjust to the sorrow of loss."
"The sorrow of loss. In dogs."
"Yup. Drink some more."
Harper did, then he chuckled. "Your dream catcher prescribes you herbal remedies for sorrowful dogs?"
"Karoliina says the closest thing to a genuine angel on earth is a dog. Finish it."

Harper did finish his ornithogalum umbellatum tea, and a few weeks later, I finished the book.

The Way of Sorrows on Amazon.
Photo credit: Banner - Jon Steele; author portrait - Emo-Photo.

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Atticus Finch as Racist Bigot: 'More Human'?

It's been a tough season of late for heroes. They are shattering all around.

Lance Armstrong, who beat cancer to win the Tour de France a record seven times, is revealed to be a doper who bullied other cyclists into silence. Greg Mortenson, who claimed to build hundreds of schools in Afghanistan, a humanitarian project described in his book Three Cups of Tea, is revealed to be a fraud. Bill Cosby, who used his fame as a comedian to lecture his fellow African-Americans on how to live, is now alleged to be a major lecher, drugging women to have sex with them.

Possibly toughest of all--no less so because he is fictional and not a real person--is the loss of Atticus Finch, the lawyer and father of the narrator in the beloved novel To Kill a Mockingbird, who risked his reputation and his family's safety to go against the white establishment of the 1930s South to represent and defend in court a black man, Tom Robinson, falsely accused of raping a white woman.

As all the world knows by now, that characterization of Atticus has been damaged, if not destroyed, by the revelation in Ms. Lee's newly published novel---Go Set a Watchman, which picks up the action of Mockingbird twenty years later---that Atticus Finch in his older years became a racist bigot.

Atticus Finch: racist bigot? Much of the media coverage of this stunning revelation can be filed under the heading "To kill an icon" (also here, here, and here).

Why does this loss feel so acute? Because the Atticus Finch of Mockingbird was something we do not have in this reduced, amoral age: a moral hero. To do what he did---defending a black man---in a region of the country that only generations earlier held black people as slaves, and doing the defending alone, at a time preceding an organized civil rights movement---qualified him as a true moral hero, one who, weighing the rightness and wrongness of things, steps up and does the right thing.

It was this Atticus Finch, the moral icon, for whom parents named their sons; in fact, the name has grown in popularity with the years. Countless lawyers went into the law because of this Atticus. Countless people who endured a cold childhood wished they'd had Atticus as a father. Mockingbird is a curriculum staple in the nation's schools. The film adaptation, winning its star Gregory Peck an Oscar for best actor, has become a classic. The American Film Institute voted Atticus Finch the No. 1 movie hero of all time. He inspired, profoundly, this cultural icon.

Now, in Watchman---it's painful to relate the following---we have an Atticus who, as discovered by his now grown daughter, has a pamphlet lying around titled "The Black Plague" and who attends the local council dedicated to preserving the second-class stature of blacks and opposing "mongrelization." Who asks his daughter: "Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?" Who admonishes his daughter for her idealistic view of racial equality: "The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people." Who denounces the U.S. Supreme Court (the novel is set in the 1950s in the era of the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision) and wants his home state of Alabama "to be left alone to keep house without advice from the N.A.A.C.P."

As described further by a reviewer:

"Atticus....isn't a vicious white supremacist bent on hurting black people. But he's committed to states' rights and Southern tradition, and sees only catastrophe in an integrated society. In essence, a man who's used the courts in search of racial justice seeks to keep blacks in their place with the help of the law. Under a mask of dedication to American-style self-reliance---he's said to have 'a constitutional distrust of paternalism and government in large doses'---Atticus supports racism."

Unsettling as these revelations are, also unsettling is the commentary attesting that such revelations make Atticus "more human." Not so.

To be sure, in attesting to a racist Atticus as "more human," commentators (here, here, here, and here), to the extent they make it clear, claim this development adds complexity and complication to an idealized portrait of Atticus in Mockingbird, one painted by an innocent and idolizing young daughter. O.K., true: Atticus is now more complex, more complicated.

But if you hold what it means to be human to a high standard, if you define humanity upward and not downward toward pathology, then someone who categorically denies the humanity of an entire class of people, based on whatever grounds, and reserves all authority for his own class, as the racist does, then that person cannot be said to be fully human himself. He is less human, not more. This includes the Atticus of Watchman, who condescends to blacks as a people still in their childhood.

This tendency to redefine humanity downward is increasingly evident in our new cultural icons. See: Chemistry teacher Walter White of the wildly popular TV series Breaking Bad---this title illustrates the downward tendency---who, terminally ill, cooks meth to provide for his family, an objective presumably making this criminal "more human." See: Mob boss Tony Soprano, of the wildly popular The Sopranos, who "whacks" his rivals and becomes "more human" by sharing the stresses of his criminal life with a psychotherapist. The power of these icons is seen in the example of Gordon Gekko, amoral financier of the 1987 film Wall Street, whose credo "Greed is good" filtered into the culture and became the norm. See: Countless Wall Street types who cite this credo as their mantra. Cultural degradation comes about step by downward step; it then becomes "only human" to engage in these reduced norms, permitting everything from cooking meth to whacking rivals to taking risks that blow up the financial system.

(Parenthetically, regarding Armstrong, Mortenson, and Cosby cited earlier, I don't detect any explaining away of their sins---doping and bullying, fraud, and lechery, respectively---as making them "more human.")

With the revelation in Watchman of Atticus Finch as racist, this Atticus does indeed become "more human" in this respect: If he did harbor the racist leanings in Mockingbird that are made manifest in Watchman, then in defending Tom Robinson as vigorously as he did in Mockingbird, he achieved, precisely because of his own profound internal struggle, something even greater than was recognized at the time. Atticus did a great and good thing---for Tom, for society---despite his true racist self.

I would like to think that the Atticus Finch so universally loved as a moral icon would himself ultimately recognize his own internal contradictions, the hideous flaw in his own humanity, and take himself to account. The path might be via his lawyerly training and faith in the law. In Mockingbird he calls the courts "the great leveler"; he might pull himself level, finally, with the Tom Robinsons of the world.

Or Atticus might have a catharsis---fully recognizing late what he did not know earlier---and fully recognize the great human wisdom he mouthed in Mockingbird, that: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." When I as a questing teen first heard that line, I knew it was Truth. For Atticus the white supremacist to climb into the skin of Tom Robinson and truly recognize Tom's humanity, and Tom's moral heroism, would redeem Atticus and make him truly "more human." More than that, it would make Atticus and Tom "more human" to each other.

I also hope against hope Harper Lee has a third novel in store, that takes the events of Mockingbird and Watchman and weighs them at the end of the day. In Watchman, when Atticus' racism fully penetrates, the daughter lashes out: "I'll never believe a word you say to me again. I despise you and everything you stand for." While Atticus deserves this outburst and the daughter is entitled to her fury at the loss of her idol, nonetheless she comes across as self-righteous. (In our twenties we can be awfully self-righteous, especially when we are right.) Adding complexity and complication, the father she now attacks is the same father who planted the fundamentals of racial justice she embraces. It would be fascinating to see the daughter, fully matured, seek to understand the forces that shaped her father, and to see Atticus seek to resolve his contradictions, or be forced to. Squaring their circle---in microcosm, America's original sin---would yield the "more human" tale as well as history.

In all the media play about Watchman, I couldn't help wondering how the film incarnation of Atticus, Gregory Peck, would react to the revelation his character was deep down a bigot. Peck was a life-long champion of civil rights, who chose his roles carefully. In Gentleman's Agreement, he played a reporter investigating anti-Semitism in '40s America. When it came to Atticus, Peck personally identified with him: "I never had a part that came close to being the real me until Atticus Finch." It would be fascinating to see Peck furrow the brow and grapple with Atticus' racism.

Some of the media play took down Mockingbird itself, noting the latent racism in that Atticus (also here). An essay titled "Mockingbird, Inc." not only questions (rightly) the circumstances behind the publication of Watchman, citing an over-eager publisher, but also takes down the Atticus Finch of Mockingbird, snidely reducing him to "a walking soapbox for moralistic bromides." Such takedown, however, begs the question: How did that "moralistic" Atticus Finch become so beloved? In an amoral time such are ours, we want---no, we need---the moral hero. Mob bosses who whack rivals can never fill that yearning, no matter how "human" they're made out to be.

In all this it should be noted black people generally do not regard Mockingbird as highly as white people do. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison calls it a "white savior" narrative that reduces blacks to mere spectators in their own struggle for equality.

How timely this discussion, this moral drama is. In this post-Charleston, post-Ferguson moment, when black people are claiming ever more insistently that black lives matter, it is becoming ever more clear that white supremacy and white privilege must be unpacked and resolved---by white people. As historian Taylor Branch says, "Things are starting to shake loose." Isabel Wilkerson, African-American writer, asks, "Could we now be at the start of a true and more meaningful reconstruction?" To get us there, we will need all sorts of heroes.

To kill a racist bigot (metaphorically)---and gain true humanity.

"Go Set a Watchman" was Harper Lee's first completed manuscript. At an editor's
suggestion, she recast and rewrote that manuscript to produce the coming-of-age novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird." For a description of that process, see here.

Carla Seaquist's latest book, "Can America Save Itself from Decline?: Politics, Culture, Morality," is just published. An earlier book is titled "Manufacturing Hope: Post-9/11 Notes on Politics, Culture, Torture, and the American Character." Also a playwright, she published "Two Plays of Life and Death," which include "Who Cares?: The Washington-Sarajevo Talks" and "Kate and Kafka," and is at work on a play titled "Prodigal." Her early career was in civil rights.

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Terry Pratchett's books are the opposite of 'ordinary potboilers'

The moral weight that Jonathan Jones says is missing from the Discworld novels is very much there – but to know this, you do actually have to read them

Like many people on Twitter, I felt the red mist descend as I read Guardian art columnist Jonathan Jones’s newly published article saying that life is too short to read a Terry Pratchett novel. I’ve loved the Discworld books since I was nine and also spent some of my professional life carefully reading and commenting on them. But a raised eyebrow and a shoulder shrug are probably the most dignified response to Jones’s declaration that while he doesn’t intend to read a single one of Pratchett’s books, he is nonetheless sure that they’re not “actual literature” and that the late author was a “mediocrity” churning out “ordinary potboilers”.

When he turned his attention to “the true delights of ambitious fiction”, though, I had to speak up. Jones writes:

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Books kept me alive in prison

The end of the ban on sending books to prisoners in the UK reminds me just how vital they were to my survival inside, and to the life I have lived since

The official lifting on the ban on sending books to prisoners, which comes into effect on Tuesday, finally brings to an end one of the most irrational and baffling Ministry of Justice policy decisions in recent times. When I consider my life before prison and my life after prison, the difference is so immense it’s almost immeasurable. In my heart, I know that I could not have made the changes I needed to make, to live a contributing life, without education and books.

In 2008 I wrote a piece about The Grass Arena, the life story of former vagrant John Healy who found redemption through chess. “A good book can change the way you think about life,” was how I started the piece. Healy’s book had been sent to me by a probation officer in 1990 when I was around six years into my life sentence and struggling. “Read what this man has achieved and be inspired,” she wrote in the inside cover. I did and I was. Never could I have imagined then that 18 years later I would be instrumental in getting The Grass Arena republished
as a Penguin Modern Classic. This book is still a source of inspiration and hope today.

How any of us become who we are is a complicated process. I was already trying to figure it out long before I read about John Healy. It was the first year of my life sentence and I was locked in my cell in Wandsworth prison for 23 hours a day. I was without skills or abilities, but I could read. I’m sure the six books a week I was allowed from the prison library helped to keep me alive during that uncertain year, unlike the man in the cell above mine who hanged himself during my first Christmas inside.

At first I read so I wouldn’t have to think – then a friend sent me a book called Prisoners of Honour, a gripping account of the Dreyfus Affair by David Levering Lewis. This was the book that would really make me think and change the way I
thought about life.

For as long as I could remember, before prison, I lived without courage or integrity. In Dreyfus, I found a man who possessed profound measures of both. A good, honest and loyal soldier of France, Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment in a tiny purpose-built prison on Devil’s Island, 10km off the coast of French Guyana, after being wrongly convicted of spying. For five years he suffered the most deprived and brutal conditions imaginable for a prisoner. Reading what he endured before he was exonerated made my bleak Wandsworth cell, with its table, chair, bed and toilet bucket, seem like luxury.

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Girl, Missing by Sophie McKenzie – review

‘Please read this book: it is brilliant!’

I loved Girl, Missing and reread it several times, because when you pick up this book, you will never put it down! Some like me, will stay up till midnight reading it, others will want to stay on each cliff-hanger and wait until the next night.

This book is about a teenager, Lauren, who knew she was adopted but never knew her real family. No-one had kept any secrets from her, but one day, she decided to look for her true family. This decision sends her on journey into chaos, puzzles, and real danger with her best friend, Jam (James).

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