Harper Lee, the reclusive writer of To Kill a Mockingbird, issued a biting letter on Monday in response to Marja Mills’s newly published memoir, The Mockingbird Next Door, which describes Mills’s friendship with Lee and her sister Alice. Mills became friends with the pair in 2004, after she moved in next door to them. “It did not take long to discover Marja’s true mission,” Lee writes. “I was hurt, angry and saddened, but not surprised. I immediately cut off all contact with Miss Mills, leaving town whenever she headed this way.”
Simon & Schuster is apparently “in talks” with Amazon but has declined to comment about what.
David Plotz, who is stepping down from his position at Slate as editor in chief, told Capital New York that he resigned because the job had stopped bringing him “the joy and passion that an editor should feel all the time.”
Guernica interviews Zia Haider Rahman, a Bangladeshi-British writer whose first novel about betrayal and class divisiveness, In The Light of What We Know, was published in April. “Novels are not bound by the rules of reportage,” Rahman says. “They’re predicated on delivering experience.”
Francine Prose and James Parker discuss literary taboos of the modern age: among them, censorship in China, “the groupthink of corporate publishing,” and “boringness.”
Viv Groskop grumbles over Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell’s ongoing Twitter short story, which is arriving in bursts of twenty tweets twice a day for seven days: “(a) this is cheating at Twitter and (b) this is not the best way to read a short story . . . How do you mentally screen out all the interruptions from the latest kitten meme, jokes about German footballers in the shower and the latest on the situation in Syria?”