Harper Lee’s estate has filed a lawsuit against Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, the New York Times reports. Although the contracts for the play were signed in 2015 before Lee’s death the following year, her estate’s lawyer filed the challenge after reading a draft of the script last fall. According to the Times, “a chief dispute in the complaint is the assertion that Mr. Sorkin’s portrayal of the much beloved Atticus Finch, the crusading lawyer who represents a black man unjustly accused of rape, presents him as a man who begins the drama as a naïve apologist for the racial status quo, a depiction at odds with his purely heroic image in the novel.”
Hotel Rwanda director Terry George has bought the screen rights to Deborah Campbell’s A Disappearance in Damascus.
At The Guardian, Chris Power looks into the myth of the “short story renaissance,” an event that seems to occur almost annually. From the New York Times to the Daily Telegraph, Power cites examples of the yearly heralding of the short story form. “All these restorations took place after ‘decades of neglect,’ he notes. “But how can the short story ever have time to wither, given the frequency of its rebirth?”
Literary Hub has a new book-based advice column. In “Dear Book Therapist,” novelist and social worker Rosalie Knecht recommends Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! to a reader trying to turn off “the inner voice that tells a creative person that they’re an idiot and their work is trash,” and counsels a wannabe-writer too afraid to publish their work to read Tom Hiney’s biography of Raymond Chandler, “which is a valuable lesson on the fact that success does not make happiness, although it can take the edge of misery.”
Elon Musk offers more information about his rumored media venture. In two tweets, Musk divulged that the name of his “new intergalactic media empire” will be “Thud!” (“exclamation point optional”).