paper trail

Lawyer who revealed J.K. Rowling's pseudonym has been fined; David Simon's new musical

Edwidge Danticat

The lawyer who outed J.K. Rowling as the author of detective novel published under a pseudonym last year has been fined in the UK for breaking client confidentiality rules. Rowling wrote The Cuckoo’s Calling under the name Robert Galbraith in April 2013. The lawyer, Chris Gossage, told his wife, who told a friend, who in turn told a newspaper columnist.

The villa in Egypt’s second largest city, where Lawrence Durrell lived and was inspired to write “The Alexandria Quartet,” is slated for demolition, reports The Guardian. “If bulldozed, Durrell's crumbling former home would become the 36th listed building from Alexandria's fin-de-siècle heyday to be demolished in five years,” writes Patrick Kingsley. “But the businessman who owns it says it may soon make way for a high-rise apartment block.”

David Simon—creator of The Wire, author of Homicide: A Year of Killing on the Streets, and former Baltimore Sun reporter—has reportedly finished a draft of a musical about the Pogues.

Edwidge Danticat delves into the form and power of the short story, in an interview with the Rumpus: “The short story is like an exquisite painting,” she says, “and you might, when looking at this painting, be wondering what came before or after, but you are fully absorbed in what you’re seeing. Your gaze is fixed, and you are fully engaged.”

How was your Public Domain Day doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue as nicely as Happy New Year’s, but if you live in the US and desire the end of copyright restrictions, it was bad. Virtually no published works entered the public domain on January 1, 2014, due to the extension of copyright laws. What could have been, under an older body of laws from the 1970s? Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Ian Fleming’s From Russia With Love.