Harper Lee received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Nov. 5, 2007.

Britain’s Mail on Sunday got a much sought after exclusive recently when friends of reclusive author Harper Lee agreed to facilitate an introduction for reporter Sharon Churcher. As was mentioned in our post last week about the 50th anniversary of Lee’s singular masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird, the novelist’s aversion to interviews, or any form of publicity, is a very well known part of her mystique. Mail on Sunday‘s access to the author is quite a win, though it came with a very big caveat: “Don’t mention the Mockingbird“. Churcher traveled to Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, AL for the interview, and although the author only graced her with a handful of short sentences, it was still a very memorable meeting:

“Nervously, I approach the novelist, carrying the best box of chocolates I could find in the small Alabama town of Monroeville, a Hershey’s selection costing a few dollars. I start to apologise that I hadn’t brought more but a beaming Nelle – as her friends and family call her – extends her hand.
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The battle between eReaders got heated on Monday as Barnes & Noble and Amazon slashed the prices for the Nook and Kindle respectively. The first shot across the bow came from Barnes & Noble, which announced that the price of the 3G Nook would be trimmed down to $199, and that a new WiFi-only version of the eReader would be available for just $149. Amazon fired back later in the day when it cut the price of the Kindle to $189. All versions of the Kindle have 3G capabilities built-in, and this new low price slyly undercuts the 3G Nook by $10. Amazon’s press release also emphasized the more than 600,000 titles in the Kindle Store, which has a larger selection of books, including New York Times Bestsellers, than either the Nook or the iPad.
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By Alex Butterworth
Pantheon | 528pgs
Release Date: June 15, 2010

Summary:
Historian Alex Butterworth studies the years spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries when unstable global economies and social upheavals turned some young people into anarchist terrorists, in The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents. The intense, captivating narrative follows the anarchist movement from its beginnings in a struggling Paris Commune in 1871, to the bloody Russian Revolution in 1905, and finally to the movement’s decline in the 1930′s. The story line moves between, Europe, Russia and the U.S. and prominent anarchist leaders such as Kropotkin, Rochefort, and Bakunin, are discussed. As the disenchanted social idealists resort to increasingly violent acts of terrorism in pursuit of a utopian way of life, governments react by creating secret police forces to investigate and prosecute the anarchists. Drawing parallels with today’s turbulent political landscape, Butterworth offers this history as a cautionary tale in hopes that new generations will not repeat the bloody mistakes of the past.
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This year marks the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning book To Kill a Mockingbird. To commemorate the milestone, Mary McDonagh Murphy has written Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper, 240pgs) in which twenty-six people are interviewed about their love of the book. Some of the interviewees are very well known, such as Oprah Winfrey, Anna Quindlen and Tom Brokaw, others like the author’s sister, Alice Finch Lee are less so. After 50 years in print, the novel is considered an American classic and still sells almost one million copies a year. “No other twentieth-century American novel is more widely read. Even British librarians, who were polled in 2006 and asked, “Which book should every adult read before they die?” voted To Kill a Mockingbird number one. The Bible was number two,” writes Murphy in an excerpt published on the The New Yorker‘s website. Murphy, who is also a filmmaker, has produced a documentary titled Hey, Boo to coincide with the book.
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By Bret Easton Ellis
Knopf | 192pgs
Release date: June 15, 2010

Summary:
Twenty-five years later, Bret Easton Ellis revisits the characters that put him on the literary map in Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to his breakout debut novel Less Than Zero. The rich, drug-fueled, young hipsters may have grown into middle age, but older doesn’t necessarily mean wiser. When narrator Clay, now a well known screenwriter working in New York, returns to L.A. to cast his movie about teens in the 1980′s, he quickly falls in with his old crowd. On the surface the glitz and glamor of the City of Angels appears unchanged from Clay’s youth, but a current of quiet desperation flows underneath. His ex-girlfriend Blair is now married to the ever unfaithful Trent, Julian runs an escort service specializing in teenage girls and Rip is almost unrecognizable due to all the plastic surgery that has mangled his face. Things take a decidedly noir turn as Clay begins a destructive affair with a talentless starlet. Mysterious text messages and strange cars parked menacingly outside his apartment push him into a paranoid panic that forces him to look into the darkness of his own soul.
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Shortly after the attacks on September 11, 2001, author Barbara Kingsolver published a series of op-ed pieces in several major U.S. newspapers calling for a meaningful national dialog and asking leaders to consider dissenting opinions, and was shocked at the harsh criticism and hate mail she received. “A lot of people were frightened, and when people are frightened, they want to burn witches. They want to run somebody up the flagpole…,” she explains in an interview with The Guardian. “It was really one of the worst times of my life.” A few months later, Kingsolver decided to channel all that fear and anger into something positive and started research on a new project, which would grow to be The Lacuna. “I have to make something of this,” she thought at the time. “I have to take all this bile and hatred and make something beautiful.”
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Steve Jobs’ presentation at the Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday revealed some interesting facts about the iPad’s eBook sales and the new features planned for the iBooks app. Engadget reported on Job’s impressive announcement that in the few short months since the iPad’s release, Apple has won 22 percent of the eBook market. In the first 65 days that the “magical” device was available to the public, five million eBooks were downloaded by iPad users. To capitalize on this success, Jobs also announced some great new features set to be added to the iBooks app later in the month. Users will be able to read PDF documents with iBooks, as well as utilize new note-taking and bookmarking functions.
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By Dan Ariely
Harper | 352pgs
Release Date: June 1, 2010

Summary:
Duke Professor Dan Ariely further explores behavioral economics, and draws some interesting conclusions on human behavior in The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home, his follow-up to the bestselling Predictably Irrational. This time the focus is on the positive, and sometimes negative effects, that irrationality has on our personal and professional lives. Using his own creative experiments, he studies behavior influenced by the IKEA effect – the act of building something instills a sense of ownership that causes us to overvalue the object, and analyzes why huge monetary bonuses can actually be detrimental to job performance. (Hmm, maybe this book should be required reading on Wall Street?) Ariely uses the data from these experiments and his own experience recovering from a painful accident in his youth, to suggest solutions in overcoming negative behavior as individuals, and as a society. Yes, we may be irrational. But, that’s not all bad.
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David Sedaris at WBUR studios in June 2008.

June is National Audiobook Month, and according to writer David Sedaris, also National Cornbread Stuffing Month. In honor of audiobooks and carbs, the author of Naked and When You Are Engulfed in Flames worked with the Get Caught Listening campaign to record a couple of promos to support National Audiobook Month. Entertainment Weekly has the audio files posted exclusively on their site. In his characteristic absurd and humorous style, Sedaris extols the virtues of Sam Lipsyte’s writing in The Ask, the voice work of narrator Dylan Baker, and the ability to eat cornbread stuffing while listening to an audiobook. All for a good cause.
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By Stephen King
Scribner | 144pgs
Release Date: May 25, 2010

Just in time for the lazy days of summer and baseball season, comes the release of Blockade Billy, the latest novella from Stephen King. In sharp contrast to the mammoth 1,000+ page Under the Dome released last fall, Blockade Billy is a slim volume centered around Major League Baseball circa 1957. An elderly George “Granny” Grantham, former third-base coach of the New Jersey Titans, recounts the fateful season that an unknown Iowa farm league catcher was called up to help his pro team hobbled by injuries. William Blakely is an odd young man, but boy can he play baseball. He quickly becomes a fan favorite, blowing out rookie batting records and guarding home plate with a fierceness that earns him the nickname “Blockade Billy”. As to be expected in a Stephen King story, the plot takes a dark twist as Billy’s oddness turns sinister and players start to get hurt. His short stint with the Titans is effectively erased from the baseball record books, and only “Granny” can reveal the dangerous truth.
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