FOUND: NEW STORIES FROM THE 1920S BY ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Some Harvard professors and students doing research found three unknown stories by Zora Neale Hurston - stories that change our understanding of her as bound to her favorite little Florida town. "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is the Hurston title that we're perhaps most familiar with, and it's a book for which she has been criticized because she used dialect that - said critics like Richard Wright - contributed to mocking of blacks as backward.
The new stories, from the late 1920s, "were set in the New York City of the Harlem Renaissance," the professors wrote in an essay; "they reminded us less of the canonical Hurston than of authors like Rudolph Fisher and Nella Larsen, who are more closely associated with stories of migration from the country to the city and with sophisticated novels of manners in urban settings."
The essay: www.tinyurl. com/33plow3 (Chronicle of Higher Education)
In case You Missed it
Twain, sanitized: A noted Mark Twain scholar who wants more people to read "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn" is, with NewSouth, publishing an edition in which the n-word and "injun" have been replaced with "slave" and "Indian." An uproar about Alan Gribben's decision has ensued.
You Saw It Coming Dept.: WikiLeaks! The group's founder has a book deal. Julian Assange says he's had to write a memoir to raise legal defense money . Knopf, he says, is paying him about $800,000, and Scottish publisher Canongate, about $500,000. Knopf's Paul Bogaards told the Wall Street Journal: "We are very excited to be publishing this book. The work that Assange has been doing at WikiLeaks has tremendous importance around the world." Due this year. (Publishers Lunch)
new and recent
"Capital Offense: How Washington's Wise Men Turned America's Future Over to Wall Street," by Michael Hirsh (John Wiley, 342 pp.). Hirsh repeats a number of points made by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm ("Crisis Economics") and others - but he also "does a highly informed, if decidedly opinionated, job of situating these developments within a historical context," writes Michiko Kakutani. The book is "useful and succinct reading" at this time of major national debate over the economy. (NYT)
"The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires," by Tim Wu, who coined the term "net neutrality." In this "engaging history of American communications technologies over the last 130 years," Wu argues that the Internet is destined to be closed, falling into the same cycle that affected telephone, movies and radio. Yes - but ..., says a reviewer at Ars Technica (www.tinyurl.com/24s7w6o ) (Knopf, 366 pp.).
EVENTS
Jazmin Ashlee signs "Love in Ruins," 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday , the Book Owl, 5772 Churchland Blvd., Portsmouth. (757) 638-7323.
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