Monroeville, Alabama Plans Harper Lee Tourist Attraction
Harper Lee’s hometown announced last week that it is developing the Harper Lee Trail. The tourist attraction will include a 1909 bank building where Lee’s father–on whom she based Atticus Finch–kept an office, along with replicas of three houses that are featured in To Kill a Mockingbird. Led by Lee’s erstwhile lawyer/advisor Tonja Carter, a coalition of local business owners hopes to bring hundreds of thousands of the legendary author’s fans to town. They also hope to avoid accidentally creating “Disneyland for racists” or drawing in white nationalists with an appetite for nostalgia. As with basically everything else connected to Lee’s legacy, “Whether Harper Lee herself would approve of the plans is open to question.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda to Produce Kingkiller Chronicle Series
If you gave me a hundred chances to guess who would be tapped to adapt Patrick Rothfuss’s monster fantasy trilogy The Kingkiller Chronicles for the big screen, I would never have gotten to Lin-Manuel Miranda. But the world is full of wonders, and that’s exactly what has happened. Miranda will serve as a producer and will compose original songs for both a feature film and TV adaptation. What a delightfully weird and unexpected pairing!
The Girl Gets Back on the Train? (New Paula Hawkins Novel in 2017)
The good folks at Riverhead are no doubt hoping to make lightning strike twice. Paula Hawkins, whose novel The Girl on the Train sold a floppity jillion copies and broke almost as many sales records, will release Into the Water in 2017. It’s another work of suspense that will “interrogate the deceitfulness of memory.” Gonna be fun to watch what happens. Will you be waiting for it?