The New York Times reports that J.D. Salinger may have left five posthumous works that will be published, possibly as soon as 2015.  A documentary directed by Shane Salerno is scheduled for release on September 6, at which point we may know more about “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans.”

One collection, to be called “The Family Glass,” would add five new stories to an assembly of previously published stories about the fictional Glass family, which figured in Mr. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” and elsewhere, according to the claims, which surfaced in interviews and previews of the documentary and book last week.

Another would include a retooled version of a publicly known but unpublished tale, “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans,” which is to be collected with new stories and existing work about the fictional Caulfields, including “Catcher in the Rye.” 

The 12- page typed manuscript is evidently in Princeton’s Firestone Library and may not be photocopied.  Access is restricted, although it is unclear exactly what that means.  Restricted to whom?  Salinger’s estate stipulates that the work may not be published until 2051!

For a summary of the story, click on the link below, and you learn about the curious ending:

Vincent then retreats to his room. There, he contemplates what has just happened, profoundly sorry. He is sorry for all the people in their ivory towers, sorry for all the soldiers who can’t keep their caps on right, sorry for all of the second-bests in the world. But most of all, Vincent is sorry that he almost compared his mother to Svengali, when in actuality she is the last and best of the Peter Pans.

 http://deadcaulfields.com/Unpublished.ht…

If you are in the Berkshires this week, don’t miss “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Creation of a Classic,” the stunning exhibit of story sketches and drawings that led up to the making of the 1937 Disney film.  The exhibit runs through October 27, 2013, and I’ll be there on August 22 at 5:30 for a talk about the origins and afterlife of “Snow White.”

Guided by the vision of a master storyteller, 32 animators, 1032 assistants, 107 inbetweeners, 10 layout artists, 25 background artists, 65 special effects animators and 158 inkers and painters and countless production staff came together to create an enduring masterpiece of the moving image. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:The Creation of a Classic explores the making of the film through more than 200 original works of art―from conceptual drawings and early character studies to detailed story sketches and animation drawings. Meticulously-rendered pencil and color layouts, rare watercolor backgrounds, colorful cels, and vintage movie posters, and a variety of interactive  stations will bring Walt Disney’s unforgettable animated story to life.

watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=_ktcmV-3NaI

If you’re in search of a good summer read, try Thomas McNeal’s Far Far Away.  Jacob Grimm comes alive (well, as a ghost) in ways that I could never have imagined.  Gothic in its sensibilities but intimate and engaging in its narrative style, the novel kept me awake and reading until 2am.   Wonderfully informative about the Brothers Grimm (there’s even a Grimm quiz show), it also gives us a richly complex “Hansel and Gretel” hypertext, with two adolescents who have to escape the clutches of the witch.  You’ll figure things out halfway through but that’s part of the sheer pleasure of this pulse-pumping story.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/books/a-detective-storys-famous-author-is-unmasked.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&smid=tw-share

It’s a mystery to me why J.K. Rowling wrote The Cuckoo’s Calling under a pseudonym.  And was it the combination of good reviews and sluggish sales that led to the anonymous tweet, tipping off the press?  Here’s what the NYT writes:

The story of how The Sunday Times uncovered the truth is an odd one that involves, as seems so often the case these days, Twitter. It started on Thursday, said Richard Brooks, the paper’s arts editor, after one of his colleagues happened to post a tweet mentioning that she had loved “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” and that it did not seem as if the book had been written by a novice.

“After midnight she got a tweet back from an anonymous person saying it’s not a first-time novel — it was written by J. K. Rowling,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview. “So my colleague tweeted back and said, ‘How do you know for sure?’  ”

The person replied, “I just know,” and then proceeded to delete all his (or her) tweets and to close down the Twitter account, Mr. Brooks said. “All traces of this person had been taken off, and we couldn’t find his name again.”

It is, of course, possible that the anonymous tweets were part of a sneaky campaign by the publisher to get the story out. But The Sunday Times’s curiosity was piqued, and Mr. Brooks decided to work surreptitiously at first, not alerting Ms. Rowling’s publisher or agent for fear of having the possible news leak to a competitor. 

And here’s a fairy tale sent to me by Michael Sims, author of the fabulous Story of Charlotte’s Web :

Cinderella had been queen a long time. She missed walking through the marketplace without people staring. She wanted to see if she could be loved for what she did without being recognized as the queen.

She succeeded in getting good reviews and had the experience that most writers have, of selling poorly and being largely ignored.

Then someone spoke aloud her magic name and all her riches materialized again.

 

For background on the new Disney film inspired by Pamela Travers’s visit to Los Angeles to meet with Walt Disney, check out:

 http://fairytalenewsblog.blogspot.com/20…

Director John Lee Hancock discusses the archival material used by both screenwriter and Emma Thompson (who plays Travers) in an interview on Moviefone:

In addition, the Archives had the tapes when P.L. Travers came because she insisted that everything be recorded on tape. I’m not sure if she was that efficient or she was terrified that she might win a point in the room but be dismissed in the movie. But she insisted that all these meetings be tape recorded. This wasn’t something that was done back then. They have something like 39 hours of this. It was invaluable not only to me but also to Kelly Marcel when she was writing it, and to Emma — it’s a goldmine if you’re playing a character, to have all those tapes from this period.

For a show that celebrates fantasy, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” doesn’t put much trust in its audience’s imagination. This blindingly flashy new musical, which opened on Tuesday night at the Theater Royal, Drury Lane, is as jammed with games and gadgets as a Toys “R” Us warehouse. Behemoth playthings are forced upon you in such relentless abundance that you wind up feeling like a spoiled, benumbed child on Christmas morning, drowning in a sea of presents and yearning to flee back to bed.

 http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/th…

Don’t hold back, Ben Brantley.

I didn’t fully trust the review until I saw this:

From Flavorwire:

Last Friday, an essential exhibit for book lovers and onetime children of all stripes opened at the New York Public Library: The ABC Of It: Why Children’s Books Matter. Within, you can find the copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that belonged to Alice Liddell, a recording of E.B. White reading from Charlotte’s Web, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s family copy of Mother Goose, complete with annotations on which sections were too scary for the children, the original Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed animals, and more delights. Take a look at some of the treasures the exhibit has to offer after the jump, and head on up to the NYPL to see the show in person before it closes next March.

And below the link to some images of books on display.  My favorite is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s family copy of Nursery Rhymes of England.  If you enlarge the page by clicking it, you will find, among other annotations, that “the miller did swear” is crossed out and replaced with “the miller declared.”

 http://flavorwire.com/400174/lewis-carro…

I went to Paul McCarthy’s White Snow installation prepared to like it. Disney’s Snow White is now over 75, and who can blame the art world for wanting to engage in a take-down of what has to be the iconic fairy-tale figure, the girl who represents everything wrong with once upon a time?  Cheerful, cute, and infatuated with good housekeeping, Snow White also becomes an exhibitionist, her beauty on display as she awaits the kiss from Prince Charming.

Here’s a summary of what you will find:

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/19…

The twisted form of White Snow lies naked on the dirty carpet with what appears to be blood on her face, but a discarded brown Hershey’s squeeze bottle on a molested couch provides the real evidence. A bloody, naked Walt Paul slumps with a cartoon character protruding from his open mouth shows that all is not what it seems in this dark fantasy. Moving through the space will offer more clues, which are featured in the accompanying films — giant mirror images creating an alarming echo chamber of bawdy cartoonish desire, resulting in violent death.

I’m the first to admit that there is a Gothic dark side to fairy tales.  White Snow distorts and deforms the confections of mass culture to represent, in graphic terms, the violence and dysfunctionality lurking beneath the surface of the nuclear family and its domestic shrines.

I’m sure Paul McCarthy will be pleased with my sense of repulsion as I viewed the mess he had made.  But before long the cacophony blaring from the speakers makes you commiserate with the museum guards, the multiple screens projecting images of dancing dwarfs and writhing SnowWhites quickly turns boring, and the rectangular peepholes into the disorderly domestic spaces make you want to say: “Yes, I get it, I am a voyeur, and you are trying to assault me with these images and make me feel that art should be disturbing and painful.”  To add to the multiple ironies, McCarthy has added a gift shop capitalizing on Disney merchandise.

To sum up: I’d rather be a critical viewer of Disney’s Snow White than a complicit spectator of McCarthy’s White Snow.

Below some fascinating background from Randy Kennedy, who quotes Paul McCarthy as saying: “We take it somewhere.”  I wish he had.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/magazi…

This Snow White would not follow much of a fairy-tale narrative — no evil queen, no magic mirror, no resurrection through a prince’s love. At one point, two of the Snow Whites, most of the dwarves and McCarthy lay in a moaning, panting, undulating pile on the living-room floor that McCarthy intended as a visual echo of an image in Jack Smith’s 1963 underground transvestite romp, “Flaming Creatures.”

“It’s not about sex,” he told me of his own scene. “It’s about basic human contact. It’s about hanging onto someone else for dear life.”

When they finished, McCarthy hopped up and seemed barely out of breath. He was practically glowing. “O.K., we take five and then we’ll go again,” he announced. “Like yesterday, we’ll kind of start this as a see-where-it-goes. Then we amp it up. We take it somewhere.”

And from the program:

“McCarthy is known for challenging, visceral work in a variety of mediums–from performance, photography, video and installation, to sculpture, drawing, and painting–and scales ranging from tiny to monumental.  Playing on popular illusions, delusions, and cultural myths, his work is created to deliberately confuse codes, mix high and low culture, and provoke an analysis of our fundamental beliefs.”

And here is another perplexed critic:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/arts/d…

What all this means, I don’t exactly know, although it obviously touches on regret for lost innocence and on a recoil from — and a satirist’s relish of — a homegrown plague of give-us-more-pleasure that has spread to much of the world. What I suspect is that in Mr. McCarthy we have a Swift for our time, or maybe a Hieronymus Bosch, and in “WS” — organized by the Armory’s artistic director, Alex Poots, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, in association with Tom Eccles — a scabrous American  “Garden of Earthly Delights.”