Alexandra Alter

The first section of the book, a spellbinding true crime story, follows the Rev. Willie Maxwell, who allegedly killed five family members for insurance money in the 1970s. In a stranger-than-fiction twist, Maxwell himself was killed in 1977, shot at a funeral ceremony for one of his alleged victims by one of her grieving relatives.

But the other mystery proved even knottier. It involved reconstructing years of investigative work done by Harper Lee, who was fascinated by the Maxwell murders and worked on a true crime book about the case that she titled “The Reverend.” To this day, it remains unclear how much she wrote, why she stopped writing or whether she finished the book.

Cep first learned about the existence of “The Reverend” in 2015, when the literary world was stunned by the news that Lee was publishing another novel, titled “Go Set a Watchman.” When Cep went to Alabama to report on the circumstances surrounding the new book, she learned about another old Harper Lee project that hardly anyone was talking about — a rumored masterpiece of true crime that people close to Lee said rivaled Capote’s “In Cold Blood” (which Lee famously helped to research but received little credit for).

Cep may not have fully solved the cases, but she collected enough clues and vivid details to tell a captivating story. Below is an edited transcript of a recent interview with Cep about how she retraced Harper Lee’s steps.

Q: Which was the harder mystery to unravel, the story behind the alleged murders, or what happened to Harper Lee’s unfinished manuscript?

A: I’m not sure I solved either of them. But I hope I’ve given people all the evidence that I can for readers to draw their own conclusions about everything, from did the Reverend do it to how did he do it if he did it, and what did Harper Lee write, what didn’t she write or why couldn’t she write?

Q: What was the most challenging thing about taking Lee on as a subject?

A: There’s a tremendous amount of her inner life that remains enigmatic even to those who knew her best. She just was exceedingly private. It was not even just a public-facing privacy; it was even with people who knew her well, and I think in some of those core instances, she was inscrutable even to herself.

Q: The thing that was surprising to me in your book was how confident and how committed to the material she seemed to be. Why do you think she abandoned it, or never tried to publish it?

A: It is the big mystery of what became of Harper Lee, and this is one iteration of it. I think for a lot of readers, it’s unsatisfying because I don’t put my thumb on the scale. I think a different writer would have made a guess. It’s something I really think Harper Lee would appreciate about the book, the degree to which I tried to be scrupulous.

Q: But if you had to make a guess …

A: I am an optimist in general, and I’m an optimist about Harper Lee. She was an extraordinary writer and thinker, and there’s a way in which she had everything going for her with this book. Look, I did it, so of course she could have, and probably did, and there’s probably no one more excited to read whatever exists of “The Reverend” than me. I’m pretty sanguine. I think there’s potential for her to have written the whole thing. People who lived around her on the Upper East Side heard the typewriter at all hours of the day and night.

Q: And by your account, she gathered an incredible amount of material.

A: It was clear she had a mind for the investigation. She had all the pieces. She should be able to write it, and then we have to sit with the question of, what happened?

Q: Were you at all intimidated taking on a literary project that Lee had failed to complete?

A: I think “Mockingbird” is one of the most extraordinary novels in the English language, and the idea that the woman who wrote that couldn’t do it doesn’t bode well for the likes of Casey Cep. Imagine if you thought Harper Lee was going to tell your story, and then Casey Cep, this writer you’ve never heard of who’s never written a book, she’s not even from Alabama, I think for some of these people it was like, “We get you? We were supposed to get Harper Lee and we get you?”

I felt like there was one thing I could do which she was never going to do, which was talk about her. It’s the story behind the story. She would never have included herself.

Q: There’s an amazing moment near the end of the book when you get this trove of documents about the Maxwell case that Maxwell’s lawyer, Tom Radney, had given to Harper Lee. What were some other breakthrough moments in your reporting?

A: I had been told the court reporter from the murder trials was dead. At some point I realized I didn’t know that for sure, and I was looking for women by that name, and it turned out she was alive and well. I go knock on the door, we get to talking about the Maxwell case and a couple of minutes into that conversation she goes, “Gosh, I haven’t talked about this since I talked to Harper Lee.”

Q: Were there any questions that you tried really hard to answer that you were unable to crack?

A: Harper Lee smoked cigarettes like a chimney. You will notice that I do not name the brand of cigarettes she smoked in the book. She’s shown holding them in some photographs but the pack is never visible. As much as I want to tell you I think they were Chesterfields, I could not say that with certainty. So I just tell you she smoked.

Q: One gets the sense that you have a real affection for Harper Lee and yet you expose her demons, her heavy drinking, her insecurities, her disdain for her hometown. Was it difficult to draw out sources on those aspects of her life?

A: People were happy to finally get to talk about it, trusting that it would be represented in a responsible way and not a sensational way. A lot of people felt like they didn’t want to embarrass her in her lifetime, but they wanted to let the world know that she struggled.

Q: What do you think Harper Lee would have made of your effort to finish the story she never told?

A: People ask me sometimes, do I think she would like the book? I respect her enough to say, probably not. I don’t think she would have approved of someone looking so seriously at her life. And yet I think that she valued the truth a great deal and would have admired the extent to which this is a book that tried to tell the truth.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/books/furious-hours-casey-cep-harper-lee.html" id="07f16907-6fce-35b1-a4d6-bc588fbc8967">The New York Times</a>.

There are two intertwined mysteries at the heart of “Furious Hours,” Casey Cep’s meticulously researched narrative about an Alabama preacher accused of multiple murders, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who tried and failed to tell his story.

The Murderer and the Novelist: What Happened to Harper Lee's Unpublished True Crime Book?

Her aversion to publicity can be inconvenient, and somewhat impractical. As one of the world’s most famous and in-demand authors, she must occasionally submit to public interrogations, particularly when she has a new book to promote. But she’s not happy about it.

“She hates it,” her agent, Valerie Hoskins, tells me ominously on the phone a week before James and I meet.

Normally, this sort of stance — a notch more hostile than a celebrity’s typical ambivalence toward nosy reporters — would make for an uncomfortable interview. But when James greets me at her bright, airy home in Ealing, a placid suburban borough in west London where she lives with her husband, writer Niall Leonard, and their two Westies, she doesn’t seem remotely ill at ease, at least not outwardly.

She suggests we sit in her enormous, spotless kitchen overlooking the garden for coffee and croissants before we move to her office to talk about her new romance novel, “The Mister,” and suggests the pastries will be better with apricot jam. She talks about her sons, ages 22 and 24, and TV shows she’s obsessed with (“Game of Thrones” and “Stranger Things”). She laments her lack of hobbies after I ask her what she does in her spare time, when she’s not writing or running the elaborate business of being EL James. She can’t think of anything she does for fun.

“I need to get a hobby,” she says. “Writing used to be my hobby.”

Over the past eight years, that hobby has morphed into a billion-dollar entertainment franchise, and James has gone from being an anonymous writer posting lusty fantasies online, to an erotica industry mogul who’s running her own small empire of kink.

When James first released “Fifty Shades of Grey” through a small Australian press in 2011, she hoped to sell a few thousand copies and prevent online copycats from stealing her work. Instead, her erotic trilogy went on to sell more than 150 million copies worldwide, and was translated into roughly 50 languages, including Arabic and Mongolian. The series was adapted into a feature film series that grossed more than $1 billion globally, which James coproduced. It helped popularize niche sexual fetishes involving bondage and anal plugs, bringing them from the fringes into the mainstream.

“It’s still a bit of a shock to me,” says James, who comes across in person as funny, casually profane and surprisingly unguarded. “I’ve been looking at it going, what the hell happened?”

Overseeing a wildly successful multimedia franchise left little time for James’ one-time hobby, writing. On top of that, James, 56, faced impossible expectations set by her blockbuster debut, as ravenous fans kept clamoring for more sequels. Inevitably, many of her readers will be disappointed by any story that doesn’t involve the dominant-submissive relationship between the sadomasochistic billionaire Christian Grey and his demure conquest Anastasia Steele, who becomes his willing sexual servant.

So it’s taken her a while to write something new.

“I’m incredibly nervous about it,” she says. “There are other stories I want to tell. I’ve been with these two for so long.”

Moving Past ‘50 Shades’

With “The Mister,” her first new work of original fiction since she became an international phenomenon, James hopes to inaugurate a new phase of her career. Her latest work is a tame (by comparison) love story set mostly in contemporary London and Cornwall, featuring a wealthy British aristocrat who falls for his house cleaner, a beautiful, mysterious young woman who fled Albania. In Hollywood pitch terms, it’s like a porny mash-up of “Cinderella” and “Downton Abbey.”

James traveled to Albania twice to research the novel, and collected a small library of books about the country, including an Albanian dictionary, a guide to Albanian social codes and laws, and a book about Albanian organized crime. Her husband, who’s the household cook, learned to make traditional Albanian stews.

It was quite a change from the research she did for “Fifty Shades,” which involved lurking in some of the darker corners of the internet, scrolling through websites devoted to sexual bondage techniques and accessories.

For fans who are expecting another story involving gags, whips and safe words, “The Mister” may come as a let down. The sex scenes are explicit and extensive, but are not nearly as transgressive and boundary-pushing as “Fifty Shades.”

But James had other narrative objectives beyond titillation. Beneath the frothy fantasy, “The Mister” deals with unexpectedly weighty topics like economic inequality, the plight of undocumented workers, the oppression of women in conservative societies and the way social institutions and governments elevate the wealthy and powerful and exploit the vulnerable.

Those themes feel particularly relevant in Britain these days, as the country’s contortions over Brexit have exposed ugly divisions over race, class and British identity. James has become preoccupied with these issues since she has fallen unexpectedly into wealth, and seen firsthand how society is weighted in favor of the rich.

“It’s important for me to put some of this in,” she said. “As an incredibly wealthy person, you keep the money.”

James is a passionate Remainer who wants Britain to stay within the European Union, a position she broadcasts unabashedly on social media even though she knows she risks alienating some fans. The issue has come up repeatedly in interviews she’s given about “The Mister,” including with French and Norwegian media outlets.

She’s anticipating a backlash, in part because we live in such polarizing times, but also because she’s come to expect scrutiny of everything she does.

“Being a successful, middle-aged, overweight woman, people are so angry that you’re stepping out of line,” she said.“Sometimes it really gets me down.”

“We Couldn’t Get Enough Paper”

Before her name became synonymous with super-hardcore bondage erotica, James, whose real name is Erika Mitchell, worked for several decades in television, as a production executive at the BBC and other companies. She grew up in Buckinghamshire, where her father worked as a cameraman for the BBC and her mother, who emigrated from Chile, worked as a sales representative. She studied history at the University of Kent, then got a job at the National Film and Television School. She and Leonard, a screenwriter and novelist, met there, and married in 1987.

Romance was always her escape. To entertain herself on her daily commute to work, she read everything from steamy historical romances involving lascivious dukes and earls to lesbian bondage fiction.

Then she discovered “Twilight,” Stephenie Meyer’s chaste teen vampire romance. Like so many other “Twi-hards,” James started writing her own explicit take on the story, and published it online, under the name Snowqueens Icedragon. For reasons that are still baffling to James, her work went viral.

She changed the characters’ names to avoid copyright infringement, and in 2011 a small Australian publishing house agreed to publish it.

Within a year, James was engulfed by a frenzy that she calls “the great madness.”

Big publishing houses and film studios began courting her. One publisher wanted to change the novel’s covers to feature a bare-chested man. Another said it took to long to get to the sex.

Anne Messitte, the publisher of Vintage and Anchor Books, won James over when she said the novels should be stocked at the front of bookstores, not buried in the erotica section. Vintage constructed a complex deal, which transferred publishing rights from the Australian publisher, while simultaneously buying the underlying rights from James. The company paid a seven-figure sum for the trilogy, and ordered a 750,000-copy first print run. Universal Pictures bought the film rights for a reported $5 million, outmaneuvering several other studios that were offering multimillion-dollar deals.

The books sold so quickly in Britain that the printers ran out of silver ink for the iconic black and metallic gray covers, which James designed herself. In the United States, Vintage printed more than 1 million copies a week to meet demand, overwhelming its paper suppliers. “We couldn’t get enough paper,” Messitte said. “It felt somewhat surreal.”

At book signings, fans wept, which in turn made James cry (her publicist always carries boxes of tissues on tour). In Portland, Oregon, a local TV news crew chased her car through the streets.

James was bewildered by her overnight success. From the beginning, she told her agent she didn’t want to be famous.

“I said, it’s not my fault, you wrote the bloody books, not me,” her agent, Hoskins, recalled.

The series altered the literary landscape, paving the way for more boundary-pushing erotica, and changed the way that major retailers and entertainment companies catered to female desire. Sales of sex toys surged. Target began selling “Fifty Shades” lubricant, vibrating rings and blindfolds.

James became a taboo-breaking evangelist for certain kinds of sexual fantasies that women were often silent about, or ashamed of.

“It was not just her tapping into something, she commercialized it,” said Anne Jamison, an associate professor of English at the University of Utah, who studies fan fiction.

James struck licensing agreements for everything from “Fifty Shades”-branded wine and lingerie to floggers, vibrators and handcuffs, and oversaw the development of many of these items herself. Perhaps most incongruously, she even licensed a “Fifty Shades” teddy bear, who comes with mini handcuffs and a blindfold.

“We set about trademarking things just to stop people from making them,” she tells me in her office, which is festooned with “Fifty Shades” paraphernalia — poster-sized images of the covers, a toy helicopter modeled after Christian Grey’s, one of the infamous teddy bears. “You don’t want someone to do it badly.”

James wants to show me some nipple clamps she helped design in collaboration with the sex-toy maker Lovehoney, a British company that produced a line of Fifty Shades-themed erotic accessories. Lovehoney had first proposed some heavy, industrial-looking clamps, which James rejected.

“They looked like they could jump start Frankenstein,” James says. She asked the company to “make them pretty,” and the next iteration satisfied her.

James calls to her assistant in the adjacent room, who brings us the delicate rose-gold clamps.

“Do not ask me to demonstrate,” she says dryly as she hands them to James.

“The Talent Is Here!”

Around half past noon, a car arrives to drive James to a photo shoot at a hotel in Kensington, for an upcoming feature in You, a magazine for The Mail on Sunday. In the car, James offers an unsolicited critique of the first “Fifty Shades” film, which she felt failed to capture the allure of the novel. Her agent, who’s been an otherwise unobtrusive chaperone, gently interjects and suggests she move on to another topic.

On the sidewalk in front of the hotel, Charlotte Bush, the director of publicity for Arrow, James’ British publishing house, greets James effusively and shows off her manicured nails, which she had painted hot pink to match the lettering on the cover of “The Mister.”

“The talent is here!” Bush calls out as she guides James to a makeshift dressing room, where hairstylists and makeup artists spring into action and begin ministering to her.

“All this fuss, it’s lovely,” James says. “I’m sort of a minimal fuss kind of person.”

“That’s because you’re a writer,” the makeup artist responds.

James sifts through a rack of evening gowns that the stylists brought for her to choose from. She dismisses one as “very matronly.” Another is “very kaftan-y,” another “too print-y.”

James examines another glittery gown: “That looks a bit too ...”

“Sequin-y,” one of the stylists concludes.

In the end, James chooses a dress of her own that she brought from home, a long blue gown with a deep V-neck, which she bought for one of the “Fifty Shades” movie premieres.

As the frenzied makeover continues, Bush, James’s publicist, wants to discuss some potential viral marketing stunts to promote “The Mister.” One of her ideas, which was quickly discarded, was to beam a pink light from a lighthouse in Cornwall, a coastal county where some of the steamiest scenes of the novel take place. But “the lighthouse people” objected, since a hot pink lighthouse could pose a hazard to ships, Bush says.

James agrees it isn’t worth causing a nautical disaster.

“The lighthouse idea is very sweet, but not if it endangers life,” James says.

The publicist’s next suggestion is less perilous. She proposes hiring a pianist to play in the middle of Sloane Square, since the novel’s heroine is a piano prodigy. James loves the idea.

“A female pianist then?” Bush asks.

“I’m on it,” Bush says, pecking at her phone.

James gently suggests that she makes sure the piano is tuned.

After the photo shoot, James sips a Negroni at the hotel bar, blissfully anonymous. She rarely gets recognized by strangers, and jokes that she wants to start a spy agency staffed by middle-aged women.

“You can go absolutely anywhere, you’re invisible,” she says.

She worries that the coming publicity blitz for “The Mister” will leave her too exposed. Not long ago, a fan approached her in public, which she took as a bad sign.

“It happened the other day and I thought, I’ve been doing too much telly,” she said earlier, using an expletive.

Born of Fandom

It’s unclear how James’ readers will respond to “The Mister,” and whether their devotion to the author transcends their love of Christian Grey and a bottomless appetite for more of the same story. Other mega-best-selling authors, including Stephenie Meyer and J.K. Rowling, have switched genres and rebranded themselves after ending their successful fantasy franchises, and have retained just a fraction of their audience.

James seems to have nearly exhausted her own appetite for “Fifty Shades.” She’s written a paranormal romance — a ghost story set in contemporary London — which she hopes to publish, and is contemplating a sequel to “The Mister.”

“There’s so many ideas and everyone’s like, oh, go back to what you’ve been doing for the last 10 years,” she says.

But readers have taken matters into their own hands, ensuring the story will continue, whether James writes it or not. On websites like fanfiction.net and Wattpad, amateur writers have posted tens of thousands of stories based on “Fifty Shades.” James says she doesn’t read them, but she acknowledges that it’s only fitting for fans to take over.

“Those characters feel like they belong to everyone now,” she says. “This was born of fandom.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/books/el-james-the-mister-fifty-shades.html" id="b569203e-4b54-3e57-ad07-2118885dbf93">The New York Times</a>.

LONDON — EL James does not like speaking to journalists, who often want to know deeply personal things, like how much money she makes and whether she has a sex dungeon in her basement.

The Evolution of EL James

In January 2018, Amélie Wen Zhao posted an ecstatic message on her website: Her debut young adult fantasy novel, “Blood Heir,” had sold to a major children’s publishing house in a three-book deal after a heated auction and was scheduled to be released in summer 2019.

“I AM GOING TO BE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR!!!!!!” she wrote.

But a year later, her nascent career has stalled, after some critics, who read early review copies of the novel, denounced the book as blatantly racist.

This week, Zhao announced online that she was pulling the book because of objections that readers had raised over the novel’s depiction of slavery.

“It was never my intention to bring harm to any reader of this valued community, particularly those for whom I seek to write and empower,” she wrote. “As such, I have decided to ask my publisher not to publish ‘Blood Heir’ at this time.”

Zhao’s publisher, Delacorte Press, supported her choice to cancel the book’s June release but did not urge her to. Delacorte still plans to publish the three books she is under contract for, including “Blood Heir” if Zhao decides she wants to release it at a later time, according to a company spokeswoman.

“We respect Amelie’s decision, and look forward to continuing our publishing relationship with her,” Random House Children’s Books, Delacorte’s parent company, said in a statement. Zhao was unavailable for an interview, according to her publisher.

The controversy surrounding “Blood Heir,” and Zhao’s swift and dramatic decision to withdraw the work just months before publication, has further fueled a skirmish in the world of young adult literature over racial representation, diversity and cultural appropriation.

The debate over Zhao’s novel echoes previous scandals that have erupted in recent years over representation in children’s and young adult books, as publishers have had to delay, cancel and even withdraw books that became lightning rods for online criticism.

In 2016, a picture book titled “A Birthday Cake for George Washington” was withdrawn from stores after critics complained that it glossed over the horrors of slavery. A similar scandal engulfed the 2015 picture book “A Fine Dessert,” which depicted an enslaved mother and daughter hiding in a cupboard and cheerfully licking a bowl of batter clean; the author, Emily Jenkins, apologized and donated her earnings to We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit that promotes diversity in children’s publishing. In 2017, Laura Moriarty’s dystopian novel, “American Heart,” was savaged months before its release by readers who said Moriarty had peddled a “white savior narrative” in her depiction of a future America where Muslims are placed in internment camps. Harlequin Teen delayed publication of Keira Drake’s fantasy novel, “The Continent,” after readers blasted it as “racist trash,” “retrograde” and “offensive.” Drake and her publisher, Harlequin Teen, apologized, and Drake rewrote the book, removing and revising some passages and character descriptions that readers had flagged as racially offensive.

Children’s book publishers have grown increasingly cautious when acquiring books that deal with charged subjects such as race, gender, sexuality and disability. Many publishers and authors now hire “sensitivity readers” who vet books and identify harmful stereotypes.

“When any author is writing outside their own experience, we want to make sure they’ve done their homework,” David Levithan, vice president and publisher of Scholastic Press, which regularly seeks advice from sensitivity readers, told The Times in 2017.

Edith Campbell, a reference librarian at Indiana State University who blogs about young adult literature, said readers’ ability to instantly weigh in on social media has forced publishers to confront the lack of diversity in the industry, and made it impossible for publishers and authors to ignore complaints when a book promulgates racial or other stereotypes.

“This is one of the few ways that publishing has evolved into the 21st century, by having to listen to people’s immediate reaction to what they’re publishing,” she said.

Shelley Diaz, a former reviews manager and young adult editor at School Library Journal, said “Blood Heir” and other young adult fantasy novels that deal with slavery often deserve extra scrutiny from readers because the stories are crafted for an impressionable young audience, and praised Zhao for responding to critics.

“Some people in the community have found things that were worthy of critique and weren’t handled in a culturally competent way,” she said. “A lot of authors have been confronted with critiques like these and decided to stand their ground and not change anything, but this was a woman of color who was brave enough to say, ‘I hear you, I hear this critique, and I want to bring a better book out to my readers.'”

But some argue that in our hyperreactive online ecosystem, where a tweet or a negative blog post can quickly spark mass calls for a book’s cancellation or a boycott against a publisher, the outrage cycle is often overblown, and can have devastating consequences for young adult authors who are just starting their careers.

Zhao, who was born in Paris and raised in a multicultural community in Beijing, and emigrated from China when she was 18, had dreamed of becoming a writer since she was in elementary school, according to her website. Her mother warned her it was impractical, so she pursued a career in finance while writing on the side.

On her website, she described how “Blood Heir,” which takes place in a fictional Cyrilian empire where a group of powerful people called Affinites are feared and enslaved, drew on real-world issues, including “the demonization of the Other and this experience of not belonging.”

“As a foreigner in Trump’s America, I’ve been called names and faced unpleasant remarks — and as a noncitizen, I’ve felt like I have no voice — which is why I’ve channeled my anger, my frustration, and my need for action into the most powerful weapon I have: my words,” she wrote on her website.

When Zhao’s agent, Pete Knapp, submitted the manuscript to publishers, editors swooned. Offers poured in from the five biggest publishing houses, and Zhao sold the book as part of a three-book package to Delacorte Press for more than $500,000, according to the industry website Publishers Marketplace. Delacorte described it in marketing copy as “the hottest fantasy debut of the summer,” calling it an “epic new series about a princess hiding a dark secret and the conman she must trust to clear her name for her father’s murder.”

After Delacorte sent out advance reader copies, many of the early reviews were positive — the book has a 4 1/2 star rating on Goodreads. But a backlash began brewing this January, when some readers posted blistering critiques on social media. Some readers criticized what they viewed as racial stereotypes and careless borrowing from other cultural traditions: the novel features a diverse cast — including “a tawny-skinned minority of a Russian-esque princess; a disowned and dishonored Asian-esque assassin; an islander/Caribbean-esque child warrior; a Middle-Eastern-esque soldier,” according to Zhao’s description of the novel on her website.

Others objected to the way in which Zhao used slavery as a plot device.

“How is nobody mentioning the anti-blackness and blatant bigotry in this book?” one reader wrote on Goodreads. “This book is about slavery, a false oppression narrative that equates having legitimately dangerous magical powers that kill people with being an oppressed minority, like a person of color. This whole story is absolutely repulsive.”

With what seemed like lightning speed in the publishing world, where publicity and marketing plans are crafted months in advance, Zhao apologized and said she would withdraw the book, which was due out in early June.

In a note to readers, she said she intended to write the novel from her “immediate cultural perspective” and to address the “epidemic of indentured and human trafficking prevalent in many industries across Asia, including in my own home country. The narrative and history of slavery in the United States is not something I can, would or intended to write, but I recognize that I am not writing in merely my own cultural context. I am so sorry for the pain this has caused.”

Rather than calming the social media firestorm surrounding her book, Zhao’s decision set off another fractious debate about whether she was right to listen to her critics, or whether she had been bullied into scrapping her hard work by an online mob of competitive, backstabbing writers.

“YA Twitter remains a cancerous stain on social media and in life. Woke white women mostly along with ‘concerned’ minority women cyber bully a debuting Chinese author Amélie Wen Zhao to NOT publish her book,” one observer wrote on Twitter.

Others praised her for pulling the book.

“I’m so glad to hear that you’re taking the concerns that were raised seriously and trying to do better instead of getting defensive,” a book blogger wrote on Twitter.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/books/amelie-wen-zhao-blood-heir-ya-author-pulls-debut-accusations-racism.html" id="f1cf55a4-1bf4-32ec-ac0d-77ceac2b2979">The New York Times</a>.

(Books News)

Y.A. Author Pulls Her Debut After Pre-Publication Accusations of Racism

More than a decade ago, Jay Asher’s young adult novel, “Thirteen Reasons Why,” a dark story about a bullied teenager who kills herself, became an unexpected best-seller. Teachers and librarians around the country embraced the novel as a timely and groundbreaking treatment of bullying and teenage suicide, and the novel went on to sell several million copies. A popular Netflix adaptation sparked controversy over its depiction of the causes of suicide but still drew hordes of new readers to the book and has been renewed for a third season.

Then, last year, Asher’s career imploded when he was accused of sexual misconduct, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators announced that he had violated the professional organization’s anti-harassment policy. The repercussions were swift: His literary agency dropped him, speaking engagements and book signings evaporated, and some bookstores removed his novels from their shelves.

Now Asher, who denied the allegations, has filed a lawsuit against the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the group’s executive director, Lin Oliver, claiming that Oliver and the organization made false and defamatory statements about him that torpedoed his career and caused financial harm and intentional emotional distress.

“I do not condone harassment of any sort and have spent my entire career standing up for its victims, so these statements were devastating,” Asher, who declined to be interviewed for this article, said in a statement.

In the lawsuit, which was filed in a California state court in Los Angeles, Asher claims that Oliver and her organization never properly investigated the complaints against him and ignored exonerating evidence.

The lawsuit will likely further fuel an ongoing debate about the scope and messy aftermath of the #MeToo movement in the children’s book world, which has seen a string of scandals involving prominent authors such as Asher, James Dashner, Sherman Alexie and illustrator David Diaz.

Publishers, booksellers and agents have wrestled with how to handle anonymous allegations against authors when the accusations are hard to confirm, and with whether it’s appropriate to rehabilitate the careers of those accused. Some publishers have canceled contracts and pulped books, and many have expanded the use of morals clauses and “author conduct” clauses in book contracts, which allow publishers to cancel book deals if the author is credibly accused of unethical behavior.

Children’s book publishers in particular have reacted swiftly to harassment allegations against authors, given their books’ impressionable audiences and their reliance on teachers and librarians, who might be reluctant to support the work of authors accused of inappropriate behavior.

But so far, few accused authors have vigorously fought allegations publicly or sought financial damages for lost earnings.

According to the lawsuit, the allegations against Asher surfaced in April 2017, when Oliver received emails that were purportedly from a group of seven anonymous women who belonged to the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. The emails claimed that Asher had used the group’s conferences to prey on women sexually, then threatened them to intimidate them into silence, making them “feel unsafe to attend SCBWI events.”

Asher has acknowledged having affairs with women he encountered at these conferences, but he maintains that they were consensual and that he never threatened any of the women or offered to help them professionally. In the complaint, Asher alleges that “an individual upset over Plaintiff’s success” was behind the emails to Oliver and that in June 2017 one of the alleged seven anonymous women contacted Oliver and told her that the allegations made in April were false. But according to the complaint, “no further investigation” was conducted.

The lawsuit further states that Asher provided the organization with evidence that one of the authors of the emails had “sexually coerced him at a SCBWI Conference” and had been harassing him for more than a decade.

Andrew Baum, a lawyer representing Oliver and the organization, said that the group and Oliver “reject, and will vigorously defend against, Asher’s claims.” Oliver declined to comment further.

In February 2018, the allegations against Asher erupted into a public controversy, after an article on Medium about sexual harassment in the children’s book world set off a cascade of online accusations against prominent illustrators and authors, including Asher and Diaz.

That month, Oliver said in a statement to The Associated Press that the organization had broken with both Asher and Diaz. “Claims against them were investigated and, as a result, they are no longer members and neither will be appearing at any SCBWI events in the future,” she said.

Asher disputed Oliver’s characterization. “In April 2017, Mr. Asher voluntarily agreed that he would no longer attend SCBWI conferences,” Asher’s spokeswoman, Tamara Taylor, said in a statement. “This was in response to many years of harassment from a group of authors with whom he had consensual relationships that ended with some hurt feelings when they learned about each other.”

Asher’s complaint states that he has suffered psychologically and economically from “dramatically decreased book sales, and exclusion from involvement in a Netflix series based upon ‘Thirteen Reasons Why’.”

Asher is seeking a jury trial and unspecified financial damages.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/books/jay-asher-lawsuit-thirteen-reasons-why.html" id="47c37727-ee4e-3bc4-aaf4-2b0f4c70a149">The New York Times</a>.

Author of 'Thirteen Reasons Why' Files Defamation Lawsuit

The remarks, published on her website, came several days after a New York Times interview in which she called “And the Truth Will Set You Free,” by David Icke, “a curious person’s dream come true.” Jewish groups and many others condemned Walker for supporting the book and The Times for publishing the interview.

Walker, author of acclaimed novel “The Color Purple,” did not back down in her statement, saying that the book was not anti-Semitic.

“I do believe he is brave enough to ask the questions others fear to ask, and to speak his own understanding of the truth wherever it might lead,” she wrote.

Walker’s response did little to dispel the controversy that erupted after she gave an enthusiastic endorsement of Icke, a British conspiracy theorist.

“There is no fair reading of Icke’s work that could be seen as not anti-Semitic,” Jonathan A. Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said in an email Friday. “Public figures should not be making excuses for Icke’s hatred; they should be condemning it.”

In the book, Icke draws on ideas from the anti-Semitic pamphlet “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” argues that Holocaust denial should be taught in schools and that Jews are responsible for organizing anti-Semitic attacks, and calls the Talmud a racist document. In other writings, he has posited that a cabal of a child-sacrificing, bloodthirsty lizard people, many of whom are Jewish, are secretly running the world.

Walker did not immediately respond to an interview request submitted through her literary agent Friday. In response to an interview request to Icke, his son sent a link to a recording of a statement this week in which Icke denied being an anti-Semite and argued that the criticism amounted to “propaganda against me designed to discredit me and what I’m writing,” but went on to say that “some Jewish people are involved in a global conspiracy.”

In last week’s By the Book column in The Times’ Book Review section, when Walker was asked which books she has on her nightstand, Walker cited “And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” saying that “in Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about.” In the same answer, she also praised “The Road of Lost Innocence,” a book about sex trafficking in Cambodia by Somaly Mam, which was discredited in 2014 when it emerged that Mam had fabricated parts of her story.

Readers who were aware of Icke’s extreme views and his role in spreading anti-Semitic tropes and ideas saw Walker’s recommendation as not only offensive, but as a dangerous endorsement of bigotry and hatred. Some critics said that in an environment where conspiracy theories have led to a rise in hate crimes and violence against Jews, and may have been a motivating factor behind the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, publishing an endorsement of such views without challenging them was irresponsible.

“The only thing that is accomplished by uncritically disseminating Walker’s bigoted book bon mots is ensuring that the racism is disseminated to more people,” Yair Rosenberg wrote in Tablet.

Rosenberg and others have noted that Walker has espoused such ideas before, praising Icke’s books on her blog, in a BBC interview, and posting a video of one of his lectures on her website.

Critics also cited blatantly anti-Semitic language in her poetry, particularly one titled, “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud,” which includes the lines, “Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only/ That, but to enjoy it?”

But while Walker’s views were no secret, they hadn’t been subject to such intense public scrutiny before.

For many readers, she is best known as a beloved figure in the literary world, a poet and author of Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Color Purple,” which was adapted into a film featuring Oprah Winfrey and a Broadway show.

Walker, 74, is also a longtime political activist and vocal feminist, known for her work with the NAACP and for taking stands on social justice issues. She has also been an outspoken critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, even comparing the country to Nazi Germany. Jewish groups including the Anti-Defamation League have been monitoring Walker’s talks and writing for years.

In her website remarks, Walker said that both she and Icke were being attacked for supporting Palestinians and that “as a woman, and a person of color, as a writer who has been criticized and banned myself, I support his right to share his own thoughts.”

“It is a sad day for freedom of inquiry, thought, and speech, when an attempt is made to frighten people into lying about what is on their nightstand,” she wrote.

Many critics took issue not only with Walker’s views, but also the Times’ decision to publish her unqualified recommendation of an anti-Semitic book without critiquing the choice or asking any follow-up questions. In a letter to The Times, Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League said The Times had failed to put the recommendation in context.

“Ms. Walker has a right to read what she will, but the Book Review has a responsibility to fact-check its material and forewarn readers if the book being recommended to readers is a conspiratorial polemic by a writer with a long history of scapegoating groups of Jews and blaming them for many of the ills of the modern world,” he wrote.

In an interview with the Times’ Reader Center, the editor of the Book Review, Pamela Paul, said that the By the Book column was designed to shed light on a subject’s reading habits and to use books as a window into their views, and should not be construed as an endorsement of their choices.

“When we interview anyone, whether it’s a public official or a foreign leader or an artist, The Times isn’t saying that we approve of the person’s views and actions,” she said. “We’re saying we think the subject is worthy of interviewing; that’s our approach with By the Book.”

It remains unclear whether the controversy will tarnish Walker’s legacy, or shape the way readers and scholars approach her celebrated body of work, which also includes “You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down” and “Finding the Green Stone.”

Writing in Slate, book critic Laura Miller argued that while The Times should have given readers contextual information to evaluate the book, the controversy did have one upside: “A lot more people know the ugly truth about Walker and Icke now.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/arts/alice-walker-david-icke-times.html" id="74ae0ba0-a92a-37f0-ad63-a7ac405b2929">The New York Times</a>.

Answering Backlash, Acclaimed Novelist Calls Anti-Semitic Author 'Brave'

In a statement addressing the widespread outrage over her praise for a book with anti-Jewish overtones, novelist Alice Walker called its author “brave enough to ask the questions others fear to ask” and denied he was anti-Semitic.

James, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2015 for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” is up against two debut authors, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, for her story collection “Sabrina &amp; Corina,” and Julia Phillips, for her novel “Disappearing Earth,” about two sisters who are lured into a stranger’s car and disappear in Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula. The two others, both of them previously Pulitzer finalists, are Susan Choi, for “Trust Exercise,” and Laila Lalami, for “The Other Americans.”

The nonfiction finalists include “Solitary,” the memoir of Albert Woodfox, a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement, and “The Yellow House,” Sarah M. Broom’s memoir of her New Orleans family and how its members were scattered after Hurricane Katrina. They will compete with Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Thick: And Other Essays,” Carolyn Forché’s “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance” and David Treuer’s “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present.”

The finalists in translated literature include works originally written in Arabic, Finnish, French, Hungarian and Japanese.

All of the winners will be announced Nov. 20 at an awards ceremony in New York City.

Below is a complete list of the 2019 finalists in fiction, nonfiction, translated literature, young people’s literature and poetry.

FICTION

Kali Fajardo-Anstine, “Sabrina &amp; Corina: Stories”

Marlon James, “Black Leopard, Red Wolf”

Laila Lalami, “The Other Americans”

Julia Phillips, “Disappearing Earth”

NONFICTION

Sarah M. Broom, “The Yellow House”

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Thick: And Other Essays”

Carolyn Forché, “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance”

David Treuer, “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present”

Albert Woodfox with Leslie George, “Solitary”

TRANSLATED LITERATURE

Khaled Khalifa, “Death Is Hard Work”

Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price

László Krasznahorkai, “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming”

Marlon James’ novel “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” an epic fantasy about a bounty hunter on the trail of a mysterious boy, on Tuesday was named one of the five fiction finalists for the National Book Award.

Alexandra Alter

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