In New York City one can find Merricat's Castle School for children between 2 and 5 years old. The name seems to be a pretty clear reference to the character of Merricat Blackwood in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Without giving any plot spoilers, it seems like an odd naming choice because Merricat Blackwood wasn't exactly a role model for young children. I'll just say that the story of Lizzie Borden was definitely an influence on Jackson's novel.
Five of my nieces/nephews attended Merricat's Castle School for preschool. I have always wondered how the school got its name but on the few occasions I ran into the proprietors it was always too hectic to ask. But it seems so strange!
In 1972, the French Ministry of Education tried an unusual program to promote reading. It gave every newlywed couple five free books. Couples could choose one of the following two sets:
Balzac's Pere Goriot
Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma
Chateaubriand's Memoires D'Outre Tombe
Flaubert's Madame Bovary
De Lafayette's Princess De Cleves
Short stories by Voltaire
Hugo's Les Miserables
Balzac's Les Chouans
Fromentin's Dominique
Stendhal's Le Rouge et la Noir
I can't find any follow-up about whether the program was deemed to be a success.
I assume any effort to do something similar in the U.S. would get mired down in controversy over what books to pick.
The novel J'irai cracher sur vos tombes ("I spit on your graves") was published in France in 1946. It was promoted as being a work so steamy and controversial that no American publisher dared to print it. It was said to be authored by one Vernon Sullivan, a black American writer. The plot involved a black man who was able to pass as white who went on a violent quest for revenge after his brother was lynched. The book quickly became a bestseller.
In reality, the book was written by Boris Vian who was French, white, and had never set foot in the United States. In other words, the book was written in French, but passed off as a translation from English. Though soon the book was published in English.
The success of the book prompted Vian to quickly write three more "Vernon Sullivan" novels. But the book's popularity ended up being Vian's undoing. As reported by wikipedia:
I Spit on Your Graves reached the peak of its infamy when it served as an instruction manual for a real-life murderer, whose copy of the book was found on the bedside table next to the murdered body of a prostitute with the following passage circled and underlined: "I again felt that strange sensation that ran up my back as my hand closed on her throat and I couldn't stop myself; it came; it was so strong that I let her go ...". Following this copycat crime, when the book went into reprints, it sold more than 500,000 copies, and Vian was tried for translating "objectionable material" (as Vernon Sullivan was still nowhere to be found). Vian ended up paying a fine of 100,000 francs, and in the summer of 1950 the French government banned any further sales of the book...
The book was adapted into a film with the same title, directed by Michel Gast. Vian had already publicly denounced the adaptation while it was still in production, but he attended the premiere on 23 June, 1959. A few minutes into the screening, he stood up and began to shout out his dissatisfaction with the film, and while doing so he collapsed and died of a sudden cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital.
Peter Kavanagh published The John Quinn letters: a pandect in 1960. The book consisted of extracts from the letters of the lawyer John Quinn who had corresponded with many famous literary figures such as James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, etc.
The book is a literary oddity not because of its subject matter but because of the way that Kavanagh collected the extracts. He gained access to Quinn's letters in the manuscript room of the New York Public Library. But he was only allowed to read the letters, not take any notes on them. So he transcribed them, from memory, outside the library.
It was a form of spite publishing because the library had forbid the publication of any of Quinn's letters until 1988, and Kavanagh disagreed with this on principle. Also, he published the book on his own handmade printing press. The NYPL promptly sued him and barred distribution of the book.
I don't think it's possible to buy a copy of Kavanagh's book today, but a few libraries have copies of it. I believe there are only 12 copies of it still in existence.
More details from Life magazine (Feb 8, 1960):
When he died in 1924, Quinn bequeathed his letters to the New York Public Library, but the courts construed his will as barring publication in any form until 1988. Scholars who have been permitted to read them in the library's Manuscript Room have to sign a special form agreeing not to use direct quotation, and are forbidden to take notes.
But to Kavanagh, these restrictions were outrageously unjust...
In the Manuscript Room, he had no compunction about signing the pledge not to quote from the letters. "To me," he explains, "that paper had no more validity than posting a sign in my flat, 'Not responsible if the roof falls in.' I was driven and had no choice."
For 13 days Kavanagh pored over the letters. Unable to take notes, he simply memorized salient passages, then rushed outside to jot them down. When he had all he wanted he went on to the most arduous task of all: hand-setting the book and printing it...
Kavanagh had not sold a single copy of the Quinn Letters when the library served him with a restraining order, preventing him from distributing the edition and demanding its confiscation. At that point, Kavanagh made a heartbreaking decision.
"I don't want their bloody hands on my book," he said, and on the morning of the hearing he systematically hacked 117 volumes with a shoemaker's knife, shearing them down the middle. "It's like tearing my heart out," he said...
Kavanagh arrived in court with a briefcase crammed with the literary remains. He approached the bench and addressed the judge as "your lordship." Then he upended his briefcase and scattered his shredded copies as evidence that he had obeyed the injunction. The judge explained that he was not "his lordship" and gave Kavanagh permission to keep two unshredded copies of the book for himself.
Anyone who has ever romanticized the writing life should read this book. It's a kind of HOLLYWOOD BABYLON of its era. Disraeli pulls no punches, as seen in the excerpt below.
Pearl Lenore Curran wrote four novels and many poems, but claimed that they had all been dictated to her by a woman named Patience Worth who had lived over two hundred years earlier. So, A body of work that was literally ghost-written.
Info from Superstition and the Press (1983) by Curtis MacDougall:
For 15 years, 1913 to 1928, Mrs. John Curran of St. Louis, who lacked even a high school education, wrote four full-length novels and almost 2,500 poems that she said had been dictated to her by Patience Worth who was born in 1694 in Dorchestershire, England, migrated to the New World and was killed during an Indian attack during King Philip's War. The novels were well reviewed and five Patience Worth poems were included in Braithwaite's Anthology of Poetry for 1917, more than ones by Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell and Edgar Lee Masters. Patience, Mrs. Curran said, first made contact with her through the Ouija board one letter at a time; later she got words and sentences at a time.
Finnegans Wake is a notoriously difficult book to read. But Gerry Fialka and his book group figured out a way to do it. They read it very slowly. Very, very slowly. They read two pages a month, and then would meet to discuss those pages.
They started doing this in 1995, and a few weeks ago (Oct 2023) they reached the end. So it took them 28 years, but they finished the book. Now they're starting over.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.