Inside Jacket

By now, everyone knows Richard Heene is a fame-hungry reality TV "star," the father of three would-be hooligans (NSFW) and now a confessed felon.

But did you know that he’s also an author?

As expected, his book — "The Official Offensive Driving Handbook" — is as gross as you’d expect. It’s also currently out of stock, so I guess it won’t be this year’s top gift, either.

 I guess the only thing I’m really shocked about is that no one has bothered to "review" the book yet. Maybe it’s a good sign, though: perhaps our celebrity-obsessed country has had enough with this man’s brand of "humor."

The last time I tried to use a payphone it was winter in New York. I’d just moved here from Berlin, carrying two suitcases, a drowned German cell phone, and a deep nostalgia for Spree-side picnics. To my immense frustration, I soon discovered that, though flickering phone booths stood sentinel on nearly every corner, it was almost impossible to find a functioning phone. After unloading pounds of change into eager metal mouths throughout the city, desperately trying to reach my few friends in sub-freezing conditions, I gave up and declared the poor public phone obsolete. Which presents a problem: what to do with their carcasses?

One English city seems to have found the most charming of solutions, turning their classic red phone booth into a mini-library. I realize that our graffiti-covered apparatuses are hardly as picturesque (or commodious), but it got me thinking. What if, where the phone book once hung from its wire rope, you could find Chaucer or Dickens or Tolstoy between plastic sheets? If you could pick up the headset to hear audio recordings of short fiction? If you could dial the number for Montaigne rather than your mother? For myself, I’d never be bored waiting for that belated friend to emerge from the subway again.

(Image: Empty Phone by Henderson Images)

A new theory suggests that Jane Austen may have died from “tuberculosis caught from cattle.”

Cormac McCarthy puts his Olivetti typewriter up for sale.

Jonathan Littell wins the Bad Sex in Fiction Prize.

The Global Language Monitor names “Twitter” the most commonly-used word in 2009.

Ha Jin’s newest book of short stories takes place in Flushing’s Chinatown.

William Golding once mistook a Bob Dylan puppet for Satan.

The release of "Pirate Latitudes" by Michael Crichton (shown here) and  "The Original of Laura" by Vladimir Nabokov — authors who left this world some time ago — reopens the sensitive issue of posthumous publication. They’re not alone, of course. Authors including Jane Austen and Franz Kafka have watched from heaven as their works were published. Ditto for one of my favorites, "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole.

In the kindest interpretation, these new works offer scholars and fans new knowledge about literary giants, and a chance to reinterpret other works. In the cruelest view, they can be little more than literary grave robbing, crass exploitation to make a few bucks.

Nabokov, for example, recorded thoughts about a new book on notecards, and left instructions that they should be destroyed upon his death. But his son decided to publish the fragmentary work.

I don’t have a problem with that sort of publication. It gives Nabokov lovers a chance to examine him working at his craft. In a way, it almost makes him immune from criticism, because we would assume that any bad writing would eventually smoothed over, any plot holes would be plugged.

I have more reservations about "finished" works that are published posthumously. I assume they stayed in a drawer for a reason: The author wasn’t satisfied. Out of respect, these works should stay where they are, bound and gagged.

For more on the topic, see this Time essay on posthumous publication and commentary by Nathaniel Rich in The Daily Beast.  Meanwhile, The Guardian asks whether this is a sign of "[p]ublishers devoid of inspiration cashing in on sure things, or worthy attempts to provie the complete spectrum of a writer’s work? My curious (nosy) nature means I err on the side of worthy."