Her mother said she saw a whole novel, but I never knew about it.”). She doesn't act like she is in pain, but prefers not walking, especially on hard floors. She walks slowly and the feet sort of flop. It makes her look like her legs are short and her front paws are about 2 inches long. ( Ted Hughes told the Paris Review that “what I was aware of was a fragment of a novel, about 70 pages. Customer: My 14 yr old cat walks on what I would describe as ' from the elbow down' of her front feet. Just imagine the uproar if Ernest Hemingway’s lost manuscripts were to be uncovered again, or another Sylvia Plath found. Judging by the stellar sales of Go Set a Watchman, and the interest with which the Salinger pieces were pored over online, that doesn’t hold back our interest a jot. One is “quite fine”, according to Jay Parini, while the other two are “clearly unfinished pieces”. “Not quite as good” is a criticism that has also been levelled by some at the late Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, published shortly before her death but written decades earlier and of the leaked “three stories” by JD Salinger, which the author had prohibited being published until 2060. The Grinch wasn’t the right colour, he wasn’t very funny, and there were only two pages of him. We are regular readers of Horton Hears a Who, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas – and were looking forward to it. Publish as much as possible of a beloved author’s work, because the fans will lap it up, or exercise a fierce quality control? It’s a question that I was pondering only this week, on reading the forgotten Dr Seuss stories in Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories to my children. Stewart’s the one author whose shopping lists I’d be happy to read: I long for the day when a previously unpublished manuscript is discovered amongst her papers.īut it’s a tricky tightrope to walk. The Wind Off the Small Isles wasn’t really lost it just fell out of print for more than four decades, and was hard to get hold of. It has Michael’s voice, his love of history, research and science all dynamically woven into an epic tale,” said his widow Sherri Crichton in an announcement, adding that the novel has its origins in Crichton’s correspondence with Professor Edwin H Colbert, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History.Īnd most satisfyingly of all – for this reader at least, who counts herself as one of the author’s No 1 fans – there’s a “lost” Mary Stewart novella out next month. “When I came across the Dragon Teeth manuscript in the files, I was immediately captivated. It’s set in the American west in 1878, during the golden age of fossil-hunting known as the “Bone Wars”, and follows the “notorious rivalry between real-life paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh during a time of intense fossil speculation and discovery”, says HarperCollins. Dragon Teeth actually sounds a lot of fun. And it isn’t only fantasy fans and children’s literature aficionados who are due to be treated with forgotten works by their heroes: a “lost” thriller by none other than Mr Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton, has been discovered in the late author’s files.

Cat walks on old manuscript