Bits Blog: Books, Just Like You Wanted

Film on J. D. Salinger Claims More Books Coming

Mr. Salinger, who died in 2010 at the age of 91, has been known for a distinguished but scant literary oeuvre that was capped by the enormous success of his 1951 novel, “The Catcher in the Rye.”

But a forthcoming documentary and related book, both titled “Salinger,” include detailed assertions that Mr. Salinger instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books — some of them entirely new, some extending past work — in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015.

The new books and stories were largely written before Mr. Salinger assigned his output to a trust in 2008, and would greatly expand the Salinger legacy.

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Another would include a retooled version of a publicly known but unpublished tale, “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans,” which is to be collected with new stories and existing work about the fictional Caulfields, including “Catcher in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 new works are said to include a story-filled “manual” of the Vedanta religious philosophy, with which Mr. Salinger was deeply involved; a novel set during World War II and based on his first marriage; and a novella modeled on his own war experiences.

For decades, those in touch with Mr. Salinger have said that he had continued to write assiduously, though he stopped publishing after a long story, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” appeared in The New Yorker. But no one had made so detailed a public claim that Mr. Salinger had left extensive posthumous publishing plans.

Matthew Salinger, who is Mr. Salinger’s son, and shares responsibility for the Salinger estate with Colleen O’Neill, the author’s widow, declined to discuss plans or the book and film. He said Ms. O’Neill, who did not respond directly to a separate query, would also decline to comment.

In an interview earlier this year, Matthew Salinger said he was skeptical that the planned book and documentary would deepen public understanding of his father, who, he said, for decades had confined his intimate dealings to a small circle of seven or eight people.

The documentary is directed by Shane Salerno, a filmmaker who spent nine years researching and filming the movie that is set for release by the Weinstein Company on Sept. 6, and will air later on PBS in the American Masters series. The companion book, co-written by David Shields, is to be published by Simon & Schuster on Sept. 3.

Speaking in his Los Angeles office on Saturday, Mr. Salerno pointed to tables and shelves filled with previously unpublished photographs, hundreds of letters and even a handwritten World War II diary that belonged to one of Mr. Salinger’s lifelong friends, a now-deceased fellow soldier named Paul Fitzgerald.

“If that’s not the inner circle, I don’t know what is the inner circle,” Mr. Salerno said.

His understanding of the publishing plans, Mr. Salerno said, took shape “fairly late” in his research.

The book and film attribute the detailed account of the plans to two anonymous sources, both of whom are described in the book as being “independent and separate.” Mr. Salerno declined to elaborate, other than to describe them as people who had not spoken to each other, but knew of the plans.

“The credibility of the last chapter,” Mr. Salerno said of a final summary of publishing prospects, entitled “Secrets,” “is in the 571 pages that preceded it.” Mr. Salerno noted that he initially had some cooperation from members of the Salinger family, but they later withdrew support.

The book and film have been marketed with the promise of revelations about Mr. Salinger, whose penchant for privacy became a hallmark. Last week, Weinstein and Simon & Schuster began a promotional campaign that includes a poster image of Mr. Salinger with a finger to his lips, beneath an admonition: “Uncover the Mystery but Don’t Spoil the Secrets!” The book, a 698-page companion to the film, is written in an oral history style with snippets of text from dozens of people who were interviewed for the project.

Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, said in an interview on Saturday that the book was “a major journalistic feat.”

Books of The Times: ‘Who Owns the Future?’ by Jaron Lanier

While working on “intriguing unannounced projects” for Microsoft Research — “a gigantic lighter-than-air railgun to launch spacecraft” and a speculative strategy for “repositioning earthquakes” — Mr. Lanier found time to follow up on his first book, “You Are Not a Gadget” (2010). That was a feisty, brilliant, predictive work, and the new volume is just as exciting. Mr. Lanier bucks a wave of more conventional diatribes on Big Data to deliver Olympian, contrarian fighting words about the Internet’s exploitative powers. A self-proclaimed “humanist softie,” he is a witheringly caustic critic of big Web entities and their business models.

He’s talking to you, Facebook. (“What’s Facebook going to do when it grows up?”) And to you, Google. (“The Google guys would have gotten rich from the search code without having to create the private spying agency.”) And to all the other tempting Siren Servers (as he calls them) that depend on accumulating and evaluating consumer data without acknowledging a monetary debt to the people mined for all this “free” information. One need not be a political ideologue, he says, to believe that people have quantifiable value and deserve to be recompensed for it.

It’s true that Mr. Lanier was once driving in Silicon Valley, listening to what he thought was some Internet start-up “trumpeting the latest scheme to take over the world,” when he realized he was hearing Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” (“If you select the right passages, Marx can read as being incredibly current.”)

He is no “lefty” (to use his word); he sees high-tech thievery as an apolitical problem. And he is too much of a maverick to align with anyone’s thinking, even his own. Whether it is a boast or a mea culpa, Mr. Lanier acknowledges: “I was an early participant in the process and helped to formulate many of the ideas I am criticizing in this book.” And “to my friends in the ‘open’ Internet movement, I have to ask: What did you think would happen?”

“Who Owns the Future?” reiterates some ideas in Mr. Lanier’s first book: that Web businesses exploit a peasant class, that users of social media may not realize how entrapped they are, that a thriving middle class is essential to keeping the Internet sustainable. When “ordinary people ‘share,’ while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes,” even that elite will eventually be undermined. Mr. Lanier compares his suggestions for reconfiguring this process to Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” but the last thing he worries about is writerly grandiosity. “Understand that in the context of the community in which I function,” he says of Silicon Valley, “my presentation is practically self-deprecating.”

Mr. Lanier’s sharp, accessible style and opinions make “Who Owns the Future?” terrifically inviting. What is he calling for? Just “The Ad Hoc Construction of Mass Dignity.” He much prefers sweeping formulations to qualified ones, although, as he points out, “being an absolutist is a certain way to become a failed technologist.” This book may not provide many answers (“It is too early for me to solve every problem brought up by the approach I’m advocating here”), but it does articulate a desperate need for them.

“Who Owns the Future?” overlaps with “The New Digital Age,” Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s much more polished work of Web analysis. Their book focuses more on global issues, but disagrees with specific points.

“The New Digital Age” looks forward to self-driving trucks that can ease the strain on Teamsters; Mr. Lanier rambunctiously writes of “Napstering the Teamsters” out of work, and of how such technology could go terribly wrong. The books also disagree on whether surgeons’ work will be enhanced or diminished by robotics.

And where Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen see promise in technology’s effect on the Arab Spring, Mr. Lanier is sick of the back-patting about social networking. Revolutions can happen without it, too, he says.

Mr. Lanier may not have any personal animus against Mr. Schmidt. But he describes listening to him and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos discuss the future of books just as he, Mr. Lanier, was struggling to write his first one. This prompts an attack on how Siren Servers could undermine and impoverish the world of reading, just as they did music. (Mr. Lanier is also a musician. He specializes in the arcane and innovative, as might be expected.) More generally, and very quotably, he warns against being seduced by “dazzlingly designed forms of cognitive waste.”

Finally, “Who Owns the Future?” takes some of it biggest swipes at those who do presume to own the future: fans of the Singularity (the hypothetical imminent merger of biology and technology), Silicon Valley pioneers seeking “methusalization” (i.e., immortality), techie utopians of every stripe. Yes, Mr. Lanier happens to be one of them. But he is still capable of remembering when, in his boyhood, prognosticators foresaw Moon colonies and flying cars. Now they think about genomics and data. Mindful of that way-cool past, he says, “I miss the future.”