I was excited to read on the Los Angeles Times book blog Jacket Copy that HarperStudio will next month release a collection of Mark Twain’s unpublished short works. The book, called Who is Mark Twain?, will feature both fiction and nonfiction.

Well…I think I’m excited, anyway. In the world of a writer, sometimes there’s a good reason works remain unpublished: They are below either the writer’s or the publisher’s standards. Even Jacket Copy says of Twain’s “new” short story “The Undertaker’s Daughter” that it “has few sharp edges, only some wit that winks between the lines.”

I wonder if Twain would’ve wanted some 21st century editors rifling through his papers and putting out a new book. The thought of a posthumous, unvetted-by-me collection of say, my own journal writings, is absolutely terrifying.

(Not that anyone would want to publish such a thing, of course…)