Posthumous

It's an authentic phenomenon. As "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest," the last of three posthumous thrillers by the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson, goes on sale this week in the United States, his books have already sold 40 million copies worldwide in a mere five years, while the modestly mounted movie version of his first title has already grossed something like $100 million, with talk of remaking these Swedish productions in Hollywood versions....

WASHINGTON -- President Obama awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously Thursday to former Army Chaplain Emil Kapaun, a Korean War officer who is better remembered for his humility and kindness in prison camps than for his role in combat. “This is an amazing story,” Obama said at the ceremony. “Father Kapaun has been called a shepherd in combat boots.” Kapaun, a Catholic priest from Kansas, died in a North Korean prison camp 62 years ago. A handful of Korean War veterans, some of whom served with Kapaun, attended Thursday's ceremony.

Michael Jackson's first posthumous release has only been circulating for a little more than a day and already it's controversial. We shouldn't be surprised: Despite the unified field of emotion that formed during his mourning, the late King of Pop always has been a polarizing figure, not only because of his troubled personal life, but also because of his music. The Jackson hits that helped shape an era of blockbuster pop -- especially ballads such as "Man in the Mirror" and "You Are Not Alone," which are close in spirit to the newly released "This Is It" -- were scorned by many critics as saccharine, overly smooth and sometimes grandiose.

Re "Family of a fallen Marine sees his citizenship dream fulfilled," Dec. 7 The whole idea of "posthumous citizenship" is almost Dickensian in its "pound-of-flesh" approach. The cynic in me sees this as a warm and fuzzy human interest story to make those who oppose a rational immigration policy feel human. So many questions jump out: Why did it take his death for Marine Cpl. Roberto Cazarez to become a citizen? Why isn't citizenship automatic upon military enlistment or entry into a combat unit?

If Dominick Dunne's posthumous novel, "Too Much Money," will get people talking about him, that's probably exactly what he would have wanted. FOR THE RECORD: 'Too Much Money': In Monday's Calendar, a book review of "Too Much Money" by Dominick Dunne said the inspiration for the character "Adele Harcourt, the Manhattan doyenne who lives past 100, is Mary Astor." It should have said Brooke Astor. — Dunne was something of an outsider who became a trusted chronicler of the lifestyles and trials of the privileged.

Posthumous movie appearances: An article in the July 18 Calendar section about actors who have had films released posthumously said that singer-actress Aaliyah had sold 32 million records in the U.S. by the time she died in August 2001. In fact, according to Nielsen SoundScan, through July 20 of that year she had sold 8.1 million albums and 3.4 million singles in the U.S.

Feather's column on Stan Kenton was the finest objective piece I've ever seen on this subject. However, why didn't he mention that there are several Kenton scholarships at various colleges around the country? Since Feather is among the names of critics who fall all over themselves deifying the Duke, I think Kenton needs all the posthumous good PR he can get. HEATHER GILBERT Sunland

A Montreal publisher has incredible timing -- its unauthorized biography of Michael Jackson had just gone to the printer on June 24, the day before the pop singer's unexpected death. Publisher Pierre Turgeon halted the presses so author Ian Halperin could write a new ending, and the book, previously titled "Michael Jackson: Return From Exile" quickly became "Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson." "Unmasked" is likely to be one of the first posthumous Jackson biographies to hit shelves.

Michael Jackson's diminishing figure - so thin that a costume designer claimed he could see the pop star's heartbeat through his skin - failed to even concern his own manager, according to testimony given Friday. "Get him a bucket of chicken," Frank DiLeo replied when told of the singer's dramatic weight loss, Karen Faye said. "It was such a cold response," said Faye. "I mean, it broke my heart. " Over two days on the witness stand, Jackson's longtime friend and hair and makeup artist offered dramatic and sometimes emotional testimony in a trial that will determine whether the music legend's mother and three children are awarded damages in the millions - even billions - for his death.

All these years later, Frances Kroll Ring can still see it, the afternoon she filled out an application at Rusty's Employment Agency on Hollywood Boulevard and drove to Encino to meet a writer who was looking for a secretary. It was April 1939, and she was 22, a Bronx transplant with typing and dictation skills. She'd been in Southern California for a little more than a year, coming west to help her father, a New York furrier, set up shop on Wilshire Boulevard. "Everybody said, 'You're a furrier?

CAMP PENDLETON - Marine Cpl. Roberto Cazarez applied for U.S. citizenship shortly before he deployed for combat duty in Afghanistan. The expedited process allows enlistees who are permanent legal residents, like Cazarez was, to go to the head of the line for citizenship. Cazarez's application was pending at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services when he was killed by a roadside bomb blast in March, just weeks before his battalion was due to return to Camp Pendleton. On Thursday, in a short but emotional ceremony, Cazarez's widow was presented with a certificate indicating that her husband had been posthumously awarded his U.S. citizenship, retroactive to the day that he was killed.

WASHINGTON -- One-hundred-and-thirteen years after John J. Pershing recommended him for promotion, Sgt. Paschal Conley, a Buffalo Soldier, would posthumously be elevated to second lieutenant under a Senate-approved defense bill. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) sought the few lines in the massive bill at the behest of Conley's descendants. Conley was a member of the group of African American Army regiments, serving from 1879 until 1906 and fighting in the Spanish-American War, according to the Alabama Department of Veterans Affairs, which sought Sessions' help after the department's commissioner, W. Clyde Marsh, was contacted by the Conley family.

Nearly two years after his death, the first posthumous release from G-funk singer Nate Dogg is on the way. Billed as the final album from the hip-hop crooner, “Nate Dogg: It's A Wonderful Life” is expected to be released next year through a joint venture between Seven Arts Music and United Media & Music Group, according to a release from the label Wednesday. The album will feature previously unreleased and re-mastered performances from the late singer including collaborations with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige and Jay-Z.

Before he died in August at the age of 68, Marvin Hamlisch recorded a brief cameo for "The Simpsons," playing a version of himself in an episode involving Abe Simpson's hidden past. On Sunday, the episode finally aired on Fox, making Hamlisch's vocal role a posthumous performance for the late conductor and composer. Sunday's episode, "Gone Abie Gone," focused on Abe's past love affair with a sultry jazz singer. They meet at a restaurant called Spiro's where Abe, Homer Simpson's dad, is working as a busboy while aspiring to become a songwriter.

As Whitney Houston's February death is revisited on the pop titan's birthday (she would have been 49 on Thursday), the late singer's label, RCA Records, is prepping a greatest hits package. A source at the label told Pop & Hiss that the catalog release was expected to come out this fall.    Houston's first and sole stateside retrospective, 2000's “Whitney: The Greatest Hits,” has proved to be a lasting smash. To date, the two-disc set has sold 2.6 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and shifted a staggering 836,000 copies in the wake of her death, making it the fourth bestselling disc of the year.

Twenty seconds into “Enough Said,” the posthumous Aaliyah single that Drake released Sunday, it's impossible not to feel an eerie chill. When the low-end sounds of Drizzy's longtime producer Noah "40" Shebib open up to reveal a hypnotic percussion, Aaliyah's silky falsetto breathes a haunting life into the track. "I can tell it's somethin' up with you, tell me do you wanna talk about, talk about … I hate to see you feel this way," she coos effortlessly over the beat. More than 10 years after Aaliyah's death, her voice -- by way of vocal tracks left recorded but previously unheard -- is finally being heard outside an all-too-abbreviated discography.

In his short life, former ABC television anchorman Max Robinson admitted having many problems: alcohol abuse, racial struggles, career disaster and three failed marriages. But he never publicly acknowledged having the disease that would end his life. Yet in his death at 49, Robinson had his family reveal that he had AIDS so that others in the black community would be alerted to the dangers of the disease and the need for treatment and education.

The United States has reached a historic tipping point -- with Latino, Asian, mixed race and African American births constituting a majority of births for the first time, theU.S. Census Bureau  reported Thursday. Minorities made up about 2 million, or 50.4%, of the births in the 12-month period ending July 2011, enough to create the milestone. The latest figure was up from 49.5% in the 2010 census. The racial and ethnic shift was an expected, but still important, turning point for the nation, whose economic and political elites remain essentially white and primarily male.

This week the blogosphere has reignited with talk that a posthumous album from Aaliyah could be in the works, after a source revealed to HipHopDX that Canadian rapper-singer Drake had been recruited to executive produce the project. Fans of the the late R&B songbird are still patiently awaiting a disc of vaulted works from the singer who helped define and reinvent the sound of '90s urban music before her 2001 death in a plane crash in the Bahamas. The prospect of Drake being at the helm only further greased the wheels of the rumor mill.

For a handful of people, Clarice Lispector's "A Breath of Life" being published in English for the first time is very good news. Sadly, that handful is fairly small. Lispector, an extraordinarily gifted writer who revolutionized Brazilian letters, was described as "that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf. " Ukrainian-born and Brazilian-bred Lispector died in 1977, one day shy of her 57th birthday. Thanks in no small part to the efforts of Ben Moser, translator and author of the 2009 biography "Why This World," Lispector has lately had something of a rebirth in America.