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RECLUSIVE "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee is quietly peeping her head out these days. At the Upper West Side apartment of author Richard Seaver last week at a party for Starling Lawrence's new novel, "The Lightning Keeper," Lee - who keeps an Upper East Side apartment - delighted the literati by chatting with partygoers. The Post's Billy Heller, a guest, asked if she was ever asked about doing a remake of the 1963 Gregory Peck film of her novel. "Is this an interview?" asked Lee, now 79. She went on to respond, "Oh, yes" - but added it would never happen. "No, no, no," she said. "It's even in my will. And you can put that in [a story]." In another break from her self-imposed silence, Lee provided a rare jacket blurb for Lawrence's book. "I'm a sucker for good writing," she said, adding that "The Lightning Keeper" "has a maturity and is a good story." Meanwhile, Lee has a letter in The New Yorker pointing out errors in the movie "Capote," in which Catherine Keener plays her. "The film has me talk to [fabled New Yorker editor William] Shawn on the telephone - I didn't," she wrote. "And . . . Truman Capote was in Kansas; Mr. Shawn wasn't."
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