Annalisa Quinn

The narrators of Francine Prose's novel Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 are not to be trusted. In describing the life of Lou Villars, French racecar driver, cross dresser and Gestapo torturer, Prose tells a complex story about the malleability of truth when everybody is a collaborator.

Lou is ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Doris Pilkington Garimara, the aboriginal author who wrote of the forced separation of mixed-race aboriginal children from their families, died on April 10. She was thought to be 76. Garimara's novel Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence was ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• The instantly recognizable man with the immaculate white moustache was a novelist, but he was also a journalist, a political agitator and a celebrity with a reach unlike any writer since Mark Twain. When Gabriel Garcia Marquez ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• At The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal writes that Amazon's recommendation algorithm has created an accidental starter kit for drug dealers: "One day, some drug dealer bought a particular digital scale — the AWS-100 — on the retail ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Ginny Weasley, the freckly, flame-haired girl who later marries Harry Potter, grows up to be a sports journalist, according to new writing from J.K. Rowling on the website Pottermore. (Login required.) The stories are Ginny's dispatches ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Of all the winners of the Pulitzer Prizes announced Monday, perhaps the most unexpected was the poetry collection 3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri, which largely passed under the critical radar. (Donna Tartt's brick of a novel, ...

Suspense and the stink of sheep permeate All the Birds, Singing in equal measure. In Evie Wyld's gloriously gruesome second novel, shepherd Jake lives alone on a chilly, windswept British island, in a cottage "squat and white like a chalk pebble at the black foot of the downs." Something or ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• In a clear victory for the villainous Dr. Diaper, Captain Underpants -- Dav Pilkey's series about a heartless school principal who when hypnotized becomes a kindly superhero dressed only in a cape and a pair of underpants ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Children's and Young Adult books have long been thought to be a sphere especially friendly to women, in contrast with the staggering gender bias found in the world of grown-up literature. It turns out that, nope, women ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• The IMPAC Dublin Award — the Dublin-based literary award that asks libraries around the globe to nominate the best new works of fiction — named 10 finalists, with half the books on the list having been ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Archie Andrews, the freckly, lovelorn comic book star since the 1940s, is going to die in an upcoming issue of the Life With Archie series, which shows Archie's life as an adult. "Archie dies as he lived ...

"Etonnez-moi," Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, used to say to his dancers. Astonish me. Maggie Shipstead's book of the same name does not astonish; rather, it charms. It is full of the kind of prose you want to curl up and nest in like a cat: seamless ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• The shortlist for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the world's most prestigious literary award for women, is out. Worth £30,000 (about $50,000), the prize "celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from throughout the ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Declassified documents show that the CIA used copies of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak's epic novel spanning 20th century Russian history, as a tool to try to provoke dissent in the Soviet Union. The book was banned ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Latin America's most prominent living novelist, has been hospitalized in Mexico City for a lung and urinary tract infection, Mexican health officials told The Associated Press. Author of masterpieces such as One Hundred ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has signed on to write a political memoir with HarperCollins, according to the Washington Examiner. Citing "publishing sources," the newspaper says the Tea Party luminary is expected to get a $1.5 million ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Flea, the perpetually shirtless bass player for the Red Hot Chili Peppers who is also known for how and where he has sometimes worn a sock, has a book deal, according to a press ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Primatologist Jane Goodall blames slapdash note taking and a busy work schedule for the text lifted from other sources in her book Seeds of Hope, co-written with Gail Hudson. Talking at length about the issue ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• A new book by Michael Lewis, the bestselling author of Liar's Poker and Moneyball, says the stock market is "rigged" in favor of high-frequency traders. In Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, which came out Monday after ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Author Donald McCaig is writing a novel that gives a real name and a past to Gone With the Wind's "Mammy" — who for decades has personified an ugly racial caricature: the matronly, obese house slave with ...