Annalisa Quinn

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

• The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award, was announced Tuesday morning. Although the prize is limited to writers from the British Commonwealth and the Republic of Ireland, the list skews international, and ...

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

• Last week, Batwoman writers J.H. Williams and W. Haden Blackman resigned, saying DC Comics forced them to cancel a gay marriage plot in which Batwoman married her girlfriend. But DC Comics co-publisher Dan DiDio said ...

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

• Sushmita Banerjee, an Indian woman who wrote a bestselling memoir about life under the Taliban, was reportedly dragged from her home in Afghanistan's Paktika province this week and shot dead. Her memoir A Kabuliwala's Bengali Wife, which ...

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

• Among the odder "revelations" coming out of a new J.D. Salinger biography is the claim that the author of Catcher in the Rye had only one testicle. According to David Shields and Shane Salerno, the biography's ...

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

• Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot by the Taliban because she advocated for girls' education, helped open Europe's largest public library on Tuesday with a speech claiming that "pens and books are the weapons ...

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

• The last words of Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate and Irish poet who died last week, came in a text message to his wife: "Noli timere," Latin for "Don't be afraid," the poet's son Michael said ...

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

N.B. — Book News is going on vacation next week. Your faithful correspondent will be in California sans laptop and praying that Jonathan Franzen doesn't choose this week to reignite any feuds with daytime talk show hosts. In ...

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

N.B. — Book News is going on vacation next week. Your faithful correspondent will be in California sans laptop and praying that Jonathan Franzen doesn't choose that week to reignite any feuds with daytime talk show hosts. In ...

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

• The FBI suspected William T. Vollmann of being first the Unabomber and then the anthrax mailer, the award-winning writer revealed in a grimly funny Harper's article [subscription required]. Vollmann's heavily redacted FBI file, which he obtained ...

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

• Barnes & Noble, the bookstore chain nowadays rarely divorced from the word "struggling," reported more bad news Tuesday. Founder Leonard S. Riggio announced he had suspended his plans to buy the company's nearly 680 bookstores — right ...

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

• The black jazz critic, essayist and novelist Albert Murray died on Sunday in Harlem at age 97. As NPR's Joel Rose noted Monday, "Duke Ellington once described him as the 'unsquarest person I know.' " A ...

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

• The poet John Hollander died on Saturday from pulmonary congestion, his daughter told The New York Times. He was 83. A professor at Yale and the author of over a dozen collections of poetry, Hollander had ...

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

• The English translation of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's newest book (the title literally translates to Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage) won't be out until 2014, Knopf Doubleday publicity director Paul Bogaards tells ...

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

• A video of poet Neil Hilborn performing his slam poem "OCD" went viral this week, garnering over 1,800,000 views on YouTube. In the video, Hilborn describes falling in love while battling his obsessive compulsive disorder, movingly ...

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

• Scholars have speculated for centuries that parts of Thomas Kyd's play The Spanish Tragedy were written by William Shakespeare. Now, Douglas Bruster of the University of Texas at Austin says the handwriting and spelling in the play's ...

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

• An anonymous donor has given £100,000 (about $155,000) to Jane Austen's House Museum in its effort to buy back the author's gold and turquoise ring from American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, who got it at auction ...

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

• Lance Armstrong, the disgraced cyclist who admitted to doping earlier this year, is being sued for more than $5 million over false claims in his memoirs, It's Not About the Bike and Every Second Counts. A ...

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

• The Egyptologist and wildly prolific writer Barbara Mertz died Thursday morning, her publisher tells NPR. She was 85. A formidable scholar with a PhD in Egyptology from the University of Chicago, she wrote works of ...

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

• Five major publishers are objecting to restrictions the Justice Department wants to place on Apple for colluding with them to fix ebook prices. The proposal, which has not yet been approved by the judge in ...

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

• A Hunger Games-themed summer camp that culminates in a tournament at which children fight to the "death" (not literally, of course) has opened in Florida. The camp hosted by the Country Day School in Largo is inspired ...