Annalisa Quinn

Once every decade, the literary magazine Granta publishes an issue called "Best of Young British Novelists," with short excerpts from the novels of 20 emerging authors. In the past, the list of names has proved unusually prescient, with authors such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Zadie Smith featured before ...

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

• Yoko Ono, the artist and former wife of John Lennon, is coming out with a book of "instructional poetry," according to OR Books. She explains, kind of: "It's something I originally created for the internet. For ...

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

• Wednesday's issue of "Batgirl" introduced the first transgender character in a mainstream comic series: Batgirl's roommate, Alysia Yeoh. Speaking with Wired, "Batgirl" writer Gail Simone said the choice was inspired by the diversity of comics fans ...

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

• New York City agreed to pay Occupy Wall Street for the destruction of books during a November 2011 police raid on Zuccotti Park. In a settlement Tuesday, the city agreed to pay the protesters and their ...

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

• Pamela Paul has been named editor of The New York Times Book Review. She'll replace Sam Tanenhaus, who is "taking on a new assignment as a writer at large," according to a Times memo. Paul began ...

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

• Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minster and "Iron Lady" who died on Monday, authorized a biography to be published after her death. Written by Charles Moore, it will be published by Allen Lane, an imprint ...

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

• The body of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is scheduled to be exhumed Monday morning. He died days after the 1973 coup that killed his friend President Salvador Allende and ushered Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. Neruda's ...

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

• Ig Publishing's new imprint, Lizzie Skurnick Books, will publish forgotten young adult novels, beginning with Debutante Hill by Lois Duncan, which was originally published in 1958. Publisher's Weekly quotes Ig co-founder Robert Lasner as saying the ...

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

• Simon & Schuster announced in a press release on Thursday morning that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is coming out with a memoir in 2014. According to the release, the book will "use a number of ...

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

• Mackenzie Bezos, the author of the novel Traps and the wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, defended the company publicly for the first time to The Times [paywall protected], calling it "great for authors and books." ...

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

• The American Library Association and Barnes & Noble were among the groups named by conservative group Morality in Media in its "Dirty Dozen List" of "the top 12 facilitators of porn." The list states that the ...

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

• Research from scholars at Aberystwyth University in the U.K. suggests that William Shakespeare was prosecuted for evading taxes and for hoarding grain during a famine and then reselling it at inflated prices. Jayne Archer, A co-author ...

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

• The former girlfriend of the late, iconoclastic artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is reportedly planning to write a book that will include previously unseen works of art — including murals he painted on the walls of her apartment ...

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

• Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenage girl shot in the head by a Taliban gunman last fall for advocating girls' right to an education, plans to publish a memoir this fall titled, I Am Malala. "I want ...

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

• Profits at Random House shot up 75.6 percent last year because of Fifty Shades of Grey sales, according to Publisher's Weekly. The Fifty Shades trilogy has been so successful that CEO Markus Dohle announced ...

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

• Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is being criticized for hiring Marc Thiessen, a journalist and vocal supporter of "enhanced interrogation techniques," to ghostwrite his book. The National Review, citing anonymous sources, broke the news of the ...

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

• Willa Cather's letters are being published next month (never mind that the author of My Antonia was militantly opposed to her letters being made public), and The New York Times has excerpts: "In other matters ...

Chinua Achebe, the prominent Nigerian novelist and essayist who died on Thursday, said in a 1994 interview with the Paris Review, "There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter."

Achebe's books are ...

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

• A recently discovered 13-page letter from Oscar Wilde advises a mysterious "Mr. Morgan" that "[t]he best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest ...

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

• A report in Federal Computer Week, a magazine covering technology within the federal government, cites anonymous sources claiming that the CIA has signed a contract with Amazon worth about $600 million over the next decade to ...