Annalisa Quinn

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

• British Prime Minister David Cameron has responded to a letter by leading U.K. writers criticizing a new security measure that prevents books and other small packages from being sent into prisons. The letter signed by Salman ...

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

• "He climbed. He grew dizzy. His ankles grew numb. But he climbed and he climbed and he clum and he clum." Random House Kids is coming out with a collection of forgotten Dr. Seuss stories that were ...

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

• Former President George W. Bush plans to take a break from painting to publish a biography of his father, former President George H. W. Bush. The book, which will be published by Crown on Nov. 11, "covers ...

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

• The winners of the 2014 PEN Literary Awards – more than a dozen prizes honoring writers of various genres — were announced on Wednesday morning, and include Frank Bidart ("a poet of roiling intensity, a poet singularly ...

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

• Louise Shivers, who published her first book, Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail, at the age of 53, has died. She was 84. The 1983 novella followed the wife of a North Carolina tobacco ...

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

• The nation's biggest comic book convention has issued a cease-and-desist letter to the nation's third-biggest comic book convention over the use of the name "Comic Con," The Associated Press reports. A lawyer for San Diego's Comic-Con ...

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

• Amazon reported big second quarter losses Thursday and said the current period may be even worse. The company posted a quarter net loss of $126 million, or 27 cents a share, even though sales rose 23 percent. ...

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

• Amid the ongoing dispute between Hachette and Amazon, Amazon executive Russ Grandinetti has proposed paying Hachette authors normal royalties while donating the e-book profits to charity, according to Publishers Weekly. Amazon's removal of the pre-order button on ...

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

• The 13-book longlist for the Man Booker Prize, the U.K.'s most prominent literary award, was announced Wednesday. The prize is traditionally open to writers from countries in the Commonwealth and Ireland, but this year marks the ...

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

• Thomas Berger, the witty and feverishly prolific author of Little Big Man, died July 13 in Nyack, N.Y., following an illness, his publisher said Monday. He was 89. Although Berger was most famous for Little Big Man, ...

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

• The so-called Big Five publishers — Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster — don't appear to be participating in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon's new e-book subscription service. Following the model of services such ...

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

• A collection of 15 unpublished stories by the late, great crime writer Elmore Leonard is expected to come out in the U.S. and U.K. in 2015. They are early stories, written while Leonard worked as a ...

The Newport Folk Festival has been around for more than half a century now — this is its 55th year, to be exact — and the event now routinely sells out months before its lineup is even announced. And why shouldn't it? On the main stage alone at this year's ...

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

• Apple has agreed to pay consumers $400 million to settle a civil lawsuit — but only if it is unsuccessful in appealing last year's conviction of e-book price fixing. If that ruling is overturned, Apple will ...

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

• Former Chicago Tribune reporter Marja Mills says her just-released biography of Harper Lee, The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee, was written with "the trust, support and encouragement" of Lee and her older sister, Alice. But ...

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

• Pakistani writer Jamil Ahmad, who published his debut novel, The Wandering Falcon, when he was 79, has died "after a long illness," his publisher said. He was 83. Ahmad spent decades as a civil servant in the ...

U.S. customs inspectors at Los Angeles International Airport intercepted dozens of live snails. In Nigeria, they are considered a delicacy. But in California, they are an invasive species.

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

Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek — who is one of the world's most prominent living public intellectuals — has been accused of plagiarizing from the white separatist magazine American Renaissance. (The magazine calls itself a "race realist" publication, while ...

Citigroup will pay $4 billion to the Justice Department and spend $2.5 billion to help struggling homeowners modify their mortgages. And, talks are underway between the government and Bank of America.

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

• Authorities in Singapore, where gay sex is illegal, have withdrawn two children's books about gay couples from libraries. In a statement, the National Library Board suggested that gayness and family values are incompatible: "Young children ...