Colin Dwyer

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

For a public library to expect to survive today, it must begin to take crucial cues from coffee shops. At least, that's the key recommendation offered by a much-anticipated report on British public libraries, which is set to ...

Ebola may have slid off the nation's worry list, but that doesn't mean the United States is ready to handle an outbreak of Ebola or another infectious disease, an analysis says. That includes naturally occurring outbreaks like dengue fever, tuberculosis and measles, as well as the use of bioterrorism agents ...

It seems we have a new case of life following art. Over two decades ago, in his seminal novel Snow Crash, science fiction author Neal Stephenson imagined a virtual world he called a "metaverse," a collective virtual reality that brought its users together in a single shared space. ...

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

Less than 10 months from the day James Patterson swore a million-dollar promise, he has kept his word. The best-selling novelist announced he has donated about $437,000 to 81 independent bookstores — a gift that completes his plan ...

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

Apple is sliding back under the judicial microscope Monday in a legal challenge that could bear big implications for the e-book market. The 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is slated to hear the company's appeal of a ...

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

Lately, it seems J.K. Rowling has managed a most impressive feat — being everywhere at once. She's drawing up the screenplay for a Harry Potter spin-off, releasing 12 days' worth of Potter-themed features on her fan site ...

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

On Monday, Australia's top literary prize picked a pair of winners in its fiction category. Steven Carroll and Richard Flanagan, who was also this year's Booker Prize winner, split the Prime Minister's Literary Award and its winnings. The ...

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

This much is known about the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante: She is native to Naples, she is the author of seven novels, and she has a name — a name that is not, in fact, Elena Ferrante. Behind ...

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

One of Lena Dunham's essays in Not That Kind of Girl features a man identified as Barry. She describes him as a notable Republican at Oberlin College, which the actress also attended. Barry had a mustache and a ...

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

In retrospectives, Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing often gets tagged as a British novelist, having been born to British parents and spent decades living in London. Yet for some 25 years of her youth, Lessing lived in Zimbabwe ...

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

Just over two years into a rocky partnership, Microsoft and Barnes & Noble have decided to call it quits. The mega-bookseller announced Thursday that it plans to buy out Microsoft's stake in its albatross of an e-reader, the ...

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

The Literary Review sent an unmistakable message to authors at a ceremony in London on Wednesday: If you're going to write a sex scene, it's probably best not to mention rockets — symbolic or otherwise. The magazine awarded ...

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

In some six months, a new novel by Toni Morrison will begin nestling its way into bookshelves. The Nobel laureate (and Pulitzer Prize winner, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient and, well, you get the idea) will publish ...

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

Truman Capote's masterpiece of true-crime literature may not be all that true, according to a man who just won the legal right to try to prove it. The Associated Press reports that Ronald Nye, the son of ...

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

Newly crowned National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson has broken her silence on the controversy surrounding comments made by host Daniel Handler at last month's award ceremony. Those comments, delivered shortly after Woodson received her prize for ...

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

A grand jury decision announced Monday not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown was preceded by a wave of shuttered doors in Ferguson, Mo. Expecting an eruption of protests over the ...

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

Just months after Gabriel Garcia Marquez's passing, the works of the late Colombian writer have found their resting place. The University of Texas, Austin has announced that the Harry Ransom Center, the school's humanities research library, has ...

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

For more than six decades, the heart of a Beat literature classic had been thought lost, dropped overboard a houseboat. Turns out, the letter that helped inspire Jack Kerouac's On the Road has now reportedly resurfaced — not ...

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

If this year's National Book Awards saw a fiery speech from Ursula K. Le Guin, the evening also featured incendiary comments of quite another kind. Ceremony host Daniel Handler — whom most readers might know better by ...

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

The 65th annual National Book Awards proved big for both literary icons and one notable newcomer. Former Marine Phil Klay took home the top fiction prize for his debut story collection, Redeployment, while long-time favorite Louise Gluck — ...