Annalisa Quinn

Allison Weiss has a handsome husband, a big house, a successful career and a worsening prescription pill addiction.

At first, Allison's pill habit is decidedly well-mannered: She takes an Oxy before dealing with the snobby parents from her daughter's private school or mean comments on a newspaper feature about her. ...

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

• Apple has agreed to settle with U.S. states and consumers in a class action brought against the company for conspiring with publishers to fix the prices of e-books. The trial was set for July, and the company ...

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

• The U.S. Department of Labor says it is looking into the deaths of two temporary workers in incidents at Amazon warehouses since December 2013. One man was crushed after being caught in a conveyor system at a ...

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

On Thursday, Juan Gabriel Vásquez became the first Latin American writer to win the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, one of the world's most valuable literary prizes. Worth €100,000 (about $135,700), 75 percent of the prize money ...

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

• The Library of Congress says the next U.S. poet laureate will be Charles Wright, a 78-year-old retired University of Virginia professor who has said he believes "the true purpose of poetry to be a contemplation ...

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

• A U.S. appeals court says a digital library of more than 10 million scanned and searchable texts amounts to "fair use," ruling against a group of authors who claimed copyright infringement. The HathiTrust Digital Library is ...

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

• Bill Watterson, the reclusive creator of Calvin and Hobbes, briefly returned to comics last week when he ghostwrote parts of Stephan Pastis' Pearls Before Swine. Watterson retired in 1995, saying he felt he had "done what [he] ...

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

• At a memorial service for Maya Angelou this weekend at Wake Forest University, first lady Michelle Obama, former President Bill Clinton and talk show host Oprah Winfrey eulogized the poet and activist who died last month at ...

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

• Hachette Book Group says it is cutting 28 positions, about 3 percent of its U.S. staff, as a "cost-savings initiative." The news comes as the publisher is embroiled in a high-profile dispute with Amazon, which has

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

• With her first novel, Eimear McBride has won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize), one of the U.K.'s most prominent literary awards. A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is a gorgeously odd novel ...

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

Note: This post was written before news of writer Maya Angelou's death emerged. Annalisa will be away until early next week, but feel free to send her your bookish thoughts and questions on Twitter at @annalisa_quinn.

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

American classics like To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men will likely be cut from a major British standardized test, the GCSE, or General Certificate of Secondary Education. NPR's Ari Shapiro reports from London: "British ...

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

• NASA has put out a free, fascinating e-book exploring the possibility of human/extraterrestrial communication. The 300-page book, which has chapters written by more than a dozen different scholars, looks to archaeology and anthropology for clues to ...

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

• Sam Greenlee, a novelist and poet who was one of the first black Americans go to abroad with the Foreign Service, died Monday, according to The Associated Press. He was 83. In his most famous book, 1969's ...

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

Ray Bradbury's Los Angeles house is for sale. The bright yellow three-bedroom house where the author of Fahrenheit 451 lived with his wife costs $1.495 million. As The Los Angeles Times' Carolyn Kellogg notes, Bradbury wrote ...

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

• Former U.K. Home Secretary Alan Johnson has won the Ondaatje prize, an annual £10,000 award for "a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place." His memoir This Boy: A Memoir ...

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

• Edward St. Aubyn's new novel Lost For Words (reviewed below), an acid satire of literary prizes, has won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. St. Aubyn's brutal portrait of the book-award scene features, among other ...

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

• In an unusually metaphysical copyright case, a German court has ruled that an American psychologist — and not Jesus Christ — is the author of a book that she said Christ dictated to her in a ...

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

• Conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh won the Author of the Year award at the Children's Choice Book Awards for his book Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures With Exceptional Americans, in which Rush Revere and ...

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

• A retired British navy commander thinks he may have found the inspiration for Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot in a Belgian refugee and retired policeman named Jacques Hornais who lived near Christie's home in England. Christie wrote ...