Annalisa Quinn

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

• The U.S. Postal Service has made a deal with Amazon to deliver packages on Sundays. For now, delivery will be limited to Los Angeles and New York, but the service is expected to expand into cities ...

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

• This year's Dylan Thomas Prize has gone to Claire Vaye Watkins for her debut story collection Battleborn. The prize, aimed at encouraging "raw creative talent worldwide," is restricted to writers under 30 and is worth £30,000 (about ...

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

• Amazon is asking independent bookstores to sell Kindles in exchange for 10 percent of the revenue from ebooks bought on the devices for two years. But the offer, under a program called Amazon Source, has been ...

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

• Lynn Coady won Canada's most prestigious literary award, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, for her short-story collection Hellgoing. (You know, in case Canadian short story writers haven't had a good enough year.) The jury — writers Margaret Atwood, ...

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

• The Mozambican poet, fiction writer and biologist Mia Couto has won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a biennial award sometimes called "The American Nobel." Couto, who has written dozens of books in his native Portuguese, ...

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

• Following allegations that he borrowed passages from Wikipedia, Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul is now accused of lifting passages from the Heritage Foundation without proper attribution in his book Government Bullies. BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski writes, ...

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

• The bestselling thriller writer Michael Palmer died on Wednesday, according to a statement released by his publisher, St. Martin's Press. He was 71. Perhaps best known for Extreme Measures, which was made into a movie with Hugh ...

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

• Jane Austen biographer Paula Byrne isn't a fan of the Jane Austen image featured on the new £10 note, saying, "It's a 19th century airbrushed makeover." But the head of the Jane Austen Society, Elizabeth Proudman, ...

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

• Amazon launched Kindle MatchBook, a service that lets customers buy steeply discounted ebook versions of books they've already bought in print (from Amazon, of course) on Tuesday. Publishers must opt-in, and as of Wednesday morning, some 75,000 ...

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

• The 93-year-old crime novelist P.D. James believes she has solved the 1931 murder of Julia Wallace, the inspiration for her 1982 novel The Skull Beneath the Skin. In an article for The Sunday Times [subscription ...

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

• The Guardian has published "In a Field," the last known poem by the Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney before his death in August. Inspired by Edward Thomas' 1916 poem, "As ...

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

• The Tucson Unified School District is reinstating seven books banned after a Mexican-American Studies program was outlawed in Arizona. In 2010, a judge ruled that the program was illegal under a law banning classes that "promote resentment ...

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

• The Emily Dickinson Archive, launched Wednesday, gives free access to high-resolution photos of thousands of the poet's manuscripts, including envelopes or bits of paper with poems jotted on them, letters, doodles and many, many exuberant ...

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

• Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, two of the three women kidnapped and held at a Cleveland house for about a decade, are collaborating with Washington Post reporters to write a book about their time in captivity. ...

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

• American authors are making the tough decision to allow their books to be censored for sale in China, The New York Times recently reported. According to the paper, "authors of sexually explicit works or those that ...

The editors of The Book of Jezebel: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Lady Things, are carefully unambitious about the aim of the book: "we thought it might be fun to collect our various observations, fascinations, annoyances, and inspirations in one easy-to-use, attractive volume." On the surface, it seems like a cheeky ...

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

• The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says it will allow Special Agent John Dodson, a whistle-blower who testified in front of Congress about the ATF's "Fast and Furious" firearms sting operation, to publish a ...

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

• A federal judge has ruled that Lance Armstrong, the disgraced cyclist who admitted to doping earlier this year, is allowed to lie in his memoirs. Earlier this year, a group of readers in California sued Armstrong ...

Early on in Confronting the Classics, Mary Beard tells the story of the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, who "used to seat his dinner guests on cushions that, unbeknownst to them, were full of air. As the meal progressed, a slave secretly let the air out, so Elagabalus could enjoy the sight ...

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

• In a controversial interview about his upcoming memoir, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins called for stronger distinctions to be made between what he called "mild paedophilia" and violent crimes. He told Giles Whittell of The Times ...