Annalisa Quinn

The essay, some time in its long journey from Samuel Johnson's "loose sally of the mind, an irregular undigested piece," has become something that can be persuasive instead of discursive, something that slices and gleams, an accumulation of arguments as relentless as the stacking of bricks.

But the essay has ...

Perry, with her blond hair and long legs, is pretty. Baby Girl, with her shaved head and overdrawn lips, is ugly. Together they steal cars, shoplift, and ditch school — not knowing they are being watched by Jamey, an ex-felon posing as a teenage boy online. The girls begin to ...

What kind of girl is Lena Dunham? Is she Hannah Horvath, narcissistic Girls character? Is she Your Friend Lena, the charming, bumbling author of her new book, Not That Kind of Girl? Is she a celebrity? An artist? A media mogul?

Her memoir persona — Your Friend Lena — is ...

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

The four longlists for the National Book Awards — in the categories Young People's Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction — were announced this week, and mostly eschewed big names in favor of authors not well-known outside of literary ...

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

• The fiction longlist for the National Book Awards was released Wednesday evening, and includes Richard Powers, who won the award in 2006; Mountain Goats vocalist John Darnielle; and Molly Antopol and Phil Klay, who were both nominated ...

The winners of the MacArthur "Genius Grant" awards were announced Wednesday morning, and include poet Terrance Hayes, playwright Samuel D. Hunter, poet and Arabic translator Khaled Mattawa and cartoonist and memoirist Alison Bechdel. Bechdel is the creator of the cartoon strip Dykes to Watch Out For and author of ...

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

• The poetry longlist for the 2014 National Book Awards includes collections from Claudia Rankine, Fanny Howe, Edward Hirsch and former U.S. Poet Laureates Louise Glück and Mark Strand. The National Book Foundation said in a press release: ...

Updated at 9:45 a.m. ET.

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

• Oscar Pistorius' manager, Peet van Zyl, is walking back suggestions that Pistorius was planning to write a memoir about his shooting death of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. In an earlier version ...

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

• Book tours have become a staple of many political campaigns, from Michele Bachmann's Core of Conviction to Hillary Clinton's new memoir (though, of course, she hasn't formally announced her candidacy). Wendy Davis, the besneakered Democratic candidate who ...

Louise Glück is in love with silence — her poems strain towards nothingness. "The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary," she once wrote in an essay. In her new collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night, one poem features a ...

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

• Young Americans are more likely to have read a book in the past year than their older counterparts, a new study finds. According to data from the Pew Research Center, "88% of Americans under 30 read ...

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

• Graham Joyce, the author of dark, uncanny fantasy novels, has died, according to his publisher. He was 59. Although his novels often dealt with the fantastical, they also had a strong element of the psychological thriller:

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

Valérie Trierweiler, the former companion of French President François Hollande, last week published a book in France detailing her relationship with the head of state. In Merci pour ce moment ("Thanks for this moment"), she writes that she ...

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

• The shortlist for the £30,000 Dylan Thomas Prize, which "is awarded to the best published or produced literary work in the English language, written by an author aged 39 or under," is out. Critical favorites such as ...

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

• The first 10 pages of an unpublished and untitled Tennessee Williams play about D. H. Lawrence; his wife, Frieda; Katherine Mansfield (spelled Katharine in the draft); and her husband, John Middleton Murr, were found in an archive ...

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

• A floating pop-up library is opening on New York's Hudson River this fall. The creation of the artist Beatrice Glow, The Floating Library will appear "aboard the historic Lilac Museum Steamship berthed at Pier 25 on ...

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

• A new Haruki Murakami book is coming out in English in December. Murakami's just-released Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage has topped The New York Times' hardcover fiction bestseller lists and reportedly inspired ...

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

• Bruce Springsteen is writing a children's book about a bank-robbing baby called Outlaw Pete, based on his song of the same name. "Outlaw Pete is essentially the story of a man trying to outlive and outrun his ...

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

• Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass has won the $100,000 Wallace Stevens prize for "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry" from the Academy of American Poets. Hass is much-lauded: he was a MacArthur Fellow, ...

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

• California history textbooks will now be asked to cover "the significance of President Barack Obama's election," under a law signed this week by Gov. Jerry Brown. The new law requires California's Instructional Quality Commission "to consider ...