Annalisa Quinn

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

• Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has signed on to write a political memoir with HarperCollins, according to the Washington Examiner. Citing "publishing sources," the newspaper says the Tea Party luminary is expected to get a $1.5 million ...

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

• Flea, the perpetually shirtless bass player for the Red Hot Chili Peppers who is also known for how and where he has sometimes worn a sock, has a book deal, according to a press ...

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

• Primatologist Jane Goodall blames slapdash note taking and a busy work schedule for the text lifted from other sources in her book Seeds of Hope, co-written with Gail Hudson. Talking at length about the issue ...

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

• A new book by Michael Lewis, the bestselling author of Liar's Poker and Moneyball, says the stock market is "rigged" in favor of high-frequency traders. In Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, which came out Monday after ...

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

• Author Donald McCaig is writing a novel that gives a real name and a past to Gone With the Wind's "Mammy" — who for decades has personified an ugly racial caricature: the matronly, obese house slave with ...

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

• James Bond creator Ian Fleming's ardent and occasionally brutal letters to his Austrian lover are up for sale from a U.K. dealer of rare books. Written in the 1930s, the letters to Edith Morpurgo show a ...

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

• A previously unpublished campus love story by Tennessee Williams called "Crazy Night," will appear in the next issue of Strand magazine. The Prohibition-era tale takes place during on the last night of the semester, known as "crazy ...

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

• Prisons Minister Jeremy Wright is defending the U.K.'s controversial policy that bans people from sending books and some other items to prisoners, following a ferocious backlash sparked by an op-ed published this weekend. "The notion we ...

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

• Adolf Hitler wakes from a coma to find himself in modern-day Berlin, where everyone assumes he's a comedian who never breaks character — and so the Führer becomes a novelty act, a YouTube sensation (the "loony YouTube ...

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

• Indian writer and diplomat Khushwant Singh, who described the violence of the partition of the Indian subcontinent, died Thursday. He was in his late 90s, though as The New York Times points out, his exact date ...

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

Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings, is coming out with a young adult novel called Belzhar (a play on Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar). It's set to be published by Dutton Children's Books, an imprint of Penguin, on ...

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

• Author and late night TV staple Kevin Trudeau was sentenced to a decade in prison for violating a 2004 court order that barred him from making deceptive infomercials about his book, The Weight Loss Cure 'They' ...

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

• A weeks-old campaign to get U.K. publishers to stop labeling children's books by gender is garnering support from members of Parliament, authors and booksellers, including the major retailer Waterstones. The literary editor of The Independent on ...

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

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the 94-year-old poet and founder of San Francisco's City Lights bookstore, sold his travel journals to the W.W. Norton imprint Liveright. Ferlinghetti, best known for his collection A Coney Island of the Mind, was ...

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

• Departed North Korean leaders Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung are both credited with producing children's books, according a doctoral candidate at Australia's Sydney University. In a research paper published in The International ...

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

• Afaa Michael Weaver's poetry collection The Government of Nature has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The prize, based at Claremont Graduate University, is awarded to a mid-career poet "to both honor the poet and provide ...

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

• Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards is writing a children's book. Gus & Me: The Story of My Granddad and My First Guitar is about Richard's grandfather, Theodore Augustus Dupree, who encouraged Richards' musical aspirations. Richards plans ...

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

• Joe McGinniss, author of the true crime book Fatal Vision and the titular "journalist" of Janet Malcolm's scathing study The Journalist and the Murderer, died on Monday, his attorney told The Associated Press. He was 71. ...

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

• Ned O'Gorman, poet and founder of the Children's Storefront, a tuition-free school in Harlem created to combat what he saw as "the pervasive lack of imagination" in children's education, died Friday at age 84. "These children ...

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

• Simon & Schuster is canceling publication of a book by John Lefevre, the man behind the @GSElevator twitter account, which supposedly repeated things overheard in the elevator at Goldman Sachs. It emerged that Lefevre has never worked ...