Annalisa Quinn

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 ...

Being haunted seems like it might be an occupational hazard for Helen Oyeyemi. Her books are re-worked fairy tales, the gruesome kind, with beheadings and wicked stepmothers and ghosts and death, death, and more death (though, once dead, her characters don't always stay that way).

The first time I met ...

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

• George Saunders has won the $20,000 Story Prize for his collection Tenth of December. "George Saunders offers a vision and version of our world that takes into account the serious menace all around us without denying ...

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

• Sherwin B. Nuland, the author of How We Die, died on Monday at the age of 83. The book, which won a National Book Award in 1994 and spurred debate about assisted suicide, sought to "demythologize ...

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

• A collection of lullaby poems from Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon who died in 1952, is being published on Tuesday by Sterling Children's Books. The works were discovered in a trunk in her ...

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

• Phyllis Krasilovsky, author of sweet, simple children's books such as The Very Little Girl and The First Tulips in Holland, died Wednesday of complications following a stroke, her daughter told The New York Times. She was ...

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

• Alison Bechdel, author of the graphic memoir Fun Home, has responded to this week's vote by South Carolina's House of Representatives to cut a combined total of $70,000 in funding to the College of Charleston and the ...

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

• E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey series has now sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, Vintage Books announced on Wednesday. The erotica series, which began as Twilight fanfiction, features shy Anastasia Steele, her handcuff-happy lover, ...

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

• Apple is appealing a judge's ruling last year that it broke antitrust laws by conspiring with publishers to fix e-book prices. The appeal, filed Tuesday, called U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote's decision "a radical departure ...

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

• Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, says he is planning a book that will span his eight years helming the Fed, with a special focus on the ...

This post was updated at 9:45 a.m. ET

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

• The annual VIDA count tracking gender inequality in literary publications is out, and the numbers don't look good for women. VIDA counted the numbers of female authors ...

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

• The shortlist for the Diagram Prize for the year's oddest book title is out and includes Pie-ography: Where Pie Meets Biography by Jo Packham, Working Class Cats: The Bodega Cats of New York City by Chris Balsinger ...

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

• Novelist James Patterson, whose mysteries, thrillers, children's books and romances have sold hundreds of millions of copies, is donating $1 million of his personal fortune to independent bookstores across the country. In a statement released by his ...

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

• Short story author Mavis Gallant died Tuesday in Paris. She was 91. Born in Montreal, she spent most of her life in Paris. More than 100 of Gallant's short stories were published in The New Yorker. ...