Annalisa Quinn

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

• Children's and Young Adult books have long been thought to be a sphere especially friendly to women, in contrast with the staggering gender bias found in the world of grown-up literature. It turns out that, nope, women ...

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

• The IMPAC Dublin Award — the Dublin-based literary award that asks libraries around the globe to nominate the best new works of fiction — named 10 finalists, with half the books on the list having been ...

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

• Archie Andrews, the freckly, lovelorn comic book star since the 1940s, is going to die in an upcoming issue of the Life With Archie series, which shows Archie's life as an adult. "Archie dies as he lived ...

"Etonnez-moi," Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, used to say to his dancers. Astonish me. Maggie Shipstead's book of the same name does not astonish; rather, it charms. It is full of the kind of prose you want to curl up and nest in like a cat: seamless ...

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

• The shortlist for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the world's most prestigious literary award for women, is out. Worth £30,000 (about $50,000), the prize "celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from throughout the ...

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

• Declassified documents show that the CIA used copies of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak's epic novel spanning 20th century Russian history, as a tool to try to provoke dissent in the Soviet Union. The book was banned ...

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

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Latin America's most prominent living novelist, has been hospitalized in Mexico City for a lung and urinary tract infection, Mexican health officials told The Associated Press. Author of masterpieces such as One Hundred ...

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 ...