Annalisa Quinn

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

• J.K. Rowling says she regrets pairing Ron and Hermione in the Harry Potter books. In an interview to be published in Wonderland and excerpted in the U.K.'s Sunday Times, she said, "I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship ...

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

• An education report commissioned by UNESCO found "shocking levels of youth illiteracy" around the world. At least 250 million of the 650 million primary school age children globally aren't learning basic skills in reading ...

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

• Parts of two previously unknown poems by the Greek lyric poet Sappho have been discovered on an ancient papyrus. An anonymous collector happened to show the papyrus to the Oxford University classicist Dirk Obbink, who realized ...

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

• Nurse Nathan Filer's debut novel, Where the Moon Isn't (called The Shock of the Fall in the U.K.), has won the prestigious Costa Book of the Year award. Filer beat out Kate Atkinson, who was widely regarded ...

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

• Mexican poet, translator and essayist Jose Emilio Pacheco died on Sunday at age 74, Mexico's National Council for Culture and Arts announced. Pacheco won the 2009 Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious Spanish-language literary award. Jose Antonio Pascual ...

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

• The Newbery medal for "the most distinguished American children's book" of 2013 was awarded Monday to Flora & Ulysses, written by Kate DiCamillo, the new ambassador for young people's literature, and illustrated in black ...

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

• As Amazon expands into Poland and the Czech Republic, it says it hopes its workers won't unionize. "In terms of unions themselves, we don't see a need for that," Tim Collins, director of Amazon's EU logistics operations, ...

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

• Simon & Schuster will publish Cody Wilson's story of making guns from a 3-D printer, Negative Liberty: A Gun Printer's Guide to the Apocalypse. Wilson's organization Defense Distributed is famous for publishing designs for 3-D printable guns ...

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

• Celebrated Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina comes out as gay in a new essay that he refers to as a "lost chapter" of his 2011 memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place. In Kenya, sex between ...

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

• Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins has sold his papers to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. According to The New York Times, his archives include "dozens of notebooks containing observations, ...

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

• Amazon has patented "anticipatory package shipping," a system that ships products before customers have actually bought them — based on what it predicts they will buy. The Verge explains: "Amazon plans to box and ship ...

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

• English novelist Hilary Mantel, who has twice won the Booker Prize, is said to be taking a break from writing about Tudors to publish a short-story collection titled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. The Guardian notes, ...

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

• The British National Archives is digitizing the official diaries kept by army military units during World War I. A press release states that "this first batch of unit war diaries reveals the real-time account of the ...

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

• Argentine poet Juan Gelman, who denounced the country's "dirty war" of the '70s and '80s, died Tuesday in Mexico City, according to a statement from the Mexican government's arts council. He was 83. The author of ...

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

• When Alaric Hunt was chosen as the winner of a mystery-writing contest that comes with a publishing contract and a $10,000 advance, the judges didn't realize he was serving a life sentence for murder. Hunt wrote ...

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

• Donna Tartt's expansive third novel The Goldfinch and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel of race, love and power Americanah were among the fiction finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Also nominated were Alice McDermott's Someone, Javier ...

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

• Researchers at Stony Brook University have developed a computer model that they say can use stylistic markers to predict the success of a book. In the paper "Success with Style: Using Writing Style to Predict the ...

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

• A British academic stumbled upon a trove of unpublished letters written by Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, who was the daughter of women's rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft and the wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Nora ...

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

• A new biography of Fox News Channel President Roger Ailes presents him as ambitious and combative (though brilliant), and claims that he used an anti-Semitic remark about a rival in 1995 and made comments critical of Fox ...

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

• A library belonging to a Greek Orthodox priest was torched in Tripoli, Lebanon, last week, according to Agence France-Press. Around two-thirds of the 80,000 books reportedly were destroyed. An unnamed "security source" told the news agency ...