Annalisa Quinn

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

• Penguin Books India is defending its decision to settle a lawsuit over Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History and withdraw the book from sale in India. The publisher says it has become "increasingly difficult for any ...

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

• The slam poet and novelist Maggie Estep died Wednesday, days after having a heart attack, The New York Times reports. She was 50. Estep helped to popularize slam poetry through appearances on MTV and HBO in ...

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

• Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who was shot in the head in 2011, is writing a book about gun control. She plans to collaborate with her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, on Enough: Our Fight to ...

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

• The Iranian poet Hashem Shaabani was reportedly executed last month as an "enemy of God," according to human rights groups. Shaabani was a founder of the Dialogue Institute, which promoted Arab culture in Iran. In a ...

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

• The shortlist of the Folio Prize, which is open to writers of any genre or nationality, is due to be announced later today — but has already been leaked via social media. The prize, worth ...

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

• Sony is closing its e-bookstore, the Reader Store, and transferring the accounts of American and Canadian customers to e-reading company Kobo. In a press release, Ken Orii, Sony's vice president of Digital Reading Business Division said, ...

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

• A group of more than 200 authors, including Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, Jonathan Franzen, Günter Grass and Margaret Atwood, have signed an open letter criticizing recent Russian laws that "that place a chokehold on the right ...

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

• A novella by the late movie star Charlie Chaplin has been published for the first time. The 34,000-word novella Footlights, which was the basis for his 1952 film Limelight, was found in the Cineteca di Bologna's ...

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

• A small but rare sample of Jane Austen's handwriting has been found tucked into another book at the Jane Austen's House Museum. The scrap reads, "Men may get into a habit of repeating the words of our ...

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 ...