Annalisa Quinn

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• A British academic stumbled upon a trove of unpublished letters written by Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, who was the daughter of women's rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft and the wife of Romantic poet Percy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

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

• Walter Isaacson, the author of a bestselling biography of Steve Jobs, is posting chapters of his next book online for crowdsourced edits. The as-yet-untitled book, which he describes as "a narrative about the people who helped to ...

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

• English novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard died Thursday afternoon at age 90. Her publicist told the BBC that Howard died "peacefully — after a short illness." Howard's best-known works were The Cazalet Chronicles, a saga of English ...

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

• The Kids Right to Read Project says it saw a striking increase in the number of books challenged or banned across the U.S. this year. Coordinator Acacia O'Connor told Shelf Awareness last week that the group ...

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

• Ned Vizzini, the author of It's Kind of a Funny Story, died last week at the age of 32. "The manner of death was suicide," the New York City medical examiner's office tells CNN. According to ...

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

• Paul Torday, the author of the 2007 novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, died Wednesday at the age of 67. After many years as a businessman, he came out with his first novel, Salmon Fishing, when ...

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

• Stieg Larsson, the author of the bestselling Millennium novels, died almost a decade ago. Now his Swedish publisher has asked another writer to pick up where Larsson left off. Swedish author David Lagercrantz will write a ...

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

• A paper in the Christmas edition of the Medical Journal of Australia posits a new theory of why, in fantasy novels, the bad guys tend to lose: Vitamin D deficiency. The authors write, "Systematic textual ...

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

• The parents of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager whose shooting death last year in Florida reignited the national debate about race relations, are talking to publishers about a possible book, according to The New ...

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

• The Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the educational publisher, will pay $7.7 million to settle allegations that the charity was used to advance the for-profit parent company. New York State's attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, ...

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

• A new Pew survey has found that Americans overwhelmingly support public libraries. More than 6,200 people ages 16 and older were interviewed by phone for the study, which was released Wednesday. It found that 90 percent ...

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

• Federal Judge Jed Rakoff has dismissed an antitrust class-action against Amazon and six major publishing houses. The suit brought by independent booksellers claimed the companies conspired to restrict trade through the use of DRM (or digital ...

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

• More than 500 authors from around the world, including five Nobel Prize winners, have asked the United Nations for an international bill of digital rights. In a joint statement, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Tom Stoppard, Margaret ...

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

• John Williams' novel Stoner sold a scant 2,000 copies when it was released almost 50 years ago. An understated novel about a Missouri academic named William Stoner, it went out of print the following year. But through ...

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

• Nelson Mandela, political leader and international icon of liberation, was also a wordsmith, an orator and writer whose eloquence was one of his most valuable tools in the fight for freedom in South Africa. In his elegant ...

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

• Amazon Publishing has launched a new imprint, StoryFront, that aims to publish "high-quality short fiction across genres." Amazon has already been experimenting with short fiction through Kindle Singles and Day One, a weekly literary magazine that launched ...

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

• Manil Suri has won the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his novel The City of Devi. The award, whose distinguished honorees include Tom Wolfe and John Updike (the winner of a lifetime ...

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

• A Gutenberg Bible from 1455, an autographed and annotated manuscript of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, and the oldest surviving Hebrew codex are among the ancient texts included in a new digitization project by the University of Oxford's ...