Annalisa Quinn

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• A British academic stumbled upon a trove of unpublished letters written by Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, who was the daughter of women's rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft and the wife of Romantic poet Percy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

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 ...