Annalisa Quinn

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 ...

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

• Three unpublished stories by J.D. Salinger have been leaked online, seemingly from the eBay auction of a rare and unauthorized volume called Three Stories. The stories have previously been available only for viewing in research libraries. ...

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

• Amazon's labor practices have come under fresh scrutiny after BBC reporter Adam Littler went undercover as a worker at an Amazon warehouse in the U.K. Wearing a hidden camera, Littler worked at a warehouse in Swansea, ...

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

• Sylvia Browne, the bestselling author of dozens of books about the paranormal, died Wednesday in San Jose, Calif. She was 77. Browne, who claimed to be psychic, said she frequently worked with police on missing persons ...

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

• James McBride won the National Book Award for fiction for The Good Lord Bird, narrated by a disguised child follower of John Brown, who made the famous doomed raid on Harper's Ferry. McBride said Wednesday night that ...

(This post was updated at 10:30 a.m.)

James McBride won the prestigious National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday for his novel The Good Lord Bird about a young slave who joins the abolitionist John Brown in his anti-slavery mission. Also honored were George Packer, who won in the nonfiction ...

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

• The U.S. Postal Service has made a deal with Amazon to deliver packages on Sundays. For now, delivery will be limited to Los Angeles and New York, but the service is expected to expand into cities ...

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

• This year's Dylan Thomas Prize has gone to Claire Vaye Watkins for her debut story collection Battleborn. The prize, aimed at encouraging "raw creative talent worldwide," is restricted to writers under 30 and is worth £30,000 (about ...

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

• Amazon is asking independent bookstores to sell Kindles in exchange for 10 percent of the revenue from ebooks bought on the devices for two years. But the offer, under a program called Amazon Source, has been ...

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

• Lynn Coady won Canada's most prestigious literary award, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, for her short-story collection Hellgoing. (You know, in case Canadian short story writers haven't had a good enough year.) The jury — writers Margaret Atwood, ...

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

• The Mozambican poet, fiction writer and biologist Mia Couto has won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a biennial award sometimes called "The American Nobel." Couto, who has written dozens of books in his native Portuguese, ...

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

• Following allegations that he borrowed passages from Wikipedia, Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul is now accused of lifting passages from the Heritage Foundation without proper attribution in his book Government Bullies. BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski writes, ...

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

• The bestselling thriller writer Michael Palmer died on Wednesday, according to a statement released by his publisher, St. Martin's Press. He was 71. Perhaps best known for Extreme Measures, which was made into a movie with Hugh ...