Annalisa Quinn

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

• The vastly prolific fantasy author Neil Gaiman is bringing back his popular Sandman series that ended more than a decade ago, the DC Entertainment imprint Vertigo announced Monday. The Sandman: Overture #1 will be illustrated by J.H. ...

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

• Publishers Penguin and Random House have officially merged into one entity known as Penguin Random House (not, as many had hoped, "Random Penguin" or "Penguin House"). The deal "creates the world's largest publisher of consumer books," according ...

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

• Paula Deen's New Testament: 250 Favorite Recipes, All Lightened Up isn't even out yet (it's set to be published in October), but a surge of pre-orders in the past few days has made it the top-selling book ...

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

• When NASA launches its first solar sail mission into deep space, it'll be carrying DNA from some of the late, legendary science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke's hair. Most famous as the author of 2001: A ...

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

• Erdem Gunduz, the protester known as "The Standing Man" who held a six-hour silent vigil in Instanbul's Taksim Square in response to clashes between Turkish police and demonstrators, has inspired protesters to form "The Taksim Square Book ...

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

• Last week, Kickstarter apologized for featuring a book proposal by pickup artist Ken Hoinsky that critics say promotes sexual assault with tips such as "Don't ask for permission" and "Force her to rebuff your advances." ...

An elaborate cake exactingly modeled from the work of a Dutch minimalist painter. A piece of literary criticism as interesting and expansive as its subject. A photograph of an eerie, antlered hat sculpted from feathers and tulle. Art criticism, written with a novelist's eye. Here are five books that traverse ...

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

• A recently released FBI file calls legendary Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes a "communist writer" and refers to a "long history of subversive connections." The dossier, which starts in the 1960s and spans decades, also reveals ...

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

• Canadian author Alice Munro says her writing days may be over. In an interview after winning the Trillium Book Award, Munro told the National Post that she was glad to get the award because she's "probably ...

Early on in Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher, he describes a birthday party at which a school friend tells the future prime minister, "If you don't stop bossing us, I shall stamp on your foot."

It's not hard to imagine that a great many people have wished they could ...

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

• Kim Jong Un gave top officials in North Korea copies of Adolf Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf, as gifts on his birthday last January, according to a report in New Focus International, a newspaper written largely by North ...

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

• VICE magazine has a reputation for using provocative content to draw an audience — Dennis Rodman's North Korean tour comes to mind — but a spread in the magazine's recent fiction issue has sparked particular fury. ...

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

• The word "tweet" (in the featherless sense) has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, together with a batch of other tech-y words such as "geekery," "crowdsourcing" and "e-reader." OED chief editor John Simpson writes that ...

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

• A breathless Daily Beast report that the woman nominated to be the CIA deputy director, Avril D. Haines, owned a small bookstore in the '90s and would occasionally host erotica readings has sparked accusations of sexism. ...

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

• A San Francisco appeals court has ruled that a werewolf erotica novel must be returned to Andres Martinez, an inmate of Pelican Bay State Prison, after prison guards took it away from him on the grounds ...

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

• A school board in Glen Ellyn, Ill., has voted to restore Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being A Wallflower to shelves, after a parent's complaint led to its removal from Hadley Junior High School earlier this ...

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

• As of this morning, Amazon sales of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 had jumped 6,021 percent in just 24 hours, to No. 213 on Amazon's bestseller list. As NPR's Alan Greenblatt recently pointed out, many people ...

The novelist Tao Lin, because he is young, narcissistic and computer literate, gets the "voice of Generation Y" treatment a lot. It's a safe way of pinning down the uncontainable paradox that is Tao Lin: On the one hand, he's meek, cripplingly shy and unusually talented. But on the other, ...

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

• The Scottish novelist Iain Banks died on Sunday, according to his publisher. He wrote science fiction under the name Iain M. Banks, and mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks, prompting The Telegraph to name him ...

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

• A new Norwegian language translation of the Bible was the secular country's best-selling book of 2012. (By comparison, the Bible didn't even break the top 100 in the U.S. last year). The Associated Press credits ...