Annalisa Quinn

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 ...

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

• A.M. Homes won the prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize, soon to be the Baileys prize) for her novel May We Be Forgiven. It follows Nixon historian Harold Silver as he begins an ...

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

• Until recently, the German language's longest "authentic" word was the 63-letter Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, meaning "the law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling," according to The Telegraph. But the law was recently repealed, leaving Germans with no ...

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

• An investigation into the death of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda took a strange turn this week as investigators' focus shifted to an American named Michael Townley, who was an assassin for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and a ...

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

• All eyes are on Apple as it heads to court Monday for the start of its ebook price-fixing trial. Last year, the Justice Department accused Apple of conspiring with five major publishing companies to set prices on ...

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

• A professor at the University of Bologna in Italy says he has found the world's oldest known complete Torah scroll. Hebrew scholar Mauro Perani says the manuscript had been mistakenly categorized as a 17th century work ...

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

• Science fiction and fantasy author Jack Vance died Sunday evening, his son told The Associated Press. He wrote more than 60 books, including The Dying Earth. In 2009, writer Michael Chabon told The New ...