Annalisa Quinn

At its best, Natsuo Kirino's The Goddess Chronicle is a dark and lovely feminist retelling of the Japanese creation myth. At worst, it's a stiff, repetitive exercise in telling, not showing.

On an island shaped like a teardrop, two sisters are born. Pretty Kamikuu ("Child of Gods") is chosen as ...

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

• The crime author Elmore Leonard had a stroke last week and is recovering in the hospital, Gregg Sutter, his researcher, told The Detroit News on Monday. Sutter added that the hugely prolific author of Out ...

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

• Following its successful antitrust lawsuit against Apple, the Justice Department is ready to mete out punishment. It has asked a court to force Apple to end existing deals with five publishers and submit to broad ...

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

• A price war between Amazon.com and Overstock.com will stretch into a second week, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne told Publisher's Weekly. Overstock started it last week when it priced 360,000 books 10 percent lower than what Amazon ...

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

• The smell of chocolate boosts book sales, according to a study by Belgian researchers published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. The researchers, led by Lieve Douce of Belgium's Hasselt University, spent 10 days observing ...

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

• President Obama's Tuesday trip to an Amazon distribution center in Chattanooga, Tenn., has raised eyebrows (and hackles) in the bookselling community. Publisher's Weekly ran a provocative story titled "Does President Obama Hate Indie Bookstores?" that called Obama's ...

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

• Caroline Criado-Perez, the feminist activist who successfully campaigned to make Jane Austen the new face of Britain's 10-pound note, has been inundated with hundreds of death and rape threats on Twitter after the banknote news broke last ...

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

• Charges of anti-Muslim prejudice flew thick and fast following Fox News anchor Lauren Green's interview with Reza Aslan, a religious scholar and the author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Green repeatedly asked ...

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

• Amazon reported an unexpected second-quarter loss Thursday of about $7 million — though revenue rose 22 percent — as it continues to bet big on investments in digital content. The Bookseller summarized Amazon's strategy of ...

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

• Jane Austen will be the new face of the 10-pound banknote, replacing Charles Darwin, the Bank of England announced Wednesday. That follows an uproar after the bank said it would replace Elizabeth Fry — the only ...

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

• Chuck Palahniuk says he is working on a sequel to Fight Club, his 1996 cult novel about underground fighting matches. The sequel, which will be a "dark and messy" graphic novel series, doesn't yet have a publisher. ...

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

• A previously unpublished short story by Catch-22 author Joseph Heller comes out today in The Strand Magazine [subscription only]. The magazine's editor, Andrew Gulli, said he found the story in the library archives at Brandeis University ...

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

• Although it's hard to imagine Ernest Hemingway as anything other than bearded, gruff and gin-scented, five detailed scrapbooks by the Nobel Prize winner's mother give a glimpse of his early life through baby photos, school reports, drawings ...

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

• In a twist worthy of her latest detective novel, it turns out it was a lawyer's wife's best friend who leaked J.K. Rowling's identity as the "Robert Galbraith" who wrote the crime novel The Cuckoo's Calling. The ...

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

• The prince of Denmark is going on world tour. The Globe theatre company announced this week that it wants to bring Shakespeare's play to every country on Earth, so it plans to embark on a two-year tour ...

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

• The 33^rd annual Ernest Hemingway look-alike competition at Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West, Fla., kicks off Thursday. The stoically bearded among us will go head to head in the fiercely competitive three-day tournament to ...

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

• Juror B37 has dropped her plans to write a book about the George Zimmerman trial. In a statement released by literary agent Sharlene Martin of Martin Literary Management, Juror B37 wrote, "I realize it was ...

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

• The debut detective novel The Cuckoo's Calling, seemingly written by a former Royal Military Police member named Robert Galbraith, was actually written by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, The Sunday Times revealed this weekend. Rowling's publisher ...

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

• A school district in Long Island, N.Y., has flunked its own summer reading list. The Hempstead Public Schools list features authors such as "George Ornell" and "Emily Bonte," (properly spelled Orwell and Brontë) alongside dozens of other ...

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

• U.S. District Judge Denise Cote delivered a stinging assessment of Apple on Wednesday when she ruled that the company knowingly "participated in and facilitated a horizontal price-fixing conspiracy." In her opinion, she wrote, "The evidence ...