Annalisa Quinn

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 But the law was recently repealed, leaving Germans with no ...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 ...

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

• A short letter from the (amply mustachioed, possibly imperialist) English author Rudyard Kipling is up for auction. Addressed to an unknown woman, the letter says, referring to a portion of The Jungle Book, that "a little ...

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

• Amazon's move last week to begin selling fan fiction has prompted a backlash in the online community. On the one hand, the deal would do away with the copyright restrictions that keep writers of fan fiction from ...

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

• U.S. District Judge Denise Cote, who will hear the Justice Department's e-book price fixing case against Apple, hinted at her initial leanings during a pretrial hearing: "I believe that the government will be able to show ...

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

• American author Lydia Davis was awarded the Man Booker International Prize, worth about $90,000, at a ceremony Wednesday in London. Davis is renowned for her works of (very) short fiction. One story, "Samuel Johnson Is Indignant," ...

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

• A never-before-seen novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck that was discovered in a Texas storage unit will be published in October. Publisher Open Road Integrated Media describes the book, titled The Eternal Wonder, as "the ...

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

• Stephen King says his next book, Joyland, will be available only in print. He recently told The Wall Street Journal: "[L]et people stir their sticks and go to an actual bookstore rather than a digital one." ...

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

• J.K. Rowling, Seamus Heaney, Hilary Mantel, Tom Stoppard and Ian McEwan, together with dozens of other well-known authors, have annotated first editions of their novels for an auction on Tuesday to benefit English PEN, an ...

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

• Amazon faces a grilling from members of Britain's Parliament over its extremely low U.K. corporate tax payments, Reuters reported Friday. As NPR noted on Thursday, Amazon has the subject of intense scrutiny after it was ...

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

• Amazon's U.K. unit racked up sales of $6.5 billion last year, but only paid $3.7 million in corporate taxes (which is nearly as much as it received in government grants). Why does Amazon.co.uk pay so little? ...

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

• The Justice Department says Apple took the lead in an ebook price-fixing ring with five major publishing houses, according to a court filing Tuesday. The houses — Penguin, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette — ...

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

• Amazon debuted a virtual currency called "Amazon Coins" on Monday. The coins can be used to buy apps in Amazon's Appstore and on Kindle Fire. A dollar will get you 100 of the new coins, though ...

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

• Last week, the mother of a seventh-grader in Northville, Mich., filed a complaint seeking to keep an unexpurgated version of Anne Frank's Diary off of middle school shelves because she felt a passage describing the female genitalia ...