Annalisa Quinn

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

• Barnes & Noble stock shot up 24 percent in trading Thursday amid rumors that Microsoft is interesting in buying all of Nook Media's digital assets. The website TechCrunch has reported that it obtained internal documents ...

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

• "Guccifer," the hacker responsible for introducing the world to former president George W. Bush's artistic side, appears to have leaked the opening chapters of Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell's newest novel. Killing Monica is ...

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

• The 11 people who worked on translating Inferno, the latest Robert Langdon novel from Dan Brown, toiled for two months in near-isolation in a heavily-guarded underground complex in Milan, according to Sorrisi e Canzoni, an Italian ...

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

• According to a report in The Guardian, Sigmund Freud's famous couch has fallen into disrepair, and the Freud Museum in London has issued a plea for donations to finance the restorations. A gift from one of ...

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

• Harper Lee is suing to recover royalties from her former literary agent, Samuel Pinkus, who she claims tricked her into signing over the copyright to her novel To Kill A Mockingbird while she was recovering from ...

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

• Luci Tapahonso has been named the Navajo Nation's first poet laureate. Elmer Guy, president of Navajo Technical College in New Mexico, announced the news and said Tapahonso will be officially introduced to the public May 17. ...

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

• Riverhead Books has announced a deal for a book about Boston Marathon bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It will be written by Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, author of the biography The Man Without a Face: ...

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

• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sold the rights to his memoir to HarperCollins, the publishing house announced Tuesday. The book will be "a full and frank look at his public and private life — from his formative ...

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

• Winnie-the-Pooh author and prominent pacifist A.A. Milne secretly wrote propaganda during World War I for MI7b, a now-defunct arm of British military intelligence services, according to recently discovered documents. Evidence of MI7b's activities was largely destroyed, ...

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

• Journalist and feminist Mary Thom, a former executive editor of Ms. magazine, was killed Friday in a motorcycle accident in Yonkers, N.Y. She was 68. Thom, who was editor-in-chief of the nonprofit Women's Media Center, wrote ...

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

• Don DeLillo is going to be awarded the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced Thursday. DeLillo, who was famously called "chief shaman of the paranoid school ...

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

• One of Maya Angelou's doctors said she is recovering at home in North Carolina after being hospitalized, according to The Associated Press. Angelou, a writer and poet best known for her 1969 memoir I Know Why ...

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

• A 95-year-old woman donated nine letters that J.D. Salinger wrote her in the early 1940s to the Morgan Library & Museum. One of the letters, obtained by The New York Times, reads, "Let's have no more ...

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

• The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, which will be officially dedicated Thursday at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, features an exhibit intended to mimic the hard decisions the former president made during his eight-year tenure. ...

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

• E.L. Konigsburg, the author of the 1967 children's book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, about two children who run away from home to live secretly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died ...

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

• Two major authors were included in Time magazine's annual list of the "100 Most Influential People" — Tenth of December writer George Saunders and Hilary Mantel, the novelist behind Wolf Hall and Bring Up the ...

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

• The Digital Public Library of America, intended to provide free open access to materials from libraries, museums, universities and archives across the country, launches at noon ET on Thursday. The project began as an initiative at ...

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

• Monday's Pulitzer awards news has led to an immediate sales spike for the winners. Sharon Olds' poetry collection Stag's Leap is already sold out on Amazon, and Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son was at Amazon's ...

Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction Monday, captures the privation and absurdity of life in North Korea in one sentence: "For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw."

The novel is a surreal, feverish look at North Korea under Kim Jong ...

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

• After last year's no-Pulitzer debacle, there was a general sigh of relief when a fiction winner was announced Monday. Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, a surreal novel of life in North Korea under Kim ...