The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.
-- Mary Ingalls, the older sister of Laura Ingalls Wilder and a central character in her Little House series, famously went blind — supposedly from scarlet fever. But a study (paywall protected) published Monday in the journal Pediatrics suggests it was actually due to viral meningoencephalitis , and that Ingalls Wilder changed it to scarlet fever to make it easier to understand.
-- There's a lovely and cryptic new short story from NW author and Orange Prize winner Zadie Smith in The New Yorker.
-- Kitty Kelley, the notorious celebrity biographer who Joe Klein once called a " professional sensationalist ," has a deal with Grand Central Publishing for a book about women in Congress . Kelley is responsible for, among other rumors, the story about Nancy Reagan's supposed affair with Frank Sinatra. Women of Congress, watch your backs.
-- "Its stores were designed to keep people parked for a while, for children's story time, for coffee klatches, for sitting around and browsing. That was a business decision — more time spent in the store, more money spent when you left it — but it had a cultural effect. It brought literary culture to pockets of the country that lacked them." — The New Republic's Mark Athitakis on why Barnes & Noble helped to democratize literary culture.
-- Bookish.com, a fascinating experiment in digital book recommendations funded by Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Hachette, launched Monday night .
-- Meanwhile, competitor Goodreads bans "sexual roleplay" from their book recommendation website because people apparently had been misbehaving. (Now, you pretend to be a casual reader looking for a good beach read ... )
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