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

In retrospectives, Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing often gets tagged as a British novelist, having been born to British parents and spent decades living in London. Yet for some 25 years of her youth, Lessing lived in Zimbabwe — then a British colony called Southern Rhodesia. After leaving the country, and even after being banned briefly for criticizing the colony's white leaders, she still devoted much of her energy in later years to opening libraries there.


Despite Lessing's death last year, those efforts have pressed on. More than 3,000 books from Lessing's personal collection have now been donated to the Harare City Library in Zimbabwe, 

. The gift has been made by Lessing's estate upon the request of the Africa Community Publishing and Development Trust, which Lessing helped found and which now reportedly runs nearly 200 libraries.


J.K. Rowling has promised a few "festive surprises" in the lead-up to Christmas. Starting on Friday, her 

, will play host to a new piece every morning for a dozen days. According to the website's newsletter, this crop will include "brand new writing by J.K. Rowling and even a new potion or two." And don't be surprised to find Rowling spin an entirely new yarn or two from loose threads in the 

 that one of the new pieces will feature Draco Malfoy.


 a ban on sending books to prisoners in England and Wales. The government's ban, which had prevented prisoners from receiving packages except under "exceptional circumstances," had 

 from British writers and activists. The 

 effectively ruled the ban unlawful, as the presiding judge said he saw "no good reason" to restrict prisoners' access to books.


Recall Zoella's big debut? It turns out that vlogger Zoe Sugg's novel 

, which just broke the record for first-week sales of a debut author in the U.K., was at least partially ghostwritten, after all. Sugg's publisher 

 that a team of writers helped her compose the book, and 

 a blog post by freelance writer Siobhan Curham that explained how she'd written a novel in just six weeks — a novel now suspected to be 

Patrick Modiano, the newly named Nobel Prize winner, delivered his Nobel address on Sunday night at the Swedish Academy. On the off-chance you couldn't grab a flight to Stockholm to see it live in person, 

 — although the video won't do you too much good if you don't know French. Nicely though, unlike many of Modiano's books, his speech has already been translated to English, and it can be 

"Today, I get the sense that memory is much less sure of itself, engaged as it is in a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion," Modiano said. "Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean."


In 1989, Richard McGuire made a splash with a slim, 36-panel comic called "Here." Some 25 years later, McGuire has finally fleshed that comic into a 300-page book meditation on memory. Each page of 

not only depicts the action ongoing in a single room, but also offers windows onto the very same space at different points in time. The result is a web of interconnection that eludes the conventions of storytelling and yet, as 

, still manages to plumb the emotions: "As your eye lurches around the page, as you flip back and forth between pages, an irresistible sentiment swells. Rare among conceptual works, 

 manages to tug your heart even as it undercuts your comfortable role of reader."
Anita Diamant's novel 

 follows the life of a woman born to Jewish immigrant parents in that New England city. As the woman, Addie Baum, grows and forges a position of independence for herself, Diamond reflects that Baum's fictional story is also tied up with the stories of so many other real immigrants — from both her own era and ours. "The struggle between the old and the new, the feeling of otherness in this culture — I think that's a given," 

. "It's part of American history, it's part of American society and culture, up to this very minute."
Fallen Olympian Oscar Pistorius is in prison serving a five-year term for manslaughter. Journalist John Carlin looks at the events that brought him there in the new book 

Chase Your Shadow: The Trials of Oscar Pistorius.

 to watch Pistorius on the witness stand: "Pistorius was, as the judge would later say, not a good witness at all. He was continually contradicting himself, confusing. Pistorius was compelling in the sense that he just broke down in the most sort of ... Shakespearean, highly dramatic way on numerous occasions — not just weeping, but howling."  Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Colin Dwyer

Author

More than 3,000 books from British Nobel laureate Doris Lessing's collection have been donated to a library in Zimbabwe. Also: J.K. Rowling promises 12 days of Harry Potter.

Book News: Doris Lessing's personal library returns home -- to Zimbabwe

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