The lawyer who outed J.K. Rowling as the author of detective novel published under a pseudonym last year has been fined in the UK for breaking client confidentiality rules. Rowling wrote The Cuckoo’s Calling under the name Robert Galbraith in April 2013. The lawyer, Chris Gossage, told his wife, who told a friend, who in turn told a newspaper columnist.

The villa in Egypt’s second largest city, where Lawrence Durrell lived and was inspired to write “The Alexandria Quartet,” is slated for demolition, reports The Guardian. “If bulldozed, Durrell's crumbling former home would become the 36th

Shall we begin? The Guardian’s guide to the coming year runs through the likely literary landmarks of 2014: Hanif Kureishi on a fading writer being vexed by his young biographer, Alain de Botton on the news, Masha Gessen on the passion of Pussy Riot, retracing E.M. Forster’s travels in India, the third and final installment in Karl Ove Knausgård’s autobiographical trilogy, Ralph Ellison’s centenary, and more.

Danielle Steel has been awarded the French Legion of Honor, making her the latest American to win France’s most prestigious prize. Steel, a writer of thrillers who is considered the

As Al Jazeera demands the release of its four journalists detained in Egypt, the Committee to Protect Journalists has released a grim accounting of the year, declaring Egypt, Syria, and Iraq the most deadly nations in the world for the press. According to the report, seventy journalists have been killed for their work in 2013. Twenty-five more deaths are still under investigation.

“The Great American Novel—always capitalized, like the United States of America itself—has to be a book that contains and explains the whole country,” writes Adam Kirsch in a review of Lawrence Buell’s The Dream of

Washington Post publisher Katherine Weymouth talks about the paper and its new owner, Jeff Bezos: “People have stopped wearing ties, that’s the biggest change around here” since Bezos bought the paper for $250 million last fall. The D.C. daily is in a “great position,” she says. “We have a credible brand, deeply engaged readers, [and we] cover Washington. And now we are owned by someone with deep pockets who cares what we do and is willing to invest for the long term.”

For its end-of-the-year roundup, Salon asked critics to name their favorite books—and their least-likable characters.

Gawker,

As an alternative to the Queen’s annual Christmas missive, the UK’s Channel 4 aired a message from surveillance whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, warning of the dangers of a future without privacy—a future, he says, which will look and feel a lot worse than George Orwell’s 1984.

On the New York Times’ Arts Beat blog, anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod talks about her new book, Do Muslim Women Need Saving, inspired by the (craven, spurious, cynical) argument that the US went to war in Afghanistan to free women from the Taliban and liberate them from their burqas (Abu-Lughod’s

For six years, the New York Times not only held the story of Robert Levinson, an American spy on a CIA mission who went missing in Iran in 2007, but also repeatedly described Levinson’s visit to the country in a manner which the paper's editorial writers and news reporters knew to be false. Public editor Margaret Sullivan weighs in on the reasons why.

Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47, has died. Read more about him here: “In the final days of the Soviet Union, when the old icons were fast decaying and any future ones were frantically packing off to escape the ruins," writes Andrew

The New York Times Magazine will take a bit longer before deciding who the new editor, replacing Hugo Lindgren, will be. Times executive editor Jill Abramson sent a memo to staff on Friday saying there were “urgent issues and questions” to consider before the new appointment, and has named a committee to “plunge into the challenges facing the magazine.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has created a new writers’ club, the Literary Assembly, which will hold its first congress in the spring of 2014, ahead of 2015 being designated a “Year of Literature” in Russia. “The Kremlin intends [the

With eleven days left in the year, the New York Times’ book critics Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin, and Dwight Gardner have weighed in with their lists of favorite books from 2013, including Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light, George Saunders’s Tenth of December, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, and Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped.

In New England, a vendue is an auction. In the south, a mourner’s bench is a pew set aside for penitents in the front of a church. In the northwest, to hooky bob is to hold onto the back of a vehicle while being towed along across

Eliot Higgins, the blogger best known as Brown Moses, is launching a new web site in early 2014, devoted to his specific and resourceful brand of investigative journalism, which relies heavily on public data, social media, user-generated content, and open-source technology. Higgins has been tracking the Syrian civil war since 2012, with an eye toward munitions and the movement of weapons. The new, as-yet-unnamed web site, however, is set to pursue a broader mission, melding classical reporting skills with the most up-to-date fact-finding tools: "I don't want it to be old journalism vs new

Only around five recordings of Samuel Beckett’s voice are known to exist. This forthcoming documentary—about the making of Beckett’s first and only feature film, starring Buston Keaton and usefully titled Film—includes one of them. Directed by Ross Lipman, a filmmaker and restoration specialist, the documentary, cleverly titled NotFilm, features a wealth of archival material, including photographs from location scouts, film footage, and rare bits of dialogue between Beckett and the director Alan Schneider.

Quercus, publisher of the late Stieg Larsson’s astronomically bestselling Millenium

When Lolita was first published by an obscure French publisher of erotica in 1955, it came packaged in a plain green wrapper. Since then, the book's had many evocative covers, most of which ignore Nabokov's ardent art direction: "No girls." There've been knocked-kneed legs in schoolgirl skirts, lollipop-licking seductresses, and button-nosed cuties smiling wanly. In Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl editors John Bertram and Yuri Leving examine the ways in which Nabokov's most famous book has been portrayed, and commission new takes on the book's cover from eighty artists and designers, along

Looking back on the year in fiction may not be the usual purview of an op-ed columnist, but the New York Times’s Ross Douthat appears to have launched the last literary feud of 2013 by doing so. Over the weekend, he used Adelle Waldman’s debut novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., to make a somewhat specious point about social conservativism, premarital sex, and the chaotic romantic lives of the book’s characters. In an interview with the New Republic, Waldman responds with admirable thanks-but-no-so-fast nuance. “Douthat makes the classic . . . conservative mistake,” writes Marc Tracy, “of