Inside Jacket

Scientists have named a giant, carnivorous, prehistoric whale after Herman Melville.

Cal Ripken and the Baltimore Sun sportswriter Kevin Cowherd will team-up to write a Disney Book Group children’s series about middle-school baseball players.

Perhaps diehard “Twilight” fans are not as strange as they seem.

University librarians studying research behavior find that many students are unsure of how to use library resources.

Emoticons predated the Internet by at least a century.

After sixty-nine years and six hundred comic-book editions, Wonder Woman gets a new costume.

Gene Weingarten on humor, pain, and the “thrills of journalism.”

The English soccer coach Fabio Capello declined an offer of one million pounds for a memoir about the 2010 World Cup.

Molly Ringle of Seattle has won this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for terrible first lines.

Rob Lowe will write a memoir, without the aid of a ghostwriter.

Eleven books for foragers and wild-food enthusiasts.

The best-selling author Jacquelyn Mitchard talks about losing her fortune in a Ponzi scheme.

Should illness memoirs be held up to the same standards as other books?

American librarians face a growing demand for Spanish-language books.

Faber has signed a Tarzan series “for the next generation.”

Billy Hayes, the author of the memoir “Midnight Express,” apologizes to Turkey for his unfair portrayal of Turks.

Librarians join forces to create an e-book Web site.

Kurt Cobain’s journals reveal the writer inside the rock star.

The eighty-two year-old teacher and theatre director Myrrha Stanford-Smith has been given a three-book deal after writing her first novel, “The Great Lie,” which follows the relationship between William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.

Mark Peters on the many methods for bleeping out expletives—in print.

Bantam Dell will publish a new book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.

In his new book, Ted Mooney attempts to make sense of the life of Harriet Wasserman, the disappearing literary agent.

Harper Lee meets with a Daily Mail reporter, but still will not talk about “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Is self-publishing the ultimate twenty-first century cottage industry?

Literary agent Andrew Wylie reveals that his clients’ e-book deals are “currently on hold across the board.”

Who says you can’t drink, watch soccer, and read all at the same time?

Are roll-up computers the next step for e-readers?

The English crime novelist Michael Jecks says that libraries should not be free.

The literary agent Bill Clegg recounts his past as a crack addict.

Do science fiction books have some of the worst covers ever printed?

Dick Francis’s son, Felix Francis, will continue the writer’s brand.

In Australia, publishers market their books with trailers.

“The Flavor Thesaurus” groups together complementary tastes.

Twelve new summer reads.

Neil Gaiman’s “Graveyard Book” is the first to win both the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal for children’s literature.

Is Ernest Hemingway responsible for the end of the bluefin tuna?

A new contest allows readers to feature their town in an upcoming Superman comic.

The rise in gay teen fiction is causing controversy.

What should Seattle do with its unwanted phone books?

The publicist and writer Sloane Crosley on the mixed blessings of “chick-lit.”

David Mitchell talks about Dickens and the Dutch.

White House party crashers Michaele and Tareq Salahi will write a book about their security breach.