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

The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers are battling a bid by Amazon to claim new Internet domains such as ".book," ".author" and ".read." In complaints filed late last week to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the two groups call Amazon's concept "plainly anticompetitive" and "not in the public interest." Barnes & Noble also isn't happy about it.

Mindy Kaling is writing a follow-up to her 2012 book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). Kaling, your cool big sister and the star of The Mindy Project, announced her plans last week to a crowd at a TV festival.

"Literature is full of dreams that we remember more clearly than our own," writes Francine Prose in an essay about literary dreams for The New York Review of Books.

Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor of Germanic languages, writes about the idea of the "female trickster" for The New Yorker: "Lady Gaga draws us out of our comfort zones, crosses boundaries, gets snared in her own devices. Shamelessly exploitative and exploratory, she reminds us that every culture requires a space for the disruptive energy of antisocial characters. She may have the creativity of a trickster, but she is also Sleeping Beauty and menacing monster, all rolled into one."

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

Scottish novelist A. L. Kennedy's Blue Book is the weird and lovely story of a chance meeting of former con artist partners aboard a trans-Atlantic cruise. And don't miss Kennedy's essay for NPR on Derek Raymond's crime novel He Died With His Eyes Open. She writes: "Derek Raymond, who died in 1994, has been described as the father of British noir. But he's far beyond noir. There probably isn't even a word for his kind of darkness."

The protagonist of William H. Gass' long-awaited Middle C, Joseph Skizzen, has a rich imaginary inner life as the founder of the mysterious Inhumanity Museum.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which came out Monday, has generated an extraordinary amount of debate. NPR's Renee Montagne calls the book "something of a feminist call to arms." But others say Sandberg's view is too narrow — Melissa Gira Grant wrote in The Washington Post that "this is simply the elite leading the slightly-less-elite, for the sake of Sandberg's bottom line."

It's pilot season, that time of year when television networks create and test new shows with hopes of turning out the next big thing. But whatever new plots they come up with, it's safe to say that they will turn to the safety of a limited number of character archetypes: the lovable loser, the charming rogue, the desperate housewife.

New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum would like to add one more character to that long, familiar list: the hummingbird. She writes that hummingbirds are "idealistic feminine dreamers whose personalities are irritants. They are not merely spunky but downright obsessive."

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

An American history textbook used by some schools in Louisiana's voucher system has caused a bit of a stir over passages describing 1960s counterculture. America: Land I Love teaches eight graders that during the '60s, "Many young people turned to drugs and immoral lifestyles; these youth became known as hippies. They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners... Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship." This is only the latest outcry over textbooks used in Louisiana voucher schools. Other textbooks claim that "[t]he majority of slave holders treated their slaves well" and "[d]inosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years."

"I don't think I'm particularly good at research. For better or worse, I write about myself," says Sarah Manguso, author of The Guardians, in an interview with Guernica.

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is writing a book called A Happy Holiday IS a Merry Christmas, according to The Associated Press. In a statement, Palin says, "This will be a fun, festive, thought provoking book, which will encourage all to see what is possible when we unite in defense of our faith and ignore the politically correct Scrooges who would rather take Christ out of Christmas." The book is slated to come out in November. There's still no word on the Palin family's fitness book we were promised last year.

In n+1, Rachel Aviv writes about Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, who used The Iliad and The Odyssey to trace the origins of human consciousness: "Drawing on evidence from neurology, archaeology, art history, theology, and Greek poetry, Jaynes captured the experience of modern consciousness — 'a whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can' — as sensitively and tragically as any great novelist."

The tall and imposing Nicolas Maduro stepped forward last week to be sworn in as Venezuela's interim leader following the death of President Hugo Chavez.

Before the country's packed congressional hall, he swore to complete Chavez's dream to transform the OPEC power into a socialist state, allied with Cuba and decidedly opposed to capitalism and U.S. interests in Latin America.

It's a dream Maduro says will not die, even with the death of El Comandante. Maduro told the country that he wasn't taking the oath because of ambition, vanity or because he comes from the Venezuelan elite.

The lawmakers and Chavista rank and file responded with cries of, "With Chavez and Maduro, the people are safe."

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