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

After last year's no-Pulitzer debacle, there was a general sigh of relief when a fiction winner was announced Monday. Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, a surreal novel of life in North Korea under Kim Jong Il, won the prize. Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap (yes, named after the winery), a collection of poems about a devastating divorce, took top honors in poetry. And Ayad Akhtar's play Disgrace took the drama category. (Read Akhtar's recent essay for NPR, "The American Sublime: 3 Books On Faith In The U.S.")

On Monday, Granta magazine released the names of authors featured in its "Best of Young British Novelists" issue, which comes out once a decade and tends to be a predictor for literary success — past honorees include such literary superstars as Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis. Morning Edition's David Greene speaks to Granta editor John Freeman and novelist Sarah Hall.

The shortlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), was announced Tuesday morning. The finalists are Kate Atkinson, A.M. Homes, Barbara Kingsolver, Hilary Mantel, Maria Semple and Zadie Smith.

The New Yorker published a short story from the late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano, "Mexican Manifesto," translated by Laura Healy: "And then she started smiling again, not a mocking smile, not as if she were enjoying herself, but a terminal smile, a knotted smile somewhere between a sensation of beauty and misery, though not beauty and misery per se, but Little Beauty and Little Misery, paradoxical dwarves, travelling and inapprehensible dwarves."

On Monday, the American Library Association released its list of the "most-challenged books," that is, books that have received the highest number of "formal, written complaint[s] filed with a library or school requesting that a book or other material be restricted or removed because of its content or appropriateness." Dav Piley's Captain Underpants tops the list, and is joined by books like Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, Toni Morrison's Beloved and E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey.

Is small-batch hard apple cider the next microbrew? It seems everybody and their brother is experimenting with ways to make the potent stuff profitable. Sales of domestically produced hard cider have more than tripled since 2007, according to beverage industry analysts — and that's not counting Europe, where it has held a steady popularity for centuries.

But there's a bit of a hitch that may stunt cider's future growth. Apple blight? Climate change? Finicky millennial tastes? Well, maybe, but Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., is focusing on the antiquated way the products are taxed.

Schumer, the man who never misses the chance to promote his state's agriculture (have you seen the video of him "cooking" for the presidential inaugural ceremonies?), is proposing legislation he says will supercharge the cider boom for both the Empire State and the whole country.

"New York is the second-largest apple producer in the country, and there's no doubt it should be at the core of the hard-cider industry, which is rapidly growing in popularity," says Schumer. "However, current federal tax rules make it extremely costly for Capital Region producers and consumers alike to produce, market and sell this product, which could prevent New York's hundreds of apple growers and hard cider producers from fully benefiting from the stable income that comes with this new product."

Here's the problem, as Schumer sees it: Under federal law, hard apple and pear ciders cannot exceed 7 percent alcohol by volume – or they become subject to the higher taxes of products with higher alcohol levels, like wine.

But hitting the right level and no higher is tricky when working with a product like apples, which naturally vary in sweetness levels. Since the amount of sugar varies, that means the amount of alcohol produced will ultimately vary, too. Sometimes, those variations can put a particular cider batch's alcohol content above that 7 percent mark.

And there are other factors that can alter how boozy a cider batch is.

"We don't know for sure how efficiently the available sugars will or will not be converted to ethanol," says Chris Gerling of the Cornell Extension Enology Lab. (It's about 51 percent, but not always.)

Gerling has worked with wine and hard-cider producers in New York state for years on ways to boost production, teaching classes and offering advice. But recently, he's become the student, learning a bit of excise tax law, courtesy of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, as this issue has come up.

"The problem is that cider has to kind of drift between beer and wine in the regulations, and can cross major TTB definition [and/or] tax boundaries with relatively small changes [and/or] fermentation outcomes," Gerling says.

And it gets even more complicated.

Add too much carbonation to the hard cider, and it falls into the even higher tax realm of champagne.

"It's much more of a burden for cider producers than for somebody who's selling sparkling wine for $50 a bottle," he says.

One reason regulations may be outdated is that hard apple cider, formerly the drink of choice for Colonial Americans, fell out of favor once beer got big. People just stopped making it here. It's only in recent years, as more U.S. producers have taken up making cider, that the tax issue has become a growing problem.

The tax issue as it stands now creates all kind of messy labeling issues and potentially confusing price changes for cider makers, Schumer says, and can be an impediment to getting the stuff to market. That's especially true, he says, for the increasing number of small craft brewers and orchards with bushels of imperfect apples looking to turn more fruit into reliable profits, and those looking to plant new cider-specific varieties.

The CIDER Act (yes, members of Congress love acronyms) would change the law to give cider makers up to 8.5 percent alcohol by volume to work with — a range similar to what winemakers enjoy — and bring U.S law in line with the European Union, where hard cider never lost its appeal.

So what would it mean to the U.S. consumer? A few more sweet hard-cider choices.

Smashing through walls and yelling "Oh, Yeah!" apparently aren't cool enough for Kool-Aid Man anymore.

Kraft Foods Group has decided that the pitcher pitchman needs an new look that plays up his "undeniably fun personality."

So he's now "technologically advanced, CGI-generated and more interactive and colorful than ever." And, of course, he has a Facebook page.

It seems that formerly rather terse Kool-Aid Man (a guy in a costume) will now be a bit of a chatterbox in his ad spots. In one, for example, he'll be seen thinking about which mix he should "wear" and saying that, "I put my pants on one leg at a time. Except my pants are 22 different flavors. I've got grape pants, I've got watermelon pants."

The good news for fans of the old guy: According to The Associated Press, "Kraft isn't abandoning trademarks of its past campaigns in the new ads, which were developed by the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi. At the end of the commercial, the Kool-Aid Man heads out to work by calming busting through the front door. When he emerges, he waves cheerily to two awestruck kids riding their bikes past his front lawn."

Still to come: How Family Guy will react to this news. As KpopStarz notes, on Family Guy "every time a character says 'Oh Yeah,' " a reasonable facsimile of Kool-Aid Man "will come bursting through whatever wall may be near by."

Oh Sit! (The CW, 8:00 p.m.): When the CW first announced that it was going to have a show called Oh Sit!, which would basically be a game of musical chairs with a punny scatological name, it seemed like it would be exciting in its sheer stupidity. But as it turns out, having seen the previews, it seems like it's really just ABC's Wipeout in disguise. I feel defrauded somehow, as if I was promised a wretchedness diamond and received a cubic zirconia.

I Killed My BFF (Bio, 9:00 p.m.): LOL? I'm not sure how I missed the fact that Bio has an entire television series about friendships that lead to murder, or the fact that they gave it a text-speak title that makes it seem like these are the most OMG murders ever, but here it is, tonight with a couple of episodes, including "West Texas BFFs." Just in case you hadn't hadn't thought about the letter "F" often enough while considering this particular offering.

Burger Land (Travel, 10:00 p.m.): I'm really only mentioning this so that I can tell you that according to my go-to source for TV listings information, The Futon Critic, Travel's press release for this show used the phrase "self-proclaimed hamburger expert." Just when you think you have the world's best job, another one comes along.

House Hunters (HGTV, 10:00 p.m.): I have nothing to say about this episode of House Hunters, except that if you don't already watch House Hunters, you really must. It is a show that often seems to be about the wealth-building adventures of the worst people in the world, who sigh and moan over bathrooms with inadequate jets in the tub, perfectly gorgeous wood floors that are one shade off from theoretical perfection, and other non-catastrophes.

Texas Car Wars (Discovery, 10:00 p.m.): Believe it or not, this is a real show, not one of the ones we made up when we threw random reality-show words into a shredder.