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

The U.S. Postal Service has made a deal with Amazon to deliver packages on Sundays. For now, delivery will be limited to Los Angeles and New York, but the service is expected to expand into cities such as Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix next year. Neither Amazon nor the USPS has released details of the deal, which USA Today notes, is "a welcome new source of revenue for the financially struggling U.S. Postal Service, which has been trying tap into the growth of online shopping." The New York Times reports: "For the Postal Service, which lost nearly $16 billion last year, first-class mail delivery, particularly on Saturdays, is often a money loser, whereas package delivery is profitable." The USPS has previously floated a number of ideas – such as eliminating Saturday mail delivery — past Congress to try to cut costs, but most have been returned to sender.

Malala Yousafzai's book I Am Malala has been banned in Pakistan's private schools "because it carries the content which is against our country's ideology and Islamic values," the chairman of All Pakistan Private Schools Federation, Kashif Mirza, told the AFP. The group represents 40,000 private schools across the country. Yousafzai drew international attention to Pakistan's educational system after the Taliban shot her in the head last year for advocating education rights for women. The AP writes that "conspiracy theories have flourished in Pakistan that her shooting was staged to create an icon for the west to embrace," and Mirza said, "Through this book, she became a tool in the hands of the Western powers." Parts of the book deemed objectionable include a mild defense of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses: Yousafzai cites her father, who thinks the book is "offensive to Islam but believes strongly in the freedom of speech."

Parul Sehgal on the re-issue of Jonathan Franzen's first novel: "Some books ought to be allowed to molder in peace." (Franzen doesn't like it either — he told The Paris Review that it was written by "a 25-year-old with a very compromised sense of masculinity.") On a related note, Franzen rendered himself approximately 100 million times more likeable by citing Harriet the Spy as a literary influence in this EW interview.

After a fierce 10-publisher bidding war, Knopf bought Garth Risk Hallberg's debut novel, City on Fire, for almost $2 million. A relatively little-known author, Hallberg has published short fiction in small literary magazines and a novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family.

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

White Girls, by Hilton Als. The titular white girls in Als' gorgeous, maddening collection of essays are often not white girls at all — they include Malcolm X, Michael Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, and the rapper Eminem. He writes, "I see how we are all the same, that none of us are white women or black men; rather, we're a series of mouths, and that every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love." For Als, this is true but also not true. We are all the same except when we are not the same, and Als does an expert job at teasing out the difference.

A Prayer Journal, by Flannery O'Connor. The author is one of Als' most fully-realized "white girls," a writer and a pious Catholic who, as he puts it, "describes, never preaches." This week, a prayer journal O'Connor kept in her early twenties will be published for the first time. Unsolemn, sometimes miserable, occasionally funny, and always beautiful, it illustrates what Als calls "the uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and profane, the shit and the stars." O'Connor writes, "I would like to write a beautiful prayer but I have nothing to do it from. There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise; but I cannot do it. Yet at some insipid moment when I may possibly be thinking of floor wax or pigeon eggs, the opening of a beautiful prayer may come up from my subconscious and lead me to write something exalted." It's impossible not to find the whole thing exalted, from her fear of hell to her genuine spiritual agony after overindulging in "Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought."

This Veterans Day, considers these lines from the preface to Fire And Forget, a collection of short stories by veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

On the one hand, we want to remind you ... of what happened ... and insist you recollect those men and women who fought, bled, and died in dangerous and far-away places. On the other hand, there's nothing most of us would rather do than leave these wars behind. No matter what we do next, the soft tension of the trigger pull is something we'll carry with us forever.

Good morning, fellow political junkies.

It's Veteran's Day 2013. Our deepest thanks to those who've worn the nation's uniform both home and abroad and made countless sacrifices to serve it with courage and integrity.

The House returns this week from a recess. Its Republican leaders will waste little time placing Democrats on the defensive and positioning the GOP as coming to the rescue of those beleaguered individuals who have received notices that their health plans were cancelled. The GOP-controlled House plans to vote this week on the Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013.

Congressional budget negotiations also resume this week. The negotiators appear to be focusing on replacing some of the across-the-board sequester cuts with more thoughtful spending cuts. They have a Dec. 13 deadline to reach an agreement.

With that, here are some of the more interesting recent pieces of news or analysis with political implications that caught my eye this morning.

House Republican leaders have distributed a playbook to their members on how to best exploit the Affordable Care Act's troubles, particularly President Obama's by now infamous "You can keep it" pledge, reports Roll Call's Matt Fuller. Meanwhile, House Democratic staffers will meet with White House aides in an effort to find administrative fixes for the law, writes Emma Dumain of the same publication.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie did 80 percent of a full Ginsburg, doing four of five of the Sunday news shows. While Christie professed to be focused on his job as the newly re-elected Republican governor of a traditionally blue New Jersey, Christie, and the journalists interviewing him, all knew that the 2016 presidential race, was why he was Sunday's top attraction. The Star-Ledger's Brent Johnson and Tom Wright-Piersanti report on his appearances.

Dozens of veterans programs have been trimmed under the sequestration budget cuts with more reductions expected and feared by veterans' advocates, reports David Francis for the Fiscal Times.

Phillip Carter and David Barno write that the military could help veterans by seizing opportunities to close the military/civilian divide. Some possibilities: allowing more civilians on bases and placing some bases closer to large population centers.

A video of the physical transformation of homeless veteran James Wolf has gone viral and for good reason. It's riveting.

Is the reason the U.S. government so dysfunctional because the Constitution is outmoded and needs a complete rewrite? That's the conversation National Journal's Alex Seitz-Wald's hopes start with his recent, thought-provoking piece.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren continues to be touted by some Democrats as the anti-Hillary Clinton 2016 candidate, writes Noam Scheiber in the New Republic. Some Democrats say she more accurately reflects the party's core ideology than Clinton. And that's despite Warren signing the letter from women Democratic senators urging the former secretary of state to run.

A conservative white Republican left the impression in his campaign literature that he was African American, thereby won enough black votes to land a seat on the Houston Community College System board long held by black member, reports Doug Miller of KHOU 11 News. It's a tactic long used by relatively obscure candidates of racial or ethnic backgrounds different than their would-be constituents.

Midterm elections are still a year off, but the scramble to gain a political edge at the polls is already well underway on Capitol Hill.

Bills are brought up and votes taken not so much in hopes they will prevail, but rather to send a political message. In the Senate, both parties are at it.

When the Senate reconvenes Tuesday, it will be voting to break a GOP filibuster of the nomination of Georgetown University law professor Nina Pillard — one of three people President Obama named to fill vacancies on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Senate Republicans recently filibustered another woman nominated to that court, Patricia Millett, and they promise to do the same with Pillard.

Democrats say there's a simple explanation: Republicans are blocking highly qualified women from serving on that court.

"Do we have to get women elected to the United States Senate to get women on the Judiciary Committee to get women on the courts?" asked Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington state. "Because our colleagues aren't going to help us do that?"

Last week, Senate Democrats, with support from 10 Republicans, voted to ban workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Thirty-two Republicans voted no, including Indiana Sen. Dan Coats.

The measure, he said, had a clear political objective.

"Same point that's made with a lot of bills that come up: Put the other party on the defensive," he said.

Majority Leader Harry Reid seemed to confirm that. He lamented to reporters that House Speaker John Boehner had no plans to take up the nondiscrimination bill, despite polls that show more than 4 out of 5 Americans support it.

"I'm flabbergasted as [to] why they're stopping everything the American people want," Reid said.

Another thing more than 80 percent of Americans say they want is to increase the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

Dick Durbin, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, says his party last Thursday discussed raising the minimum wage to around $10 an hour and then indexing it to inflation.

Durbin says it's about sending working families a message: Democrats can help them.

"It's more than a message vote. It appears that there are so many nonstarters for Speaker Boehner, you just wonder, where are the starters?" Durbin said. "If you can't help working families who are struggling paycheck to paycheck to get by in America, then where are your priorities? What is important?"

Durbin admits he knows of no Senate Republicans who would vote to raise the minimum wage.

Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey said it's clear why Democrats are raising the issue.

"It's a populist measure," he said. "They think they can probably score some political points, but it's very bad policy and it would, if it were to pass, it would actually exacerbate a terribly high unemployment rate that we already have."

But Senate Democrats are not the only ones trying to force tough votes on their opponents.

Last week at the Capitol, National Right to Life Committee President Carol Tobias was on hand as South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who's seeking re-election, introduced a bill already passed by the House. It would ban all abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy except in cases of incest or when the mother's life is at risk.

"We're choosing today to speak up for all babies at 20 weeks and try to create legal protections under the theory that if you can feel pain, the government should protect you from being destroyed by an abortion, which I imagine would be a very painful way to die," Graham said.

Supporters cite recent polling showing nearly two-thirds of Americans agree with them. Still, last week on the Senate floor, Washington state's other Democratic senator, Patty Murray, called this bill co-sponsored by 33 Republicans "blatantly political."

"This extreme unconstitutional abortion ban is an absolute nonstarter," she said. "It is going nowhere in the Senate, and those Republicans know it."

But they also know any vote on the bill could leave some Democrats seeking re-election in a tough spot — just like the votes Democrats are forcing Republicans to take in these pre-election days.