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There's a diplomatic spat brewing between India and Italy over the trial of two Italian marines charged with killing two Indian fishermen last year.

India's Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the Italian ambassador not to leave the country after Rome refused to let the marines return to India to stand trial for the killings. The court had earlier allowed the marines to return to Italy to vote in last month's national elections after Ambassador Daniele Mancini assured Indian authorities that they would return by March 22 to stand trial. Earlier this week, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that won't happen. The Indian court has given Mancini until March 18 to respond.

Here's the background to the story, from The Associated Press:

"The marines, Massimilian Latorre and Salvatore Girone, were part of a military security team aboard a cargo ship when they opened fire on a fishing boat in February last year, killing the two fishermen. The marines said they mistook the boat for a pirate craft.

"Italy maintains that the shooting occurred in international waters and that Rome should have jurisdiction. India says the ship was in Indian territorial waters."

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

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been ordered by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote to testify in the Justice Department's antitrust case over alleged price fixing. Last year, the DOJ filed a lawsuit accusing Apple and five major publishers — Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and Macmillan – of conspiring to fix e-book prices. The publishers all chose to settle. The trial is scheduled to start in June.

When Middle C author William H. Gass was asked the question "What is something you always carry with you?" by The Daily Beast, he answered, "Grudges" in a rather crotchety interview Wednesday. Let's hope he doesn't read NPR contributor John Freeman's review of his latest book.

Claire Vaye Watkins beat out Junot Diaz for the Story Prize on Wednesday. Watkins is the author of Battleborn, a short story collection — and the daughter of Paul Watkins, of Manson Family fame.

In other prize news, the U.K.'s Folio Society will sponsor a literary award worth 40,000 pounds that is expected to compete with the Booker Prize. But, unlike the Booker, this prize will be open to Americans.

Alisa Sniderman, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, argues in favor of reading Vladimir Nabokov apolitically: "History does lurk in the wings of Nabokov's fiction, but he never gives it center stage." (Although he did once say, charmingly, in a Paris Review interview, "It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.")

You can now enjamb your tweets.

Like most people, Roth doesn't like getting old, and losing friends is perhaps the most painful part of it. "If you look at your address book," he says, "it's like walking through a cemetery."

Philip Roth: Unmasked — which opens at Film Forum in New York on March 13 and will air on PBS beginning March 29 — covers a lot of territory, beginning with Roth's recollections of growing up in Newark, N.J., followed almost immediately by his assertion that he couldn't wait to leave there forever.

He makes the case, cogently, that although certain elements of his work have been drawn from his own life, his stories are largely un-autobiographical. ("Life isn't good enough in some ways," he says, in defense of the good old-fashioned tradition of making stuff up.)

Early in the film, he notes that he doesn't like being pigeonholed as a Jewish-American writer. "I don't write in Jewish," he says simply. "I write in American."

Roth says nothing in the movie, and isn't asked, about his recent announcement that he has permanently retired from writing fiction. But he does offer some fascinating observations about how writers cannot operate from feelings of shame — which is different, he notes, from feeling shame as a person — and about the joys of writing about people who misbehave sexually.

He also discusses the point, around the time of The Counterlife, at which politics and history began to play a larger role in his work — sex and death, after all, can take you only so far.

Manera and Karel have shaped Philip Roth: Unmasked simply but carefully, keeping the number of talking heads — other than Roth's own — to a minimum. Roth's detractors may very well hate this documentary. There's no one to carp on-camera about his alleged misogyny, his preoccupation with the male ego and other assorted oldies but goodies.

Yet a Philip Roth documentary that doesn't trundle heavily down those tired old avenues is probably all the better for it. Interviewees include superstar novelist Jonathan Franzen and New Yorker staff writer Claudia Roth Pierpont, both of whom are great admirers of Roth's work. But the most persuasive and passionate of all is novelist Nicole Krauss.

"We don't go to literature for moral perfection," she says. "We go there for moral ambiguity, moral feeling, moral struggle."

Roth hands us nothing on a plate; it's the only way, maybe, to give us everything. (Recommended)