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

Research from scholars at Aberystwyth University in the U.K. suggests that William Shakespeare was prosecuted for evading taxes and for hoarding grain during a famine and then reselling it at inflated prices. Jayne Archer, A co-author of the study, told The Sunday Times [paywall protected] that "there was another side to Shakespeare besides the brilliant playwright — as a ruthless businessman who did all he could to avoid taxes, maximise profits at others' expense and exploit the vulnerable — while also writing plays about their plight to entertain them." As many have pointed out, this gives new meaning to those lines from Shakespeare's Coriolanus: "They ne'er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses crammed with grain."

A new biography of Derrida asks, "What would a biography of Jacques Derrida have to look like to be a Derridean biography?" File under: questions best left unanswered.

Alexander Nazaryan writes about Thomas Pynchon's novel V. for The New Yorker: "I advocate surrender to Pynchon; letting your mind toss on the wild currents of his language is a lot more enjoyable than treating his novels like puzzles, wondering where the pieces fit: Who is Rachel Owlglass? Why are we in Egypt?"

Proust's notebooks capture his exacting self-editing process.

Half of a Yellow Sun author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie complained about V.S. Naipaul to the London Evening Standard: "I've become very tired of this nonsense where he's supposed to be the best writer in the world. ... God bless him, I wish him well, but I think that just because you're an old man who's nasty doesn't mean that we shouldn't actually take your work apart." Her words weren't quite as cutting as those of Derek Walcott in his poem "The Mongoose": "I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction."

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

Kate Atkinson's Life After Life is the story of the many lives of Ursula Todd, an Englishwoman who dies in dozens of ways in this inventive novel. It also made NPR's Scott Simon cry.

James Salter, as Katie Roiphe recently pointed out in Slate, is a literary powerhouse who very few people have heard of. His latest novel, All That Is, about a WWII veteran who returns home, just might fix that.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could soon issue a final ruling that aims to force oil companies to replace E-10, gasoline mixed with 10 percent ethanol, with E-15.

This move could come just as widespread support for ethanol, which is made from corn, appears to be eroding.

Mike Mitchell was once a true believer in ethanol as a homegrown solution to foreign oil imports. He owns gas stations, and he went further than most installing expensive blender pumps that let you choose E-15, E-20 and all the way up to E-85.

The result was a variation on the old adage, "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink."

"We're environmental people, and we kind of jumped on the bandwagon early and it bit us," Mitchell says.

Many car companies, especially the Detroit Three, have been making vehicles that can use the higher blends of ethanol for more than a decade. They're called "flex-fuel" vehicles.

Most people who own those cars still use the lowest ethanol blend they can find, because ethanol negatively affects gas mileage.

Philip Verleger, an economist who tracks the oil industry, says when Congress approved the Renewable Fuels Standard in 2007, foreign oil imports were rising.

Then came tar sands and new ways to drill for oil.

"The oil crisis is going away," Verleger says. "We have plenty of oil. We have too much oil."

Verleger says the switch to E-10 was driven by the Clean Air Act, to reduce smog, and it worked pretty well.

The switch to E-15, however, is being driven by the renewable fuels mandate, which directs the EPA to require a greater volume of ethanol in gasoline every year, pretty much, no matter what.

Even some environmental groups don't like that mandate, because corn ethanol requires so much energy and water to produce.

"The need for the ethanol program is gone," Verleger says, "but the thing is ... once you get something it's very hard to undo it."

Oil companies say they're absolutely not going to put E-15 into the marketplace, and if they're forced, they'll take their product elsewhere.

"It's my opinion that refiners have very limited choices in order to comply," says Andy Lipow, an oil industry consultant, "and one way to comply is to export ever-increasing amounts of gasoline and diesel fuel, or otherwise just simply shut down the refineries."

That's a bluff, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group for the corn ethanol industry. Its President, Bob Dinneen, says the EPA should call that bluff.

Dineen says this is the way Congress envisioned the mandate working: more and more ethanol over time in a gallon of fuel, and less and less petroleum.

"This is about market share," Dinneen says. "This is about their profitability; it's not any more complicated than that."

The problem is that the mandate applies only to the oil companies, not the people who blend the ethanol into the gas, and not the gas stations that buy the blended product.

There's that "horse to water" problem again. Since half of all gas stations are completely independent of the oil companies, they could just keep ordering lower ethanol gas, and they probably will.

Even though the EPA says E-15 is safe for any car built after 2001, car companies insist it's not.

"There is no guarantee that fuel will work properly in your vehicle," says Brent Bailey. Bailey heads a research group that has done 20 studies on the effects of higher ethanol blends on non flex-fuel cars. He says while most cars will probably be fine, it's "a little bit like Russian Roulette."

"You may have plenty of blanks out there, but then there might be some damage in certain cases," Bailey he says.

While that might make for an interesting experiment, oil companies, car companies, and gas stations are worried about class action lawsuits.

The petroleum industry is doing everything it can to postpone a showdown. If the EPA approves the increase, and if the refineries comply, E-15 may show up in your local gas station some time next year.

After nearly five hours of questioning, the satirist known as the "Egyptian Jon Stewart" was released on bail Sunday.

Bassem Youssef is charged with insulting Islam and President Mohammed Morsi. He's among the most prominent critics of Egypt's Islamist president to be called in for questioning recently, prompting concerns that the president is cracking down on his detractors and members of the opposition.

Youssef is a doctor-turned-celebrity who came by his star status by lampooning public figures and the media. Politicians of all stripes are regularly skewered on his weekly show, "ElBernameg," or "The Program," and that's made him both popular and not, as the AP reports:

"The fast-paced show has attracted a wide viewership, while at the same time earning itself its fair share of detractors. Youssef has been a frequent target of lawsuits, most of them brought by Islamist lawyers who have accused him of 'corrupting morals' or violating 'religious principles.'"

For the past six years in Somalia, Western countries have been putting up the cash and African nations have been supplying the soldiers, a formula that has pushed back al-Qaida-linked militants and allowed Somalia to elect it's first democratic government in 20 years.

"We can fix our problems in Africa," says Brigadier Michael Ondoga, a contingent commander with the African Union Mission in Somalia or AMISOM. "All we need is your support."

It's not at all hard to see why this plan is so agreeable to the American government.

AMISOM has driven al-Shabaab out of Somali cities and major towns, and it's done so at a low cost in terms of money.

America's contribution in weapons, wages and training for these troops is around $350 million. That is less than Washington spends on the war in Afghanistan in a day and a half.

And in a new development, the U.N. Security Council on Friday authorized sending 2,500 troops to eastern Congo and gave them the unprecedented mandate to launch offensive operations.

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