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Best-selling author James Herbert who wrote the horror classic The Rats, dies aged 69.

Author Dennis Lehane is offering an unusual reward for the person who finds his family's beloved missing beagle. Lehane says he'll name a character in his next book after whoever finds Tessa, who disappeared from the family's home in Brookline, Mass., this week. He says on his Facebook page that Tessa jumped a fence at the home, and even though she has been micro-chipped, she was not wearing her tags. Lehane says Tessa is "smart, fast, and immeasurably sweet."

Novelist Mo Yan, this year's Nobel Prize winner for literature, is practiced in the art of challenging the status quo without offending those who uphold it. Mo, whose popular, sprawling, bawdy tales bring to life rural China, is the first Chinese winner of the literature prize who is not a critic of the authoritarian government. And Thursday's announcement by the Swedish Academy brought an explosion of pride across Chinese social media.

Google and U.S. publishers have settled a longstanding dispute over Google's book-scanning project. A lawsuit filed by authors remains, though, leaving the project in question.

The man who wrote "Drugstore Cowboy," an autobiographical crime novel that led to an acclaimed 1989 film starring Matt Dillon, has died at age 75.

The five writers knew a little about each other before they decided to pile into an SUV and embark upon a tour of five Southern states in seven days.

Helen Gurley Brown, who fed the sexual revolution of the 1960s with her best-seller “Sex and the Single Girl” and then turned around the failing Cosmopolitan magazine by injecting her philosophy that women could have it all -- “love, sex and money” -- has died. She was 90.

The Renaissance scholars and married couple Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff are trying to renew the reputation of Thomas Browne, a 17th-century physician and novelist.

Gore Vidal, the author, playwright, politician and commentator whose novels, essays, plays and opinions were stamped by his immodest wit and unconventional wisdom, his nephew said Tuesday.

Stephen R. Covey, author of "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" as well as three other books that have all sold more than a million copies, has died. He was 79. In a statement sent to employees of a Utah consulting firm Covey co-founded, his family said the writer and motivational speaker died at a hospital in Idaho Falls, Idaho, early Monday due to complications from a bicycle accident in April.