What's new

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

The estate of Arthur Conan Doyle has been ordered to pay more than $30,000 in legal fees to Leslie Klinger, an author and Sherlock Holmes expert who successfully challenged the estate's copyright. Calling the estate's grip on the Sherlock Holmes story "a form of extortion," a U.S. appeals court said Klinger "performed a public service" and deserved to be repaid. In December, a court ruled that the character of Sherlock Holmes, as well as Holmes stories written before 1923, are in the public domain. That ruling was upheld in June.

"Dubstep," "mojito" and "frenemy" are among more than 5,000 new words added to The Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary. "Selfie," "mixtape" and "schmutz" also made the cut.

Christian Wiman has two new poems in Commonweal magazine. One of them, "Memories Mercies," begins:

"Memory's mercies

mostly aren't

but there were

I swear

days

veined with grace"

Amelia Togba-Addy lives in Atlanta, but Ebola is always on her mind.

Like many Liberian Americans, she has family and friends in West Africa, where Ebola has killed nearly 900 people. In Liberia alone, the World Health Organization has reported almost 500 cases and more than 250 deaths so far.

So when Togba-Addy's aunt called early one morning last week, she panicked.

Goats and Soda

An Ebola Quarantine In Freetown: People Come And Go As They Wish

Back in 2008, doctors in Cambodia made a worrisome discovery. They were having a hard time curing some people of malaria.

Even the most powerful drug wasn't clearing out the parasite from patients' blood as quickly as it should. Malaria had evolved resistance to the last medicine we have against it, a drug called artemisinin.

When Nimco Ali was 7, she thought her family was going on vacation. They flew from their hometown in Manchester, England, to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa.

Ali doesn't remember the exact location. But she clearly remembers what happened there.

The young girl found herself in a dingy room, with a woman dressed in all black, standing over her. She didn't know what was going on at the time. But she fell asleep. And when Ali woke up, she was confused.

The woman had mutilated her genitals.

Ali is British to the core: She was raised in Britain and went to British schools. But her family is from Somalia — where 98 percent of girls and women have a part of their genitals cut, mutilated or completely removed.

“ It's not something that defines you. It's something that happened to you.