Quick literary hits from the Guardian

Half of Fussy was extremely lucky last week, spending that time out of the office, away from a computer, and in a much warmer climate.

(The other half was stuck in the cold and picking up the slack.)

But all good things must come to an end, and we logged back on to find our RSS feeder jam-packed with literary news from the week-plus we were gone.

So to clear out the unread items while still providing you with excellent browsing material, we have a quick roundup from the Guardian’s archives.

• Novelist Rosamunde Pilcher, best known for The Shell Seekers and Coming Home, died February 6. (You almost certainly knew that already, but we didn't want to catch flak over its omission.)

• Bestselling author Dan Mallory, who wrote The Woman in the Window under the pseudonym AJ Finn, admitted to lying about having brain cancer ... but will still see a second AJ Finn novel published.

• Previously unpublished works from Robert A. Heinlein and J.D. Salinger will be released, with Heinlein’s papers including a completely different ending for his novel The Number of the Beast.

• And the British Council has apologized for commissioning, then rejecting, an essay about food by George Orwell. (Members were concerned about the tastefulness, pun intended, of talking about food during the postwar austerity.)