Farmville’s Blushing Books, a publisher of erotica, is in water that’s hot and growing hotter: Author complaints and legal problems have gotten an extensive airing in one of the world’s biggest news publications.

Seven former employees and “a dozen” authors described issues including a haphazard business operation, frequently late payments and threats of “lower royalties and defamation lawsuits if they defected,” wrote Alexandra Alter in The New York Times. Others detailed copyright infringement and contracts ceding “permanent and exclusive” rights to their books and pen names.

Blushing was founded by Anne Wills, pen name Bethany Burke, “an early online erotica entrepreneur,” The Times wrote. She started selling e-books in 2001. By 2016, she had about 200 authors, publishing about 30 books a month.

In 2019, seven of her top authors hired an attorney, reached a settlement, and left. In early 2020, three employees quit in a tax accounting conflict; Wills went to the police about one, who later was arrested (the charges were expunged). Authors began to talk. Late in 2020, Romance Writers of America suspended Blushing and barred it from conferences. The Authors Guild is representing 30 authors who want their rights back.

Blushing says it is now making monthly royalty payments with the help of an automated tracking system. Through her attorney, Wills said she believes she’s met her contractual obligations. The full article: tinyurl.com/BlushNYT

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The National Book Awards finalists, announced Tuesday, include Lauren Groff, in rare company as a finalist for her third straight book, “Matrix,” and Anthony Doerr, for “Cloud Cuckoo Land.” There are 25 across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. Nov. 17 is the big, in-person awards gala; people can sign up to watch online (donation suggested): tinyurl.com/BkGala.

Nobel Prize in Literature: to Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian writer who moved to England as a refugee in the 1960s after a violent coup. The judges on Thursday cited “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” His 10 novels include “Memory of Departure,” “Pilgrims Way” and “Dottie,” involving immigrants’ experience in Britain; “Paradise,” about a boy in an African country scarred by colonialism; and “Admiring Silence,” about a young man who hides his English life from his family back in Zanzibar (Tanzania) — and his past from his family in England. (nobelprize.org, NYT)

New and recent

From Wole Soyinka, “Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth,” his first novel in almost 50 years. It mixes satire and mystery in portraying corruption, greed and power in his beloved Nigeria: Someone is stealing body parts from a hospital and selling them for rituals. Soyinka, who is in his late 80s, was awarded the Nobel for literature in 1986 — the first Black person honored. (Pantheon, 464 pp.)

Also: Amor Towles, “The Lincoln Highway” ... Steven Pinker, “Rationality” ... Sandra Cisneros, “Martita, I Remember You” … Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny, “State of Terror.”

There’s more online — a long look at the fall’s most anticipated titles (New York Times) and reviews: Pat Barker, “The Women of Troy,” sequel to “The Silence of the Girls” ... Samuel Moyn, “Humane,” on the risks of making war less dangerous (drones and surveillance tech can let us ignore the need for peace). ... Kate DiCamillo, “The Beatryce Prophecy” (and a profile). ... Jon McGregor, “Lean, Fall, Stand,” on a stroke’s effect on a marriage. Visit PilotOnline.com and DailyPress.com.

— Erica Smith, erica.smith@pilotonline.com