PARIS (AFP) ― Copy us at your own risk. That is the message sent by the French publisher of “Fifty Shades of Grey” which is cracking the whip at spin-offs of the erotic romance.Publisher Lattes has trademarked the title of the book, which has sold a quarter of a million copies in France since it hit shelves a month ago, and told AFP it has sent warning letters to two publishers it accuses of infringement.One of them, Les Editions First, has released “Decoding Fifty Shades of Grey” by Ana de Lis

LONDON (AP) ― Valerie Eliot, the widow of T.S. Eliot and zealous guardian of the poet’s literary legacy for almost half a century, has died. She was 86.In a statement Sunday, the Eliot estate said Valerie Eliot died two days before at her London home after a short illness.Born Valerie Fletcher in Leeds, northern England, on Aug. 17, 1926, Eliot was the second wife of the U.S.-born Nobel literature laureate. She met him at London publisher Faber & Faber, where he was a director and she a star-str

PARIS (AFP) ― France’s top literary prize, the Goncourt, on Wednesday went to Jerome Ferrari for a Corsican epic about dashed hopes, set in a village bar on the troubled Mediterranean island.“Le Sermon sur la Chute de Rome” (The Sermon on the Fall of Rome) tells of a young man who packs in his philosophy studies to open a bar on the island with an old friend, hoping to turn it into a haven of peace and friendship.But things take a radically different turn as drink, sex, corruption ― and the viol

PARIS (AFP) ― U.S. writer Julie Otsuka won France’s Femina foreign novel prize Monday for “The Buddha in the Attic,” a novel about the thousands of Japanese women sent to California in the early 1900s for arranged marriages.The novel follows Fumiko, Hanako and Miyoshi with their kimonos, sandals and long black hair, first to the Japanese husbands awaiting them in the United States, then through their new lives.“I hope the novel honoured this Monday will bring awareness to Europe about the histor