Senators Adam Schiff (California) and John Curtis (Utah) have introduced the bipartisan CLEAR Act (Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting Act), Publishers Lunch reports. This bill “would require tech companies to submit a list of the copyrighted works used to create AI products to the register of copyrights” at least thirty days before a generative AI tool is released. Should a company violate the act, they would pay a penalty of at least $5,000 for each instance, and creators could take legal action against them. 

Federal judges have dismissed three lawsuits accusing author Neil Gaiman of sexual assault in New Zealand four years ago, reports the Associated Press. The former nanny of his children, Scarlett Pavlovich, filed the suits against Gaiman and his wife in February of last year, “accusing Gaiman of multiple sexual assaults while she worked as the family’s nanny in 2022.” Pavlovich was demanding at least $7 million in damages. 

Claire Kirch of Publishers Weekly looks at the ways in which Minnesota’s literary community “is coming together to support immigrants and others under attack by ICE agents, who have been an unwelcome presence in the state for the past six weeks.” Among the activities is the forthcoming publication by two affiliated publishers based in Minneapolis of an anthology, ICE Out: Minnesota Writers Rising Up, edited by Ian Leask and featuring more than fifty writers responding to ICE’s presence through poetry and prose. “In yet another show of solidarity, mystery authors Jess Lourey and Kristi Belcamino have organized Authors for Minnesota Day, slated for February 28, in which more than 50 Minnesota-based authors—including Allen Eskens, William Kent Krueger, Bao Phi, Margi Preus, and Curtis Sittenfeld—will stop by more than two dozen indie bookstores around the state to sign copies of their latest releases and give them out, along with swag kits in some cases, to anyone who donates to either the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota or the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota Immigration Rapid Response Fund.”

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) has announced that Host Publications is the winner of the 2026 Constellation Award. The press, based in Austin, Texas, will receive $10,000. CavanKerry Press, located in Fort Lee, New Jersey, was selected as a finalist. Given to honor an independent literary press that champions the writing of people of color, including Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American Pacific Islander individuals, the Constellation Award was launched in 2021 by CLMP with the support of Penguin Random House. “With a current focus on poetry, Host publishes radical writing by emerging LGBTQ+, BIPOC, intersectional feminist, and immigrant voices, championing experimental writing that queers language and meaning-making, and engages with a poetics of liberation. Host works to empower its community of writers whose work inspires social transformation and creates a new sense of what is possible in writing.”

The New York Times reveals the quick responses and careful considerations that are triggered inside a publishing house when a forthcoming book, in this case the novel Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack, hews a little too close to the news cycle for comfort. Avid Reader Press, the publisher of Novack’s novel about a sex worker who assassinates a right-wing politician, had already sent out hundreds of prepublication copies of the book, emblazoned with the words “Somebody had to do it” and the image of a bleeding American flag, when Charlie Kirk was killed in September, prompting Novack’s team to reconsider the publishing plan. In the end, they decided to remove certain biographical information about the author from the finished book and the publisher’s website. “The circumstances surrounding Murder Bimbo were particularly extreme. But any publisher putting out a book in the current news environment faces significant marketing and publicity challenges.”

Literary Arts has announced the finalists for this year’s Oregon Book Awards. Thirty-five titles by Oregon authors across seven genre categories were chosen as finalists by panels of out-of-state judges, from a total of two hundred submitted titles. The winners will be revealed at an awards ceremony on April 20. The finalists for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction are Olufunke Grace Bankole for The Edge of Water (Tin House), Ling Ling Huang for Immaculate Conception (Dutton), Kevin Maloney for Horse Girl Fever (Clash Books), Madeline McDonnell for Lonesome Ballroom (Rescue Press), and Karen Thompson Walker for The Strange Case of Jane O. (Random House). The finalists for the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry are H. G. Dierdorff for Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter (University of Nevada Press), Garrett Hongo for Ocean of Clouds (Knopf), Jennifer Perrine for Beautiful Outlaw (Kelsey Street Press), Lisa Wells for The Fire Passage (Four Way Books), and Joe Wilkins for Pastoral, 1994 (River River Books). The finalists for the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction are Judith Barrington for Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs (Oregon State University Press), Karleigh Frisbie Brogan for Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts (Steerforth), Justin Hocking for A Field Guide to the Subterranean: Reclaiming the Deep Earth and Our Deepest Selves (Counterpoint Press/Catapult), Wayne Scott for The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined (Black Lawrence Press), and Lidia Yuknavitch for Reading the Waves (Riverhead Books).

The estate of Maya Angelou has joined Kurt Vonnegut’s estate in its case against Utah’s Sensitive Materials Law, Erin Somers of Publishers Lunch reports. Under the law, which was passed in 2022 and amended in 2024 to require public schools and their libraries “to remove certain ‘inappropriate’ books or books with any reference to sex,” Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings were banned by two school districts in Utah. Other banned books include Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.

The longlist for the inaugural James Patterson and Bookshop.org Prize has been revealed. The award honors outstanding full-length debut books published in the United States within the past twelve months. All nominations and selections are made by booksellers working in qualifying independent bookstores. The winner will be announced on April 6 and will receive $15,000; the runner-up will receive $10,000. The longlisted books are The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders (Catapult) by Sarah Aziza, The Correspondent (Crown) by Virginia Evans, When the Tides Held the Moon (Erewhon Books) by Vanessa Vida Kelley, Aftertaste (Simon & Schuster) by Daria Lavelle, It’s Different This Time (Dell) by Joss Richard, My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women (Curbstone Press) by Christina Rivera, The Slip (Simon & Schuster) by Lucas Schaefer, My Mother’s Boyfriends (7.13 Books) by Samantha Schoech, The Nature of Pain: Roots, Recovery, and Redemption Amid the Opioid Crisis (University Press of Kentucky) by Mandi Fugate Sheffel, and The Lilac People (Counterpoint) by Milo Todd. 

Becca Rothfeld, a former nonfiction critic for the Washington Post’s Book World, laments last week’s shuttering of the stand-alone books section in a Page-Turner essay for the New Yorker, pointing out that the New York Times Book Review is the last discrete newspaper books section standing. “There are still plenty of places to read about literature, many of them excellent,” Rothfeld writes. “There are older and more established outlets, like the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books; cult favorites, like Bookforum; and irreverent newcomers, like the Drift and the Point, the latter of which I edit. These magazines are delightful and, in their own way, consistently surprising; I love reading them, and I have loved writing for them. But they are produced for an audience that already knows it cares about literature. The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits.”

The romance genre, known for its prolific authors and voracious readers, is at the vanguard of implementing A.I. tools, reports the New York Times. As the publishing industry’s best-selling genre, romance “relies on familiar narrative formulas” and is “built around popular tropes,” making the community particularly vulnerable to A.I.-generated work, especially since most authors don’t reveal when they have used chatbots, so as not to alienate readers. A contentious topic for writers and readers alike, one book-club leader, Zoë Mahler, noted, “Romance is about human connection, and there’s nothing more human than being vulnerable and falling in love. Why would I want to read a story written by a machine trying to emulate that?”  

Publishers Lunch has announced that the Tuesday Agency, an Iowa City-based speakers agency for authors, has closed its doors. Agency president Trinity Ray said, “We have suffered the economy and politics of the day and we’re doing our best to take care of all those who put their trust in us,” as changes to rules around government loan repayments, NEA grants, and other such financial factors have made it impossible for the company to keep running. Ray is working to pay the six authors the agency still owes money to and is launching a smaller company, Goliath Jones, to continue platforming important voices. 

Cengage and Hachette have responded to Google’s recent opposition to their motion to join the class action infringement suit against the tech company, reports the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The authors who started this suit welcome the participation of publishers, saying, “Proposed Interventors . . . [would] ensure the publishing industry’s discrete interests are fairly treated in class litigation where both authors and publishers’ rights are at stake.” AAP added that, per the publishers’ response, “Google’s opposition misrepresents the clear legal interests of publishers in this matter and misstates the law on timeliness of the motion to intervene.” 

On the heels of the Washington Post’s elimination of its Book World supplement, Adam Kirsch of the Atlantic considers the decline of book reviews and the implications that has on the literary ecosystem as a whole. “A book critic, or a newspaper book section, is a convener, bringing people together around a new book or writer, a literary trend or controversy,” he writes. Though the disappearance of the book review does not mean the end of literary criticism overall, readers, publishers, and authors suffer in different ways. Relatedly, NPR has shared that the Post’s CEO and publisher, Will Lewis, has stepped down. 

Amazon’s latest earnings reports boast record-setting numbers, Publishers Weekly reports, attributed to “explosive” sales at company’s cloud computing business, AWS. Demand for AWS led to a 14 percent increase in fourth quarter sales as the company hit $213.4 billion in revenue. The news comes on the heels of the layoff of three hundred reporters at the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and the dissolution of the newspaper’s books section.

Sales of Wuthering Heights are “skyrocketing” ahead of the release of director Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of the Emily Brontë classic, the Guardian reports. Penguin Classics UK notes a 459 percent increase in sales of the title in the United Kingdom; 10,670 copies of the book flew off British shelves in January 2026, as opposed to 1,875 in January 2025. Jess Harrison of Penguin Classics reflected on the surge in interest: “There seems to be a real yearning among readers for intense, maximalist, tragic love stories. We’ve seen huge demand for similarly angsty classics like Dostoevsky’s White Nights and Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat. But Wuthering Heights stands apart in being so wild and unhinged—an extreme book for extreme times.”

For the New York Times, Elizabeth A. Harris considers the fate of the mass market paperback, the inexpensively-bound editions that have found their readers in train stations and airports, supermarket aisles and drug stores since the 1930s. In spite of its appeal, the form is endangered: “Sales have dropped for years, peeled away by e-books, digital audiobooks and even more expensive formats like hardcovers and trade paperbacks, the mass market’s larger and pricier cousin.” With only “about a 30 cent difference” in cost between printing a mass market edition versus a trade paperback—but a much higher potential retail price—publishers are shifting gears. Still, the form has enduring fans. Paula Rabinowitz, author of a cultural history of the mass market paperback, sees inspiration in its design: “It was one of the most brilliant technologies in the history of the world, precisely because you could shove it in your purse or your pocket.”

The Whiting Foundation has appointed two inaugural resident directors to provide creative direction for the Whiting Award for Emerging Writers and the Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress, reports Publishers Weekly. Adam Kirsch, a senior editor at the Atlantic, and Peter Godwin, a former president of PEN America, will serve the emerging writers and nonfiction programs, respectively. The foundation believes this new model “encourages new voices and perspectives, while strengthening Whiting’s commitment to writers at pivotal points in their careers.”

Spotify announced a partnership with Bookshop.org, which will allow users of the audio streaming service to buy physical books from independent bookstores. Set to launch later this spring, Spotify users in the United States and the United Kingdom will be able to access titles on Bookshop.org directly from Spotify’s app. Additionally, the streaming company introduced a new Page Match feature that will allow “readers [to] seamlessly switch between the printed (or e-book) and audiobook versions of a title.” 

Amidst the ongoing resistance to ICE operations in the Twin Cities, the Public Library Association (PLA) is prepared to move forward with their biennial conference at the Minneapolis Convention and Visitors Bureau from April 1-3. The association shared that they are “heartbroken by recent events and [have] been coordinating closely with city and venue partners to support them and to foster a safe and welcoming conference environment” as they “look forward to gathering in strength and solidarity with Minnesota colleagues” and everyone around the country. Offering a virtual option as well, PLA urges attendees to download the conference app for full updates and include a list of suggestions to support safe travel to and around the city for those joining in person. 

The 57th annual Cairo International Book Fair closed yesterday after setting new records for attendance, the Arab Weekly reports. More than 6.2 million visitors are believed to have attended the fair, which ran from January 21 to February 3. Over 1,450 publishing houses from 83 countries were represented at the fair, which has evolved to be “more than a marketplace” for publishing in Africa and the Middle East; this year’s gathering offered “a sprawling forum for debate, performance, and encounter, with dedicated programs for children and young people, subsidized book schemes, and initiatives designed to widen access to reading.”