In the days following the Trump administration’s dismissal of the librarian of Congress and the director of the U.S. Copyright Office, the legislative branch is pushing back against executive overreach, Publishers Weekly reports. Control of congress is at stake because the Library of Congress provides an important function for Congress, answering questions on legal matters and supporting research. Current federal regulations would prohibit the executive branch or Department of Justice from accessing what members of Congress are investigating. Six members of the House of Representatives requested “an investigation into, and continued monitoring of, potential improper communications” between the Library of Congress and the executive branch. It seems some discomfort in Congress is bipartisan. John Thune, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, also called for more information about precedents in firing and naming Library of Congress staff.

George Saunders writes an opinion essay for the New York Times criticizing the White House’s dismissal of Carla Hayden, the former librarian of Congress. Saunders, who received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2023, bonded with Hayden over “the idea that knowledge is power, that in a democracy, the more we know, the better we are.” He calls the White House’s justification for firing Hayden “nonsense,” “sloppy” and “juvenile,” noting that the decision gave him “a visceral feeling for just how diseased this administration really is.”

In her acceptance speech for the Freedom to Publish Award at this year’s British Book Awards, Margaret Atwood said she cannot remember another point in her lifetime “when words themselves have felt under such threat,” the Guardian reports. Atwood said she was both honored and “a little puzzled” to receive the prize, adding, “Unlike so many writers, publishers and booksellers, both in the past and today, I have never been imprisoned—though I may have to revise that statistic if I attempt to cross into the United States in the near future.” The Freedom to Publish Award, which was established in 2022 to “highlight the growing threats to writers, publishers, and booksellers, and to amplify those who fight back,” is awarded by the Bookseller and Index on Censorship.

Audible has announced it is expanding its catalog with AI narration and translation for publishers. “Audible believes that AI represents a momentous opportunity to expand the availability of audiobooks with the vision of offering customers every book in every language,” said Bob Carrigan, CEO of Audible. The company plans to begin releasing AI translations for audiobooks later in 2025. Publishers can opt for “human review from professional linguists to ensure translation accuracy and cultural nuance, and will be able to review the translations themselves in [Audible’s] text editor.”

The Authors Guild has filed a class action lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), its leadership, and officials within the Department of Government Efficiency for unlawfully terminating millions of dollars in grants from funds that are appropriated by Congress. In April, the NEH sent a letter informing grantees that their grants were being terminated because the agency was redistributing its funds “in furtherance of the President’s agenda.” Many grant recipients were abandoned mid-project, even as they were required to forego other employment and compensation during the term of their NEH award. The Authors Guild’s lawsuit “asks the court to find, among other things, that these actions are a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, the Constitution’s guarantees of the separation of powers and the freedom of expression, and that the actions exceed the congressionally granted authority of agencies.” Additionally, the lawsuit seeks to restore the funds promised to grantees and “require the government to operate the NEH consistent with Congress’s intent.”

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has not clarified how it is implementing new restrictions following Trump’s executive orders, according to the ACLU. Four arts and theater groups filed an amended complaint on Monday seeking clarity on how the NEA plans to address an executive order that forbids federal agencies from spending federal funds on what the government calls “gender ideology.”

Peter C. Baker writes for the New Yorker about how both professional writers and enthusiastic amateurs are experimenting with new forms of literature on Substack. “The literary mainstream has always been shaped (for both better and worse) by intermediary institutions like university creative writing programs, plucky little journals, and newspaper book reviews,” Baker writes. “Perhaps Substack could have a similar era of influence, becoming a place where people gather for an accessible twenty-first-century version of literary community, collaborate on the formation of new readerly sensibilities, and share their own experiments at high speed and low cost.” Still, he writes, it is also possible that the platform will be remembered as “yet another digital space where authors felt the vague obligation to maintain a presence.”

Arts organizations are reeling as they respond to cuts in federal funding, ABC News reports. Trump has claimed that federal agencies and institutions including the NEA, NEH, PBS, the Kennedy Center, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services have been advancing a “woke agenda.” Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, and n+1 are among the dozens of literary publications that recently learned their grants had been rescinded. Besides supporting literary organizations, federal funding has also benefited individual artists and authors at pivotal moments in their careers. Poet Marie Howe, who was one of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners, said support from the NEA is not just about the funding—“It’s also deep encouragement,” she said. “It gives you courage. It says to you, ‘Go on, keep doing it.’”

Trump nominated Mary Anne Carter, the former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), to lead the agency days after Trump proposed eliminating the NEA, which has been withdrawing grants from arts groups, the New York Times reports.

The Trump administration has fired Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office, Publishers Weekly reports. Perlmutter’s dismissal comes just after she released the third part of a preliminary report on copyright and artificial intelligence. Some have speculated that Perlmutter’s dismissal was due to her release of the report, while others have suggested that Perlmutter heard of her impending dismissal and wanted the report to be released beforehand to ensure it entered the public record. The report states that “the copying involved in AI training threatens significant potential harm to the market for or value of copyrighted works,” but also acknowledges that the “assessment of market harm will also depend on the extent to which copyrighted works can be licensed for AI training.”

Deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who represented Trump during his 2024 criminal trial, has been named acting librarian of congress, the Associated Press reports. Blanche succeeds Carla Hayden, who was fired abruptly by the White House last week amid criticism from some conservatives that she was advancing a “woke” agenda.

University College London has acquired an archive of George Orwell’s correspondence, manuscript notes, readers’ reports relating to his earliest novels, and other historic papers that were at risk of being dispersed, the Guardian reports. The archive, which belonged to Victor Gollancz, Orwell’s publisher, contains about 160 items dating from 1934 to 1937 and will be added to the Orwell Archive in UCL Special Collections.

The Charles Dickens Museum will celebrate its hundredth anniversary on June 9 by offering free entry to the author’s former home in London, the BBC reports. Visitors can meet Dickens’s living descendants and attend readings and talks that will take place in each of the museum’s historic rooms.

The annual PEN America Literary Awards were held Thursday in New York City after a turbulent year of protests over the organization’s response to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, Publishers Weekly reports. Multiple writers withdrew their books from consideration, so for the second year in a row, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award was not conferred. In lieu of an author receiving the $75,000 prize, the funds will be divided between two nonprofits: the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, which provides “humanitarian aid for children living among devastation and displacement,” and Palestine Legal, “a legal aid organization dedicated to protecting the civil and constitutional rights of people in the U.S. who speak out for Palestinian freedom.” Seven of the fifty-five finalists across eleven award categories withdrew their works from consideration this year.

Trump has fired Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, who was the first woman and the first African American to hold the position, the Washington Post reports. Hayden previously led Baltimore’s library system and served as president of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004. In a statement, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Connecticut) called for the White House to explain its decision, writing, “Every Member of Congress I know—Democratic or Republican—loves and respects Dr. Carla Hayden…. [Her] tenure has been marked by a steadfast commitment to accessibility, modernization, and the democratization of knowledge. Her dismissal is not just an affront to her historic service but a direct attack on the independence of one of our most revered institutions.”

In a statement to Retail Brew, Amazon claimed its annual book sale “unintentionally overlapped” with Independent Bookstore Day on April 26, but Amazon did not promise to avoid the national indies sales event in the future. This year, Amazon held its annual book sale from April 23 to April 28, which Ray T. Daniels, the chief communications officer of the American Booksellers Association (ABA) criticized as “predatory.” Ironically, Amazon’s ill-timed sale may have driven even more customers to indies this year in protest. Among the 560 bookstores that use ABA’s e-commerce platform, there was a 77.41 percent increase in online sales over Independent Bookstore Day in 2024. Bookshop.org also saw a 170 percent sales increase over last year.

Though the consequences of tariffs on the book publishing industry could lead to declines in discretionary spending, a new report from BookScan suggests books are in a better position than many other goods, Publishers Weekly reports. In times of economic uncertainty, the report notes, “consumers are more likely to pull back spend on higher-ticket items, like technology and apparel, and favor items that they see as having a high perceived value, like books.” A significant data point from BookScan’s analysis is that 50 percent of new book buyers report that they are reading somewhat more or much more compared to the same time a year ago. This increased engagement with books, the study found, will likely benefit sales in the near-term.

Alexandra Alter writes for the New York Times about the complicated deliberation process that led to Percival Everett winning the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for James (Doubleday). The prize went to Everett after the Pulitzer committee’s board could not agree on the three finalists that the fiction jury initially presented: Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot (Viking), Stacey Levine’s Mice 1961 (Verse Chorus Press), and Gayl Jones’s The Unicorn Woman (Beacon Press). Alter notes that “some observers expressed skepticism about this year’s process,” quoting the writer and bookseller Drew Broussard, who questioned whether the Pulitzer board had overruled the jury’s selections of a “world-shaking all-woman trio of finalists in a year when one novel by a male writer has taken up quite a lot of the available oxygen.” But Levine, one of the finalists, dismissed that speculation, emphasizing that in a moment when diversity initiatives and public funding for the arts are in danger, the Pulitzer Prize stands for integrity. In an e-mail, Levine wrote, “Percival’s book is so important in this regard…. Is this really the time to fuss about what might or might not be gender politics in a literary contest?”

Lawrence Venuti writes about the dilemmas facing contemporary translation and its commentary for Public Books. “Translation is imagined as mechanical transfer,” he writes, “so transparent as to be invisible, not particularly resourceful or creative, certainly not an interpretive act in its own right. Would we get a different view of translation,” he asks, “one that is both more illuminating and more appreciative, if we turned to translators themselves?”

Ploughshares has appointed Jenny Molberg as its new editor in chief. Molberg joins Ploughshares from the University of Central Missouri where she worked as a professor of creative writing, directed Pleiades Press, and edited Pleiades: Literature in Context. In addition to serving as the new editor in chief of Ploughshares, she will work as a professor of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College in Boston. In a letter announcing her new role, Molberg wrote, “I think of great writing as advocacy for conditions of peace—a repurposing of toxic power and suffering—a call for action, for radical joy. Through this lens, I recognize my responsibilities to the authors I help edit and usher into the world, the students I teach, and the literary world writ large.”