Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch shares the latest developments in the Anthropic lawsuit, the $1.5 billion settlement of which is being questioned by Judge William Alsup, who last week gave a list of seventeen questions for the attorneys and has now added to that list with seventeen more. Among them, Cader writes, are questions about the “situation in which multiple claims are submitted for the same work” and the claims process itself, asking for it “to involve the submission of documents—such as contracts—that would confirm who has legal standing and how proceeds are to be split.”

Barnes & Noble has announced the finalists for the 2025 Discover Prize for debut novels. They are Kaplan’s Plot (Flatiron Books) by Jason Diamond, Great Black Hope (Summit Books) by Rob Franklin, Tilt (Marysue Rucci Books) by Emma Pattee, The Artist and the Feast (Union Square) by Lucy Steeds, Lonely Crowds (Little, Brown) by Stephanie Wambugu, and Maggie: Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar (Summit Books) by Katie Yee. The winner will be announced on October 9.

Anne Enright, Annie Ernaux, Deborah Levy, Max Porter, Sally Rooney, and Viet Thanh Nguyen are among a group of authors who have signed a letter urging French president Emmanuel Macron to resume a program for evacuating Palestinian writers, scholars, and artists from Gaza, the Guardian reports. The program was “abruptly suspended by the French government at the beginning of August over a Palestinian student’s allegedly antisemitic online remarks, a decision that the letter-writing authors said amounted to a ‘collective punishment.’” The Pause program was established in 2017 to help “foreign researchers, scientists, intellectuals, and artists who find themselves in emergency situations.”

“I think these are dangerous times,” says former U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón in a video produced by the Associated Press. “I think that as artists we really have to hold true to what we believe in; we have to maintain our moral center even as funding resources dry up and even as we are asked to toe the line.... I think it’s really important to remember who we are.” Limón, the twenty-fourth poet laureate, will be succeeded by Arthur Sze, whose term starts October 9. 

Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against Penguin Random House, the New York Times, and four New York Times reporters, including Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, authors of Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success (Penguin Press, 2024), arguing that three New York Times articles and the subsequent book are “malicious, defamatory, and disparaging,” and written “with actual malice, calculated to inflict maximum damage upon President Trump during the height of a presidential election,” Katy Hershberger of Publishers Lunch reports. The lawsuit “also accuses the newspaper as being ‘a leading, and unapologetic, purveyor of falsehoods against President Trump.’” Spokespersons for Penguin Random House and the New York Times say the lawsuit has no merit.

The third annual Banned Wagon Tour, a program sponsored by Penguin Random House in parternship with EveryLibrary and First Book, will visit libraries and bookstores in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia beginning October 5. The annual tour is organized “to celebrate the freedom to read and express ideas, highlight the value of free and open access to information, and confront the harms of censorship.” Among the banned books the wagon will give away are The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Beloved by Toni Morrison, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez, and Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.

Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch untangles some of the complex issues surrounding Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright infringment settlement, including what one Big 5 publisher is doing about copyrights that were not properly registered to participate in the class-action lawsuit. Macmillan “has been communicating to authors and agents who have inquired about unregistered copyrights, acknowledging, ‘From what we currently understand, this was largely our mistake and we take full responsibility. If your work was excluded from the settlement for this reason, we will make you whole by paying you what you otherwise would have been paid under the settlement.’” Cader adds that “agents and authors hope that Macmillan’s position will inspire others.”

The Poetry Foundation has announced the recipients of its annual Pegasus Awards. Rigoberto González, the author of seventeeen books and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, will receive the 2025 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which recognizes a U.S. poet for outstanding lifetime achievement with an award of $100,000. Amy Stolls, who recently completed twenty-six years at the National Endowment for the Arts, wiil receive the $25,000 Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry, which is given “in recognition of commitment and extraordinary work in poetry and the literary arts through administration, advocacy, education, publishing, or service.” And Kazim Ali will receive the 2025 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism a $10,000 prize that “commends an outstanding book-length work of criticism published in the United States in the prior calendar year.”

Arthur Sze has been named the new U.S. poet laureate, succeeding Ada Limón, who has held the position since 2022. The winner of the Library of Congress’s 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, and other honors, Sze will begin his laureateship with a reading on October 9. During his term as poet laureate, Sze, who lives in Santa Fe, plans to have a special focus on poetry in translation.

Kelly Jenson of Book Riot unpacks the Institute of Museum and Library Services’s new project, Freedom Trucks: “six mobile exhibits intended to crisscross the country and ‘share the story of our nation’s founding’ to celebrate America’s 250th birthday in 2026.”

The former co-owners of Denver’s Tattered Cover Book Store have launched a new publishing, Left Field Publishing, which will publish both adult and children’s books, Publishers Weekly reports. “According to its mission statement, Left Field is committed to publishing ‘powerful, beautifully-told stories that fall outside the traditional lines.’ It will focus on authors ‘whose work blends genres, expands minds, and invites conversation.’” 

Capping off a week of announcements by the National Book Foundation, the New Yorker shares the longlist for the National Book Award in fiction: Rabih Alameddine for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove), Susan Choi for Flashlight (FSG), Angela Flournoy for The Wilderness (Mariner), Jonas Hassen Khemiri for The Sisters (FSG), Megha Majumdar for A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf), Kevin Moffett for Only Son (McSweeney’s), Karen Russell for The Antidote (Knopf), Ethan Rutherford for North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther (A Strange Object), Bryan Washington for Palaver (FSG), and Joy Williams for The Pelican Child (Knopf).

Capping off a week of announcements by the National Book Foundation, the New Yorker shares the longlist for the National Book Award in fiction: Rabih Alameddine for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove), Susan Choi for Flashlight (FSG), Angela Flournoy for The Wilderness (Mariner), Jonas Hassen Khemiri for The Sisters (FSG), Megha Majumdar for A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf), Kevin Moffett for Only Son (McSweeney’s), Karen Russell for The Antidote (Knopf ), Ethan Rutherford for North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther (A Strange Object), Bryan Washington for Palaver (FSG), and Joy Williams for The Pelican Child (Knopf ). 

Richard Smith, the man who impersonated Henry David Thoreau at the Walden Pond State Reservation in Concord, Massachusetts, for the past twenty-six years, has retired, the New York Times reports. His last day on the job was September 6, which was 178 years to the day after the 19th-century transcendentalist writer left Walden Pond.

Funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for fiscal 2026 “cleared a legislative hurdle this week,” Publishers Weekly reports, with the House Appropriations Committee endorsing a $291.8 million budget and the Senate Appropriations Committee also approving that amount. The budget now goes to the Senate and House of Representatives for a full vote. 

Readerlink Distribution Services plans to acquire Baker & Taylor, a distributor of books to public and academic libraries and schools, and expects to close the deal on or around September 26, according to Publishers Lunch. Readerlink had already acquired the distributor’s marketing and publishing imprints  in 2015. “In a statement, Readerlink noted that they will retain ‘most of the current Baker & Taylor management team and employees,’ and that B&T CEO Aman Kochar will continue to lead the division, reporting to Readerlink president and CEO Dennis Abboud.”

The National Book Foundation revealed the longlist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. The list includes Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf), Caleb Gayle’s Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State (Riverhead Books), Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Ben Ratliff’s Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening (Graywolf Press), and others. The finalists will be announced on October 7; the winners will be revealed at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 19.

Shira Permutter, the copyright office director who was removed by the Trump administration in May, will be allowed to return to work while her lawsuit over her firing moves forward, Publishers Lunch reports. “In a 2-1 decision, Judges Pan and Childs of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals called her case ‘unusual’ and ‘extraordinary,’ noting that ‘the President’s removal of Perlmutter was likely unlawful.’”

A federal judge postponed approval of the proposed $1.5 billion settlement of the class action lawsuit against AI company Athropic, writing that he was “disappointed” that attorneys representing the author plaintiffs had left “important questions to be answered in the future,” Publishers Weekly reports. “In the filing, and later in court, Judge Alsup expressed skepticism about the entire resolution process, including the timeline, noting that it relies on input from the Author-Publisher Working Group, which will then face challenges by Anthropic, all of which needs to be completed before the October 10 deadline. Before a preliminary approval can be granted, Alsup ruled that those ‘critical choices will need to be confirmed well before October 10.’”

The New Yorker has revealed the longlist for the National Book Award for poetry, which includes Gabrielle Calvocoressi for The New Economy (Copper Canyon), Cathy Linh Che for Becoming Ghost (Washington Square), Rickey Laurentiis for Death of the First Idea (Knopf), Richard Siken for I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon), Patricia Smith for The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner), and five others. The longlist for translated literature was also announced, with multiple books published by New Directions (Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, Book III, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell; and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s We Are Green and Trembling, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers) and Two Lines (Jazmina Barrera’s The Queen of Swords, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, and Mohamed Kheir’s Sleep Phase, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger) making the list. The finalists will be announced on October 7; the winners will be revealed at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 19.