The Poetry Foundation is facing protests from employees, poets, and others in the literary community after the organization announced on December 1 that it was phasing out all public programming beginning in the new year, Publishers Weekly reports. Poetry Foundation staff say the decision “would result in substantial layoffs and a loss of support for the poets who are paid to read and present at events.” On December 15, members of the community also “published a letter they sent to the foundation’s senior leadership team earlier this month asking for them to retain the jobs of two longtime employees, Shoshana Olidort and Maggie Queeney, who are set to be laid off on December 31. In the letter, which is now open to the public for signatures, the employees urged the foundation to reconsider its decision in light of its responsibility to ‘mitigate harm to poetry and to the arts and education more broadly’ at a moment of ‘extreme political and economic turmoil.’”

Bennington College in Vermont has launched a new BFA program in creative writing through the college’s Conservatory for Creative Writing, the Bennington Banner reports. “While designed specifically for transfer students—rising sophomores and juniors—the program offers pathways for other prospective students, including first-year students, those continuing after an associate’s degree, and those who have taken a break from college. Students entering as sophomores will begin with general curriculum coursework before transitioning into the BFA; juniors transfer directly into the core creative writing program.”

The National Book Critics Circle has announced the longlist for the NBCC Award in Fiction: The Antidote (Knopf) by Karen Russell; Audition (Riverhead) by Katie Kitamura; The Book of Records(Norton) by Madeleine Thien; Heart the Lover (Grove) by Lily King, Long Distance (Bloomsbury) by Ayşegül Savaş; On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) (New Directions) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell; Sea, Poison (New Directions) by Caren Beilin; The South (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Tash Aw; We Do Not Part (Hogarth) by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris; and The Wilderness (Mariner) by Angela Flournoy.

Publishers Weekly looks at the steadily declining popularity of the mass market paperback, which from the late 1960s to the mid-90s drew millions of readers with its low prices and widespread availability. “The decision made this winter by ReaderLink to stop distributing mass market paperback books at the end of 2025 was the latest blow to a format that has seen its popularity decline for years. According to Circana BookScan, mass market unit sales plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84 percent, and sales this year through October were about 15 million units.”

Haruki Murakami last week received two awards in New York City that honor for his career as an author, translator, critic, the Associated Press reports. “On Tuesday night, the Center for Fiction presented him its Lifetime of Excellence in Fiction Award, previously given to Nobel laureates Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro among others. Two days later, the Japan Society cohosted a jazzy tribute at The Town Hall, “Murakami Mixtape,” and awarded him its annual prize for ‘luminous individuals (including Yoko Ono and Caroline Kennedy) who have brought the U.S. and Japan closer together.’”

Publishers Weekly has named Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya as the 2025 Person of the Year. “With book banning efforts sharply on the rise a few years ago, it became clear to many, including...Malaviya, that the challenges weren’t one-offs but rather part of an organized, well-funded operation. To counter that campaign, Malaviya decided to throw the full weight of the country’s largest trade publisher into marshaling the opposition.”

Audible is partnering with TikTok “to help listeners discover top trending books and stories right inside the Audible app and web experience.” The collaboration creates “a seamless bridge” between what’s trending on BookTok and what listeners can access on Audible.

Best-selling author James Patterson has once again given “holiday bonus” checks of $500 each to independent booksellers, the Associated Press reports. “Over the past twenty years, Patterson has donated millions of dollars to schools, libraries, literacy programs and others in the book community. For the past several years, he has made a tradition out of sending $500 checks to 600 independent booksellers who have been recommended by peers or patrons. The list for 2025 ranges from Katie Gabriello, social media coordinator for Whitelam Books in Reading, Massachusetts, to store manager Kate Czyzewski of Thunder Road Books in Spring Lake, New Jersey.”

Willamette University and Pacific University have announced plans to merge into a new private university system, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting. If the merger goes through, the proposed new system, tentatively called the University of the Northwest, would become the state’s largest private university with more than 6,000 students. Both Willamette and Pacific universities currently have low-residency MFA programs in creative writing. “Higher education institutions across the country are facing declining enrollment and budget difficulties, but leaders at Pacific and Willamette say they’re not pursuing the partnership due to financial challenges. They say the partnership will lead to better services and expanded career pathways for students, as well as create a regional workforce development hub.”

Darrell Kinsey is the winner of the Center for Fiction’s 2025 First Novel Prize for Natch (University of Iowa Press). “Joseph Earl Thomas, author of the 2024 First Novel Prize–winning novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, presented Kinsey with the award, which carries with it a prize of $15,000.”

Elaina Richardson is stepping down as president of the artist and writers retreat Yaddo, the New York Times reports. She has held the post for twenty-five years, during which time “she has increased Yaddo’s endowment from $8 million to $38 million and overseen significant upgrades to the 400-acre former summer home of Spencer and Katrina Trask, a financier and a writer who, after the deaths of their four young children, bequeathed their estate to artists seeking respite from the demands of everyday life.”

Oxford University Press has sold its New York City offices on Madison Avenue for $40 million, Publishers Weekly reports. “The sale comes just one week after Scholastic announced the sale of its own Manhattan headquarters, in addition to its primary warehouse located in Jefferson City, Mo., and plans to lease back part of the properties. Net proceeds for the Scholastic deal are expected to top $400 million.”

The second annual State of Reading Report, compiled by Social reading app Fable and digital subscription service Everand using the reponses of more than 1,600 users, shows that people “are finding increasing ways to weave reading into daily life,” with 64 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds reading more; “audiobooks have overtaken ebooks as the top digital format, and smartphones are the top device”; readers’ comfort level with and usage of AI has risen but people still trust humans more; and fantasy titles such as Onyx Storm, Iron Flame, and Fourth Wing topped the most-read list among users.

The U.S. Supreme Court will not consider Leila Green Little et al. v. Llano County, a book removal case in Texas “that jeopardizes First Amendment rights in public libraries,” according to Publishers Weekly. It would have been the first book-banning case to be heard by the court since 1982. The original lawsuit, filed in April 2022 by seven library patrons in Llano, Texas, was filed after seventeen books were removed from the Llano branch library. “Publishers, librarians, and literary organizations had petitioned SCOTUS for a writ of certiorari, the process by which SCOTUS decides whether to take a case, but to no avail.” One of the plantiffs, Leila Green Little, wrote in an e-mail to Publishers Weekly, “This means we now live in a censorship state.”

The Whiting Foundation is partnering with the Brooklyn-based literary public relations firm Press Shop PR to “provide strategic publicity guidance to this year’s awardees” of the Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress, Publishers Weekly reports. The 2025 grantees are Paul Bogard, Jason Cherkis, S.C. Cornell, Caitlin Dickerson, Elena Dudum, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Will Harris, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Avi Steinberg, and Raksha Vasudevan.

Netflix says book adaptations are driving viewership, according to Katy Hershberger of Publishers Lunch. “In 2025...adaptations amassed more than 4.5 billion views around the world for movies and series including Frankenstein, The Woman in Cabin 10, The Hunting Wives, The Thursday Murder Club, and Ransom Canyon, and book-to-screen content has been in the streamer’s global Top 10 list every week this year.”

Novelist Elif Shafak has been named the new president of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature, the Guardian reports. Shafak, who has been vice president since 2020, takes over from Bernardine Evaristo, who is nearly finished with her four-year term.

László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian author who won the 2025 Nobel Prize in literature, gave a lecture in Stockholm on Sunday in a rare public appearance, the Los Angeles Times reports. “He introduced his lecture, according to the English translation, by saying that ‘on receiving the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, I originally wished to share my thought with you on the subject of hope, but as my stories of hope have definitely come to an end, I will now speak about angels.’” The seventy-one-year-old writer described new angels as “wingless, messageless beings among us searching for human recognition.”

The notebooks of French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus have been published as a single volume for the first time, offering an unprecented glimpse into the thinking of the intensely private writer, the New York Times reports. Not to be confused with personal diaries, the notebooks contain the writer’s preparatory musings for such works as The Stranger and The Fall and include “explorations not just of the absurdity of existence but of isolation, guilt, redemption and resilience.” Other commentary is less searching and more candid: “‘I always wonder why I attract socialites,’ he wrote in 1949. ‘All those hats!’”

Following Valsoft’s recent acquisition of Above the Treeline (ATL), developer of the catalog platform Edelweiss, ATL has started to implement price increases on publishers using the digital cataloging service, negatively impacting small and big presses alike, reports Publishers Weekly. “…[T]hese changes in prices have made it difficult to carry out the vital task of ensuring independent bookstores can access the information they need on our full portfolio of titles,” notes one anonymous sales director with a big New York City publisher. Industry members are discussing the possibility of a new competitor coming along that can match the work of Edelweiss for cheaper.