Applications for the National Book Critics Circle’s Emerging Critics Fellowship are open until Friday, June 5, at midnight Pacific Time. The fellowship is open to critics of all experience levels who want to review and write about books, though they need not have published book reviews already. Over the course of the fellowship year, fellows will have access to one-on-one mentorship, professional development and craft lectures over Zoom, and dues-free NBCC membership, among other things. “As a published author of fiction and nonfiction, my time as an NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow has been immensely valuable—giving me a comfortable and inclusive forum to learn how to partake in the national conversation about books, publishing, and prizes in America,” 2021–2022 fellow Rishi Reddi said of the program. “I got to spend a year ‘inside’ the erudite and necessary field of literary criticism and for me—for whom books have always been a lifeline and an immense pleasure—the experience has been priceless.”

Ten cultural organizations sent a letter to Congress calling for expanded funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in the run-up to meetings about the 2027 fiscal year later this week, according to Publishers Weekly. The White House tried to dismantle the IMLS last year and has once again proposed eliminating it in 2027. In their letter, the organizations emphasized the importance of museums, libraries, and archives in American cultural life. “For many, the library is the only no-fee access to information, education, and career development,” Sem Helmick, president of the American Library Association, which was one of the letter’s signatories, emphasized in a statement.

Julia Elliott has been named this year’s winner of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for her short story collection Hellions, published by Tin House in 2025, NPR reports. The $150,000 award is given each year to a novel, short story collection, or graphic novel by a woman or nonbinary author in the United States or Canada. Elliott is known for writing fiction that blends Southern gothic horror, surrealism, and fairytales, and her latest collection is no exception. “This eerie, eclectic, genre-leaping collection takes no half-measures; every sentence of Hellions crackles or crawls,” the prize jury wrote in a statement. “But for all its wildness, there is tremendous control.”

Netflix has launched a hub for “book-inspired storytelling,” Publishers Lunch reports. The hub, called Watch Your Favorite Books, will recommend content based on books on the Netflix homepage. “The experience is organized around reader ‘types,’” according to the streaming service, “think: plot-twist lovers, romance enthusiasts, nonfiction fans, and more, making it easy for members to find adaptations that match how they like to read and watch.”

Lately publishers have been moving away from printing hardcover books at 6-by-9 inches, choosing instead to make them the slightly smaller 5-by-8 inches, Adam Messinger writes for the Los Angeles Times. Some attribute this shift to the fact that smaller books are more Instagram-friendly, easier to carry around, and generally more approachable. “It’s a tone,” offered Gretchen Achilles, the director of interior design at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “Smaller trim sizes have an intimacy…. You want to echo what’s going on in the text as an experience for the reader.”

The UK’s Publishers Association has reported that it is seeing growing numbers of AI-narrated pirated audiobooks online, according to the Bookseller. This discovery comes on the heels of a recent New York Times article about the spread of pirated audiobooks on platforms like YouTube. “For the past few years, a key part of our content protection and enforcement strategy has been working directly with online platforms to tackle piracy and wider content protection issues. This includes working with YouTube and Spotify to improve detection and takedown processes,” said Jack Newton, head of content protection and enforcement for the Publishers Association. Spotify, for instance, “has a recent track record of tackling music piracy, and we are applying that same collaborative approach to protect the rights of authors and publishers.”

Last week the American Booksellers Association held a virtual community forum in which some members pushed back against the move away from in-person meetings, Publishers Weekly reports. After tumultuous forums the previous two years, this year the ABA switched to the virtual format. During the Q&A portion of the meeting many of the questions that participants asked the organization’s CEO and board president pertained to this switch. “This community forum was meant to be more democratic, but for a democratic outcome people have to show up,” Lucy Kogler, manager of Talking Leaves...Books in Buffalo, New York, told Publishers Weekly. “Given that out of more than 3,500 possible attendees, only 137 at its peak attended—and that number includes about two dozen who are ABA board and staff and media—proves that membership is not being served as a cohesive unit.... Ideas and concerns need to be vocalized and heard in physical proximity.”

The Library of Virginia has announced the twelve finalists for its annual People’s Choice Awards. The prize, which was established in 2004, honors the most-requested fiction and nonfiction books by Virginia authors or about the Commonwealth published during the previous year. This year’s finalists in fiction are Strangers in Time (Grand Central) by David Baldacci, King of Ashes (Flatiron) by S.A. Cosby, The Correspondent (Crown) by Virginia Evans, Culpability (Spiegel & Grau) by Bruce Holsinger, All Too Well (Sourcebooks) by Corinne Michaels, and The View From Lake Como (Dutton) by Adriana Trigiani. The finalists in nonfiction are Mailman (Simon & Schuster) by Stephen Starring Grant, Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance (Black Dog & Leventhal) by Jane Harrington, A Perfect Frenzy (Atlantic Monthly Press) by Andrew Lawler, The Determined Spy (Dutton) by Douglas Waller, Bad Naturalist (Timber Press) by Paula Whyman, and Lincoln’s Lady Spymaster (Harper) by Gerri Willis. Members of the public can vote any time between June 1 and July 15 at: lvafoundation.org/peopleschoiceawards. The winners will be announced at the 29th annual Virginia Literary Awards Celebration on September 19.

In the wake of revelations that Steven Rosenbaum’s new book, The Future of Truth, contains quotes made up by AI, WIRED spoke to Rosenbaum to learn more about how he uses AI. Over the course of the interview, Rosenbaum denied using AI explicitly to write or edit passages in the book, but also maintained that he finds it a valuable writing partner and continues to use the technology today. “If the only way for me to not end up with a mistake ever again is to literally stop using AI, that’s just not realistic. If the answer is to stop writing, that’s not out of the realm of possibility,” he is quoted saying.

The Ink Book Prize, an annual award that aims to celebrate “unique voices and compelling storytelling while promoting the spirit of independent publishing,” announced last week that it was removing a title from this year's shortlist after discovering that AI was used in parts of the illustration design, according to the Bookseller. In a statement, the team behind the prize said that they received two e-mails after the shortlist was announced expressing concerns about the use of AI to create the cover of one of the selected titles. The author’s representative subsequently chose to pull out of the shortlist. In a social media post, Kirsten McNeil, who published another book on the shortlist, also announced that she would be withdrawing from the prize. “AI imagery is created using large language models which use copyrighted human-created art to generate images. It is a huge threat to our creative industry, especially in children’s picture books,” she wrote. “Although it is always an honor to be recognized for our book, we believe in putting human-created stories first and do not want to risk being associated alongside any AI-generated publications.”

Increasingly, disabled authors are undertaking book tours that challenge the industry to be more inclusive and also reenvision what book events can look like, Publishers Weekly writes. For example, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha recently planned their first in-person tour in more than six years for their new poetry collection, The Way Disabled People Love Each Other (Arsenal Pulp). For the tour they requested an American Sign Language interpreter, real-time captions, and wheelchair access—half of the book stores they worked with provided all three, and all at least had spaces that were accessible. “It’s just nuts-and-bolts access,” Piepzna-Samarasinha says. “I need it for myself as a disabled writer. But it’s not just for me; I want disabled people to come to my readings.”

Three hundred incarcerated people at twelve prisons across the country are in the process of selecting the winner of this year’s Inside Literary Prize, Minnesota Public Radio News writes. The prize, which was first awarded in 2024, is a collaboration between Freedom Reads, the Center for Justice and Innovation, and the National Book Foundation, and is determined entirely by a jury of incarcerated readers. “There were times where I walked in the room and I'm like, ‘I'm not with this book, I don't get it,’” Makayla Richardson, one of the prize’s judges, says of the selection process. “But then, to sit in a room with other people and get their perspectives…it's just very helpful and educational.” (Read about the launch of the award program in “Prize Judged by Incarcerated Readers” by Alissa Greenberg, from the May/June 2024 issue.)

Workers at the American Library Association voted overwhelmingly in favor of unionizing earlier this week, Publishers Weekly reports. Employee concerns include anxiety about multi-round layoffs and desire for better pay and benefits as well as more professional development opportunities. “We couldn’t be happier with the strong and definitive victory we saw, and we’re gratified to see the staff so unified,” David Connolly, an employee of the ALA, is quoted saying. “It’s been a difficult time for the association's budget…in particular with the elimination of salary increases this year and the rollback in retirement benefits.”

The American Booksellers Association has reported that its membership has grown by more than five hundred in the last year, with the total number of associated bookstores nearly triple what it was a decade ago and the highest it has been since the late 1990s, according to the Associated Press. This surge (to a total of 3,417 members at 3,783 locations) is partially thanks to a recent proliferation of stores specializing in the popular genres of romance, fantasy, and romantasy. “People are craving connection, especially in-person connection,” Kelley Hartnett, the owner of Double Dog Bookshop in Wentzville, Missouri, is quoted saying. “People are over the internet and virtual meetings and algorithms. They’re not the same as having a human-to-human connection. It feels really healing.”

Recent reports that Steven Rosenbaum's book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality contains quotes made up by AI have underscored the extent to which nonfiction book publishers are ill-equipped to handle the onset of AI, Charlotte Klein writes for New York magazine. Publishers typically do not pay for books to be fact-checked, which means that authors must either pay an outside checker themselves—which typically costs somewhere between $7,000 and $10,000—or forgo this process. And there is no industry standard as to what AI usage, if any, is permissible. “A lot of authors are well intentioned in their use of AI and don’t want to rely on AI to generate work that they would then present as their own,” Todd Shuster, cofounder of the literary agency Aevitas, told Klein. “But they might rely on AI for some research or ideas around the structure of the book or outline. And the author then sort of forgets or denies or suppresses the extent to which they relied on the AI for such research.”

In the wake of last week’s revelations that an AI detection tool raised red flags about a Commonwealth Prize-winning short story, the Authors Guild put five of the top AI detection tools to the test to see how likely they are to mistakenly flag human-written work as AI-generated. The Authors Guild selected ten of its articles published in 2022 or earlier, before generative AI was widely available, and ran them through the five AI detectors. Three were almost entirely accurate, while two—ZeroGPT and Sidekicker.ai—were either unpredictable or totally inaccurate. Ironically, the Authors Guild points out, because AI models are trained on polished writing, "The more refined and controlled a writer’s style, the more it may resemble the output these tools are designed to flag. This creates a troubling paradox. A writer who has spent decades honing clarity, economy, and precision is, by definition, writing in a way that overlaps with what AI has learned to produce.”

Five North American public library organizations issued a statement yesterday calling on the Big Five publishers to negotiate e-book lending models on the grounds that digital pricing is straining library budgets, according to Publishers Weekly. This statement is just the latest chapter in the ongoing battle between libraries and publishers concerning digital licensing. In their defense, publishers have stressed the importance of making sure that authors are compensated within lending systems. On the other hand, Angela Goodrich, COO of the Urban Libraries Council, told Publishers Weekly that many large, high-circulating library systems are spending more than 50 percent of their collections budget on licensing. “That’s exponentially larger than what we were doing eight years ago, and part of that is because e-books and audiobooks are more expensive than print books,” she pointed out.

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller list for the week ending May 24, 2026. The list is compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identifies “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” New to the list this week are Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press) by Yang Shuang-zi, which was named the winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize last week, at no. 7; She Who Remains (Sandorf Passage) by Rene Karabash at no. 32; Plastic, Prism, Void: Part One (Littlepuss Press) by Violet Allen at no. 35; Riverwork (Coach House Books) by Lisa Robertson at no. 38; and Cat Poems (New Directions), edited by Tynan Kogane, at no. 40.

A 2022 reprint of the 2006 young adult novel Pretty Little Liars has generated backlash online because it replaced references to the early aughts with more current mentions of TikTok, Snapchat, and Billie Eilish, the New York Times reports. Modernization, or updating cultural and technological references, has long been a practice in publishing, especially in middle-grade and young adult books. Proponents of this strategy say that dated references can prevent younger readers from feeling fully engrossed in a story and even sometimes from simply understanding what’s going on. But others argue that there’s something to be said for trusting young readers. “There’s no single, universal idea of what kids want,” Jennifer Buehler, a young adult literature scholar at Saint Louis University, is quoted saying. “You can’t assume all kids will be turned off when they sense the adult behind the book.”

A Canadian company named Zoom Books has been accused of buying tens of thousands of books from shops around the world to train AI models, Publishers Lunch writes. The Spanish news outlet Demócrata first alleged that bookstores in Germany, Australia, Spain, and elsewhere were receiving the bulk orders. Badalona bookstore owner Marçal Font told the publication that he had received seven orders in a row for large numbers of obscure Catalon nonfiction titles. “On average, they are books of five or ten euros, many practically impossible to find,” he is quoted as saying. Zoom Books subsequently responded to the accusations, saying in a statement to Publishers Lunch that the Demócrata allegations are false. “To be unequivocally clear: Zoom Books does not digitize or destroy used or new books for the purpose of training AI models, nor for any other purpose,” the company wrote. “Any claim or implication to the contrary is inaccurate.”