Alissa Wilkinson of the New York Times considers a new documentary, Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation, directed by Ebs Burnough, which takes as its subject Kerouac’s famous novel On the Road and follows three threads of inquiry: the author’s early life; the 1957 novel’s influence on writers, actors, storytellers and artists; and examples of Americans who could be said to be following in the footsteps of the famous author, who died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven. According to Wilkinson, the doc “crams too much into its run time but not without cause: There’s just a lot to cover.”

Kelly Jensen of Book Riot offers an overview of the anti-book ban laws that have passed in a number of states in 2025, including examples of the four Rs of book censorship (a term and classification coined by Emily Knox): Restriction, Redaction, Relocation, and Removal. 

Publishers Weekly reports on a new e-book platform called Briet that invites publishers to sell their e-books to libraries outright, providing universal, perpetual access to titles while avoiding the thorny issues of licensing and hold times. The new digital platform is an initiative of the Brick House publishing cooperative and the Flaming Hydra collective of journalists and artists.

Shira Perlmutter, the former copyright office director, has been denied temporary reinstatement as the lawsuit over her firing by the Trump administration continues, Publishers Lunch reports.

In interviews with T: The New York Times Style Magazine, nine artists reflect on how American censorship transformed their work and their lives. Among the artists interviewed are Khaled Hosseini, who discusses his novel The Kite Runner (Riverhead Books, 2003); Geraldine Brooks, who discusses two of her books, Year of Wonders (Viking, 2001) and Horse (Viking, 2022); and the graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, who reflects on Maus (Pantheon, 1986–1991).

The Academy of American Poets has awarded $1.1 million to twenty-three poet laureate fellows across the United States. As part of the initiative, Lester Graves Lennon and Sehba Sarwar, the poet laureate fellows of Altadena, California will launch “After the Fires: Healing from Histories,” a poetry project that seeks to provide space for the Altadena/Pasadena community to document history and heal from the devastation caused by the 2025 Eaton Fire. Lennon and Sarwar will collaborate with the library district and local arts organizations to offer monthly workshops and readings that will culminate in a publication and daylong literary festival.

Forty European and international organizations, including the Federation of European Publishers, have written a joint statement criticizing the provisions for the European Union AI Act, Publishers Weekly reports. The coalition, which represents millions of authors, performers, publishers, producers, and other creatives across Europe, maintains that the implementation package for the act does not deliver meaningful protection of intellectual property rights in the context of AI.

The finalists for the thirty-seventh annual Lambda Literary Awards, celebrating outstanding LGBTQ+ voices in literature, have been announced. This year’s shortlist includes Anyone’s Ghost (Penguin Press) by August Thompson, Good Dress (Tin House) by Brittany Rogers, Cinema Love (Dutton) by Jiaming Tang, Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press) by Saretta Morgan, and Pretty (Knopf) by KB Brookins, among other titles.

Book publishing sales fell across all major categories in May, Publishers Weekly reports. Adult book sales declined 9.6 percent, fiction sales dropped by 8.3 percent, and nonfiction fell by 11.3 percent.

Bookshop.org, the online bookselling platform, reported 65 percent year-over-year growth for the first half of 2025, Publishers Weekly reports. The platform has already sold $1 million in e-books, after introducing the format in January. Bookshop.org works with 2,471 bookstores and with around 90 percent of the American Booksellers Association members, according to Andy Hunter, the CEO of Bookshop.org. To counter Amazon’s Prime Day event earlier this month, Bookshop.org conducted an “Anti-Prime sale,” offered free shipping, and ultimately earned $1.5 million in sales.

Rachel Kurzius writes for the Washington Post about how fan fiction, which was once relegated to the internet, is transforming traditional publishing. Kurzius writes that the “interest of many readers…has caught up with what fic writers, often women and queer people, have been up to all along: Joyful same-sex romances and stories told with the immediacy of first-person present tense, for example, now fill bookstore shelves.” Fan fiction is unfettered “by the constraints of the market (or even of good taste) and often buoyed by anonymity,” Kurzius adds.

The Booker Prize longlist has been announced, and it features authors from nine different countries, making it the most global list of books the award has seen in a decade, the Guardian reports. The list includes The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hamish Hamilton) by Kiran Desai, The South (4th Estate) by Tash Aw, and Flashlight (Jonathan Cape) by Susan Choi, among others. The shortlist will be announced at a ceremony in London on September 23, and the winner will be announced on November 10.

A new literary hub will open in Sydney with initial funding of $1.5 million AUD (approximately $978,300) from the New South Wales state government, the Guardian reports. The new hub will rival Melbourne’s Wheeler Center and allow Sydney to host seventy-five literary events over the next twelve months.

A preliminary injunction has found that the mass cancellation of previously awarded National Endowment for the Humanities grants violated the constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act, Publishers Lunch reports.

Dan Pelzer, who died this month at ninety-two years old, read 3,599 books in his lifetime, and his children have posted his reading list online with the goal of inspiring readers everywhere, the New York Times reports. Pelzer’s reading list was varied, including books on the mental health of adolescents, bildungsromans, autofiction, and works by John Grisham and Charles Dickens.

The second novel by George Saunders will be published in January 2026 by Random House, Kirkus Reviews reports. The novel, which is titled Vigil, follows K.J. Boone, an oil company CEO on his deathbed who is guided into the afterlife by Jill “Doll” Blaine, a woman who died young in 1976. “I found myself wondering about that generation of climate change deniers who, through obfuscation and spin, put progress on hold for twenty or thirty years, and are now old and passing away,” Saunders said in a statement. “I wondered whether such a person might, at the end of his life, feel inclined to repentance. If he had a chance to explain himself, would he try?”

An exhibition at the Holburne Museum in Bath will showcase the illustrations featured in Jane Austen novels over the last 150 years, Fine Books & Collections reports. The exhibition, which will run from September 11 through January 11, 2026, will include drawings, illustrated editions, original sketchbooks, printing blocks, and more.

The same day the White House released an AI strategy document that emphasized rapid AI integration within government operations and the importance of eliminating obstacles to AI development, Trump said adhering to copyright was “not doable,” Publishers Weekly reports. Trump also compared training AI models on copyrighted material to human beings reading a book or article.

New Directions has announced Tynan Kogane, who previously served as senior editor of the press, as its new editor in chief, Publishers Weekly reports. New Directions has made several other promotions due to the retirement of executive vice president Laurie Callahan. Mieke Chew has been promoted to senior editor and executive director of publicity and Declan Spring has been promoted to executive vice president. Christopher Wait has been promoted to vice president and director of sub-rights and permissions; Maya Solovej has been promoted to publicity manager and associate editor; and Oliver Preston has been promoted to production associate.

For Electric Literature, the staff of the Brooklyn Public Library recommends books that changed the shape of politics and reading in the United States. The list includes Parable of the Sower (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993) by Octavia E. Butler, A People’s History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980) by Howard Zinn, and Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) by Rachel Carson, among other titles.