Last Friday, Lambda Literary announced its 2026 prizewinners. The awards, also known as the Lammys, “were created in 1989 to garner national visibility for LGBTQ books, which had established a foothold through a nascent network of lesbian and gay publishers and bookstores.” This year’s winners were selected by a panel of eighty literary professionals from more than 1,300 submissions. Among the winners are Hungerstone (Zando) by Kat Dunn, which won the award for lesbian fiction; Nova Scotia House (Nightboat Books) by Charlie Porter, which won the award for gay fiction; Guest Privileges (Dzanc Books) by Gaar Adams, which won the award for LGBTQ+ nonfiction; and YEET! (Omnidawn Publishing) by jason b crawford, which won the award for LGBTQ+ poetry.

Recently, it has seemed as though new books are getting more and more expensive, but USA Today reports that book prices actually haven’t kept up with inflation. Part of the reason they seem so costly is that e-books have shifted our perception of how much a book ought to cost. And then, of course, there is the reality that the rest of life’s expenses—groceries, insurance, gas—are inflating, and there’s less wiggle room left in the budget for readers to spend thirty dollars on a hardcover book. While many people think that publishers keep most of the money, the reality is that they are struggling too. “A twenty dollar book ends up netting two or three dollars for the publisher at the end of the day,” Keith Riegert, president of the independent publishing collective the Stable Book Group, said.

Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman, the new owners of the online literary magazine the Rumpus, have detailed some of their plans for the publication to Publishers Weekly. Though they plan to retain the spirit of the Rumpus, some coverage areas will be different: There will be more of a focus on politics, and on cultural criticism. The magazine is also diversifying its audience with a Spanish-language vertical called El Alboroto helmed by three editors who are fluent in the language, and a column written and edited by people who are or have been incarcerated. “With America being seduced by AI, there’s going to be even more of an appetite for craft, for soul, for work that still is original and heartbreaking and bone-tingling,” Millman said. “More than ever there needs to be original voices that are beholden to no one but the reader.”

This year marks a century since the founding of the Book of the Month Club, Publishers Weekly writes, and a decade since chairman John Lippman relaunched the service with the goal of appealing to younger readers and those who are more likely to buy books online. Lippman said that the organization has grown every year since its rebrand, and that its membership now skews towards Gen Z women rather than millennials. To celebrate its centennial, Book of the Month launched a splashy ad campaign poking fun at the idea that “nobody reads anymore,” and is also offering special editions of classics like Catcher in the Rye and Native Son. “Just like in the 1920s,” Lippman said, “we fundamentally believe in the book business.”

Libraries, which could always benefit from funding for digitization efforts, are being approached by AI companies offering to pay for materials to be digitized in order for that data to be used to train models, Library Journal reports. While these arrangements can benefit libraries, there’s reason to be cautious. To ensure that proper care is taken when partnering with AI companies, the University of Virginia recently published a statement enumerating shared practices for AI training requests, which sixteen other universities have cosigned. These institutions have jointly agreed to separate digitization from AI use, apply scrutiny to broad training requests, and preserve the ability to share information, among other things. “We have responsibilities to the people who donated these materials to us,” UVA dean of libraries and university librarian Leo S. Lo said. “We want to make sure that we can fulfill our stewardship [duties] and have accountability.”

In an article for the New Yorker, writer Jessica Winter argues that in order to get kids to want to read, the adults in their lives need to champion all different kinds of reading rather than “book-shaming.” Research has found that the percentage of people who read for pleasure has dropped from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023, and that the proportion of parents who read aloud to infants before they turn three months old has dropped six points in the last four years. And yet, many books that clearly appeal to kids, like highly commercial graphic novels, are often disparaged by adults in their lives, potentially to a young person’s detriment. “When someone starts exercising for their health, we don’t criticize their choice of exercise or belittle them for not being able to run a marathon on the first day,” Deborah Reed, director of the Tennessee Reading Research Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is quoted saying. “Once the habit is formed, they do more and are encouraged to try new things they previously didn’t think were possible. Shouldn’t we approach reading the same way?”

This year, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (LBYR) is celebrating its hundredth birthday, Publishers Weekly notes. The division has been known for publishing critically acclaimed books from the beginning, including numerous Newbery and Caldecott Award winners. Over the course of its centennial year, LBYR is launching two new imprints: Requited, a new adult imprint, and Alvina Ling Books, which will be headed by Ling, who has been with LBYR for 25 years. It will also celebrate its anniversary by introducing new initiatives to promote reading for fun among children and to support writers telling stories of underserved communities. “In this age when consumers are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of books published each year as well as concerned about AI content, I think boutique imprints are more meaningful than ever,” Megan Tingley, LBYR’s publisher, said. “Readers crave authentic voices and works that have been carefully curated by trusted and respected editorial experts. We have to lean in to what makes reading such a uniquely intimate and emotional experience.”

Earlier this week, a library book that was due back in October 1949 was finally returned to a Norfolk library, according to the BBC. The fine for the overdue book, when adjusted for inflation, should have been around £800 (approximately $1,072), but the library said that it would waive the fine this time. The book, The Devil Held the Aces (W.H. Allen, 1944) by Patrick Doncaster, was returned after being found in an attic. “This return definitely caught us by surprise, but in the very best way,” Will Buhler, a mobile libraries manager at the Norfolk County Council, said. “We like to think it’s had quite the life wherever it’s been tucked away, whether that’s an attic box or a well-loved bookshelf.”

Virginia Evans and Lyse Doucet have won the 2026 Women’s Prize for fiction and nonfiction respectively, the Associated Press reports. Evans’ The Correspondent (Crown, 2025) became a runaway bestseller, making her a literary star after writing seven unpublished novels. “Why did I keep going? I didn’t know how not to, I guess,” she said. Lyse Doucet, chief international correspondent for the BBC, won for The Finest Hotel in Kabul (Allen Lane, 2025). Both prizes come with a £30,000 (approximately $40,200) and are open to female writers from any country who work in English.

Texas Monthly is teaming up with Penguin Random House to relaunch Texas Monthly Press. The relaunch will build on the house’s initial publishing run from the late-1970s to the early-1990s, the magazine’s strong storytelling, and the publishing house’s national reach to publish books across genres and formats about the mythos of Texas. “As a native Texan and lifelong reader of Texas Monthly, I was thrilled to learn of the magazine’s plans to relaunch Texas Monthly Press. The opportunity to help bring this iconic imprint back to life felt deeply personal,” said Amanda D’Acierno, president of Penguin Random House Audio Global, which is managing the collaboration. The imprint will release its inaugural slate of books in fall 2027.

A new study from the Authors Guild has found that average author earnings have declined 42 percent since 2009, the year Kindles became available, according to Publishers Weekly. The survey also found that only 19 percent of print and e-books read in the last month were bought new, and six percent were read through a paid subscription, which means that authors were earning less in royalties. Another ten percent of books were bought used and 29 percent were obtained through a library. “While the Guild stresses it strongly supports the availability of books through various channels and formats, it also notes that authors aren’t benefitting from the wider availability of their books,” Jim Milliot writes.

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller list for the week ending June 7, 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 I See You’ve Called in Dead (Zibby Publishing) by John Kenney, at no. 7; The King in Yellow, Deluxe Edition (Pushkin Press) by Robert W. Chambers, at no. 11; The Clock House Murders (The Bizarre House Mysteries) (Pushking Vertigo) by Yukito Ayatsuji, at no. 16; She Walks at Night (Detective Kindaichi Mysteries) (Pushkin Vertigo) by Seishi Yokomizo, at no. 25; Puck: A Novel (Zando) by Samantha Allen, at no. 29; Homosexual Intifada: A Queer Palestinian Anthology (Olive Branch Press), edited by George Abraham, at no. 32; and The Fire Agent (Spiegel & Grau) by David Baerwald, at no. 39.

A judge has ordered that a group of authors cannot include six different AI companies in a single lawsuit for copyright infringement, according to Publishers Lunch. The issue, the judge said, is that there wasn’t clear evidence of conspiracy between the companies. The plaintiffs must instead sue Anthropic, Google, xAI, Perplexity, Apple, and NVIDIA separately. “Each defendant trained on a mixture of different data repositories at different times between 2020 and 2024,” the court writes. “Even accepting plaintiff’s argument that there is a ‘reasonable inference’ that each defendant used Anna’s Archive to train their LLMs, that would not be enough for the Court to find a common transaction or occurrence.”

The trustees of the International Griffin Poetry Prize have announced that the $65,000 Canadian (approximately $46,679) Canadian Poetry Prize will be reinstated. The $130,000 Canadian (approximately $93,359) International Poetry Prize will remain unchanged, and Canadian poets are eligible for that prize as well, though a Canadian poet cannot win both prizes at the same time. These changes are the result of comments and recommendations from the Canadian poetry community. The trustees also announced that the longlist for the International Prize will be twelve books and will feature Canadian representation, and that the panel of three judges will always include a Canadian.

Tessa McWatt, a Guyanese author and professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, has been awarded the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, BBC reports. The $10,000 prize is considered the leading international award for Caribbean writing. McWatt received the honor for The Snag: A Mother, A Forest, and Wild Grief (Random House Canada, 2025), her account of losing her mother to dementia. She said that getting the award was a “real joy, as it feels like a win for my mother, who is the central figure in the book and my heart's inspiration.”

Barnes & Noble has announced the six finalists for its annual Discover Prize, Kirkus Reviews reports. The award, which is given for an outstanding debut novel, was established in 1995 and the winner will be announced on June 25. This year’s shortlist includes Yesteryear (Knopf) by Caro Claire Burke, Lost Lambs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Madeline Cash, The Golden Boy (Cardinal) by Patricia Finn, Upward Bound (Hogarth) by Woody Brown, Seek Immediate Shelter (Flatiron) by Vincent Yu, and Waiting on a Friend (Hogarth) by Natalie Adler. “It’s such a joy to spend so much time talking in depth about new writers—their prose style, their characters, the worlds they create—and their future potential with other booksellers around the country,” Barnes & Noble campaign manager for fiction Lexie Smyth said in a statement.

The Literary Arts Fund is now accepting applications for its 2026 Innovation Project Grant program. These grants will range from $25,000 to $100,000 and offer literary nonprofits funds for “new, one-time, and forward-thinking projects that aim to address critical structural challenges that, if improved or solved, would ultimately strengthen literary arts nonprofits’ abilities to serve creative writers.” Proposed projects must commence after January 1, 2027, and conclude by December 31, 2027, and the deadline for applications is August 17. (Read more about the fund in “A Lifeline From Literary Arts Fund” by Adrienne Raphel, from the March/April 2026 issue.)

The Booker Prize Foundation is publishing a short story collection this week that aims to make prize-winning fiction more accessible to people who face barriers to reading, according to the Guardian. The collection, All Around the World, includes pieces by Booker Prize winners like Anne Enright and David Szalay and will be distributed through the Quick Reads initiative, which aims to improve adult literacy at a time when more than a third of adults in the UK struggle to read a book in its entirety. Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, who curated the collection, said that “Quick Reads is like dipping your toe in the water of literature, with some of the barriers that might put people off removed. A lot of people might feel there is nothing about their world in books. The stories in All Around the World have access points, and I hope they alert readers to the fact that, actually, their life might be in here somewhere.”

Audiobook industry sales revenue grew nine percent in 2025, a 43 percent increase from 2024, Publishers Weekly reports. These numbers come from the Audio Publishers Association’s annual sales survey, which also found that general fiction accounted for the largest share of audiobook revenue, while the fastest growing genres were humor, general fiction, and children’s books. “Convenience remains the primary driver of audiobook consumption,” Ed Nawotka writes. “Among listeners, 86 percent cited the ability to multitask while listening, and 84 percent cited the ability to listen on the go as the top benefit, with 70 percent describing audiobooks as an alternative to screen time.” AI-narrated audiobooks don’t seem to be holding listeners’ interests; only sixteen percent of listeners said they had listened to a title voiced by AI.

An unfinished and never before published short story by Edith Wharton has been printed in the most recent issue of the Strand Magazine, the Associated Press writes. The piece, titled “The Men Who Saved the World,” tells the story of a young American nurse who finds herself seated next to a war hero at a dinner party, and animates the strange divide between civilian and military life that Wharton witnessed during World War I. As Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli writes in his introduction, “Wharton asks a question that is as relevant today as it was over a century ago: What is the cost of refusing to see the horrors beyond the softly curtained windows—and who pays for it?”