Thousands online are calling for boycotting Barnes & Noble after its CEO James Daunt went viral earlier this week for saying he has “no problem” selling AI-written books that are labeled as such, according to the Los Angeles Times. Daunt has since clarified that the bookseller does not, to his knowledge, sell any AI-generated books, and that it would only do so if there is a demand for these books and if they are labeled appropriately. “The argument is nuanced, and perhaps over nuanced, but there are important principles that have to be balanced and I believe we do so as sensibly and thoughtfully as is possible,” he is quoted saying. “Book banning is a clear and present danger, so we are very careful with demands to ban any books.” But, he added, the company is also careful “not to sell AI generated books that masquerade to be by real authors.”

The New York Public Library has acquired the professional and personal archive of noted New Journalist and bestselling author Gay Talese. The papers, which will be housed in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, document over 80 years of Talese’s life and career, including manuscripts, research files, photographs, and correspondence with contemporaries such as Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, and Nora Ephron. The collection is expected to become available to the public in 2029. “The acquisition of the Gay Talese archive solidifies the New York Public Library as the landmark repository for twentieth century journalism and New Journalism in particular,” said Julie Golia, director of the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Library. “Talese’s careful archiving of his own work provides deep insight into his innovative, meticulous, and influential approach to writing and reporting.”

Little, Brown will use a new colophon in books published across all of its imprints starting in August, according to Publishers Weekly. The 189-year-old publisher last adopted a new colophon in 2009. This new colophon reimagines that design, which was inspired by antique typewriter keys, giving it a sleeker look. “It felt important that Little, Brown be seen as the heritage brand it truly is, with a visual identity that fully reflects that history and stature, as well as its future,” Little, Brown executive art director Gregg Kulick is quoted as saying.

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller list for the week ending May 17, 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.” The top five fiction titles are: 1. The Calamity Club (Spiegel & Grau) by Kathryn Stockett, 2. John of John (Grove Press) by Douglas Stuart, 3. Heart the Lover (Grove Press) by Lily King, 4. I Who Have Never Known Men (Transit Books) by Jacqueline Harpman, and 5. On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) (New Directions) by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland.

Earlier this week, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize made headlines when online readers accused the author of one of its winning stories, which was published by Granta, of having used AI, and the New York Times takes a closer look. “We’ve taken stock of the comments and tried to be very systematic in our understanding of some of the perspectives and tried to look at ourselves internally to see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough,” Razmi Farook, the director general of the Commonwealth Foundation is quoted as saying. “We’re confident in the rigor of our process, but we’re conscious that this is an evolving technological environment.” The accusations made against the author have underscored how difficult it is to figure out whether something was actually written by a person. After all, many of the AI writing tics readers pointed out online—like an excessive use of metaphor or negative parallelism—often appear in human writing, too.

Taiwan Travelogue, a novel by Yang Shuang-zi and translated by Lin King, has been named winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize, the New York Times reports. This is the first book translated from Mandarin and the first by a Taiwanese author to win the award, which includes a prize of £50,000 (approximately $67,000), split evenly between the author and translator. The novel tells the story of a young Japanese novelist who travels to Taiwan in 1938, when the island was occupied by Japan, and falls in love with her female translator. Natasha Brown, an author and the chair of the prize jury, said in a news conference that the book “pulls off an incredible double feat: It succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.”

James Daunt, the CEO of Barnes & Noble, said on NBC’s Today that he would support stocking books written by AI in the company’s stores. “As long as an AI-written book says it’s an AI-written book and doesn’t pretend to be something else and isn’t ripping off somebody else, as long as that’s clearly stated and the customer wants to buy it, then we will stock them,” Daunt said. In 2019, the same year Daunt stepped into his role, the company faced bankruptcy, but in the years since Barnes & Noble has bounced back, opening sixty-seven new stores in 2025 and another sixty this year.

The Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP) has announced the finalists for its twelfth annual Firecracker Awards for Independently Published Literature. The annual prizes are awarded in the book categories of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction as well as magazines: for general excellence and best debut. The Firecracker Awards “celebrate the books and magazines that make a significant contribution to our literary culture and the publishers that strive to introduce important voices to readers far and wide.” The winners will be announced on June 25. The winners in the book categories will each receive $2,000 ($1,000 for the press and $1,000 for the author or translator), and those in the magazine categories will each receive $1,000. The winning books will be distributed to over 750 independent booksellers across the country in partnership with the American Booksellers Association, and will be promoted by CLMP.

“The Serpent in the Grove,” a story written by Jamir Nazir and published by Granta in partnership with the Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize, was allegedly AI-generated, Publishers Lunch reports. On Bluesky, fiction writer Christopher Linforth and University of Pennsylvania professor Ethan Mollick separately describe running the story through the AI-checker Pangram, which detected red flags. When Granta learned of these allegations the editors asked Claude.ai whether the story had been written with AI, and the response suggested that the story was “almost certainly not produced unaided by a human,” pointing to passages that are specific enough that it would have been hard for a model to write them unaided. “The intention of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize is to find writers from around the Commonwealth and bring them to global attention. It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism—we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know,” Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing said in a statement. “There is, however, a certain irony in the fact that beyond human hunches AI itself is the most efficient tool we have for revealing what is AI generated.”

The National Book Foundation announced today that it has elected four new members to its board of directors: Greg Greeley, CEO of Simon & Schuster; Franklin Leonard, founder and CEO of the Black List; Elizabeth McNamara, a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine; and Miwa Messer, executive producer of author events and content at Barnes & Noble. The four new members join eighteen others on the organization’s board. “Greg, Franklin, Elizabeth, and Miwa bring significant experience in the literary ecosystem, a deep commitment to the written word, and a shared vision that access to books and reading are for everyone, everywhere,” said Ruth Dickey, executive director of the National Book Foundation. “It is our honor to work alongside them to champion the work of writers and translators and celebrate the joys of reading.”

Sales in the first quarter of 2026 are up among the more than 1,400 publishers who report revenue to the Association of American Publishers, according to Publishers Weekly. Compared to the first quarter of 2025, sales rose 0.9 percent, with increases seen in every category except for adult books and religion. Professional and scholarly books and those from university presses both posted increases of 5.7 percent, and sales of children’s and YA books rose 2.6 percent. “The 2.6 percent increase in the children’s/YA segment was due entirely to a 16.8 percent jump in sales in the relatively small nonfiction category. The two most important formats, paperback and hardcover, had sales of 23.2 percent and 9.1 percent, respectively.”

The Society of Authors and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) have joined forces to issue a new report, How to Protect Against Scammers: A Guide for Authors. This guidance comes on the heels of reports from both organizations that AI scams coaxing writers to pay money or give up rights to their work are becoming a more pressing issue on both sides of the pond. “Even the most vigilant of writers are understandably falling prey to these scams,” WGGB General Secretary Ellie Peers said. “We therefore hope that our new joint guidance with the Society of Authors will help authors assess whether opportunities are genuine or fraudulent, provide practical actions they can take to protect themselves, and signpost sources of further support and expert advice.” For more information, read “Beware of Scams Targeting Writers,” a collection of coverage from Poets & Writers Magazine.

New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani announced on Friday that the 2027 Fiscal Year Budget will add $31.7 million in permanent funding to the baseline for the city’s three public library systems: the Queens Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the New York Public Library. In the past, it wasn’t a guarantee that New York’s libraries would have funding restored each year, creating uncertainty around long-term decisions. “For too long, library funding has been treated like a political bargaining chip and fought over every single year,” Mayor Mamdani said at a press conference. “By baselining this funding, we are giving every branch in every borough the stability to plan ahead, hire staff and serve New Yorkers without wondering if the money will disappear next spring.”

Researchers at Trinity College Dublin have discovered the oldest-surviving English poem, the Associated Press reports. The Old English verse, “Caedmon’s Hymn,” was written by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the seventh century and unearthed within a manuscript of a Latin ecclesiastical history dating back to the ninth century. “Prior to the discovery of [this] manuscript, the earliest one was from the early twelfth century. So this is three centuries earlier than that. And so it attests to the importance that was already being attached to the English in the early [ninth] century,” Mark Faulkner, an associate professor of medieval literature at Trinity, told the AP. It appears that Caedmon wrote these lines after attending a feast where others were reciting poetry, prompting him to excuse himself because he was embarrassed that he didn’t have anything to contribute.

Prolific audiobook narrator Lindsay Dorcus is among a group of six Illinois voice actors, podcasters, and journalists bringing class action lawsuits against tech companies that trained AI models on their “voice footprints,” Publishers Lunch reports. Nine separate lawsuits brought against Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, ElevenLabs, Adobe, and Samsung allege that the vocal talents’ works were “scraped” from internet sources for training purposes without the narrators’ consent, a violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). “The Amazon suit is particularly pointed on the topic of audiobook narration, claiming that Amazon’s ignoring BIPA was ‘a deliberate institutional decision.’”

“Archaeologists working in Egypt have discovered a remarkable combination of Homeric epic and Egyptian ritual: a 2,000-year-old mummy with a papyrus fragment of the Iliad sealed in a clay packet outside its wrappings,” the New York Times reports. The papyrus fragment was unearthed at a burial site known as Oxyrhynchus, where it accompanied the mummy of a non-royal male, bundled close to the body. Scholars speculate that the passage served as more than good reading on the long path to eternity: “For a Roman-era Egyptian, the Iliad—specifically some lines from Book 2’s ‘Catalogue of Ships’—was perhaps as crucial for navigating the afterlife as a magical spell.” 

Final approval of a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and authors whose works were used to train its AI model Claude stalled yesterday as the judge in the case asked for more details about “issues including lawyers’ fees and payments to lead ​plaintiffs in what is the largest known U.S. copyright settlement,” Reuters reports. The settlement had received initial approval from Judge William Alsup, now retired, in September 2025, making it the first major U.S. case settled concerning authors’ rights in the training of AI. “Authors and other copyright holders filed claims covering over 92 percent of the more than 480,000 works included in the settlement, an attorney for the authors said during the hearing. The settlement has ​spurred objections from authors who have argued it is not large enough, overcompensates ​the plaintiffs’ attorneys, or wrongly excludes some copyright owners.”

American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney has won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize for her debut collection, Joy Is My Middle Name (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025). She received £20,000 (approximately $26,794). The other poet shortlisted for this year’s prize were Harriet Armstrong for To Rest Our Minds and Bodies (Les Fugitives), Colwill Brown for We Pretty Pieces of Flesh (Vintage), Suzannah V. Evans for Under the Blue (Bloomsbury), Seán Hewitt for Open, Heaven (Vintage), and Derek Owusu for Borderline Fiction (Canongate). The judges were Irenosen Okojie, Joe Dunthorne, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Prajwal Parajuly, and Eley Williams. The annual award celebrates “exceptional literary talent” under the age of forty. 

The New York Public Library and Random House Publishing Group are partnering to offer the Kate Medina Fellowship for Literary Narrative Nonfiction to support writers whose projects “engage meaningfully” with the library’s onsite collections, including manuscripts, archives, books, photographs, prints, maps, newspapers, and journals. The selected fellow will receive a stipend of $30,000 to support four months of research between September 1, 2026, and March 15, 2027. Applications are due June 15.

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller list for the week ending May 10, 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.” The top five fiction titles are: 1. The Calamity Club (Spiegel & Grau) by Kathryn Stockett, 2. John of John (Grove Press) by Douglas Stuart, 3. Heart the Lover (Grove Press) by Lily King, 4. I Who Have Never Known Men (Transit Books) by Jacqueline Harpman, and 5. On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) (New Directions) by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland.