Celebrated science fiction and fantasty publisher Tor will venture into commercial fiction with a new imprint, Publishers Weekly reports. Set to launch in January 2027, Wildthorn Books will publish fifteen to twenty titles each year in genres including commercial and upmarket women’s fiction, suspense, paranormal mystery, magical realism, speculative nonfiction, and historical fantasy. Devi Pillai and Monique Patterson will lead the imprint. “‘Readers have changed—and so has the market,’ said Pillai in a statement, noting that as commercial fiction continues to blend with genre, it became apparent that Tor ‘was the perfect house to create Wildthorn.’”

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Debut Novel. From this longlist, three finalists will be announced in February, and the winning book will be announced in March. This year’s longlisted titles are Trip by Amie Barrodale (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown (Henry Holt), The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Crown), The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne (Little, Brown), Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Pantheon), North Sun by Ethan Rutherford (Deep Vellum), Blob by Maggie Su (Harper), and Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee (Summit Books). These titles were selected from from a pool of 146 novels published by debut novelists in 2025. Rachel Beanland, Dionne Irving, and Taymour Soomro judged.

Renowned agent Georges Borchardt, who had “an astute eye for literary talent” and introduced American readers to the daring and the avante-garde, died on Sunday at the age of ninety-seven, the New York Times reports. “At various times, he or the Manhattan agency that he and his wife, Anne Borchardt, founded in 1967, Georges Borchardt Inc., represented five Nobel laureates, eight Pulitzer Prize-winners and one statesman, the French president Charles de Gaulle.” Borchardt is also remembered for having “arranged for the publication in English of Elie Wiesel’s searing Holocaust memoir Night after it was rejected by fourteen American publishers” and for spotting the brilliance in “an enigmatic but tender and often darkly funny French play written by a lanky Irishman”—Waiting for Godot. In an interview with the Paris Review, Borchardt reflected on his legacy: “I really feel in many cases that I’ve made it possible for a book to succeed and also made it possible for a writer to go on writing.” 

The National Book Critics Circle has announced the finalists for its annual awards in six categories—Autobiography, Biography, Criticism, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry—as well as the Barrios Book in Translation Prize and the John Leonard Prize. The winners will be named on March 26 at a public ceremony in New York City. The finalists in poetry are Yuki Tanaka for Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon), Rickey Laurentiis for Death of the First Idea (Knopf), Kevin Young for Night Watch (Knopf), Henri Cole for The Other Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Tolu Oloruntoba for Unravel (McClelland & Stewart). The finalists in fiction are Karen Russell for The Antidote (Knopf); Katie Kitamura for Audition (Riverhead); Solvej Balle for On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) (New Directions), translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell; Han King for We Do Not Part (Hogarth), translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris; and Angela Flournoy for The Wilderness (Mariner). The finalists for the John Leonard Prize are Nicholas Boggs for Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Evanthia Bromily for Crown (Grove); Saou Ichikawa for Hunchback (Hogarth), translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton; Liz Pelly for Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria/One Signal);  Hedgie Choi for Salvage (University of Wisconsin Press); and Lucas Schaefer for The Slip (Simon & Schuster). The finalists for the Barrios Book in Translation Prize are Yoko Tawada for Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (New Directions), translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda; Banu Mushtaq for Heart Lamp (And Other Stories), translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi; Hanna Stoltenberg for Near Distance (Biblioasis), translated from the Norwegian by Wendy H. Gabrielsen; Neige Sinno for Sad Tiger (Seven Stories), translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer; Markus Werner for The Frog in the Throat (NYRB Classics), translated from the German by Michael Hofmann; and Olga Ravn for The Wax Child (New Directions), translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken.

According to Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch, a recent case management update filed with the court by the attorneys in the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement reveals that there are currently eight-six opt-outs ahead of the extended deadline of January 29. “As for claims received for the pool of nearly 500,000 registered, infringed works, ‘the Settlement Administrator has received a total of 56,798 claims for 161,691 works.” At this rate, taking into account attorneys’ fees, each claimed work would be awarded over $8,000.

Min Jin Lee’s forthcoming novel, American Hagwon, her first since Pachinko, which has sold over a million copies and was named among the best novels of the 21st century by the New York Times, will explore the Korean obsession with education, the Associated Press reports. “‘We’re obsessed with education, and it became my obsession over why Koreans care so much,’ says Lee, whose American Hagwon, scheduled for Sept. 29, will likely be one of the year’s most anticipated books.” The book’s publisher, Cardinal, is calling it a look into “what happens when the rules shift, the world order becomes suddenly unrecognizable and benchmarks of success are no longer a guarantee.”

Canadian poet Karen Solie is the winner of the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize for her collection Wellwater, the Guardian reports. Solie was announced as the winner at a ceremony in London on Monday; she will receive £25,000 (approximately $33,638.50) from the T. S. Eliot Foundation. The annual prize is awarded to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland. “Wellwater emerged from a shortlist that included Tom Paulin’s Namanlagh, Isabelle Baafi’s Chaotic Good, Nick Makoha’s The New Carthaginians and Sarah Howe’s Foretokens.” The judges were Michael Hofmann, Patience Agbabi and Niall Campbell.

A new organization known as McCormack Writing Center will house the programs formerly known as Tin House Workshop, the organization announced on its website today. Founded in 2003 as a summer writers workshop and operated alongside the literary magazine Tin House and Tin House Books, the workshop expanded its programming to craft intensives, online classes, and residencies in subsequent years. The transition to the McCormack Writing Center follows the acquisition of the organization’s book publishing arm by Zando in 2025. Tin House Workshop lead staff Lance Cleland and A.L. Major will stay on through the transition, serving as executive director and director of programs respectively.

Who’s afraid of terminal punctuation? Many of us denizens of the digital age, Nitsuh Abebe argues in an On Language essay for the New York Times Magazine, discussing anxieties about tone as we struggle to make ourselves known in social media, e-mail, and texts. Abebe unpacks the hahas, emojis, and dropped periods that stand in for familiarity as face-to-face interaction grows sparser: “The issue, in other words, isn’t the writing. It’s the lack of context—the fact that more and more of what we communicate is aimed at somebody we don’t know or rarely speak to, with little base line of what we’re normally like.”

A partnership between One World and Little Free Library will place book-sharing boxes in twelve communities across the United States, each box stocked with titles that “help readers understand and shape our changing world,” Publishers Weekly reports. Books from the One World Essentials line—including Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, and The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio—will be distributed in custom book-sharing boxes that honor a given title. Each will placed in a neighborhood with a connection to the author or the book. “The books in this series are not just about thinking, but rethinking, not just observing, but getting close, not just catharsis but movement to action,” says Chris Jackson, One World publisher and editor in chief. “Most of all, they’re meant to be freely read and shared—and we’re excited to get them to more readers through this exciting partnership with Little Free Library.”

The Nero Book Awards, given annually to “celebrate exceptional writing from authors based in the U.K. and Ireland,” has announced its 2025 winners. Benjamin Wood won in fiction for Seascraper (Viking); Claire Lynch won in debut fiction for A Family Matter (Chatto & Windus); Jamila Gavin won in children’s fiction for My Soul, A Shining Tree (Farshore); and Sarah Perry won in nonfiction for Death of an Ordinary Man (Jonathan Cape). Each winner receives £5,000 (approximately $6,690) and is in the running to win the Nero Gold Prize for the best overall book of the year, set to be announced in March and including a £30,000 cash prize (approximately $40,140). 

Hachette Book Group (HBG) and Cengage are joining the copyright lawsuit against Google, reports Publishers Lunch. This class action suit was initiated by writers and illustrators in 2023, accusing the tech behemoth of copyright infringement in using their books to train Gemini, Google’s AI system. HBG and Cengage will represent the interests of publishers, a previously unrepresented class of rightsholders in the suit. The motion states, “They wish to stand alongside their authors in vindicating copyright owners’ rights” as “[p]ublishers are significant stakeholders in this case, with a parallel but distinct set of interests and arguments to make at a historic trial.”

According to six small press editors Emmeline Clein at Cultured recently spoke with, reissuing out-of-print and invigoratingly unique books is publishing’s hottest trend. “Longstanding institutions like New York Review Books, Semiotext(e), and New Directions are flourishing alongside younger upstarts like Hagfish and McNally Editions, while new presses continue to crop up—Doubleday just announced the debut of its own reissue imprint, Outsider Editions,” Clein writes. A new wave of unusual titles from long ago are offsetting more expected, mainstream books. Edwin Frank of New York Review Books adds, “It’s analogous to the way people began to collect vinyl. There became a historical dimension to people’s awareness and their cultural commitment. It all started up in the wake of the pandemic.” 

Wiley has announced the appointment of its first chief of AI and data services officer, Publishers Weekly reports. In the new role, Armughan Rafat will focus on “developing and commercializing AI-ready content and data products for AI developers and corporate R&D teams.” The position has been created to “accelerate Wiley’s effort to license its content to AI developers as well as companies building out their AI applications.” Since January 2024, Wiley has generated nearly $100 million in revenue from AI licensing, including deals with Anthropic, the AI corporation sued in a class-action lawsuit brought by writers for copyright infringement.

For the New York Times, Colin Moynihan reports on a “previously undisclosed trove of correspondence” between Harper Lee and fellow Alabama writer Jo Beth McDaniel. The “dozens” of letters newly shared by McDaniel offer “a fuller view of [Lee’s] take on the Deep South’s transition from Depression-era segregation to the Civil Rights movement,” among other subjects, and help sketch out the beliefs of the intensely private writer, who had last given a formal interview in the 1960s. “This is a marvelous opportunity to take a more nuanced view of Harper Lee,” says Lee biographer Charles J. Shields. In one 1992 letter, Lee remarks on the response of white Southerners to pushes for Black equality: “Many Christians were challenged for the first time to be Christians. ...What was heart-breaking was to discover that people you loved—friends, relatives, neighbors—whom you assumed were civilized, harbored the most vicious feelings.”

Five writers are included in the 2026 class of USA Fellows, announced today by the Chicago-based arts funding organization United States Artists. Poets Sarah Aziza and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, nonfiction writer Mayuk Sen, sequential artist Lauren Rebecca Weinstein, and multigenre writer and artist Johanna Hedva will each receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards, “granting recipients the freedom to allocate funds to their unique needs.” Fifty artists from twenty-one states comprise this year’s class of fellows, with grants made in ten creative disciplines. Nominations for the fellowships come from an anonymous, rotating group of arts professionals, with finalists identified by panels of experts in each discipline. The 2026 class of fellows marks “two decades of unrestricted support that nurtures artists’ creative freedom and drives lasting impact” as the program hits its twentieth anniversary year.

Katie Couric has launched her own book club, KCBC (Katie Couric Book Club), and chosen Virginia Evans’s novel The Correspondent (Crown, 2025) as its inaugural title, the journalist and author announced via Katie Couric Media. “As some of you might have heard, my 2026 resolution can be summed up in four words: scroll less, read more. To that end, and in an effort to hold myself accountable, I’ve started a book club! I’m so excited. My goal is to read in community, as they say, one book a month.” Couric will host a conversation with Evans about the book on Monday, January 19, on Substack.

Bestselling author Colleen Hoover has revealed in an Instagram story that she recently received a cancer diagnosis, USA Today reports. The author of It Ends With Us (Atria Books, 2016) and Verity (Grand Central Publishing, 2021) noted her “second to last day of radiation” at a Texas Oncology location and added that the unspecified type of cancer had been “removed.”

At least eight college and university libraries across the country—in Massachusetts, Kentucky, Missouri, and Nebraska—received bomb threats this week, Book Riot reports. “Last October, at least fifteen colleges and universities received bomb threats to their libraries. Yesterday, January 12, 2025—the first day back on campus for many universities following winter break—at least eight college and university received similar library bomb threats.”

Adelaide Writers’ Week, one of Australia’s biggest cultural festivals, has been cancelled in the backlash following the removal of Australian Palestinian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the event’s lineup, the Guardian reports. The board of the festival said last week that Abdel-Fattah, “a vocal critic of Israel,” had been disinvited due to “insensitivities” following the mass shooting at a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach last month. After word of the author’s removal spread, 180 other writers scheduled to appear withdrew from the festival, including former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and British author Zadie Smith. All but one member of the board have now resigned, including the director who had invited Abdel-Fattah.