Daily News

Kelvin Watson, executive director of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District (LVCCLD), has been named Library Journal’s 2026 Librarian of the Year. Starting this new role in the spring of 2021, after COVID-19 shutdowns, and serving as the first full-time African American library director in the state of Nevada, Watson and his leadership has led to LVCCLD receiving numerous awards, such as the American Library Association (ALA)/Information Today, Inc. Library of the Future Award (from 2022-2024); the 2023 ALA Medal of Excellence Award; and the 2023 Urban Libraries Council Innovation Award for Anti-Racism, Digital Equity, and Inclusion, among others. Watson remarked that his basic principles of access, discovery, and delivery have remained consistent for him throughout the years. “Those three words have been with me, probably, my entire library career.” 

The New York Times takes a look at what drove the book business in 2025, a year when readers bought around 184 million print adult fiction books. In a nutshell, some of this year’s biggest books were genre novels, sales of romance titles are still rising, and the Bible is a best-seller. “One prediction that appears overblown is the idea that readers would fully adopt digital book formats, causing sales of print books to plummet the way sales of physical newspapers have. But people seem to like reading paper books, which make up roughly three-quarters of book sales, according to the Association of American Publishers. At the same time, sales of e-books have shrunk, even after all but replacing the mass market paperback during the 2010s.”

Kristin Hannah’s best-selling novel The Women was among the most checked-out books in U.S. public libraries this year, NPR reports. “As it happens, books by women dominated most-borrowed library lists in 2025.... Three of the top ten titles for the country’s biggest public library system, in New York City, were part of a best-selling romantasy series by Rebecca Yarros: Fourth Wing, Iron Flame and Onyx Storm.”

Bethanne Patrick writes for the Washington Post about V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night (Random House, 2023) and how the novel illuminates the experiences of civilian women during the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. Ganeshananthan says she wanted “to put those women at the center…. Students, dissidents, health-care workers, people living in proximity to those bearing arms, people displaced from their homes, all of that.” She adds, “my novel is in part about a woman’s mind and consciousness. I’m thrilled to get the opportunity to go beyond why that’s a worthy topic and delve into what she thinks, the very real and varied kinds of labor she undertakes in a world that would try to give her less agency than she would seize for herself.” Brotherless Night has received multiple awards including the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024, and the Asian Prize for Fiction in 2023.

The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that Amanda Jones’s 2022 defamation case against two men who accused her of promoting pornography to children can continue, Publishers Weekly reports. Jones, a school librarian, spoke up against proposed book bans and the censorship of books about LGBTQ people and people of color. After the men claimed she was advocating to make pornography accessible to children and grooming them, she filed a defamation lawsuit. After multiple dismissals and denied appeals, the Louisiana Supreme Court ordered the appeals court to hear the case on the merits. One of the justices filed a concurrence, stating, “The burden will be on defendants to prove that plaintiff did in fact do the acts they have publicly accused her of.” Jones is not seeking significant damages—just $1 and an apology. “We teach our children to report and speak out against bullying, and that is what I am doing,” she said.

Emily Eakin writes for the New York Times about the “plagiarism plot” in contemporary literature. Referencing works such as Yellowface (William Morrow, 2023) by R. F. Kuang, A Lonely Man (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) by Chris Power, and Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024) by Danzy Senna, among others, Eakin writes, “it would be possible to assemble an entire library of diverting and accomplished contemporary work fixated on literary imitation, appropriation, and theft.” While she understands the “anxiety of influence” for writers of fiction as a “hazard of the trade,” Eakin argues that the presence of these stories has oversaturated the literary landscape.

HarperCollins has cut ties with children’s book author David Walliams, and he has been dropped from the Waterstones children’s book festival, following “allegations of inappropriate behavior towards young women” and “junior female staff” at HarperCollins UK, the Guardian reports. “One woman who raised concerns is understood to have left the company after reaching a settlement that included a five-figure payout. After the investigation, the publisher decided it would no longer release new titles by the author.” Walliams has denied the allegations.

Louis Menand writes in the New Yorker about the slow struggle of the dictionary, once a staple of every household, in the age of the internet. A new book, Stefan Fatsis’s Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary (Atlantic Monthly Press), serves as “a good-natured and sympathetic account of what seems to be a losing struggle,” he writes. “Fatsis concludes, a little reluctantly, not only that the dictionary may be on its last legs as a commercial enterprise but that lexicographical expertise is expiring with it. He cites an estimate that, twenty-five years ago, there were two hundred full-time lexicographers in the U.S. Today, he thinks that the number is ‘probably closer to thirty.’”

The Unterberg Poetry Center of New York City’s 92nd Street Y has digitized hundreds of audio recordings from its decades of events with literary luminaries, giving today’s listeners “a glimpse into history and a taste of what the writers themselves were like in public,” the New York Times reports. The recordings, the earliest of which date to 1949, include audio from events with Isaac Asimov, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Anaïs Min, and more, capturing authors’ tics, nerves, and charm. “Tom Wolfe was a fast talker. Eudora Welty had a musical Southern drawl. Kurt Vonnegut’s jokes got belly laughs.”

Novelist Dinaw Mengestu, who leads the Center for Ethics and Writing at Bard College, has been elected president of PEN America, reports the New York Times. This change in leadership comes at a time when PEN is navigating “rising challenges to free speech across the country along with continuing fallout from criticism of its own response to the war in Gaza.” When asked about his priorities as president, Mengestu stated, “We really need to have an active literary presence on the board. It’s important that the free expression work is loud and at the forefront, and that it’s happening in partnership with the literary community. We also need to deepen our relationships with PEN International chapters. There’s a strong antidemocratic stream moving throughout the world. If there’s a moment when we can’t become a purely internal organization, it’s now.” 

A desire for escapist reading may be displacing readers’ interest in nonfiction, editor Emma Loffhagen writes for the Guardian. Disillusionment and weariness from relentless bad news seem to be driving the trend: A decade ago, during the era of Brexit and the first Trump administration, “it felt as though reading itself was part of the civic response, a way to understand what was happening, and perhaps influence what might happen next. Fast forward to the present day, and the picture is starting to look different: a recent report from NielsenIQ found that trade nonfiction sales have slipped sharply.” Podcasts may also be offering readers competing sources of information about matters of the day, futhering the move away from nonfiction books.

PEN America has released a list of the top 52 banned books in public schools since 2021, when the organization began documenting “the unprecedented wave of censorship that now impacts millions of students across 45 states.” Leading the list is best-selling author John Green’s Looking for Alaska, which was banned 147 times. Two titles by Toni Morrison—The Bluest Eyes, banned 147 times, and Beloved, banned 77 times—are also on the list, which includes winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Stonewall and Lambda Literary Awards. In total, PEN America reports nearly 23,000 book bans in public schools since 2021, a figure it describes as “systemic censorship never before seen in the lives of living Americans.”

Bennington College in Vermont has launched a new BFA program in creative writing through the college’s Conservatory for Creative Writing, the Bennington Banner reports. “While designed specifically for transfer students—rising sophomores and juniors—the program offers pathways for other prospective students, including first-year students, those continuing after an associate’s degree, and those who have taken a break from college. Students entering as sophomores will begin with general curriculum coursework before transitioning into the BFA; juniors transfer directly into the core creative writing program.”

Publishers Weekly looks at the steadily declining popularity of the mass market paperback, which from the late 1960s to the mid-90s drew millions of readers with its low prices and widespread availability. “The decision made this winter by ReaderLink to stop distributing mass market paperback books at the end of 2025 was the latest blow to a format that has seen its popularity decline for years. According to Circana BookScan, mass market unit sales plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84 percent, and sales this year through October were about 15 million units.”