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A new effort at Riverhead Books will bring more Chinese language literature in translation to American readers, NPR reports. Led by editor Han Zhang, the initiative aims to circumvent systemics obstacles, “both real and imagined,” to “doing business with a country with a pretty intensive censorship structure in place” and offer translations that convey the richness and range of contemporary Chinese literature. The first book in Zhang’s program, Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang, was released last week. “I think, for a long time, the perception of Chinese literature among Western readers has been quite fixed,” says Yeuran. “It’s often seen as either heavily influenced by Chinese culture, or focused on people living rural, impoverished lives. Which has nothing to do with our lives today.” Other books in Zhang’s lineup include titles from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The technology studio Hidden Door has opened early access to its literary role-playing platform, Publishers Weekly reports. Hidden Door promises fans of titles such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz an “immersive entertainment” experience through choose-your-own-adventure storytelling within the worlds of their favorite books. The studio uses a mix of machine learning technology and partnerships with publishers to give readers the power to “explore, expand, and remix” fictional narratives. Hidden Door is primarily using titles in the public domain but is working on licensing agreements for select titles that will involve a revenue-sharing component.

An exhibition featuring the prolific yet often overlooked British poet, literary critic, translator, novelist, anthologist, and biographer Richard Aldington will open at the Grolier Club in New York City next month, Fine Books & Collections reports. Richard Aldington: Versatile Man of Letters will celebrate Aldington’s life and legacy through more than a hundred objects including first editions, typescripts, letters, photographs, and ephemera. The exhibition will run from September 11 through November 15.

A federal judge has sided with six publishers, the Authors Guild, and several authors and students in their lawsuit against Florida over a law that bans books that “describe sexual content” in school libraries, Publishers Lunch reports. The law banned books such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Erica Ackerberg writes for the New York Times about a recently published book that collects five hundred years of author portraits. Edited by Alexandra Ault and Catharine MacLeod, Writers Revealed: Treasures from the British Library and the National Portrait Gallery, London (National Portrait Gallery, 2025) includes portraits of John Donne, John Keats, and George Eliot, in addition to other renowned English authors.

The inaugural Story Feast festival will take place in London on September 13, with the goal of transforming market perceptions and creating more opportunities for East and Southeast Asian authors in the U.K. publishing industry, Publishers Weekly reports. This year’s Story Feast has obtained sponsorship from several publishers including Walker Books, Penguin Random House, Pan Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster, and will feature five panels with approximately twenty speakers across children’s and adult literature.

Ten authors nominated for this year’s Polari prizes, a set of U.K. awards that celebrate LGBTQ+ literature, have withdrawn their books from consideration over the longlisting of John Boyne, who has described himself as a TERF, the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, the Guardian reports. Two judges have also withdrawn from the jury, and more than eight hundred writers and publishing industry workers have signed a statement calling on Polari to formally remove Boyne from the longlist. The statement says that Boyne’s “public statements on trans rights and identity are incompatible with the LGBTQ+ community’s most basic standards of inclusion,” and points out “the context of rising anti-trans hatred and systematic exclusion of trans people from public life in the U.K. and across the world.” In a statement to the Guardian, the Polari prize said: “The hurt and anger caused has been a matter of deep concern to everyone associated with the prize, for which we sincerely apologize. We accept and respect the decisions of those writers and judges who have chosen to withdraw.” Though the prize is set to continue this year, the Polari prize added that it “will be undertaking a full review of the prize processes, consulting representatives from across the community ahead of next year’s awards, taking on board the learnings from this year.”

The Associated Press (AP) informed its freelance book reviewers that it will end its weekly reviews starting September 1, Publishers Lunch reports. The AP said it will “continue covering books as stories,” which will be written by journalists on staff. The AP added that the “difficult decision” was made after reviewing the AP’s story offerings and readership and determining that “the audience for book reviews is relatively low.”

The Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) has announced that board chair Tieshena Davis will step down after just over a year in the role, Publishers Weekly reports. IBPA vice chair Renita Bryant will lead the board until it elects Davis’s successor.

“The fundamental trait of the novels that I like is that people are always wrong,” André Aciman tells the New Yorker. “My own life has been one of always reading people and mistaking one thing for another, so it has been very useful for me to find that the great novelists I love also seem to have been in a state of perpetual error.” Among those novels he discusses is Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton and Emma by Jane Austen. 

Fearing legal action by the state, school districts in nine Florida counties have removed hundreds of books from libraries ahead of the new school year, PEN America reports. This latest wave of book bans follows a censorship campaign launched by the Florida Department of Education against Hillsborough County, which resulted in the removal of over six hundred titles from school library shelves in May, even though these titles had no challenges filed against them and did not violate state law.

The National Association of Black Bookstores (NAB2), a member-based nonprofit that aims to support and promote Black booksellers, has launched, Publishers Weekly reports. NAB2 was established by Kevin Johnson, the owner of Underground Books in Sacramento, California, who is also a former professional basketball player. Johnson says he was inspired to launch NAB2 to honor his mother, “Mother Rose” Peat West, who founded Underground Books in 2003 and died last year.

For the New York Times Magazine, Niela Orr writes about Jamaica Kincaid and her new essay collection, Putting Myself Together: Writing, 1974–, published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Orr describes how Kincaid has carried her childhood creativity through five decades of writing: “For the person with a lifelong interest in the way power works, her power is nurturing her access to that impressionable voice, being a student and devotee of it,” Orr writes. “[Kincaid] knows that maturity is not just about repressing the inner child or cradling her but learning how to rouse her from sleep. The secret is in recognizing how much of her she still has access to.”

Independent Publishers Group (IPG) has cut its publishing staff by a third and will reduce its title count by approximately 25 percent, Publishers Weekly reports. Joe Matthews, the CEO of IPG, has characterized the layoffs as part of “a year of transition.”

Kevin Breen writes for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses about how to identify generative AI in the publishing world. Breen suggests readers look out for writing that is more generalized, stories that have “perfect grammar but thin substance,” and prose that “favors summary and relies less on complex, multi-sentence exchanges of dialogue (for example).” He also encourages readers to trust their critical instincts and recommends some tools that can identify content that was generated by AI.

Yale Library has announced its fall exhibitions at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Fine Books & Collections reports. Open from September 2 through May 3, 2026, Textured Stories: The Chirimen Books of Modern Japan will focus on the history of illustrated Japanese crêpe-paper books, which typically feature handmade pages and stories drawn from Japanese fairy tales and folklore. Running concurrently until March 1, 2026, Unfolding Events: Exploring Past and Present in Artists’ Books will display more than thirty artists’ books by contemporary, mostly American artists.

Author J.B. MacKinnon, who is based in Vancouver, has filed four proposed class action lawsuits against technology companies for illegally using copyrighted works by Canadian writers to train their LLMs, Publishers Weekly reports. MacKinnon serves as the representative plaintiff in separate suits against Nvidia, Meta, Anthropic, and Databricks Inc. The lawsuits claim these companies took steps to explicitly conceal their copyright infringement, removing copyright information of books before feeding them into their AI systems, and instructing their LLMs to respond misleadingly when asked about the use of copyrighted text.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.