Nearly $350,000 was awarded to writers, editors, and translators at last night’s annual PEN America Literary Awards held in New York City, Publishers Weekly reports. Those honored included Jamaica Kincaid, who received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974– (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Nicholas Boggs, who received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Edwidge Danticat received the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, honoring the Haitian American novelist, short story writer, and memoirist for her extraordinary body of work. The evening “marked a return to form for the free speech organization’s flagship literary prizes, which had been diminished in recent years by a boycott, led by Writers Against the War in Gaza, which was lifted on December 31, 2025. Due to numerous authors withdrawing their books from consideration, the ceremony and a number of awards were canceled in 2024. Last year, the ceremony returned but one of its top prizes, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was not conferred due to author withdrawals.”
Daily News
Every day the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine scan the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know.
As audiobooks and romantasy novels converge in popularity, Vanessa Romo of NPR talks to Antony Palmini, the audiobook rising star who has voiced the “book boyfriends” of some of the romantasy genre’s biggest titles. Palmini has offered his resonant baritone to leading characters in series including A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fae & Alchemy, participating in the recordings of more than fifty audiobooks last year. Early hints of Palmini’s path to “admittedly niche celebrity” came while working at a Blockbuster video store as a teenager, when a coworker admired his voice on the phone to customers: “‘There’s like a voice that’s coming out that sounds kind of, dare I say, sexy,’ he said, recalling his friend’s words.”
JD Vance has announced the publication of his second memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, with HarperCollins this June, the Guardian reports. Vance’s earlier memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper, 2016), became a best-seller, “spending more than two hundred weeks on the New York Times list and selling more than five million copies worldwide, and was later adapted into a film by Ron Howard starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.” The new book is seen as a calculated move as Vance contends for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination.
A freelance writer is in hot water after the New York Times discovered he used artificial intelligence “to help write a book review that inadvertently incorporated elements of a Guardian review on the same title,” the Wrap reports. The Times has cut ties with the freelancer, Alex Preston, who used AI to write his January 6 review of the novel Watching Over Her (Simon & Schuster, 2026) by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, translated from French by written Frank Wynne, after a reader wrote in to alert the newspaper to the similarities with the Guardian review. “The Times then launched a review and spoke to Preston, who admitted he used an AI tool to help draft the piece and that he failed to catch the Guardian material before the paper published the review.”
The New York Times recently announced updates to its best-seller lists. “With audiobooks making up a larger share of how people consume books, we are broadening our audio offerings by adding two new lists: Audio Children’s (top 15) and Audio Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous (top 10). These additions round out our coverage of the audiobook segment, which currently includes Audio Fiction and Audio Nonfiction, and reflect [the newspaper’s] goal to publish lists that cover different formats through which readers—and increasingly listeners—purchase books.” The newspaper also announced that it would cease publication of the monthly Mass Market list; the weekly Paperback Nonfiction list will shift to monthly. The changes will go into effect online on April 1 and in print on April 12.
The judging panel of the 2026 International Booker Prize today announced the shortlist of six books that are competing for this years’ prize for fiction translated into English. They are The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin; She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel; The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin; On Earth as It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan; The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump; Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. The winner of the International Booker Prize, which will be announced on May 19, will receive £50,000 (approximately $66,226), with the money divided equally between the winning author and translator. Each shortlisted title will be awarded a prize of £5,000 (approximately $6,622), split between the author and the translator.
New legislation may aid prison libraries in delivering materials and preparing incarcerated individuals to transition home, reports Publishers Weekly. As the majority of the U.S.’s nine-hundred-plus prison libraries are often under-resourced and understaffed, the introduction of the Prison Libraries Act into the U.S. House of Representatives aims to offer one-year grants to “advance reintegration efforts, reduce recidivism, and increase educational opportunities,” per the bill. This would require $10 million in federal spending each year through 2031 and would allow “for more free resources to be made available, for people who are incarcerated to be viewed as members of the public, and for the public to think about how this is for the good of all of us,” says Jeanie Austin, a librarian at the San Francisco Public Library, which has a Jail and Reentry Services department.
Harlequin, a division of HarperCollins known for its romance books, is partnering with the AI entertainment company Dashverse to create microdramas inspired by the imprint’s titles, reports Publishers Lunch. These illustrated short-form videos will be available in English with the goal of offering readers a new way of experiencing beloved books such as Catherine Mann’s A Fairy-Tail Ending and JC Harroway’s Forbidden Fiji Nights With Her Rival. “This partnership with Dashverse represents an exciting opportunity to reimagine these cherished stories for a new audience, leveraging cutting-edge technology to bring them to life in an innovative and engaging medium,” says Harlequin EVP and publisher Brent Lewis.
April 7th is National Black Bookstore Day, established by the National Association of Black Bookstores (NAB2) “to increase visibility, drive engagement, and strengthen the long-term sustainability of Black-owned bookstores.” This nationwide movement is also meant to honor Georgia “Mother Rose” West, founder of Underground Books in Oak Park, California, and a notable figure in the Black literary community who passed in December 2024 at the age of 75. Among the resources the NAB2 provides in association with this special day are a bookstore directory to enable readers to find Black-owned bookstores throughout the U.S. and a report on the current state of Black bookstores, including the fact that Black-owned bookstores represent only eight percent of independent bookstores nationwide.
Ahead of the 30th annual celebration of National Poetry Month this April, the Academy of American Poets has announced its lineup of festivities: “free programs, resources, and events designed to make poetry accessible to everyone.” Offerings include curation of the Academy’s free Poem-A-Day e-mail series by chancellor emerita Dorianne Laux; free National Poetry Month posters featuring artwork by Alfredo Richner and words from U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze; and the annual Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day, celebrated on April 30. A virtual benefit for the Academy will take place on April 28, with benefits going to the organization’s K-12 poetry education programs.
The European and International Booksellers Federation has issued a statement condemning the arrest of four employees of a Hong Kong bookstore. The founder of the bookshop Book Punch, Pong Yat-ming, has been taken into police custody along with three booksellers from the shop; they stand accused of selling a biography of the imprisoned pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai. “The arrest of booksellers for distributing literature is an attack on the core mission of booksellers to provide access to diverse ideas and on the fundamental principle of intellectual freedom,” reads a statement from the EIBF. “EIBF calls for the immediate release of the arrested booksellers and urges the international community to join us in condemning these actions and to stand in solidarity with booksellers and publishers worldwide who face repression for their work.”
Winners of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) book awards for publishing year 2025 were announced last night at a ceremony in New York City. In a statement to the press, the NBCC spoke to the breadth and impact of this year’s honorees: “This year’s NBCC winners include books on timely and timeless topics: the present and future impact of new technologies, the power of storytelling in shaping a life, the importance of shining a light on forgotten or ignored histories, the lasting repercussions of sexual abuse, the complexity of geopolitics, the beauty of transformative narratives.” Kevin Young (Night Watch, Knopf), Han Kang (We Do Not Part, Hogarth, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris), Karen Hao (Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Penguin Press), Alex Green (A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled, Bellevue Literary Press) and Arundhati Roy (Mother Mary Comes to Me, Scribner) took home awards in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, biography, and autobiography, respectively. Critic Rhoda Feng received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, given to an NBCC member for exceptional work in the field. Other honors bestowed included the Toni Morrison Achievement Award, which recognizes “institutions that have made significant contributions to book culture,” and which was was jointly awarded to NPR and PBS. “At a time when some question the value of public, service-minded media, we salute PBS and NPR for all you have done for both book culture and American democracy,” said board member Jacob M. Appel of the award.
Bertelsmann, the parent company of Penguin Random House, is stepping up legal efforts to combat book bans, CEO Thomas Rabe told Reuters. “In January 2025, the Trump administration dismissed 11 complaints related to books banned by local school districts. ‘These are indeed factual book bans,’ Rabe said. Bertelsmann and its publishing arm are contesting the measures in court, and the group has so far won every legal case that has been decided, he added.”
“The Gathering,” a poem about the “relentlessness of the news cycle” by Partridge Boswell, has won the National Poetry Competition sponsored by the British arts organization Poetry Society, the Guardian reports. The poem was picked from more than 21,000 entries by poets in 113 countries. Boswell received £5,000 (approximately $6,680). “The speaker reflects on the tensions of personal grief against the backdrop of state violence in Gaza and elsewhere,” the judges said of the winning poem. “How do we maintain language’s potency amid the anaesthetising relentlessness of the news cycle? How do we resist false narratives, eclipsed histories?”
Marianthe Dresios and Omer Korkmaz, both first-year students at Johns Hopkins University, have penned a love letter to the semicolon, the disrespected and little-used punctuation mark that Kurt Vonnegut advised writers to avoid (“All they do is show you’ve been to college,” according to Vonnegut) for the school’s News-Letter. “The semicolon does not draw a sentence to a close. It holds its breath, waiting for the next clause to continue the message of the first. In the same way, the semicolon is not dead; it merely waits for us to love it again.”
The Associated Press reports that Tracy Kidder, the author of a dozen acclaimed nonfiction books, including The Soul of a New Machine (Little, Brown, 1981), which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, has died of lung cancer. He was 80.
Random House has announced its publication this September of Gloria Steinem’s memoir, An Unexpected Life, Publishers Marketplace reports. “Moving between memory and the present, Steinem examines the progress and setbacks of more than sixty years of activism and offers a message to new generations about what the ongoing fight will require—and the imagination it will demand,” said the publisher in a press release. The book was acquired by Random House vice president and executive editor Jamia Wilson; read a conversation between Wilson and Vivian Lee about Wilson’s beginnings at Feminist Press and the work of building a list in the September/October 2023 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Mystery surrounds a library book conscientiously returned by its reader before its due date—but over 10,500 miles away from where it was checked out, the Express & Star reports. Australian librarian Jessica Berry was baffled to discover a book in her return queue that had come from Gornal Library, a community library in the West Midlands of England. The book, a copy of Gill Hornby’s 2013 best-seller The Hive, has since been returned to Gornal, where it has been withdrawn from circulation. Although the book’s wandering days are over, tales of its exploits live on: “We’ve been entertaining some of our regulars with the story of this novel’s incredible journey,” said library assistant James Windsor.
Six books have been announced as the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction: The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet (Hutchinson Heinemann), Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health by Daisy Fancourt (Cornerstone Press), Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell (Picador), Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane Rogoyska (Allen Lane), Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton), and Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century by Ece Temelkuran (Canongate). “We awarded the first Women’s Prize for Nonfiction in 2024 because women’s voices were systemically underrepresented in most narrative nonfiction disciplines, as well as being overlooked in review coverage, award recognition and receiving lower advances,” said Claire Shanahan, executive director of the Women’s Prize Trust. “This exceptional shortlist... shines a light on the brilliant women writing such bold and accomplished nonfiction, for the pleasure of all booklovers, everywhere.” This year’s winner will be announced on June 11 at an event in London and will receive £30,000 (approximately $40,140).
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been named a Global Icon for Bvlgari’s 2026 Carrying Culture campaign, “becoming one of five women chosen by the Italian luxury house to front its Icons Minaudière collection,” according to Brittle Paper. The author of eight books, the most recent of which is the novel Dream Count, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2025, joins Canadian supermodel Linda Evangelista, Italian American actress Isabella Rossellini, South Korean actress Kim Ji-won, and South African architect Sumayya Vally in a campaign photographed by Ethan James Green and designed by Greek fashion designer Mary Katrantzou. (Read the profile of Adichie by Renée H. Shea from the July/August 2009 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)
Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly reports on statistics compiled by Bowker that show the total number of books published in the U.S. in 2025 jumped 32.5 percent over 2024, to more than four million books. “The increase was led by self-published works, for which the number of print and e-books...soared 38.7 percent to more than 3.5 million from 2.5 million in 2024.”
In an essay for the New York Times, David Streitfeld looks at the power of book reviews and how, back in 1993 at the Washington Post Book World, before the Jeff Bezos era, a review by Michael Dirda of a misunderstood novel by Annie Proulx had career-changing results for both Proulx and Larry McMurtry, who had been fired from Book World fifteen years earlier. “Here is a tale, in the dark for 30 years, about how book reviews are an engine that helps keep the culture running. It is about what can happen when you’re not ruled by data.”
Henry Grabar of the Atlantic covers the recent revival of Barnes & Noble (B&N). After becoming a private company in 2019, B&N acquired a new CEO, James Daunt, who subsequently changed the trajectory of the company, which was going down in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. Having previously founded an independent bookstore, Daunt changed what he calls B&N’s “retailer’s mindset” by giving authority to the local store managers, so they could choose what books to stock and promote, creating diversification across all stores. As a result, Barnes & Noble opened sixty new stores last year with the goal of doing the same this year as well. Grabar writes: “Daunt believes that Barnes & Noble makes room for a type of book buyer who might not feel at ease in independent bookstores, in which customers, he says, are met with a ‘sort of scrutiny, and also a sense of intellectual expectation.’” B&N is also “a popular stage set for TikToks,” appealing to teenagers with its laid-back atmosphere and wide aisles.
Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James is developing two new TV projects with Motive Pictures, an independent British production company, Deadline reports. Previously, James collaborated with Motive on his first show, Get Millie Black, which aired in both the U.S. and the U.K. in 2024 and 2025, respectively. The duo is back and working on two dramas, one of which “is being billed as a blood-soaked odyssey into the lawless Caribbean, set during the Golden Age of piracy,” and the other of which is “a revenge epic and geopolitical thriller that plays out across the Americas.”
The HarperCollins Union has secured the highest starting salary in the publishing industry with a new contract, reports Publishers Lunch. This three-year contract mandates a beginning salary of $52,500, for a 35-hour week, which will increase annually to reach up to $55,200 in 2028. Additionally, all covered employees will receive annual pay increases, one floating holiday was included to a total of eighteen throughout the calendar year, and entry-level employees must be considered for a promotion after two years. “We were able to achieve provisions that will provide life changing support to current members, and a more sustainable future for new employees,” says Caitlin Stamper, the union chair and a Harper Children’s designer.
Jeff Shotts has been announced as the winner of the 2026 A.P. Anderson Award, bestowed by the Anderson Center at Tower View to honor an individual for “significant contributions to the cultural and artistic life of Minnesota.” An editor at Graywolf Press for nearly thirty years and the press’s current executive editor, Shotts has acquired and edited works that have received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and awards from the National Book Critics Circle, among other accolades. “Editors... work in the shadows and rarely get the acclaim they deserve,” wrote Dobby Gibson, one of Shotts’s nominators, in a statement shared by the Anderson Center. “Jeff’s work at Graywolf has strengthened Minnesota’s stature as a center of literary arts. By nurturing world-class talent from Minnesota and beyond, he ensures the Twin Cities are not just a regional hub but a national and international presence in literature. And most important of all, Jeff has ensured Graywolf—and by extension Minnesota—fosters a culture of literary risk, innovation, and excellence.”
For the New York Times, Alexandra Alter considers the curious case of Shy Girl, the buzzy self-published horror novel picked up by Hachette—and then pulled from publication after evidence of AI use in its authorship. After online speculation about the book’s voice and the telltale tics of AI, Max Spero, the founder and chief executive of the AI-detection company Pangram, ran the book through its software, finding that an estimated 78 percent of the book was AI-generated. Hachette subsequently cancelled the book’s planned publication in the United States and ceased printing the title in the U.K. While AI has roiled the online book marketplace for time, Shy Girl may be the “first commercial novel from a major publishing house to be pulled over evidence of AI use. Its cancellation is a sign that AI writing is not only appearing in cheap self-published e-books that are flooding Amazon but is seeping into even traditionally published fiction.”
Amazon Literary Partnership has opened applications for its 2026 grants cycle, offering funding to “literary nonprofits with the aim of empowering writers, helping them create, publish, learn, teach, experiment, and thrive.” Grants are awarded in amounts ranging from $5,000 to $20,000; in 2025, ninety-nine Amazon Literary Partnership grants offered a total of $1 million in funding to organizations across the United States. Recent recipients of grants include the National Book Foundation, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), Girls Write Now, and Cave Canem. Applications for this year’s grants are due May 1. Recepients will be announced in July.
Utah has added another book to its list of banned titles, reports The Salt Lake Tribune. Looking for Alaska (Dutton Books for Young Readers, 2005) by John Green is now the twenty-eighth title to be banned from Utah public schools. This young adult fiction book was also among the top fifty-two books banned from U.S. schools in 2025, according to PEN America. Utah law requires that a title be banned from public schools if at least three school districts determine there to be indecent content found within. On Green’s website, he states that a sex scene from the book is frequently the most cited reason for why it has been banned.
Smithsonian Magazine covers a new exhibition at Yale Library that explores the history of typos across five hundred years. Entitled “‘Beauties of My Style’: Errata and the Printed Mistake” and opening on March 30 at the university’s Sterling Memorial Library, this exhibition shows errors found in Ulysses, the Bible, and many more well-known titles. According to the library, “errors committed” lists—acknowledging typos and including apologies and additions—first appeared in the fifteenth century, with authors placing these slips in the back of their books. The exhibition looks at errata lists alongside their respective texts, exploring themes such as “censorship, misrepresentation, intervention, and instability,” per the library’s statement.
The executive director of the Modern Language Association (MLA), Paula M. Krebs, will be stepping down from her position in 2027. Having been with the MLA for close to a decade, Krebs has led the association “through a period of significant evolution, guiding the organization as it strategized to respond to the impact of new technologies, the COVID-19 pandemic, and legislative challenges to higher education.” Of her time spent with the MLA, Krebs notes, “As a first-generation college student, I’ve always had a bit of an outsider perspective, and this organization welcomed that, allowing me to take some risks and try some new things.” The executive council plans to start searching for Krebs’s replacement in the coming weeks.
Publishers Weekly reports on the surprise Chapter 11 filing of Baker & Taylor, which reveals debts to thousands of creditors that are estimated to total between $100 million and $500 million; the company’s estimated remaining assets are valued at $1 million to $10 million. Those owed money include Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins, which are due $23.4 million, $16.4 million, and $15.6 million respectively; Ingram, Wiley, Norton, and multiple public libraries are also on the list of those to whom Baker & Taylor is in debt. “Given the huge gap between Baker & Taylor’s assets and what they owe their creditors, one observer told Publishers Weekly that companies will be lucky to receive pennies on the dollar.”
Six novels have been announced as the shortlist for the second annual Climate Fiction Prize: Dusk by Robbie Arnott (Chatto & Windus), The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha (John Murray Press), Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Simon & Schuster) Hum by Helen Phillips (Atlantic Books), Endling by Maria Reva (Virago), and The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (Granta Books). Sponsored by the British nonprofit Climate Spring, the prize “celebrates the most inspiring novels tackling the climate crisis” as part of the organization’s broader mission to leverage the power of storytelling to address climate change. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced May 27 and will receive £10,000 (approximately $13,300).
Publishers Lunch reports that book distributor Baker & Taylor is set to close in January 2027. The news comes on the heels of the failed acquisition of the company’s assets by distributor ReaderLink last month. Local news reports that 253 of the 318 of the employees at the company’s warehouse in Momence, Illinois, learned yesterday that they had lost their positions; the remaining employees will assist in winding down operations through the end of the year. One of the oldest companies in the book industry, Baker & Taylor “was the largest supplier of materials to libraries, and B&T Publisher Services distributes books from more than 250 small presses. Small publishers are particularly in need of distribution services after the closure of Small Press Distribution.”
The Los Angeles Times uncovers a trend in book jacket design marked by childlike sketches, doodles, and crayon marks. “The more childish and unrefined, the better,” Maddie Connors writes. The “naive design” trend reportedly appeals to millennials and Gen Z readers. “The book cover trend, imbued with nostalgia for childhood, promises fiction that grapples with the pangs of adulthood in an age of precarity.” Examples of the design can be found on the covers of books by Madeline Cash and Cazzie David.
Virginia Evans is the winner of the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel for The Correspondent (Crown), the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced. Judges Rachel Beanland, Dionne Irving, and Taymour Soomro considered 146 eligible novels by American authors published in the United States during the 2025 calendar year. Submissions came from 59 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. Evans will receive $10,000. The other finalists were Susanna Kwan for Awake in the Floating City (Pantheon) and Maggie Su for Blob: A Love Story (Harper).
Jaime Leifer has been named publishing director of Bloomsbury US’s adult trade division, according to Publishers Weekly. “Leifer will oversee the adult literary fiction list alongside the division’s nonfiction list, which the publisher hopes to expand.”
An author in Utah has been convicted of “aggravated murder after poisoning her husband with fentanyl and then self-publishing a children’s book about coping with grief,” the Guardian reports. Prosecutors say Kouri Richins gave her husband five times the lethal dose of the synthetic opioid by mixing it in a cocktail that he drank in March 2022. The couple were $4.5 million in debt; Richins reportedly believed she would inherit her husband’s estate, valued at more than $4 million, after his death.
Comic book retailers are adopting BookTok-style videos to help increase store sales, reports Publishers Weekly. Creating content for a younger, online demographic, these booksellers are employing a variety of social-media-savvy techniques, including posting reels and creating videos in which they speak with comics creators, utilize puppets to share reviews of recent releases, drink wine while discussing new books, and more. One such comic store owner, Jen King of Space Cadets in Shenandoah, Texas, says, “When they see what people are like in the community, and how we talk to each other, they realize, Oh wait, they’re just like my friends. I’m not any different in person. The person they see on the screen is really me.”
Jack Kerouac’s original typescript scroll of the first draft of On The Road has sold for upwards of $12 million, making it the most expensive literary manuscript to sell at an auction, reports Fine Books & Collections. Typed with no paragraphs or chapter breaks, and measuring 119 feet long by 9 inches wide, the famous scroll “features occasional cross-outs by repeated ‘x’s, and numerous penciled deletions and word changes, in some cases substituting fictional names for the real names of himself and his companions, plus marginal notes in pencil by Kerouac.” Singer-songwriter Zach Bryan bought the literary work of art, having previously purchased a church in the author’s hometown that he plans to turn into a Kerouac museum.
Four years following his survival of an assassination attempt, Salman Rushdie says he’s tired of being everyone’s “free speech Barbie,” reports the Guardian. During this year’s New Orleans Book Festival, Rushdie spoke with the Atlantic’s George Packer, saying, “it’s a little frustrating to be not known for a book—but for something that happened to a book,” referring to the attacker that stabbed him onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York in 2022 due to his having written The Satanic Verses (Viking, 1989). Wanting to focus more on his writing than the incident, Rushdie mentioned his return to fiction, and his most recent short story collection, The Eleventh Hour, published by Random House last November.
For the New York Times, Alexandra Alter spoke to acclaimed writers about a key element of their practice: the company of dogs. Authors including Alice Hoffman, editor of the new anthology The Best Dog in the World: Essays on Love, and anthology contributors Roxane Gay, Amy Tan, and Paul Yoon reflected on the singular gift of a dog’s company at the writing desk. Some literary familiars even know when it’s time to call it a day, as with novelist Ann Leary’s dog, Eddie. “When he thinks she’s done enough work, he closes her laptop with his paw,” writes Alter.
Ten-time Grammy winner Billie Eilish is in final talks to make her screen debut in a film adaptation of The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s iconic 1963 best-seller, Deadline reports. The film will be directed by Oscar winner Sarah Polley, whose ouevre includes the acclaimed literary adapation Women Talking, based on the Miriam Toews book of the same name. Eilish will play the part of Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Plath’s novel drawn from experiences of her own adolescence. Previously, Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst have been attached to plans to adapt the novel but no such films have come to fruition.
The buzziest books on #BookTok are about to find their way to the top of an official #BookTok chart in the U.K., the Guardian reports. The new chart will launch later this month, offering a ranked list of twenty titles that are “resonating most strongly with readers online.” The ranking will “combine verified retail sales data with social media engagement,” using data about engagement provided by TikTok and sales figures drawn from NielsenIQ BookData. Both popularity metrics will be integrated using an algorithm developed by NielsenIQ BookData partner Media Control to arrive at the final ranking. Nielsen IQ and Media Control described the significance of the new chart, which creates “for the first time, a reliable data-based link between social media resonance and real sales performance” as #BookTok continues to drive book sales worldwide.
The tech company behind Grammarly is facing a class action lawsuit over an AI tool that the writing software implements to offer editing suggestions to users from the perspective of well-known writers and academics, “none of whom consented to have their names appear within the product,” reports Miles Klee for Wired. Award-winning journalist Julia Angwin is the only plaintiff named in the suit, as her name, alongside Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson, was offered via Grammarly’s “Expert Review” tool. The suit states that Angwin “challenges Grammarly’s misappropriation of the names and identities of hundreds of journalists, authors, writers, and editors to earn profits for Grammarly and its owner, Superhuman.”
The L.A. Times Festival of Books, taking place on April 18 and 19 this year and including almost 100 panels/programs as well as 550 storytellers, recently announced a literary lineup that includes Roxane Gay and Margaret Atwood, alongside recent Booker Prize judge Sarah Jessica Parker. Comedian Larry David, musician Lionel Richie, and scholar Reza Aslan will also be featured. As part of the festival, on April 17 the forty-sixth annual L.A. Times Book Prizes will be held, honoring Amy Tan with the Robert Kirsch Award, We Need Diverse Books with the Innovator’s Award, and Adam Ross with the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, alongside many others.
Returning this year after being on hiatus since 2019, the Indies Choice Book Awards, presented by the American Booksellers Association, has announced the shortlisted titles for 2026. Independent booksellers vote for all seven genres: Adult Fiction, Adult Nonfiction, Debut Adult, Young Adult, Middle Grade, Children’s Picture Books, and Debut Children’s. A few of the shortlisted books include One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad for Adult Nonfiction, We Survived the Night by Julian Brave NoiseCat for Debut Adult (spotlighted in the New Nonfiction feature of the September/October 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine), and Blood in the Water by Tiffany D. Jackson for Middle Grade. The winners, who will be announced on April 8, will receive $2,000 each.
Aspen Words has announced the five finalists for the 2026 Aspen Words Literary Prize: Rabih Alameddine for The True, True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove Press), Sonora Jha for Intemperance (HarperVia), Charlotte McConaghy for Wild Dark Shore (Flatiron Books), Maria Reva for Endling (Doubleday), and Jess Walter for So Far Gone (Harper). Given annually for “an influential work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture,” the prize confers a cash award of $35,000, one of the largest for fiction writing in the United States. Past winners include Mohsin Hamed, Tayari Jones, and Tommy Orange. This year’s winner will be revealed on April 23.
The iconic penguin logo of Penguin Random House has been liberated from its orange lozenge, set free to dance, slide, and waddle its way across the press’s marketing materials and other assets, Fast Company reports. After whimsical sketches of the bird made their way from Penguin’s archives into the brand’s 90th anniversary publicity campaign, the press was inspired to seize on readers’ affection for the penguin with a new series of illustrations. The resulting “Playful Penguins” depict the peguin at his cheekiest, and often beak-deep in a book. The original logo dates back to 1935, when press founder Allen Lane took a secretary’s advice that penguin would make “a good name to encapsulate a ‘dignified’ yet ‘flippant’ brand attitude.” Illustrator Edward Young took the logo assignment to the London Zoo, where the press’s logo hatched from a day of sketching, “capturing a mischievous energy that suggests a creature constantly in motion.”
In a keynote address to attendees of the London Book Fair, Pan Macmillan CEO Joanna Prior argued that concerns about AI have led publishers to neglect a more urgent threat: the declining number of book readers. “AI changes how we work,” said Prior. “But the reading crisis changes whether we have a business at all.” Prior made the case that the shift in reader engagement “is neurological as much as cultural,” Publishers Weekly reports, describing “a generation rewired for the scroll over the page.” Prior called for literary advocacy “as relentless as the algorithms we are competing with,” and for following readers’ interests to make “the book as accessible, as urgent, and as socially relevant as the notification.”
The London Book Fair kicked off today at Olympia London, and Publishing Perspectives has compiled list of highlights drawn from the conference general program. The global publishing event brings together over thousands of publishers, literary agents, authors, and industry professionals whose primary focus is the sale and negotiation of international rights, distribution, and licensing of content across print, audio, and digital media. Erin Somers of Publishers Lunch reported on the first day of programming, which included an opening keynote from Pengruin Random House UK CEO Tom Weldon, who predicted that the war in the Middle East will lead to supply chain issues in the UK and the United States. “From an economic point of view, with the cost of oil going up dramatically that is going to put a lot of pressure on freight costs,” he said.
Book Riot unpacks the State Department’s recent decision to halt passport services at certain public libraries due to their status as a nonprofit/non-governmental organization. “In rural areas, these libraries may have acted as the primary passport agency for many people who would have otherwise had to drive long distances and take time off work to apply for a passport.”
Published in response to an AI industry “built on stolen work…taken without permission or payment,” approximately ten thousand authors, including Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, have contributed to an “empty” book that will be distributed to attendees of the London Book Fair, the Guardian reports. The only contents in Don’t Steal This Book is a list of the author’s names. Next week the UK government “is due to issue an assessment on the economic cost of proposed changes in copyright law.”
Last week Amy Griffin, best-selling memoirist of The Tell (The Dial Press), was sued by a former classmate who accused the author of using her story of sexual abuse for her book, reports the New York Times. The lawsuit was filed in California almost one year following the publication of the book, stating, “‘The Tell’ constitutes neither a genuine nor harmless memoir.” Selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club last year, the memoir mentions detailed memories from childhood that Griffin claims to have recovered while under the influence of MDMA therapy.
Physical books and other print media are thriving in France, reports the Guardian. During a time of screen fatigue, “social media-addled attention spans,” the rise of generative AI, and general fear of a post-literate society, the French magazine-book scene includes 3,000 independent bookstores (a higher number than all of those in the United States, though France has one-fifth of the population) and 770 new kiosks. Paris-based journalist Lindsey Tramuta says, “Print is showing some strong signs of survival,” adding that the magazine is “an object of fascination—a collectible that carries a point of view….”
Former Amazon executive Greg Greeley has been named the new CEO of Simon & Schuster, effective immediately, reports Publishers Lunch. At age sixty-two, Greeley is one of the first Big Five CEOs from outside the literary industry. Richard Sarnoff, a company board chair, commented: “Greg Greeley is a talented and strategic leader with wide-ranging experience managing enterprises across physical and digital markets. His depth of expertise and avid love of books give us the confidence that he is the right CEO to take Simon & Schuster forward as it begins its next 100 years….” He is following Jonathan Karp, who served as CEO of Simon & Schuster for five years and will remain with the company as publisher of the new Simon Six imprint.