Daily News

Simon & Schuster celebrates its one hundredth anniversary this year; Publishers Weekly looks back at the publisher’s history and considers its future.

Caitlyn Shea has been named the new executive director of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, which manages the farmhouse in Huntington, Long Island, where Walt Whitman was born in 1819 and which now hosts poetry readings, workshops, and other events.

The New York Times Book Review interviews U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

In the Guardian, author Kester Brewin argues that writers should include a transparency statement in their books about their use of AI. “Until we have some mechanism by which we can test for AI—and that will be extraordinarily difficult—we at least need a means by which writers build trust in their work by being transparent about the tools they have used.”

Guadeloupian author Maryse Condé, who in 2018 won the New Academy Prize—an “alternative” to the Nobel Prize in Literature, which in 2018 was suspended due to a controversy—has died at age 90.

Author John Barth, a leading figure of postmodern fiction, has died at age 93.

On Literary Hub Allison Rudnick, a curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explores how literary magazines played an integral role in the development of graphic design.

More than two dozen items owned by Sylvia Plath will be for sale at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair this week, including a painting by the poet, her personal books—at least one with annotations—and other materials offered by Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company.

Fine Books & Collections magazine offers a preview of a museum exhibition on the life of Franz Kafka, who died in 1924. Marking the centennial of the author’s death, “Kafka: Making of an Icon” will open in May at the Weston Library of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and travel to the Morgan Library in New York, where it will run from November 22 through April 13, 2025.

The Intercept reports on multiple controversies at PEN America, which has received criticism from its staff and the writing community over the free speech organization’s response to the war in Gaza.

The Edible Book Festival may be “spiritually linked to April Fool’s Day,” but it is a real festival indeed, writes Literary Hub. An informal, international affair, the festival is open to anyone who wants to put on a tasty literary event. A quick internet search reveals Edible Book Festivals happening this week in Bowdoinham, Maine; Buffalo, New York; and Urbana, Illinois.

Finalists for Canada’s 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize have been announced, including Jorie Graham for To 2040, Ishion Hutchinson for School of Instructions, Ann Lauterbach for Door, Ben Lerner for The Lights, Fred Moten for Perennial Fashion Presence Falling, and Mira Rosenthal for her translation of To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki. Read about recent changes to the Griffin Poetry Prize in Poets & Writers Magazine.

As National Reading Month comes to a close, NPR offers some tips for how to read more books in 2024.

The Los Angeles Review of Books writes about Toni Morrison’s rejection letters to writers during the Nobel laureate’s time as a senior editor at Random House. “Morrison’s rejections tend to be long, generous in their suggestions, and direct in their criticism.”

PEN America’s staff union, PEN America United, says the free speech organization is attempting “to chill the free expression of its own workers—at a time when PEN America is facing mounting outrage from hundreds of prominent authors for its inadequate response on the war in Gaza,” according to a statement by the union. The accusation comes in response to language PEN America proposed during bargaining with the union this month that would discipline staff for engaging in “political activity that ‘impacts the ability of PEN America to engage in its mission.’” PEN America’s management disputes the charges, according to Publishers Weekly.

Harvard University discovered a book in its Houghton Library that was bound with human skin, the BBC reports. Des Destinées de l’Ame, written by by Arsène Houssaye in the mid-1880s, “is a meditation on the soul and life after death.” Harvard has “announced it has removed the binding ‘due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history’.”

The Washington Post offers a history lesson on the Maryland-born poet who is the namesake of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which collapsed after it was struck by a cargo ship yesterday. Best known for penning “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Key wrote other verse and—like so many lionized U.S. historical figures—held disturbing views that have spurred many to question why his name should be commemorated.

Influential literary scholar Marjorie Perloff has died at age 92, reports the New York Times.

Fashion brand Chanel recently hosted a “Literary Rendez-vous” in Paris with author Rachel Cusk, model Naomi Campbell, and Chanel ambassador Charlotte Casiraghi, reports RUSSH, an Australian fashion magazine. Chanel apparently has a “rich literary tradition”; its last Literary Rendez-vous featured author Jeanette Winterson, critic Erica Wagner, and Chanel ambassador and actress Kristen Stewart.

Publishers Weekly has named eight presses to its 2024 list of fast-growing independent publishers, including Mad Cave Studios in Miami, Florida; Microcosm Publishing in Portland, Oregon; and Forefront Books in Nashville.

Philip Metres and Jessica Jacobs discuss their new poetry collections and the serendipity of their shared themes and book-cover imagery on Ideastream, a public broadcaster in Cleveland. Metres’s Fugitive/Refuge, forthcoming in April from Copper Canyon Press, and Jacobs’s Unalone, published by Four Way Books this month, have the same cover photograph and meditate on family history and faith.

In the Millions, Lauren Alwan offers praise for authors who take their sweet time: “I’m interested in how, in a world that values speed, the slow writer learns to tolerate the uncertainty that comes with the long project.”

The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced, including Safiya Sinclair in autobiography for How to Say Babylon, Lorrie Moore in fiction for I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, and Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi, in poetry for Phantom Pain Wings. 

Publicist Lena Little has launched her own firm, Lena K Little Public Relations, reports Publishers Weekly. Little has worked with Knopf, Pantheon, and Little, Brown and authors including Leslie Jamison, Chigozie Obioma, and Orhan Pamuk, among others.

The Perelandra Bookshop in Fort Collins, Colorado, has launched a reader-in-residence program, reports the Colorado Sun. “The reader gets a small stipend for their three-month stint—$50 per month for books, and another $50 per month for coffee. They also have access to Perelandra’s wholesale book catalog. The overt goal of the residency is to foster a space for people to experience literature more thoughtfully.” 

The Atlantic suggests some books that can help digitally overloaded readers learn to the appreciate the physical world.

The New York City Department of Education has launched an investigation after hundreds of books were found in the trash at a public school in Staten Island, New York, with notes indicating that they were dumped because they deal with race, immigration, and queerness, reports ABC News. Reports of the trashed books follow close on the heels of the American Library Association’s announcement of another record year for efforts to ban books.

The New Yorker contemplates the uncanniness of artificial intelligence, particularly the large language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT: “A large language model generates ideas, words, and contexts never before known. It is also—when it takes on the form of a chatbot—a digital metamorph, a character-based shape-shifter, fluid in identity, persona, and design.”

Publishers Weekly shares a conversation with Lauren Groff at Winter Institute, the American Booksellers Association’s annual conference, which Groff attended in February to prepare for the opening of the Lynx, an independent bookstore she and her husband, Clay Kallman, will open in Gainesville, Florida, next month. “Groff hopes that, with an inventory that emphasizes books by BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors that deal with such issues as race, gender identity, and sexuality, the Lynx ‘will reverberate outwards, and be a beacon of hope’” at a time when efforts to ban or limit access to books has reached a fever pitch nationwide, particularly in Florida.

The American Booksellers Association (ABA) and Small Business Rising, a group that represents independent businesses, have dubbed March 20 “SBA: Dump Amazon! Day” The occasion is meant to pressure the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) to dump Amazon as a sponsor of the administration’s National Small Business Week, which will be held April 28–May 4. “Amazon’s co-sponsorship is little more than a disingenuous PR stunt, allowing it to whitewash its anticompetitive behavior and all the harm it is doing to small business,” says a statement by the ABA.

Kristen Arnett, Naomi Klein, Hisham Matar, Lorrie Moore, Kayla Upadhyaya, and other writers will not participate in this year’s PEN World Voices Festival due to PEN America’s stance on the crisis in Gaza. In an open letter the authors write: “Palestine’s poets, scholars, novelists and journalists and essayists have risked everything, including their lives and the lives of their families, to share their words with the world. Yet PEN America appears unwilling to stand with them firmly against the powers that have oppressed and dispossessed them for the last 75 years."

On Literary Hub Maris Kreizman offers a critique of a new publishing company called Authors Equity, which will reportedly rely on a staff of freelancers: “Rather than offering book workers the stability and benefits of full-time employment, Authors Equity will rely on the gig economy to get the job done. ... [T]hese kinds of cost-cutting measures also very rarely make the finished output better,” writes Kreizman.

The winners of the inaugural Libby Book Awards have been announced; among them are James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store for Best Adult Fiction and Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You for Best Audiobook. The awards in seventeen categories are judged by seventeen hundred librarians worldwide.

In the Atlantic author Phil Klay lambastes Guernica for retracting an essay it published by a Jewish woman living in Israel that many interpreted as insensitive to the ongoing crisis in Gaza, which reportedly has killed more than thirty thousand Palestinians, including more than thirteen thousand children. In January the International Court of Justice ruled that it was “plausible” that Israel’s retaliatory war against Gaza after Hamas’s October 7 attack, which killed twelve hundred Israelis, was tantamount to genocide.

The longlist of thirteen nominees for this year’s International Booker Prize—which awards novels and story collections translated into English and published in the U.K. and/or Ireland—have been announced. Check out what the prize judges, including U.S. writers Natalie Diaz and Aaron Robertson, have to say about their selections here.

Contemporary Russian literature is in the midst of a renaissance, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with many authors—particularly women—under the age of thirty-five publishing diverse works in response to post-Soviet politics. 

Meg Day is this year’s poet-in-residence at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the third poet to hold the title. Read more about the residency, a museum collaboration with the Academy of American Poets, in Poets & Writers Magazine.

The fashion industry has taken a literary turn recently, with books inspiring clothing collections, interior design, and more. Author Simon Chilvers’ discusses the trend on a podcast from the Financial Times.