The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced $34.79 million in funding for ninety-seven humanities projects, many of which celebrate the nation’s upcoming 250th anniversary, Publishers Weekly reports. Projects include the digital publication of the poet Marianne Moore’s literary notebooks; an open access edition of documents related to the naval history of the American Revolution; a digital edition of more than 13,000 speeches, letters, and other writings by Frederick Douglass; and more. Multiple projects respond to President Trump’s executive order regarding “celebrating America’s birthday.”

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.

A first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit has been discovered in a home in Bristol, England, the New York Times reports. The copy, which is one of only about 1,500 first editions printed in 1937, is up for auction and has already exceeded $25,000.

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.

Boundless, the successor to the failed U.K. crowdfunding publisher Unbound, has also filed for bankruptcy just months after it was established, Publishers Lunch reports. Unbound authors were promised that the new company would pay all the money owed to them and have voiced their complaints about the latest filing.

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.

Alissa Wilkinson of the New York Times considers a new documentary, Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation, directed by Ebs Burnough, which takes as its subject Kerouac’s famous novel On the Road and follows three threads of inquiry: the author’s early life; the 1957 novel’s influence on writers, actors, storytellers and artists; and examples of Americans who could be said to be following in the footsteps of the famous author, who died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven. According to Wilkinson, the doc “crams too much into its run time but not without cause: There’s just a lot to cover.”

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. 

Publishers Weekly reports on a new e-book platform called Briet that invites publishers to sell their e-books to libraries outright, providing universal, perpetual access to titles while avoiding the thorny issues of licensing and hold times. The new digital platform is an initiative of the Brick House publishing cooperative and the Flaming Hydra collective of journalists and artists.

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.

In interviews with T: The New York Times Style Magazine, nine artists reflect on how American censorship transformed their work and their lives. Among the artists interviewed are Khaled Hosseini, who discusses his novel The Kite Runner (Riverhead Books, 2003); Geraldine Brooks, who discusses two of her books, Year of Wonders (Viking, 2001) and Horse (Viking, 2022); and the graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, who reflects on Maus (Pantheon, 1986–1991).

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.

Forty European and international organizations, including the Federation of European Publishers, have written a joint statement criticizing the provisions for the European Union AI Act, Publishers Weekly reports. The coalition, which represents millions of authors, performers, publishers, producers, and other creatives across Europe, maintains that the implementation package for the act does not deliver meaningful protection of intellectual property rights in the context of AI.

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.

Book publishing sales fell across all major categories in May, Publishers Weekly reports. Adult book sales declined 9.6 percent, fiction sales dropped by 8.3 percent, and nonfiction fell by 11.3 percent.

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.

Rachel Kurzius writes for the Washington Post about how fan fiction, which was once relegated to the internet, is transforming traditional publishing. Kurzius writes that the “interest of many readers…has caught up with what fic writers, often women and queer people, have been up to all along: Joyful same-sex romances and stories told with the immediacy of first-person present tense, for example, now fill bookstore shelves.” Fan fiction is unfettered “by the constraints of the market (or even of good taste) and often buoyed by anonymity,” Kurzius adds.

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 new literary hub will open in Sydney with initial funding of $1.5 million AUD (approximately $978,300) from the New South Wales state government, the Guardian reports. The new hub will rival Melbourne’s Wheeler Center and allow Sydney to host seventy-five literary events over the next twelve months.

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.