Audible is launching a new royalties program the audiobooks and streaming company says will create more financial opportunities for writers and other content creators. The program “evolved out of ongoing conversations with authors and publishers, and that advances our creator-centric ethos. Under this model, creators are able to monetize more types of content, and listeners will get to discover more innovative storytelling,” says a statement from the company.

Publishing houses were busy buying various media properties during the first half of the year, including “a flurry of smaller deals among indies, with tough economics forcing smaller presses to either cash out or scale up,” reports Publishers Weekly.

An unpublished novel by Zora Neale Hurston will be released in January by Amistad. Literary Hub considers “what we know” about the impending publication.

Publishers Weekly reports on a series of changes underway at Penguin Random House’s Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group after a company restructure that led to the loss of several major employees. Among the news is the promotion of Jenny Jackson to editorial director of fiction.

Siglio Press is sponsoring a marathon reading of late poet Bernadette Mayer’s 2020 book, Memory, this Sunday at Familiar Trees, a bookstore in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Memory compiles more than eleven hundred images and nearly one hundred thousand words documenting Mayer’s 1971 “investigation into the nature of memory, its surfaces, textures, and material.”

The New York City Poetry Festival will descend on Governor’s Island this weekend, with headliners Kazim Ali, Kate Farris, Safia Elhillo, and Ilya Kaminsky.

The New York Times considers the continuing mystery surrounding the identity of Italian writer Elena Ferrante, the author of My Brilliant Friend and other wildly popular novels.

Novelist Lauren Groff has launched a nonprofit called the Lynx Watch, which will distribute books throughout the state of Florida that have been targeted by book banners. The nonprofit is an extension of Groff’s bookstore in Gainesville, Florida. Books are Magic in Brooklyn, New York—owned by author Emma Straub—is joining efforts to help raise money for the Lynx Watch, reports Publishers Weekly.

The home of modernist Greek poet C.P. Cavafy in Alexandria, Egypt, has been restored, and a Cavafy Archive near the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, has been made public for the first time. The effort, funded by the Onassis Foundation, is part of an effort to revive the international reputation of the poet, who died in 1933, reports the Guardian.

Reagan Arthur has been tapped to lead an unnamed boutique imprint at Grand Central Publishing Group, part of Hachette Book Group, where she will also “edit major authors across HBG’s publishing divisions,” reports Publishers Weekly. Arthur had been laid off two months ago by Penguin Random House, where she was Knopf’s executive vice president and publisher.

The Moscow Times, an English-language journalism organization that covers Russia, has been dubbed “undesirable” by the Russian government, endangering writers, reports the Washington Post. “The ‘undesirable’ classification forces organizations to cease operations in Russia and puts Russians who work for, fund or collaborate with them at risk of potential prosecution, with jail terms of up to five years.”

After a four-year closure the house of author Margaret Mitchell has reopened to the public in Atlanta. New exhibitions offer a more critical view of her writing, particularly Gone With the Wind, unpacking “the myths undergirding the classic novel—especially the book’s views on slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction,” writes Now Habersham.

Unnamed Press of Los Angeles is launching a new imprint called Smith & Taylor Classics, led by author Brandon Taylor and editor Allison Miriam Woodcut. “The imprint will publish trade paperback editions of lesser-known novels by familiar authors,” reports Publishers Weekly.

McKay’s, a beloved used book and music store in the South, has launched a scavenger hunt of sorts in honor of its fiftieth anniversary, spurring hundreds of participants to take “an epic road trip” across North Carolina and Tennessee to visit all five of the store’s locations, writes Axios, which calls the event “a sign of enthusiasm for old books in the digital age.”

Author Curtis Sittenfeld is challenging ChatGPT, the AI chatbot, to a writing contest. She and the chatbot will each write a story containing the same elements of a summer beach read, and she will compare the two. “I’m curious about whether, in its current iteration, ChatGPT can write fiction I’d want to read or aspire to write,” she says in the New York Times.

In Esquire author Gabino Iglesias reflects on the different reception writers receive in France compared with the United States.

A month after a round of layoffs at Little, Brown, the publishing house has hired a new executive editor, Bryn Clark, formerly with Flatiron Books, reports Publishers Weekly.

Esquire asks whether writers are “doomed” by the rise of AI or if the language-generative technology holds promise for “new ways of making a living” and a “lucrative future” for book publishing.

Henry Holt has a new editorial director for fiction. Emily Griffin last worked at Harper, where she was a vice president and executive editor, working on titles by Roxane Gay, Etaf Rum, Elizabeth Westmore, and other authors, reports Publishers Weekly.

The New York Times reports on reactions to a published account by the daughter of Nobel laureate Alice Munro, Andrea Skinner, of sexual abuse by her stepfather and Munro’s refusal to leave the man despite her knowledge of the abuse. Fans, including many prominent authors, were devastated by the news. “These revelations not only crush Munro’s legacy as a person, but they make the stories that were, in retrospect, so clearly about those unfathomable betrayals basically unreadable as anything but half-realized confessions,” novelist Rebecca Makkai told the New York Times. “To me, that makes them unreadable at all.”