Kate McKinnon will host the 75th National Book Awards and Jon Batiste will perform at the ceremony on November 20 in New York City, the Associated Press reports. “I’ve been an invested reader my whole life and am so honored to be part of this event that celebrates the life-changing power of books while recognizing some of today’s most brilliant storytellers,” McKinnon said in a statement. 

Luis Jaramillo discusses his novel The Witches of El Paso, which was published earlier this month by Primero Sueño Press, and writing about motherhood, magic, and malleable borders in an interview with Electric Literature. Jaramillo describes magic as “a metaphor for creativity, the force that exists in all of us.” He adds: “Anyone who writes knows that you have to be careful what you write about. Writing makes things happen.”

Han Kang declined a press conference for her Nobel Prize in Literature amid global wars, the Korea Herald reports. Upon hearing the news, Kang told the Swedish Academy in a phone interview, “I’m so surprised and I’m absolutely honored,” but Kang’s father relayed to local reporters at his home in Jangheung County, South Jeolla Province, “with the wars raging between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, with deaths being reported every day, she could not hold a celebratory press conference.”

The 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair, which began yesterday and runs until October 20, began with rousing remarks from Karin Schmidt-Frederichs, chairwoman of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, who said, “There are no bots at the book fair,” Publishers Weekly reports. Schmidt-Frederichs added that the fair aspires to be a forum for democracy, diversity, and dialogue—sentiments that were echoed by other speakers. For instance, British Turkish novelist Elif Shafak gave a keynote address in which she addressed the tragedy of global tribalism and proposed literature as a remedy for the discord of the digital age. “The literary mind cannot be isolationist,” she said, “Literature brings the periphery to the center.”

Book critic Michael Dirda writes for the Washington Post about his trip to Norway and his exploration of the country’s literature. Dirda shares his impressions of Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen and Hunger by Knut Hamsun, writing of the latter: “In general, Hamsun presents privation as a kind of drug, instilling a heightened awareness of the self and the external world.”

ByteDance, the Chinese technology company that owns TikTok, began publishing digital books last year and is now planning to publish physical books through its imprint, 8th Note Press, the New York Times reports. 8th Note Press is partnering with Zando, an independent publishing company, and the companies together will release ten to fifteen books per year. The target readership will be millennial and Gen Z readers, and the venture will focus on romance, romantasy, and young adult fiction, with the first editions arriving in early 2025.

Unite Against Book Bans is holding a Freedom to Read Community Day of Action this Saturday, October 19, 2024. Libraries, bookstores, and other partners nationwide are organizing events, rallies, and readings to unite against book bans. Readers can find events near them, sign the freedom to read pledge, and report censorship online.

Nadxieli Nieto will be the next editorial director of Algonquin Books, Publishers Weekly reports. She previously worked at Flatiron Books, where she served as executive editor, and PEN America, where she served as the director of Literary Awards.

The New York Times has compiled a list of audiobooks to help readers and voters make sense of our political moment and the upcoming presidential election. The list includes Why We’re Polarized, written and read by Ezra Klein; Unbought and Unbossed, written by Shirley Chisholm and read by Marcella Cox; and Election, written by Tom Perrotta and read by a full cast.

Xochitl Gonzalez celebrates the landmark publication of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street in the Atlantic. In her bio note for that novel, which was published forty years ago by Arte Público Press, Cisneros stated she was “nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife.” Gonzalez considers Cisneros’s literary legacy and its particular resonance for contemporary Latina writers who explore pleasure and longing in their books. “After all,” Gonzalez writes, “she was a mother, in a sense, to many—all of the Latinas striving to add to the literary landscape full-throated, complicated women rendered beautiful and bitchy and real.”

The dissolution process of Small Press Distribution (SPD) is moving forward in California, Publishers Weekly reports. The Superior Court of Alameda County partially granted a motion filed by SPD to consolidate all claims and leave them with the court. However, “a source familiar with the proceedings said some presses are having trouble substantiating their claims, in part because of a lack of information from the distributor,” according to Publishers Weekly. Court documents reveal that SPD, which closed in March, owes a total of more than $316,000 to publishers. 

The New York Public Library has acquired the archive of Oliver Sacks, Fine Books & Collections reports. The archive contains documents that span eighty years, from Sacks’s birth in 1933 to his death in 2015, including manuscripts for his sixteen books along with his drafts, margin notes, and revisions. It also includes notes for hundreds of speeches, photographs relating to Sacks’s life and work, family correspondence, and handwritten notebooks and travel journals, among other materials.

Jessica Smith, who graduated from Marquette Senior High School in Michigan in 2016 before moving to North Carolina, where she now teaches, launched an initiative called “Pages for a Fresh Start” to collect books for children affected by Hurricane Helene, TV 6 reports. After being overwhelmed with donations, the Venue at Asheville (where used books were being collected) has asked people to hold off on sending additional titles until next week. 

First editions of Jane Austen’s six novels will be on display for the first time at the house where she wrote them in Chawton, Hampshire, the Guardian reports. The collection includes “her brother Frank’s copy of Emma,” “her brother Edward’s copies of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,” and “a copy of Sense and Sensibility in the original publisher’s binding,” according to the Guardian.

The Authors Guild has announced a partnership with Created by Humans (CbH), a platform that enables authors to license their work to AI developers. CbH will be prepared to offer licenses to AI companies in early 2025 and “will give authors a clear path to control, manage, and monetize their content while giving AI developers access to high-quality, curated written works with the full consent of rights holders,” according to the Authors Guild. As part of the new collaboration, the Authors Guild’s CEO will serve on CbH’s advisory board, and the Authors Guild will work with CbH to develop informational materials and webinars that clearly explain the terms of licenses and fees. 

The Nobel Prize in Literature, which was announced today, has the power to bring new readers to previously unknown authors—with financial ramifications for the writers and their publishers, Marketplace reports. For instance, Transit Books, the publisher of Jon Fosse, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, sold out of all the Fosse stock they had within 48 hours of the Swedish Academy’s announcement. Transit decided to print tens of thousands more copies of his work, but they had to pay for printing and royalties to the author before they received revenue from sales. Such a risky decision could bankrupt a publishing house, but in Transit’s case, they hired more staff, started publishing more books in hardcover, and have sold over 50,000 copies of Fosse’s books in the past year. 

The American Booksellers Association has announced Trevor Noah as the spokesperson for Indies First 2024, a national campaign of activities and events in support of independent bookstores that takes place on Small Business Saturday, the weekend after Thanksgiving. Since the program’s launch in 2013, spokespeople have included Amanda Gorman, Celeste Ng, Roxane Gay, and others. 

South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, NPR reports. Kang is the first Korean writer to win the award. In its citation, the Swedish Academy commended the author “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of life.” In 2016, Kang won the International Booker Prize for her novel The Vegetarian (Portobello Books, 2015). Watch Kang and translator Debora Smith speak about working together on The Vegetarian in the Poets & Writers Theater.

Barnes and Noble has announced its annual Discover Prize finalists, including the 2024 novels Martyr! (Knopf) by Kaveh Akbar, Swift River (Simon & Schuster) by Essie Chambers, and Pearly Everlasting (HarperCollins) by Tammy Armstrong.

In advance of tomorrow’s announcement for this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, A.O. Scott considers if “great literature” is overrated. “Greatness is not the same as popularity,” he writes in the New York Times. “The great books are the ones you’re supposed to feel bad about not having read. Great writers are the ones who matter whether you read them or not.”