Alexandra Alter of the New York Times writes about novelist Hannah Pittard, whose marriage to author Andrew Ewell ended nearly ten years ago, and the thorny issue of who gets to tell the story of the breakup between two writers. In this case, Pittard wrote a memoir, We Are Too Many (Henry Holt, 2023), then Ewell wrote a novel, Set for Life (Simon & Schuster, 2024), with a plot that “so closely mirrored their troubled past that at first Pittard thought it must be a memoir,” then Pittard wrote a satirical novel of her own about it, If You Love It, Let It Kill You, out next week from Henry Holt.

Carolina Ciucci recommends ten perfect bookends for readers whose “books breach containment,” for Bookriot. From Pride and Prejudice to Michaelangelo’s David, there’s a theme for any libary in need of support, because after all, “[d]eath by book avalanche, however fitting, sounds like an unpleasant way to go.”

Fanny Howe, the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including the poetry collection Second Childhood (Graywolf Press, 2014), died on July 9 at the age of 84. Kazim Ali, cofounder and chairperson of Nightboat Books, which published Howe’s book-length essay Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken as its very first title in 2005, writes: “There would be no Nightboat Books without Fanny Howe. It would be wrong to say she was a polar star or a beacon in the darkness, because Fanny believed in mystery, in unknowing, in bewilderment. She didn’t mean to shine a light, but rather to see in the darkness.” In celebration of her life and work, the Paris Review unlocked her Art of Poetry interview from its archive. 

Following allegations by the Observer that claimed author Raynor Winn “fabricated or gave misleading information about some elements of her 2018 nonfiction best-seller” The Salt Path, the book’s publisher, Penguin, says it “undertook all the necessary due dilligence” before releasing the book, the BBC reports. The novel was adapated into a movie, released last year, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. Both the novel and the film tell the story of a couple “who decide to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path after their home is repossessed.” The Observer alleges that Winn misrepresented the events leading up to the couple losing their home.

Publishers Weekly outlines efforts by independent booksellers to counter Amazon’s annual Prime Day sale, which this year runs from July 8 to July 11. Among the “anti–Amazon Prime Day promotions” are Bookshop.org’s “anti-Prime” sale, which offers free shipping, and Libro.fm’s offer of three audiobook credits for the price of one to new members (to counter Amazon-owned Audible). 

Prominent translators as well as the UK’s Society of Authors’ Translators Association are expressing concern over a new AI fiction translation service, GlobeScribe.ai, which charges $100 per book, per language for its use, the Guardian reports. GlobeScribe.ai founders Fred Freeman and Betsy Reavley, who previously founded Bloodhound Books, say the service “opens the door to new opportunities, making translation a viable option for a much broader range of fiction.”

In an essay for Business Insider, Alice Amayu writes about being accepted into the University of Sydney’s creative writing graduate program and deciding not to enroll after seeing how AI is “ruining the media landscape and the book industry.” Amayu writes: “There are days when I wonder what my classes would have been like, and it makes me sad that I’ll never experience them. Many people are still pursuing MFAs, and it’s still worth it.”

According to Publishers Weekly, Humanities Tennesee recently announced that Southern Festival of Books will return this year after months of uncertainty “following federal funding cuts.” Thanks to “community support, new donations, and an expanded partnership with Vanderbilt University,” the festival will be held from October 18 to October 19.

In an interview with the Guardian’s Hannah Marriott, Barbara Kingsolver talks about Higher Ground, the recovery residence that she recently established using royalties from her best-selling novel Demon Copperhead, a retelling of Dickens during Virginia’s opioid crisis. The residence, Marriott writes, “provides a safe place to live for women whose lives have been torn apart by addiction, who are seeking long-term recovery.”

Emma Alpern of New York magazine explores the lasting appeal of literary authors on Substack, such as George Saunders, Garth Greenwell, Brandon Taylor, and Ottessa Moshfegh. “[M]uch of what’s popping up on Substack is appealingly specific, the kind of stuff that’s unpublishable elsewhere,” Alpern writes.

The BBC’s Steven McIntosh unpacks the details of an investigation by the Observer’s Chloe Hadjimatheou into author Raynor Winn’s best-selling book The Salt Path. Hadjimatheou alledges that Winn fabricated or gave misleading information about some parts of the narrative of her book, which chronicles the author’s 630-mile walk on the South West Coast Path in England with her husband, who had received a diagnosis of a terminal illness. Winn has described the Observer’s article as “highly misleading.”

Sophia Valchine of the Detroit Free Press argues in USA Today that authors who use AI are lazy, pointing to AI prompts accidentally embeded in novels by authors Lena McDonald and K.C. Crowne. “I believe authors are turning to AI because they don’t want to think,” Valchine writes.

Rachel Brooks writes for Monitor on Psychology about how psychologists are combatting censorship to keep culturally diverse books accessible to the public. Research has shown that stories featuring marginalized characters have positive effects such as increasing children’s reading time and reducing in-group favoritism. Another study showed that thirty books frequently challenged in Florida were not connected to negative behavior in terms of civic involvement, mental health, school grade point average, or crime. Ironically, in some cases, the reading was associated with positive outcomes like improved civic and volunteering behavior. Brooks writes that psychologists are well-positioned advocates in the book banning conflict because they can address the important role books play in children’s development.

The 150th issue of the Believer is being published today. The anniversary issue features work by writers including Sheila Heti, Charles Johnson, and Joan Silber, among others.

The Academy of American Poets has announced that its president and executive director Ricardo Maldonado will step down on July 17. In a statement, Maldonado said, “Looking ahead to my own future, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to step down from this role in order to return to my first calling—writing—and to make space for poetry in a more personal way. I leave this role with immense gratitude for our dedicated board of directors, our chancellors, our brilliant staff, and the ever-growing community of poets and readers who make this work possible.” The Academy has opened a search for its next president and executive director.

For the New York Times, J. D. Biersdorfer recommends tools for organizing your digital library. If the e-book app on your phone or tablet is overflowing with outdated files, Biersdorfer outlines methods for clearing and sorting books in the Kindle mobile app, Apple Books library, Google Play Books library, Nook app, and Kobo app.

Nitish Pahwa writes for Slate about the lawsuits that are deciding whether tech companies have the right to train their LLMs on copyrighted works. A district judge ruled last week that Anthropic did not violate copyright law when it used the works of three authors to train the company’s chatbot, but that Anthropic’s use of pirated materials did violate copyright law. A new trial is scheduled to decide the damages owed from Anthropic’s illegal downloads of pirated works. Another lawsuit filed by a group of authors that included Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Richard Kadrey, was brought against Meta on similar grounds. The plaintiffs argued that AIs trained by copyrighted works undercut the authors’ ability to negotiate other book deals. The judge in that case sided with Meta on the grounds that the plaintiffs “made the wrong arguments.” The judge said it would be hard to defend fair use for “a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works,” but concluded that the plaintiffs chose a bad argument, because Meta’s AI did not reproduce enough text from the authors’ books to constitute plagiarism or piracy.

In an unexpected reversal, the Senate has voted to kill an AI-law moratorium, which would have blocked states from regulating artificial intelligence for the next decade, the Washington Post reports.

Lauren Groff has announced her next book will be a short story collection called Brawler, to be published by Riverhead Books on February 24, 2026, Elle reports. Brawler is Groff’s first collection since 2018 and jumps from Florida to California to New England and beyond. The cast of characters includes a mother and her children attempting to escape from an abusive husband; a young woman newly responsible for a disabled sibling; and a group of classmates gathering to say goodbye to their dying friend; among many others. Each story touches on, as Groff puts it, “the violence that lurks within familial spaces,” which reverberate within the “larger moments of cultural violence that I think we’ve been in for a very long time.”

Noah Hawley writes for the Atlantic about how Kurt Vonnegut processed the violence and randomness of war in his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut, who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, considered survival a “kind of cosmic joke,” Hawley writes, “with death being the setup and life being the punch line.”