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.”

Digital audio sales increased by 61.8 percent in the category of adult fiction and 58.3 percent in adult nonfiction during the month of July, Publishers Weekly reports. The format represented about 20 percent of total adult fiction sales in July and 18 percent of nonfiction sales. 

Chinese avant-garde author Can Xue is Ladbrokes’ favorite to win this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the Guardian reports. Others on the list of likely authors include Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Gerald Murnane, and Thomas Pynchon. Can Xue, the pen name of Deng Xiaohua, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize twice: for her novel Love in the New Millennium (Yale University Press, 2018), translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, and for her short story collection I Live in the Slums (Yale University Press, 2020), translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. The Swedish Academy is scheduled to announce the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

Nonprofit arts organizations and presses have always needed to fundraise to maintain their operations, but lately smaller and midsize organizations without endowments have been experiencing existential crises, Esquire reports. Nonprofit presses, founded in the 1970s and 1980s to liberate writers from the demands of corporate publishing, often publish emerging voices and more experimental work, but they still rely on tax-deductible private funding. For instance, Copper Canyon Press depended on support from the Lannan Foundation for nearly thirty years, but in 2023, almost overnight, Copper Canyon’s $1.4 million operating budget decreased by $200,000. Several arts professionals cite collective funding and collaboration as possible approaches to the challenge of shrinking budgets.

The London-based small press Herb Lester lets readers follow in the footsteps of their favorite book characters and writers, the Washington Post reports. Lester’s literary maps offer itineraries but they also feature retro illustrations, typography and graphics, and original art. Upcoming guides include Frida Kahlo’s Mexico City, Joan Didion’s Los Angeles, and Ian Fleming’s London.

Mary Beth Jarrad, the longtime marketing and sales director at NYU Press, has joined the New Press as publisher, Publishers Weekly reports. Prior to her tenure at NYU, Jarrad served as senior director of international sales and marketing at Penguin Random House and worked for a decade in university press publishing in multiple positions at Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. 

Salmon Rushdie, who survived a stabbing attack in 2022, is writing a new work of fiction that will comprise three novellas, each one relating to one of his “three worlds,” India, England, and America, the Guardian reports. Rushdie, whose most recent book, Knife, is a reflection on the attempted murder, made the announcement at Lviv BookForum, the biggest book fair in Ukraine.

Sage Mehta writes for the New Yorker about growing up with her father, the author Ved Mehta, who was blind from an early age and left Lahore in 1947 with millions of other Hindu refugees when the city became part of Pakistan. “If blindness was the first exile,” Mehta writes, “Partition was the second.” In his new home in New York, Mehta explains that her father was “obsessed with the way things looked” and she “learned to provide the specificity that he craved” with her access to the sighted world. 

Tom Rachman, whose debut novel, The Imperfectionists (The Dial Press, 2010), was a best-seller, writes for the New York Times about going back to school in his late forties following a successful career as a novelist. “I’d glued my dignity to my occupation,” he writes, “and it was a struggle to pry them apart.”