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.”

An exhibition celebrating Jane Austen acknowledges the author’s unenthusiastic relationship to Bath, the English city where she lived from 1801 to 1806, the Guardian reports. The exhibition, which is titled The Most Tiresome Place in the World: Jane Austen & Bath, will open at the No. 1 Royal Crescent in Bath on July 5. The exhibition’s title is taken from a conversation between Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland in Austen’s 1817 novel, Northanger Abbey. Tilney says, “For six weeks, I allow Bath is pleasant enough; but beyond that, it is the most tiresome place in the world.”

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) has announced its plans to relaunch North Point Press, Publishers Weekly reports. North Point Press was originally founded in Berkeley, California in 1978 by William Turnbull and Jack Shoemaker to publish literary fiction and nonfiction. The press closed in 1990, and FSG acquired its publishing assets in 1992. Catherine Tung will oversee the relaunch of the press as senior editor. North Point will cover categories including ecology, natural history, environmental science, personal growth, psychology, spirituality, food, design, and health.

A group of more than seventy authors including Dennis Lehane, Gregory Maguire, and Lauren Groff released an open letter published on Literary Hub about the use of AI, NPR reports. The letter was addressed to the big five U.S. publishers along with “other publishers of America,” and asked the companies to promise that “they will never release books that were created by machines.” The letter—which also included requests to refrain from replacing publishing house employees with AI tools and to only hire human audiobook narrators—garnered more than a thousand signatures in less than a day.

Joseph Bernstein writes for the New York Times about why men have stopped reading fiction and considers efforts by book clubs, publishers, and booksellers to combat the trend. Bernstein writes, “for men to read more fiction as the world of the novel exists today would not just require more stereotypically masculine subject matter. It might be a matter of men approaching their reading lives a little more like women do—getting recommendations online from celebrities and influencers, browsing together, forming book clubs.”

Kyle Chayka writes for the New Yorker about recent studies that demonstrate how AI is homogenizing our thoughts and writing. One study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that people who used ChatGPT to write an essay demonstrated less brain activity than those who did not. Another finding was that the texts produced by AI converged around common words and ideas. “A.I. is a technology of averages,” Chayka writes, “large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus, both in the quality of the writing, which is often riddled with clichés and banalities, and in the calibre of the ideas.”

Clare Mulroy writes for USA Today about Julia Whelan—a voice actor narrating the audiobooks for a range of best-selling contemporary novels. Whelan has narrated Atmosphere (Ballantine Books, 2025) by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Great Big Beautiful Life (Berkley, 2025) by Emily Henry, and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (Tor Books, 2025) by V. E. Schwab, among other titles. Whelan discusses her path to narrating dozens of books per year, the threat of AI encroaching on the audiobook industry, and Audiobrary, the audio platform she founded that applies publishing models with royalties to both narrators and authors.

The Supreme Court has ruled that parents can opt their children out of classes using LGBTQ+ books on religious grounds, Publishers Lunch reports.

James Hill writes for the New York Times about the Parisian Atelier Devauchelle, where bookbinding is a communal art. The women who run the atelier sew and create new bindings, restore torn pages of books, and create slipcovers and special boxes to conserve fragile editions. The workshop is located near Drouot, an auction house that sells antiquarian books.

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) has announced the 2025 CLMP Firecracker Awards—annual prizes that celebrate the work of independent literary publishers. Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) by Mubanga Kalimamukwento won the prize in fiction, Low: Notes on Art & Trash (Fonograf Editions, 2024) by Jaydra Johnson won the prize in creative nonfiction, and Mirror Nation (Wave Books, 2024) by Don Mee Choi won the prize in poetry. Each winner in the book categories receives $2,000 to be split evenly between the press and the author. Revel, a biannual magazine based in Atlanta, won the award for best debut magazine, and Circumference, a biannual journal founded in 2020, won the award for general excellence in magazines. Each winner in the magazine categories receive $1,000.

Alex Reisner writes for the Atlantic about how tech companies developing LLMs pose “an existential threat to the media, and to the livelihood of journalists everywhere.” Reisner writes that chatbots “have proved adept at keeping users locked into conversations...by answering every question, often through summarizing articles from news publishers,” and cites one study that found Google’s AI overviews have reduced traffic to outside websites by more than 34 percent.

Though bookseller James Daunt has received widespread praise for rehabilitating Barnes & Noble (B&N) since he was named CEO in 2019, many independent publishers are frustrated with how little attention B&N has paid to their lists, Publishers Weekly reports. Nearly every one of the dozen independent presses Publishers Weekly interviewed said that their business with B&N has dropped significantly since Daunt took over, though all the indies emphasized they are glad B&N is in business. As one nonfiction publisher said, “Daunt’s entitled to running his business as he sees fit. Opening more stores is good. Sales being up is good. What he is doing is working—it’s just not working for us.”

A group of authors including Jonathan Alter, Mary Bly, and Jia Tolentino has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, arguing that the tech company used the Books3 pirate database of almost 200,000 books to train its LLM, and knowingly infringed on copyrighted material, Publishers Lunch reports.

Jenny Singer writes for the Washington Post about the BookTok phenomenon of the “book boyfriend,” as romance book sales continue to soar. The term refers to characters “who seem to have stridden, galloped, or brooded onto the page from somewhere in the recesses of the reader’s deepest desires,” Singer writes. “Simply put, a book boyfriend is a character you can’t stop thinking about—and longing for—beyond the page.” Singer notes the history of idealized and problematic book boyfriends, adding that the trend even existed in 1848 when “a literary magazine reported that ‘New England states were visited by a distressing mental epidemic, passing under the name of the Jane Eyre fever.’”

In Bartz v. Anthropic, a federal judge in California has ruled that AI training constitutes fair use when using legally acquired copyrighted books but violates copyright law when downloading pirated copies for permanent storage, Publishers Weekly reports. In a statement responding to the ruling, the Authors Guild said: “While the Authors Guild is relieved that the court recognized Anthropic’s massive, criminal-level, unexcused e-book piracy for what it is, the decision that using pirated or scanned books for training LLMs is fair use” contradicts copyright law and “ignores the harm caused to authors and the value of their works due to market saturation by LLM-generated content that competes with human authors.”

In the Poets on Translation series in Poetry, Heather Green writes about translating the work of Tristan Tzara and “using new sounds to root a poem in a partially shared soil of linguistic meaning.”

Meg LaBorde Kuehn, the publisher and CEO of Kirkus Reviews, is leaving the company, effective July 11, Shelf Awareness reports. Judy Hottensen, who stepped down as vice president and associate publisher of Grove/Atlantic on January 1, will serve as interim CEO.