A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (Oxford University Press, 1949) by Aldo Leopold remains an environmental classic seventy-five years after it was first published, the Washington Post reports. Barbara Kingsolver called the book “the manifesto of a movement,” and Leopold is often considered the father of environmental ethics. The book advocates for wildlife conservation amidst the new technologies of the mid-twentieth century. Leopold encourages readers to shift their values with respect to the environment, writing, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

Caitlin Flanagan writes for the Atlantic about the poem and wisdom Seamus Heaney gave her. She met Heaney in 1970, when she was nine years old and he was spending the year at the University of California in Berkeley, where her father taught English. With the poem, Flanagan says, “Seamus gave me the one thing I desperately needed growing up in that crazy family: my certificate of belonging, in this world and the next.” She later adds, “Seamus didn’t believe in a force as mere as optimism. He believed in something far greater and more powerful: hope.”

Sarah Jessica Parker, the actress and publisher of SJP Lit, will serve on the judging panel for the 2025 Booker Prize alongside the authors Ayòbámi Adébáyò, Kiley Reid, and Chris Power, the New York Times reports. The Irish novelist and screenwriter Roddy Doyle will chair the jury. Parker said helping judge the prize was “the thrill of a life,” but also found the position “daunting.” She added, “I’m just going to listen a lot. That’s the way I’ve probably created a career outside of acting: just being surrounded by people who are expert and listening, listening, listening.”

Constantia Constantinou has been appointed as the new executive director of the Whiting Foundation, Publishers Weekly reports. Most recently, Constantinou served as vice provost and director of libraries at the University of Pennsylvania. In a statement, she said, “I am thrilled to join the Whiting Foundation at a time when the Humanities and Literary programs are making an impact in supporting writers, editors, educators, librarians, and archivists who advance literature and promote the preservation of our shared cultural heritage.”

Merriam-Webster, the American dictionary publisher, announced its word of the year yesterday, Time Magazine reports. The chosen word for 2024 is “polarization,” defined as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.” Merriam-Webster introduced other words that reflect contemporary politics, such as “far left,” “far right,” and “MAGA.” Other words that the publisher said “stood out” in search volume this year include “demure” and “democracy.”

Max Norman writes for the New Yorker about Damion Searls, who has translated the work of Nobel Prize–winning author Jon Fosse, and about Searls’s philosophy of translation. Searls does not believe in translation as an art of equivalence or reflection. Rather, he believes translation is, as Norman writes, “fundamentally about experience: the translator’s experience of reading the original, which is then re-created for a new reader.” In that sense, the practice of translation is, for Searls, also about creative freedom and mutual trust.

Weike Wang recommends a list of creative writing craft books for the Rumpus. The list includes The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (HarperCollins, 1989), How Fiction Works (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) by James Wood, and The Art of Revision: The Last Word (Graywolf Press, 2021) by Peter Ho Davies, among other titles.

Nikki Giovanni, a poet who wrote about Black joy, and a public intellectual who discussed race, gender, sex, politics, and love, died yesterday, the New York Times reports. Giovanni was a prolific member of the Black Arts Movement and toured the country as a celebrity author with frequent television appearances and sold-out performances. Among many other prizes, she received seven NAACP awards and thirty-one honorary doctorates. She taught at Rutgers and Queens College before working as a visiting professor and earning tenure at Virginia Tech. Giovanni’s newest book, The New Book: Poems, Letters, Blurbs, and Things, is expected to be published next year.

Chris Vognar writes for the Atlantic about Edna Ferber’s novel Giant (Doubleday, 1952), the reception to the book in Texas, and how Ferber captured aspirations for transformation in the state that resonate with contemporary politics. “Ferber,” Vognar writes, “was attacked not only for being a carpetbagger, but also for having a progressive agenda.” He adds, “Though the state has changed in many ways over the past seventy years—it is more diverse, more urban, and more ideologically varied—political realignment seems just as elusive today.”

Haruki Murakami discusses his latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (Knopf), which began as a novella in 1980, and his evolution as a writer with the New Yorker. “I wasn’t satisfied with the original novella I wrote,” Murakami says. “And that dissatisfaction stuck in my throat like a small fish bone, a sort of loose end for me as a writer. Somehow I wanted to resurrect that world in a more striking form—that was my long-held desire.”

Giles Harvey writes for the New York Times Magazine about how Alice Munro knew and stayed silent about her husband’s sexual abuse of her daughter and other children. Harvey analyzes Munro’s fiction alongside personal letters and accounts from her children. “In Munro’s stories,” Harvey writes, “abused young women invariably keep quiet.”

David J. Morris, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, writes for the New York Times about the decline of literary men, and how literature can combat “the age of Donald Trump and the distorted conceptions of masculinity he helps to foster.” Morris writes that while half of the women who matriculate at four-year public colleges graduate four years later, for men, the rate is under 40 percent. Furthermore, he notes that the creative writing program where he teaches receives 60 percent of their applications from women. Morris draws a connection between reading fiction and improved emotional intelligence, arguing that “young men need better stories—and they need to see themselves as belonging to the world of storytelling.”

Irvine Welsh will publish a sequel to his 1993 cult classic, Trainspotting, the Guardian reports. Men in Love will follow the same cast of characters—Renton, Spud, Sick Boy, and Begbie—as they try to leave drugs behind and pursue romantic relationships. The novel, which is set in the late eighties, will be published in July 2025 by Jonathan Cape.

Karl Ove Knausgaard shows the Washington Post his bookshelves and writing studio. With an eclectic collection including popular science, Danish philosophy, Shakespeare plays, and Russian literature, Knausgaard insists on the importance of re-reading books. “Ten years is enough to forget everything,” he says. Leo Tolstoy and Ursula K. Le Guin are among the authors he returns to regularly. Knausgaard also notes the literary inspiration he received from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which he says, “released my writing.”

The fatal crackdown in Gwangju in 1980, the last time South Korea declared martial law before President Yoon Suk Yeol did so this week, was narrated in Human Acts (Hogarth, 2017) by Han Kang, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the New York Times reports. In the epilogue of the novel, Kang writes about how the tragedy of Gwangju reverberates in violent oppression throughout the world. She writes, “‘Gwangju’ had become another name for whatever is forcibly isolated, beaten down, and brutalized, for all that has been mutilated beyond repair.” Human Acts has raised international awareness about the atrocities that took place in Gwangju. Lee Jae-eui, who was a college student in Gwangju in 1980, said, “For all our efforts, there was a limit, but the book did what we could not for decades until now and for decades to come.”

After more than four years of litigation, the copyright case over the Internet Archive’s scanning and lending of library books is now over, Publishers Weekly reports. The end of the litigation will now trigger a monetary payment to the plaintiff publishers, a sum that will cover the publishers’ attorney fees and litigation costs. In a statement, the Internet Archive said, “While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit’s opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has decided not to pursue Supreme Court review.” The nonprofit added, “We will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers (AAP) agreement to remove books from lending at their member publishers’ requests,” and “advocate for a future where libraries can purchase, own, lend, and preserve digital books.” 

Penguin Random House (PRH) will raise its entry-level salary to $51,000, from $48,000, and increase salaries across seven employment levels, effective January 1, Publishers Weekly reports. A person at PRH familiar with the decision said the publisher wants to “lead the market” in compensation as well as in other elements of its business.

In an interview with the Rumpus, Delilah McCrea discusses her debut poetry collection, The Book of Flowers (Pumpernickel House Publishing, 2024), morbid humor, and being prescribed a dedicated poetry practice in therapy. McCrea explains, “I’ve had many great griefs in my life: the deaths of my parents, my divorce, being rejected by people I care about because I’m trans. And often I’ll have emotional responses to those events that I’m not yet able to consciously understand. The first time I’m able to start processing them is when I write a poem.”

Josh Spencer, the founder of the Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, will open another location in Studio City on December 12 for customers enrolled in a membership program, and on December 14 for the wider public, the Los Angeles Times reports. Describing the new store’s aesthetic, Spencer says, “We don’t like to repeat ourselves….  We’ll have nature sounds on the speakers more than rock music, and maybe some water fountains.” Spencer describes selling books as hard work that “offers endless creativity,” adding, “I like creating a space, an experience.”

Writer and advocate Suleika Jaouad publishes an adapted version of the foreword she wrote for the thirtieth anniversary of Lucy Grealy’s memoir Autobiography of a Face (HarperCollins, 1994) in the Washington Post. Jaouad discusses how the book helped her cope with a cancer diagnosis, writing, “the memoir is a companion for those experiencing illness, telling us that what we feel—whether rage, delight, envy, despair or hilarity at the absurdity of it all—is normal and natural.”