Comic book retailers are adopting BookTok-style videos to help increase store sales, reports Publishers Weekly. Creating content for a younger, online demographic, these booksellers are employing a variety of social-media-savvy techniques, including posting reels and creating videos in which they speak with comics creators, utilize puppets to share reviews of recent releases, drink wine while discussing new books, and more. One such comic store owner, Jen King of Space Cadets in Shenandoah, Texas, says, “When they see what people are like in the community, and how we talk to each other, they realize, Oh wait, they’re just like my friends. I’m not any different in person. The person they see on the screen is really me.”

Jack Kerouac’s original typescript scroll of the first draft of On The Road has sold for upwards of $12 million, making it the most expensive literary manuscript to sell at an auction, reports Fine Books & Collections. Typed with no paragraphs or chapter breaks, and measuring 119 feet long by 9 inches wide, the famous scroll “features occasional cross-outs by repeated ‘x’s, and numerous penciled deletions and word changes, in some cases substituting fictional names for the real names of himself and his companions, plus marginal notes in pencil by Kerouac.” Singer-songwriter Zach Bryan bought the literary work of art, having previously purchased a church in the author’s hometown that he plans to turn into a Kerouac museum. 

Four years following his survival of an assassination attempt, Salman Rushdie says he’s tired of being everyone’s “free speech Barbie,” reports the Guardian. During this year’s New Orleans Book Festival, Rushdie spoke with the Atlantic’s George Packer, saying, “it’s a little frustrating to be not known for a book—but for something that happened to a book,” referring to the attacker that stabbed him onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York in 2022 due to his having written The Satanic Verses (Viking, 1989). Wanting to focus more on his writing than the incident, Rushdie mentioned his return to fiction, and his most recent short story collection, The Eleventh Hour, published by Random House last November. 

For the New York Times, Alexandra Alter spoke to acclaimed writers about a key element of their practice: the company of dogs. Authors including Alice Hoffman, editor of the new anthology The Best Dog in the World: Essays on Love, and anthology contributors Roxane Gay, Amy Tan, and Paul Yoon reflected on the singular gift of a dog’s company at the writing desk. Some literary familiars even know when it’s time to call it a day, as with novelist Ann Leary’s dog, Eddie. “When he thinks she’s done enough work, he closes her laptop with his paw,” writes Alter.

Ten-time Grammy winner Billie Eilish is in final talks to make her screen debut in a film adaptation of The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s iconic 1963 best-seller, Deadline reports. The film will be directed by Oscar winner Sarah Polley, whose ouevre includes the acclaimed literary adapation Women Talking, based on the Miriam Toews book of the same name. Eilish will play the part of Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Plath’s novel drawn from experiences of her own adolescence. Previously, Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst have been attached to plans to adapt the novel but no such films have come to fruition.

The buzziest books on #BookTok are about to find their way to the top of an official #BookTok chart in the U.K., the Guardian reports. The new chart will launch later this month, offering a ranked list of twenty titles that are “resonating most strongly with readers online.” The ranking will “combine verified retail sales data with social media engagement,” using data about engagement provided by TikTok and sales figures drawn from NielsenIQ BookData. Both popularity metrics will be integrated using an algorithm developed by NielsenIQ BookData partner Media Control to arrive at the final ranking. Nielsen IQ and Media Control described the significance of the new chart, which creates “for the first time, a reliable data-based link between social media resonance and real sales performance” as #BookTok continues to drive book sales worldwide. 

The tech company behind Grammarly is facing a class action lawsuit over an AI tool that the writing software implements to offer editing suggestions to users from the perspective of well-known writers and academics, “none of whom consented to have their names appear within the product,” reports Miles Klee for Wired. Award-winning journalist Julia Angwin is the only plaintiff named in the suit, as her name, alongside Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson, was offered via Grammarly’s “Expert Review” tool. The suit states that Angwin “challenges Grammarly’s misappropriation of the names and identities of hundreds of journalists, authors, writers, and editors to earn profits for Grammarly and its owner, Superhuman.”

The L.A. Times Festival of Books, taking place on April 18 and 19 this year and including almost 100 panels/programs as well as 550 storytellers, recently announced a literary lineup that includes Roxane Gay and Margaret Atwood, alongside recent Booker Prize judge Sarah Jessica Parker. Comedian Larry David, musician Lionel Richie, and scholar Reza Aslan will also be featured. As part of the festival, on April 17 the forty-sixth annual L.A. Times Book Prizes will be held, honoring Amy Tan with the Robert Kirsch Award, We Need Diverse Books with the Innovator’s Award, and Adam Ross with the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, alongside many others.

Returning this year after being on hiatus since 2019, the Indies Choice Book Awards, presented by the American Booksellers Association, has announced the shortlisted titles for 2026. Independent booksellers vote for all seven genres: Adult Fiction, Adult Nonfiction, Debut Adult, Young Adult, Middle Grade, Children’s Picture Books, and Debut Children’s. A few of the shortlisted books include One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad for Adult Nonfiction, We Survived the Night by Julian Brave NoiseCat for Debut Adult (spotlighted in the New Nonfiction feature of the September/October 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine), and Blood in the Water by Tiffany D. Jackson for Middle Grade. The winners, who will be announced on April 8, will receive $2,000 each. 

Aspen Words has announced the five finalists for the 2026 Aspen Words Literary Prize: Rabih Alameddine for The True, True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove Press), Sonora Jha for Intemperance (HarperVia), Charlotte McConaghy for Wild Dark Shore (Flatiron Books), Maria Reva for Endling (Doubleday), and Jess Walter for So Far Gone (Harper). Given annually for “an influential work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture,” the prize confers a cash award of $35,000, one of the largest for fiction writing in the United States. Past winners include Mohsin Hamed, Tayari Jones, and Tommy Orange. This year’s winner will be revealed on April 23.

The iconic penguin logo of Penguin Random House has been liberated from its orange lozenge, set free to dance, slide, and waddle its way across the press’s marketing materials and other assets, Fast Company reports. After whimsical sketches of the bird made their way from Penguin’s archives into the brand’s 90th anniversary publicity campaign, the press was inspired to seize on readers’ affection for the penguin with a new series of illustrations. The resulting “Playful Penguins” depict the peguin at his cheekiest, and often beak-deep in a book. The original logo dates back to 1935, when press founder Allen Lane took a secretary’s advice that penguin would make “a good name to encapsulate a ‘dignified’ yet ‘flippant’ brand attitude.” Illustrator Edward Young took the logo assignment to the London Zoo, where the press’s logo hatched from a day of sketching, “capturing a mischievous energy that suggests a creature constantly in motion.”

In a keynote address to attendees of the London Book Fair, Pan Macmillan CEO Joanna Prior argued that concerns about AI have led publishers to neglect a more urgent threat: the declining number of book readers. “AI changes how we work,” said Prior. “But the reading crisis changes whether we have a business at all.” Prior made the case that the shift in reader engagement “is neurological as much as cultural,” Publishers Weekly reports, describing “a generation rewired for the scroll over the page.” Prior called for literary advocacy “as relentless as the algorithms we are competing with,” and for following readers’ interests to make “the book as accessible, as urgent, and as socially relevant as the notification.”

The London Book Fair kicked off today at Olympia London, and Publishing Perspectives has compiled list of highlights drawn from the conference general program. The global publishing event brings together over thousands of publishers, literary agents, authors, and industry professionals whose primary focus is the sale and negotiation of international rights, distribution, and licensing of content across print, audio, and digital media. Erin Somers of Publishers Lunch reported on the first day of programming, which included an opening keynote from Pengruin Random House UK CEO Tom Weldon, who predicted that the war in the Middle East will lead to supply chain issues in the UK and the United States. “From an economic point of view, with the cost of oil going up dramatically that is going to put a lot of pressure on freight costs,” he said.

Book Riot unpacks the State Department’s recent decision to halt passport services at certain public libraries due to their status as a nonprofit/non-governmental organization. “In rural areas, these libraries may have acted as the primary passport agency for many people who would have otherwise had to drive long distances and take time off work to apply for a passport.”

Published in response to an AI industry “built on stolen work…taken without permission or payment,” approximately ten thousand authors, including Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, have contributed to an “empty” book that will be distributed to attendees of the London Book Fair, the Guardian reports. The only contents in Don’t Steal This Book is a list of the author’s names. Next week the UK government “is due to issue an assessment on the economic cost of proposed changes in copyright law.”

Last week Amy Griffin, best-selling memoirist of The Tell (The Dial Press), was sued by a former classmate who accused the author of using her story of sexual abuse for her book, reports the New York Times. The lawsuit was filed in California almost one year following the publication of the book, stating, “‘The Tell’ constitutes neither a genuine nor harmless memoir.” Selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club last year, the memoir mentions detailed memories from childhood that Griffin claims to have recovered while under the influence of MDMA therapy.

Physical books and other print media are thriving in France, reports the Guardian. During a time of screen fatigue, “social media-addled attention spans,” the rise of generative AI, and general fear of a post-literate society, the French magazine-book scene includes 3,000 independent bookstores (a higher number than all of those in the United States, though France has one-fifth of the population) and 770 new kiosks. Paris-based journalist Lindsey Tramuta says, “Print is showing some strong signs of survival,” adding that the magazine is “an object of fascination—a collectible that carries a point of view….” 

Former Amazon executive Greg Greeley has been named the new CEO of Simon & Schuster, effective immediately, reports Publishers Lunch. At age sixty-two, Greeley is one of the first Big Five CEOs from outside the literary industry. Richard Sarnoff, a company board chair, commented: “Greg Greeley is a talented and strategic leader with wide-ranging experience managing enterprises across physical and digital markets. His depth of expertise and avid love of books give us the confidence that he is the right CEO to take Simon & Schuster forward as it begins its next 100 years….” He is following Jonathan Karp, who served as CEO of Simon & Schuster for five years and will remain with the company as publisher of the new Simon Six imprint.

António Lobo Antunes, a giant of Portuguese literature and the author of more than thirty novels and other books, has died at the age of eighty-three, the New York Times reports. The author “charted Portugal’s halting emergence from the crippling dictatorship of Dr. António de Oliveira Salazar from 1932 to 1968, and its failed colonial wars in Africa. His career was studded with literary awards, including the Jerusalem Prize in 2005 and the Camões Prize, Portugal’s highest literary honor, in 2007.”

Publishers Lunch reports that thirteen publishers, including Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster, together with the Association of American Publishers (AAP), have brought a lawsuit against Anna’s Archive, a website used by tech companies to source pirated books for training AI models. The suit alleges that the copyrights of more than 140 million texts have been violated by Anna’s Archive. “Anna’s Archive is a brazen pirate operation that steals and distributes millions of literary works while outrageously offering access to AI developers in exchange for crypto payments,” said Maria A. Pallante, president and CEO of AAP, in a statement to the press. “To fight back, we must use all available tools and believe this action in U.S. court will make a difference. The unfortunate reality is that creators face a level of digital piracy today that is so staggering it is almost unbelievable—it is an affront to the public interest.”