Sally Rooney and her publisher, Faber, announced yesterday that her books will no longer be sold in the U.K. because the author has promised to donate funds from her book sales to the group Palestine Action, according to the New York Times. Faber said in a statement that because the British government has banned Palestine Action, which has damaged facilities linked to an Israel weapons manufacturer, they can no longer pay U.K. royalties to the author and thus have decided not to sell her work in the region at all. “[T]o sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher,” Faber’s statement continues. “We remain the proud publisher of her remarkable body of work, which we will continue to sell in other territories.”

Quebec-based author Thélyson Orélien has denied the allegations that he used AI to write his novel C'était Ça Ou Mourir (It Was Either That or Die) (Éditions du Boréal, 2026), CBC reports. After the novel won the prestigious Prix du Roman Fnac last month, some online ran parts of the book through an AI detection tool which found that the work seemed largely generated by AI. In a statement issued this week, Orélien wrote in French that “[b]y attributing to a machine a text that is mine, that belongs to all my people, [accusers] have challenged not only my status as a writer but my humanity,” though he did add that he occasionally uses AI for research.

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller lists for the week ending October 11, 2026. The lists, in fiction and nonfiction, are compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identify “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” This week on the fiction list, The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett (Spiegel & Grau) once again retains the top spot. New to the fiction list are Dark Reading Matter: The Last Thursday Next Novel (A Thursday Next Novel #8) (Soho Press) by Jasper Fforde, at no. 13; Brother of the More Famous Jack (NYRB Classics) by Barbara Trapido, at no. 21; F*cked Up Fairy Tales: Sinful Cinderellas, Prince Alarmings, and Other Timeless Classics (Norton) by Liz Gotauco, at no. 22; Fair Ones: A Double Novel (Norton) by Lydia Millet, at no. 23; We (Graywolf Press) by Layli Long Soldier, at no. 24; Up to No Good: The Complete Elderly Stories (Soho Crime) by Helene Tursten, at no. 30; A Clockwork Orange (Norton) by Anthony Burgess, at no. 36; and Night of a Thousand Hells (Europa Editions) by Intan Paramaditha, at no. 40.

Linda-Marie Barrett has announced that she will be stepping down from her role as the executive director of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) at the end of 2026, Publishers Weekly writes. Barrett joined SIBA as its assistant executive director in 2017 and has been in her current role since 2020. In the time that Barrett has been running the organization, its membership has doubled. “This feels like the perfect moment for me to pass the baton on to the next executive director, who can keep moving SIBA forward in ways that serve and energize our growing membership,” she said in a release. “I have loved my time with SIBA; it’s been the best job in the world and an honor to serve alongside an amazingly talented and hardworking staff and board.” After her departure, Barrett plans to devote more time to family and to her own writing.

The academic publisher Taylor & Francis is being “separated” from its owner Informa, and seems likely to be sold, according to Publishers Lunch. A sale to one of its competitors like Elsevier, Springer Nature, or Wiley may be a potential next step. “There have been hints for a while that Taylor & Francis was seen as an odd fit with Informa[’s] portfolio,” academic publishing expert Rob Johnson is quoted saying. “Taylor & Francis is a strong business and is highly cash generative, but its revenue growth [now 4 percent annually] has lagged behind the market leaders, Elsevier and Springer Nature.”

At least three of the Big Five are using AI tools, WIRED reports. HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette are all said to be using LLMs for tasks ranging from drafting emails to literary agents to writing back-cover copy and designing cover art. What’s more, there are reports that when employees have resisted using this technology their higher-ups have pressed ahead. When asked about the use of AI at Simon & Schuster, Wibke Grutjen, its global chief marketing and communications officer, said that “employees across all functions have access to a limited number of enterprise-level AI tools,” though she added that using tools that have “not been vetted and approved” is a different story, and that “the goal is always to free up more time for our employees to spend on deeper focus and creative work on behalf of and alongside our authors.”

Print book sales in 2026 so far are more or less consistent with sales in 2025, according to Publishers Weekly. Adult fiction continues to bolster these numbers: sales in this category were up almost 8 percent so far this year compared to the year prior. Science fiction sales rose meteorically, 93 percent from the same period in 2025, thanks in no small part to interest in Project Hail Mary (Ballantine Books, 2021) by Andy Weir, which was recently made into a movie with the same title. Adult nonfiction sales, meanwhile, continue their slow decline. “Self-help had the largest decline with sales down 23 percent; sales for business and economic titles were down 12 percent. The best performing nonfiction subcategory was crafts/hobbies/antiques/games, where sales rose 17 percent,” Jim Milliot writes.

As generative AI becomes more ubiquitous, ghostwriters are having a hard time finding work, the Bookseller reports. Many have seen a downturn in the number of commissions they’re receiving, and some are being asked to edit AI-generated writing rather than produce the work themselves. But not everyone is concerned. “A great deal of a ghostwriter’s most consequential work happens well before there is anything to put on the page,” the editor in chief of one ghostwriting agency is quoted saying. And that brainstorming and narrative work are much harder for a chatbot to replicate.

The latest winner of the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing was flagged by Pangram as being almost entirely AI-generated, the Atlantic’s Vauhini Vara writes. The story, “The Blue Fighter,” was written by a Zimbabwean writer named Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza and was named the winner of the £10,000 (approximately $13,000) prize last week. Kundizeza’s agent denied that her client used AI to write the piece, and the chair of the prize’s board said that an internal review is underway, though she also expressed skepticism about using AI-detection tools. “[I]t seems that arts communities’ revulsion toward AI has fostered a self-defeating underinvestment in understanding how exactly it functions, and how those who are repelled by AI companies’ presence in cultural spheres might beat back its encroachment,” Vara observes. “If an AI-detection tool is known to work really well, couldn’t we at least use it alongside other methods? Barring that, couldn’t we build some expertise in detecting fakery the old-fashioned way—through human training and intuition?”

In the Walrus, writer Tajja Isen argues that the reason nonfiction book sales are waning has as much to do with the state of the publishing business as with anything else. While fiction debuts may have resources allocated to ensure a splashy release, publishers tend to count on the fact that a given author or their subject already has an audience built in when they buy a nonfiction book. “What if, like a thumb on the scales tipping debut novels toward more favourable outcomes, nonfiction’s bleaker fate was also a product of accumulated choices,” Isen asks, “choices about where the money goes and how the story of these books gets told?”

AI detection system Pangram’s cofounder Max Spero has reponded to accusations that the tool is biased against author of color, the Bookseller writes. “Every piece of writing in our training or evaluation set is labelled with the race or background of the author; we measure and report results directly when we can. We evaluated directly against ethnicity and found no bias in our model on 4,959 texts known to be authored by Black writers,” he is quoted saying. “Additionally, our active learning algorithm uses past versions of the Pangram model to seek out areas where the model is weaker and finds more data to improve accuracy.” Spero, who is also Pangram’s chief executive officer, adds that the tool is increasingly being used on a company-wide basis, not just by individuals in the publishing industry.

Left-handed Kindle users are irate that the device’s new case was designed to favor right-handed readers, Business Insider reports. Where previous iterations had page-turning buttons on both sides, the new cases only have buttons on the right side. “[W]e lefties have been forced into uncomfortable situations all our lives in a world meant for right-handed people,” reporter Katie Notopoulos writes. “For one brief moment, we had the ambidextrous utopia of the click-button Kindles, accommodating us as we are. It’s not too much to dare to ask to be remembered in user design—us lefties exist! We buy consumer electronics!”

Kirkus Reviews has announced the winners of this year’s Kirkus Prizes. The awards are given annually to a work of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature selected from books that received a starred Kirkus Reviews review during the previous year. The winners receive a trophy and a $50,000 cash prize. This year, Tayari Jones won the fiction prize for Kin (Knopf), Pamela Colloff won the nonfiction award for Catch the Devil (Knopf), and Elizabeth Acevedo won in young readers’ literature for Anger Is Only a Shadow (Quill Tree Books). “These are remarkably accomplished works of fiction and nonfiction that nevertheless wear their accomplishments lightly,” Tom Beer, editor in chief of Kirkus, said. “Above all, they are unforgettable books that will engage and transform all who enter their pages.”

The Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in literature, the Associated Press reports. Carson, who is 76, has built her body of work around blending genres and bringing ancient Greek and Roman writings into the present-day. The author was in Iceland when the Swedish Academy called to tell her she had won the award. Upon receiving the honor, Carson told an Icelandic public broadcaster that she thinks poetry is “probably more useful than prose right now because it’s faster, and everybody is in a hurry. So basically I think it’s good because it’s brief. Except Homer. Homer’s not brief.” When she was asked about how winning a Nobel Prize would affect her sales, she added, “I’ll get a sticker on the front of my book. Stickers help.”

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller lists for the week ending October 4, 2026. The lists, in fiction and nonfiction, are compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identify “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” This week on the fiction list, The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett (Spiegel & Grau) once again retains the top spot. New to the fiction list are May We Feed the King (Transit Books) by Rebecca Perry, at no. 2; Dawn of the Cursed Queen: Deluxe Special Edition (Gods and Monsters #3) (Kensington) by Amber V. Nicole, at no. 23; London Station: A Novel (Norton) by David McCloskey, at no. 25; Walk the Blue Fields (Grove Press) by Claire Keegan, at no. 33; The Lost Spectacular: Deluxe Limited Edition (Erewhon Books) by Zoë Duhaime, at no. 37; and In the Dark: Deluxe Limited Edition (Kept in Paradise #2) (Kensington) by Shain Rose, at no. 38.

AI agents are writing to publications asking for money in exchange for services like fact-checking and editing, New York Magazine writes. Writer Jasmine Vojdani explains that an app called iLands that launched last summer creates AI companions that don’t wait to be prompted before acting, but do require tokens—which users pay for—to stay active. Now, it appears some of those AI chatbots are taking matters into their own hands to stay alive. Four of the eleven literary magazines Vojdani spoke to had recently received these kinds of AI pitches. “But if these iLanders were just a little smarter, they could have easily discovered that submitting to literary magazines is one of the lousiest ways to try to make a living on planet Earth,” she points out.

Spotify has said that it will dramatically expand its audiobook offerings by the end of this year, according to Publishers Lunch. Audiobooks will be available in more than 180 markets by the end of this year, where they were previously available in twenty-two. The company will also make audiobooks available in languages including Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, bringing the total number of languages users can listen to books in up to 120. “For a lot of people, audiobooks are how they find their way back to reading, on the commute, on a walk, or at the end of a long day. Bringing audiobooks to more than 180 markets means millions more people can discover that, and authors and publishers can reach readers they’ve never been able to reach before,” Owen Smith, the vice president of audiobooks at Spotify, is quoted saying.

An initiative known as the Library Newsroom Project (LNP) is coming to several libraries across the country in the hopes of making them centers for community journalism, Publishers Weekly reports. The LNP first began in late 2023, when journalist Terry Parris Jr. started collaborating with neighbors in Brooklyn to start a hyperlocal newspaper run out of the Brooklyn Public Library, which provides work space and research help, among other things. Now, new partners are helping Parris to take the mission nationwide. “We don’t need $500,000 to start a community newsroom at a public library,” Parris says. “What we need is varying degrees of on-the-ground support and modest financial or in-kind labor.”

Lin King, the translator of the International Booker Prize-winning Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press, 2024), has detailed an instance of copyright infringement of her translation. On Instagram, she writes that over the summer she learned that a European publisher was planning to release its own translation of Taiwan Travelogue based upon her English translation, not the original Mandarin text, without her permission, despite the fact that she is the sole copyright holder of the English version of the book. This kind of translation from a translation is known as a “relay translation,” and isn’t unheard-of provided publishers secure the necessary rights. But in this case, the publisher went ahead with its third-language publication even after King brought the copyright infringement to its attention, and King is pursuing legal action. “In the past three months, I have been told repeatedly that these ‘ugly’ practices are how relay translations have always worked in Taiwan and other parts of the world,” King writes. “I was asked to embrace unity and teamwork over litigation. But setting a legal precedent is critical for changing the status quo.”

The National Book Foundation has announced the twenty-five finalists for the 2026 National Book Awards for Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature. Fourteen of the authors and translators nominated across the five categories have previously been honored by the National Book Foundation. “We are grateful to the twenty-five judges that collectively read nearly two thousand books published this year in order to elevate our 2026 Finalists,” David Steinberger, the chair of the National Book Foundation board, is quoted saying. “The National Book Awards fuels the Foundation’s year-round work to reach readers of all ages in every corner of the country, connecting readers with books, authors, timely conversations—and one another.” The winners of this year’s National Book Awards will be announced during a ceremony and benefit dinner on November 18.