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 83, 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.”

Former Penguin Random House executive Brendan Cahill has announced the launch of new publisher Navigator Books, Publishers Weekly reports. The press will be based in Philadelphia and focus on history, memoir, biography, and historical fiction, publishing its first of three 2026 titles in July. The press plans to release six titles per year starting in 2027. “There are many talented established and emergent authors who are frustrated by today’s publishing landscape,” Cahill said in a statement. “Navigator Books is excited to join the new generation of innovative and dynamic author-centric independent book publishers seeking to transform the industry by addressing its legacy limitations.”

Ina Steiner reports on the end of Amazon’s book club program for EcommerceBytes. Last Friday, the technology company notified customers that it was winding down Amazon Book Clubs as of March 1 to “focus on other book discovery features for readers.” Steiner notes that “the Book Club feature had allowed members to use a widget to suggest books to fellow members and to endorse suggestions made by other members.” Amazon’s offered alternative to customers was exploring Goodreads, which was acquired by Amazon in 2013. 

The Gernert Company has joined forces with Bookcase Literary Agency to offer representation to authors of women’s commercial fiction, reports Publishers Weekly. Bookcase, a Los Angeles-based agency that represents romance authors such as Meghan Quinn and Anna Todd, is playing a central role in this partnership. Founder of the Gernert Company, David Gernert, states: “Today’s romance authors are entrepreneurial, global, and deeply and often directly connected to their readers. By partnering with Bookcase, we’re combining institutional reach with category-specific insight in a way that meaningfully serves this new generation of writers.” 

Wikipedia is now restricting certain contributors who were paid to implement AI in translating existing Wikipedia articles into other languages, as the editors discovered that these translations include “hallucinations,” reports 404 Media. These AI-generated errors have also led to new policies for the online encyclopedia, including the use of an independent AI model to peer review the current AI translations. 

For the New York Times Style Magazine, Elly Fishman considers the endeavor of visual artist Bethany Collins who for four months “woke up every day before dawn, brewed coffee, and sat down at her dining table to copy out Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick(1851) with a nib pen.” Collins was inspired by an earlier work by conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg, who in 1974 gave a similar treatment to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. “Immersing herself in Melville’s text, she found Moby-Dick to be rife with two-hundred-year-old anxieties that still echo today: The book warns ‘against following the lone madman who will take the whole ship down,’ she says, noting that Melville also points out the dangers of ‘overconsumption, the pursuit of oil, and an obsession with whiteness.’ As Americans, ‘all of those obsessions and pursuits are somehow uniquely ours,’ she says.”

Sixteen novels have been announced as the longlist for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction, “with settings ranging from climate-ravaged islands to a near-future Kolkata” and including nine titles from independent presses and seven debuts, the Guardian reports. The annual award confers a prize of £30,000 (approximately $40,100) to a work of fiction written in the English language by a woman. The titles comprising this year’s longlist are Gloria Don’t Speak (Weatherglass Books) by Lucy Apps, Paradiso 17 (4th Estate) by Hannah Lillith Assadi, Moderation (Atlantic Books) by Elaine Castillo, Flashlight (Jonathan Cape) by Susan Choi, Dominion (Europa Editions) by Addie E Citchens (Europa Editions), The Benefactors (Sceptre) by Wendy Erskine, The Correspondent (Michael Joseph) by Virginia Evans, The Mercy Step (Cassava Republic Press) by Marcia Hutchinson, The Others (Fly on the Wall Press) by Sheena Kalayil, Kingfisher (Saraband) by Rozie Kelly, Heart the Lover by Lily King (Canongate), Audition by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press), A Guardian and a Thief (Scribner) by Megha Majumdar, Wild Dark Shore (Canongate) by Charlotte McConaghy, The Best of Everything (Tinder Press) by Kit de Waal, and A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing (Dead Ink) by Alice Evelyn Yang.

Writers are gathering in Baltimore as the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) kicks off the 2026 AWP Conference & Bookfair at the Baltimore Convention Center. BmoreArt expects that more than 10,000 writers, editors, and other literati will participate in the annual festivities, which include panels, readings, an exhibition hall with booths from presses and writing programs, offsite events, and a keynote address by screenwriter and director John Waters. The conference runs through today through March 7; visit Poets & Writers at booth #347 to meet staff, enjoy free copies of Poets & Writers Magazine, and more.

The Authors Guild has launched its Human Authored certification program, Publishers Lunch reports. For $10 per book (free to Authors Guild members), authors “can register to use the Human Authored certification mark to distinguish their human-written books from AI-generated books.” According to the program’s usage guidelines, “The certification mark may only be used in connection with literary works for which the text itself was fully authored by one or more human beings and not generated by AI, except for a de minimis amount (such as through the use of AI-powered spelling and grammar check applications). Use of generative AI to create a table of contents, indices, or other auxiliary parts of a book, or for researching, brainstorming, outlining, or any purposes other than generating text does not disqualify a work from being Human Authored.”

Steph Opitz has been named director of publishing services at Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, Publishers Weekly reports. Opitz, who has worked for Bookshop.org since 2022, most recently as director of bookstore partnerships, will succeed longtime Consortium president Julie Schaper, who in September announced her plans to retire.

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has revealed the five finalists for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Judges Samantha Hunt, Tania James, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow considered 387 eligible novels and short story collections by American authors published in the U.S. in 2025 and selected the following finalists: Dominion (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Addie E. Citchens, The White Hot (One World) by Quiara Alegría Hudes, The Sisters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Heart the Lover (Grove Press) by Lily King, and Small Scale Sinners (A Public Space Books) by Mahreen Sohail. The winner, to be announced in early April, will receive $15,000; the remaining four finalists will each receive an honorarium of $5,000.

Media Do International, a Japanese e-book distribution company, will acquire Seven Seas Entertainment, “the largest independently owned manga publisher in the English-language market.” Seven Seas will continue to operate under its existing leadership team with the same editorial direction, and all its imprints will continue to be distributed by Penguin Random House. The publisher notes that, “The acquisition reflects continued global momentum in manga, light novels, and international storytelling across print, digital, and audio formats, and positions [us] for long-term growth within an expanding worldwide readership.”

The digital catalog service Edelweiss has announced a discount tier for publishers, allowing presses to make their titles searchable within the platform, visible in saved filter results, and eligible for inclusion in curated collections for bookstores, libraries, and media sources, reports Publishers Weekly. The company’s CEO, John Rubin, said, “This new offering is designed to provide a clear, affordable option for title visibility, while still preserving the functionality and value that our full-service publisher partners rely on.” This announcement comes on the heels of criticism from the literary community when Edelweiss raised prices and fees following its acquisition by Valsoft in December 2024. Details on the rollout will be announced in the coming months, and the launch of this new offering is expected later this year.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters recently announced their eleven new members for 2026, including, in literature: Sandra Cisneros, Marie Howe, Pico Iyer, Rick Moody, Carl Phillips, and U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze. The academy’s website states, “The three hundred members of Arts and Letters are divided into departments of architecture, art, literature, and music, and are elected in recognition of notable achievement in their fields. Members are elected for life, pay no dues, and nominate and elect new members as vacancies occur.” The new members, alongside three honorary members, will be inducted during the annual Arts and Letters ceremony in May, with Zadie Smith delivering the keynote address.

The American Library Association has taken to social media to “strongly denounce” House Resolution 7661 (H.R. 7661), new legislation initiated on Tuesday aimed at censoring trans narratives and “sexually-oriented material” in public school libraries. Earlier this week, Kelly Jensen wrote about the resolution for Book Riot. “Such a broad definition also ensures that this kind of bill could be applicable in any situation where it would benefit the banners,” argued Jensen. “It isn’t a stretch to see a bill like this used to outright ban all books by or about LGBTQ+ people under the guise of it being ‘sexually oriented.’”

In an opinion piece for Publishers Weekly, Jason Low, publisher and co-owner of the multicultural book publisher Lee & Low books, describes how recent book bans have upended Lee & Low’s Diversity Baseline Survey. Low says the survey, which had become “the industry standard for inclusive hiring practices and accountability” since its initiation in 2017 and which is typically conducted every four years, “will be postponed until further notice” because of “more pressing matters.” Low thanked publishers for the attention given to past surveys before considering the state of inclusivity and diversity in publishing: “As far as books for children go, the diversity movement is by and large in limbo. In the face of extreme censorship that targets diverse authors and titles, our first priority as publishers must shift toward continuing to publish and sell diverse books for children in contentious times. The second priority is to redirect the time and effort we would have spent on DBS 4.0 and channel it toward the fight to ban book bans.”

Tom Hanks is set to star in the film adaptation of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Kirkus Reviews reports. The acclaimed novel, for which Saunders received the Booker Prize, imagines a grieving Abraham Lincoln amid a polyvocal chorus of ghosts as Lincoln’s recently deceased son lingers between death and rebirth. The film adaptation will combine live action and stop-motion animation, and will mark the prolific actor’s first time portraying an American president. (Saunders spoke about conceiving of the novel as such and cultivating “narrative alertness” in a feature by Kevin Larimer in the March/April 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)

Ann Godoff, the founder, president, and editor-in-chief of Penguin Press, passed away on Tuesday evening due to bone cancer complications, reports Publishers Lunch. Starting off in the industry as an assistant to Simon & Schuster editor Alice Mayhew, Godoff became a senior editor at Atlantic Monthly Press in 1987, moving to Random House in 1991, where she continued to grow professionally. Penguin Press publisher Scott Moyers writes, “Ann’s impact on American book culture over the past four decades is incalculable. … Beyond the industry accolades, her legacy should be measured in her success in helping authors create indelible new spaces in the minds of readers.”

Tyrant Books, an independent publisher based in Rome, Italy, and New York City, will resume publishing, reports Publishers Weekly, after being largely dormant following the sudden death of its founder Giancarlo DiTrapano in 2021. Luke Goebel, who previously worked as an unpaid assistant at Tyrant Books, will now oversee its editorial direction and expansion, serving as one of two individuals having an acquisition of 50 percent ownership. Regarding the reason behind this acquisition, Goebel notes, “I did it for one reason: to ensure that Tyrant would never be absorbed into any corporate ecosystem whose financial roots trace back to power structures fundamentally misaligned with what this press represents.” The other owner is Matthew Johnson of Fat Possum Records, who provided early funding for the press.