In an essay for the Atlantic, John Williams, the former editor of the Washington Post’s now-defunct Book World, argues that an editor should serve subscribers, not data. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, owner of the Post, recently said, “Each and every day our readers give us a roadmap to success. The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.” In response, Williams writes: “As a reader of many distinctive publications, I want to be led by them. What makes them special is where they choose to take me, and how much I trust them to do that. In a subscription business, you are not just trying to reach new people, crucial as that is; you are also trying to retain those you already have. Sizable, steadfast subscriber bases are hard-won, and keeping them involves the fulfillment of an unspoken contract as well as the actual one that paying readers sign. I expect publications I support to attempt growth without radically changing the focus or quality of the work or pivoting to some get-traffic-quick scheme every time readership dips over a holiday weekend.”

A new study by the National Literacy Trust shows that only 10 percent of boys age 14 to 16 read daily for pleasure in the UK, according to a report by the Guardian. “While reading declines for both boys and girls in early adolescence, there are ‘signs of recovery’ among girls in later teenage years, but boys’ engagement remains persistently low.”

The thirteen books nominated for this year’s International Booker Prize for fiction translated into English have been revealed, the New York Times reports. Among those nominated are two past winners of the National Book Award for translated literature: We Are Green and Trembling (New Directions, 2025) by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers, and Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press, 2024) by Yang Shuang-zi, translated from Mandarin by Lin King.

Over four hundred independent bookstores in the UK will have to pay higher business rates starting in April due to adjustments in the country’s budget, reports Publishers Lunch. Added on to this, some stores’ taxes will be doubled. These financial changes are being called “a disaster” by the UK’s Bookseller Association, which is asking their government for permanent reductions in business rates for booksellers. 

The New Yorker’s Casey Cep covers the unlikely success of a bookstore in Alabama with a unique business model. The Alabama Booksmith, run by ninety-year-old Jake Reiss, only sells signed, first editions of hardcover books, mostly at the publishers’ prices. Cep writes, “Because Reiss guarantees sales of several hundred copies, he can sometimes convince publicists to add a book-tour stop in Birmingham, even if it’s just for a lightning signing during which he and his team serve as a kind of human conveyor belt, shuffling signature-ready books by so speedily that the author can make it to a nearby city for another event that same night. When that strategy doesn’t work, he’s not above begging authors directly.”

Ingram Content Group has announced a new digital catalog and galley platform to aid publishers in sharing titles with booksellers, media, and librarians, reports Publishers Weekly. Covered, the new online service from the company, will have a beta launch this fall for a select group of industry professionals with broader industry availability to come in 2027. This platform is meant to serve as a more cost-effective competitor to Edelweiss and NetGalley, the former of which hiked up its prices in 2024, making waves in the literary community. 

A New Jersey school district faces controversy after pulling a title from its curriculum in response to a mental health crisis at its schools, NPR reports. After five reported suicide attempts by students at Columbia High School in Maplewood, administrators’ “most immediate response” to the crisis was to remove The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz from its AP English Literature and Composition curriculum. After pushback from parents, students may now read the book with signed permission—terms that PEN America says amount to a book ban. “Book restrictions in schools and libraries are often linked to objections to their treatments of sexuality or to their discussions of race. But the situation in New Jersey is part of a much larger trend, according to PEN America. In a November 2024 report, the group found nearly 60 percent of banned books are young adult titles that specifically depict grief, death, suicide, substance abuse, depression and other mental health concerns, and sexual violence.”

As a federal immigration crackdown continues to target Minneapolis and St. Paul, two literary adovacy organizations are among those that have stepped up to support children sheltering in place to avoid ICE raids, Publishers Weekly reports. The Boston literary nonprofit Reach Out and Read launched a Books for Neighbors initiative in the Twin Cities in late January, adapting its usual model of distributing books at pediatrician well visits to instead offer materials through mutual aid groups and community organizations. Separately, A Book of One’s Own, a nonprofit that works to provide books to hands of Minnesota children, has shifted focus to supporting families in the Twin Cities: “To date, 4,000 Spanish-language books have been donated to 25 public school districts—including 500 books to Liam Conejo Ramos’s school after the five-year-old was detained by ICE. A lesser quantity of Hmong and Somali books also have been donated to schools for distribution to students.”

For the New York Times, Parul Sehgal considers Toni Morrison as “a wave of Morrisoniana” deepens scholars’ sense of her ambition: “to confront the immense silences in the archives where Black life and thought are concerned.” Recent works including Toni at Random by Dana A. Williams, On Morrison by Namwali Serpell, and Language as Liberation, a volume collecting Morrison’s Princeton lectures, comprise an ever-richer portrait of her genius and legacy, also felt in the reissuing of Morrison’s eleven novels with new introductions by contemporary literary luminaries. “When a writer dies, what survives of her work is often that which is most legible, that which can be taught—her craft and technique, the public statements that distill her aims and themes. But what gives Morrison’s novels their force lies below the skin of language and outside the logic of neat précis. Morrison seems to know forbidden things—all the secrets of childhood and maternity and the marriage bed.” (An excerpt from Toni at Random, on Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House, appears in the July/August 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)

This spring, the Library of Congress will unveil The Source: Where Creativity Sparks Discovery, an experiential learning center for young people between the ages of eight and fifteen, reports Publishers Weekly. The website for this literary youth center will launch on April 2, and there will be a family day event on May 9. Shari Rosenstein Werb, director of the library’s Center for Learning, Literacy, and Engagement and The Source’s lead curator, stated, “The LoC is a research library, and you have to be sixteen to get a research card. We want to encourage young people to do research, so we’ve collected maps, audio, all sorts of things from the library that invite kids to explore the collections.” 

Michael Silverblatt, the host of KCRW’s Bookworm for over three decades, passed away on February 14, reports the Los Angeles Times. He was 73 years old. Known for his in-depth 30-minute interviews with authors such as David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion, and Zadie Smith, and his wide breadth of literary knowledge, Silverblatt became a prominent personality thanks to his unique voice and voracious reading style. During a talk at Cornell University in 2010, he said, “I’m as fantastical a creature as anything in Oz or in Wonderland. I like it if people can say, ‘I never met anyone like him,’ and by that they should mean that it wasn’t an unpleasant experience.”

Minnesota Writers Respond, an evening of fellowship in response to the current moment in Minneapolis, presented in partnership with the Loft and Milkweed Editions, is taking place on February 26. Organized by author Jessica Nordell, this public literary event will include readings from Michael Kleber-Diggs, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay, and Halee Kirkwood, among others. Proceeds will go toward the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM), “a nonprofit organization that provides free immigration legal representation to low-income immigrants and refugees in Minnesota and North Dakota.”

A year-long celebration of Toni Morrison kicks off today in the legendary author’s home state of Ohio, on what would have been her 95th birthday. First festivities of Beloved: Ohio Celebrates Toni Morrison include a community gathering hosted by members of Morrison’s family in her hometown of Lorain; a Lit Cleveland event featuring Namwali Serpell, author of the new essay collection On Morrison; and library events for children honoring Morrison’s work for young readers. A statewide virtual book club will also invite participants to read all eleven of Morrison’s novels over the course of the year in the order of the time they were set, beginning with Mercy. 

Conjunctions has announced seven finalists for its inaugural Writers Helping Writers residency, which will provide a three-week retreat at Livingston Manor in upstate New York to a writer who has “shown an ongoing personal commitment to helping other writers achieve their own creative goals.” The seven finalists, “chosen from a gratifyingly large pool of candidates,” are Andrew Altschul, Donna Hemans, Ruth Joffre, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Kristina Ten, Susan Wheeler, and Kyle Lucia Wu. Rick Moody judged. The recipient of the first annual residency will be revealed on March 4 and will make their stay in May.

This August, Zando will launch a new horror imprint, Evil Twin, with hopes of replicating the “explosive success” of its Slowburn romance line, Publishers Weekly reports. Nancy Trypuc will lead as publishing director for the imprint while continuing in the role of deputy director of marketing for Zando, where Trypuc has used the press’s social media reach to cultivate an enthusiastic community of romance readers. “We know how to build a robust and playful presence both online and IRL to meet genre readers where they gather,” said Trypuc in a statement. 

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the finalists for the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. This year’s judges—Rachel Beanland, Dionne Irving, and Taymour Soomro—chose the following three finalists from among 146 eligible novels: The Correspondent (Crown) by Virginia Evans, Awake in the Floating City (Pantheon) by Susanna Kwan, and Blob (Harper) by Maggie Su. The winner, to be announced in early April, will receive $10,000.

Harlequin, one of the biggest publishers of romance novels in the world, plans to shut down its historical romance line in September 2027, according to a report by Reactor. “The move includes ceasing U.S. and U.K. retail efforts as well as digital publishing related to the line in those markets. The company reportedly will not acquire any new works for the line moving forward.”

The Associated Press reports on the International Damascus Book Fair, which wrapped up on Monday, the first book fair to be held in the capital of Syria following the end of the rule of Bashar Assad, who was overthrown in 2024 after the Syrian civil war. “The first book fair since Assad was unseated in December 2024 witnessed high turnout, with state media reporting that 250,000 people attended on the first day, Feb. 6, trekking out to fairgrounds where it was held about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the city center. The fair’s director, Ahmad Naasan, said about 500 publishing companies from some 35 countries took part.”

Ahead of the Valentine’s Day weekend, the New York Times Book Review has shared a glossary of romance novel terms and tropes, from amnesia and apron tugger to yearning and zombies. The guide parses the evolving (and sometimes cultish) culture surrounding the booming genre—Publishers Weekly estimates nearly 44 million copies of romance novels sold in 2026—and invites new readers to understand its niches, so as “to achieve maximum swoon.”

In a statement to the Wire, author Arundhati Roy has announced her withdrawal from the 2026 Berlinale film festival, where she had been set to make an appearance at a screening of her film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. Roy’s withdrawal comes in response to controversy surrounding comments from the film festival’s jury president about the place of politics at the festival, and particularly discussion of Palestine. “This morning, like millions of people across the world, I heard the unconscionable statements made by members of the jury of the Berlin film festival when they were asked to comment about the genocide in Gaza. To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping,” said Roy. “It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time—when artists, writers, and filmmakers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.”