Tasha Sandoval writes for Public Books about a new and developing “abuelita canon” that features grandmothers, their sacrifices, and their legacies. She argues that these novels are “shedding light on the lives of the women who came before us: writing them into full human existence, beyond caricature.” The canon includes Catalina (One World, 2024) by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Oye (Hogarth, 2024) by Melissa Mogollon, and Candelaria (Astra House, 2023) by Melissa Lozada-Oliva. (Read Ten Questions for Karla Cornejo Villavicencio). “Honest intergenerational conversations are what make the writing of this new abuelita canon possible,” Sandoval adds.

Anne Michaels was awarded the 2024 Giller Prize for her novel Held (Knopf) at a gala in Toronto on Monday while outside, pro-Palestinian demonstrators protested the Giller Foundation’s lead sponsor, Scotiabank, which holds a stake in the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, the Toronto Star reports. The past year has been tumultuous for the Giller Foundation with multiple protests including an open letter signed by more than forty authors calling on the foundation to cut ties with Scotiabank, a separate letter signed by more than three hundred members of the literary community calling for a boycott of the prize, and two international judges stepping down from the prize’s committee. Though the Giller Prize removed Scotiabank from its name in early September, the bank remains the lead sponsor of the award. Michaels earned $100,000 with her win this week.

The independent distributor National Book Network (NBN), which was founded in 1986 by Jed Lyons, will close next year, and its 150 clients have been offered the chance to move to Simon & Schuster (S&S) Distribution Services, Publishers Weekly reports. After the sudden closure of Small Press Distribution in March, and the imminent closure of NBN, the largest independent distributor left in the United States is Independent Publishers Group. The distribution segment of the publishing industry is now dominated by the distribution divisions of Penguin Random House, S&S, Hachette, and Macmillan, as well as the distribution segment of Ingram Content Group, Ingram Publisher Services.

A new study in the journal Scientific Reports has found that nonexpert readers cannot consistently distinguish between poems written by William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, or Sylvia Plath and Chat GPT 3.5 attempting to imitate each of them, the Washington Post reports. Readers even preferred the AI-generated verse, and were more likely to guess the AI-generated poems were written by humans than real works by renowned poets. In fact, the five poems most often judged to be written by AI were all penned by human writers.

Three candidates—Lindsay Cronk, the Dean of Libraries at Tulane University; Andrea Jamison, an assistant professor of school librarianship at Illinois State University; and Maria McCauley, the director of libraries at the Cambridge Public Library in Massachusetts—are under consideration for the role of president of the American Library Association (ALA) from 2026–2027, Publishers Weekly reports. Ballot mailing for the ALA election will begin on March 10, 2025, and end on April 2, 2025.

HarperCollins has confirmed it has plans to sell authors’ work to an AI technology company, 404 Media reports. A spokesperson for HarperCollins said, “While we believe this deal is attractive, we respect the various views of our authors, and they have the choice to opt in to the agreement or to pass on the opportunity…. HarperCollins has a long history of innovation and experimentation with new business models.” One HarperCollins author, Daniel Kibblesmith, who received a non-negotiable one-time offer of $2,500 to include his book in the AI deal, said, “I see it as the beginning of two diverging markets, readers who want to connect with other humans across time and space, or readers who are satisfied with a customized on-demand content pellet fed to them by the big computer so they never have to be challenged again.”

Barnes & Noble has announced the sale of Sterling Publishing Co. Inc. to Hachette Book Group. Barnes & Noble acquired Sterling in 2003 and the publisher now includes adult imprints Union Square & Co., Puzzelwright Press, Sterling Ethos, and SparkNotes as well as several children’s and gift and stationary imprints. Since 2021, Sterling has been led by Emily Meehan, who oversaw the publisher’s rebranding in January 2022 to Union Square & Co.

Independent bookstores have become a new battleground in China in the ongoing suppression of dissent and free speech but Chinese-language bookstores are thriving abroad, the Associated Press reports. At least a dozen bookstores in China have been shut down in the last few months, and the climate has been “chilling” for China’s publishing industry. In recent years, however, Chinese bookstores have appeared in Japan, France, the Netherlands, and the United States due to the policing of free expression in China and growing Chinese communities abroad.

Unionized bookstore workers held a rally outside the Barnes & Noble flagship store in New York City on November 14 in advance of holiday sales, Publishers Weekly reports. The rally, organized by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, was part of efforts to reach a contract with workers by the end of the year, with an agreement on wages being the final major point to negotiate. Workers from Barnes & Noble, Book Culture, Greenlight, McNally Jackson, and the Strand Book Store were in attendance.

Stephen King, the Guardian, and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia are among those who have said they will stop posting on X (formerly Twitter), due to concerns about disturbing content on the social media platform, the Guardian reports. King noted a “toxic” atmosphere, and La Vanguardia said the site had become an “echo chamber” for disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Elizabeth Nunez, a Trinidad-born academic and writer whose fiction explored family obligations, the pernicious effects of colonialism, and the immigrant’s nostalgia for home, has died, the New York Times reports. Dr. Nunez was the author of eleven novels, including her most recent title, Now Lila Knows (Akashic Books, 2022), and served as the director of the National Black Writers Conference from 1986 to 2000. Dr. Nunez wrote about her homeland, but also resisted the reduction of her identity. She told the Miami Herald in 2006: “I don’t mind being classified as a Caribbean writer, as long as it’s a subcategory in literary fiction.” Read Dr. Nunez’s essay, “Widening the Path: The Importance of Publishing Black Writers” in the January/February 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Black Garnet Books, the first Black woman-owned brick-and-mortar bookstore in Minnesota has found a new owner five months after Dionne Sims announced it was for sale, Publishers Weekly reports. Sims founded Black Garnet in July 2020, two months after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. The bookstore initially operated as a pop-up to sell works by BIPOC authors but changed to a brick-and-mortar model when Sims received a $100,000 matching grant from the City of St. Paul after raising $113,900 through a GoFundMe campaign. The new owner, who has not yet disclosed her identity, describes herself as a “proud Black queer woman” and leverages creativity in her social justice activism and community organization. She is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota and will introduce herself to the store and its community on Thursday, November 21.

Alexis Wright, a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria, was awarded the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature for her novel Praiseworthy (Giramondo Publishing, 2023), the Guardian reports. The book, told in ten parts, follows more than two hundred years of colonization through the story of a remote Aboriginal town. Wright spent ten years writing Praiseworthy and said the novel is the consequence of “really deep thought and hard work over a long period of time, with many, many false starts and reworking and reworking...until I’m absolutely sure that every page, every part of that book stands up and won’t fall over.” The novel also received the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the $60,000 Stella Prize, among other awards.

Georgia Bodnar has launched a boutique literary agency called Noyan Literary in New York, Publishers Weekly reports. The agency is hoping to represent “writers of ambition who are writing books of enduring consequence in both fiction and nonfiction,” Bodnar said. The initial list of authors includes Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde, who won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2019, and Debra Kamin, a reporter for the New York Times, among others. Bodnar hopes that running an independent agency will make her “a little bit more accessible to writers…who don’t really know the people to know, who don’t really have the relationships, but who have the talent.”

Katherine Rundell, whose book The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure (Faber and Faber, 2022) was published in the United States yesterday by Doubleday under the title Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures, will donate all her royalties from the book’s sale to climate charities in protest of Donald Trump’s re-election, the Guardian reports. “In the scheme of things, it’s very small—but I want my book to be a tiny part of the urgent fight ahead of us,” Rundell said.

Willem Marx writes for Electric Literature about the closure of Banned Books USA and the persistent movement to ban books in the state of Florida. Banned Books USA has been working to counteract censorship efforts in schools and libraries over the past year. In collaboration with Bookshop.org and Electric Literature, Banned Books USA offered Florida residents free access to over nine hundred banned books. Banned Books USA also made targeted gifts to Florida organizations such as Gainesville’s Pride Community Center of North Central Florida and Read Aloud Florida. In total, the organization donated 2,362 books, sponsored fourteen events, and reached thousands of Florida readers. On October 31, 2024, Banned Books USA paused operations after using the funds that were part of a one-time donation from Paul English as well as funds raised with community support.

Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital (Grove Press, 2024), Publishers Weekly reports. In an interview after the announcement of this year’s longlisted titles, Harvey said, “I wanted to write about our human occupation of low earth orbit for the last quarter of a century—not as sci-fi but as realism. Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer? Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral? These were the challenges I set myself.”

Lynn Steger Strong writes for the Atlantic about how Lili Anolik’s new book Didion and Babitz, out this month from Scribner, fixates on the alleged rivalry between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. Strong observes: “Every time Anolik noses her way toward parallels between Didion and Babitz, she veers away, doubling down instead on the split between them.” Strong wonders about the compulsion to pit women against each other, and asks, “What has the world done to us, and particularly to women, to make us so quick to make such blanket statements, to make us think that only a single type of woman writer might have a right to make it out intact?”

Though Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) has been banned for decades in India, the prohibition is now in doubt because of “some missing paperwork,” the Associated Press reports. Last week, a court in New Delhi concluded proceedings on a petition filed five years ago that challenged the then-government’s ban on the import of the novel. Because authorities could not produce the notification of the ban, the judges declared, “We have no other option except to presume that no such notification exists.” The petitioner’s lawyer, Uddyam Mukherjee, said that the court’s ruling means that at least for now, nothing prohibits someone from importing the book into India.

Louis Menand writes for the New Yorker about Edwin Frank’s book Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and its argument linking twentieth-century authors as disparate as Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and Chinua Achebe. Menand relays Frank’s view that “the twentieth-century novel is a distinct literary genre,” and deems the book “an ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious effort to map it.” In distinguishing Frank from academic literary critics, Menand writes, “Frank is interested, as literature professors generally are not, in the feel of certain books and writers, and he is adept at capsule characterizations.”