George Packer recalls reading, and recently rereading, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for the Atlantic, pointing out the century-old novel’s still-relevant lessons for contemporary readers. “The need for political reconstruction, in this country and around the world, is as obvious as it was in Thomas Mann’s time,” Packer writes. 

Barnes & Noble has announced plans to open twelve new stores in November in California, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Utah, and Washington, D.C., Publishers Weekly reports. The additional locations are part of the company’s plan to open sixty bookstores this year.

Bookstores are setting up readers on “blind dates” with books, according to the New York Times. A contemporary trend in bookshops like the Strand Book Store in Manhattan features “a table of anonymous books with covers wrapped like Christmas presents and titles replaced by vague descriptions,” Hank Sanders writes. Spoiler Alert (HarperCollins, 2020) by Olivia Dade is pitched as a “You’ve Got Mail-esque Romance.” Readers are drawn to the element of surprise, and the practice helps sellers promote books that are not recently published, best-selling, or written by famous authors. 

Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, which was published this month by Biblioasis in the U.S., explores how the notebook is an indispensable part of renowned writers’ biographies and classic works of literature, Wilson Wong reports for the New York Times. Allen discusses what can be discovered and gleaned from studying the notebooks of authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, and others. Wong writes that Allen’s book “is a revealing document of a relationship so intimate as to be sacred: that of the writer and the page.”

San Francisco Center for the Book is presenting an exhibition featuring the artist and graphic designer David King and his small press publications, zines, ephemera, and early design projects, Fine Books & Collections reports. The exhibition will include David King’s publications from 1977 to 2019 and will be on view until December 22.

In an interview with Electric Literature, Jenna Tang discusses translating Fang Si Chi’s First Love Paradise (HarperVia, 2024) by Lin Yi-Han, an influential novel that helped propel the #MeToo movement in Taiwan. The novel follows teenage Fang Si-Chi, who is groomed and assaulted by a neighbor. Lin Yi-Han explores how Si-Chi’s community repeatedly fails to protect her and illuminates the way harm flourishes when perpetrators act without consequence. Only two months after the book was published, Lin Yi-Han passed away due to suicide, and soon thereafter, her own suspected abuser was acquitted of charges. Tang discusses her translation choices, the importance of bringing the novel to an English-speaking audience, and what the book means to her. “This book has been by my side in very meaningful ways since I first moved to the U.S. It gave me just the right amount of courage and rage to move forward.”

In a recent study, only 34.6 percent of eight- to eighteen-year-olds surveyed in the U.K. by the National Literacy Trust said they enjoyed reading in their spare time, the Guardian reports. This is the lowest figure recorded by the charity since it began asking children about their reading routines nineteen years ago. Reading frequency is also at a historic low, with 20.5 percent of eight- to eighteen-year-olds reporting that they read daily in their spare time, compared with 28 percent last year.

Freedom to read activists in Alaska received good news in court when the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in Alaska agreed to pay $89,000 to settle claims that the district inappropriately pulled dozens of books from school libraries, Publishers Weekly reports. Titles that were removed included classic works of literature such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in addition to other books concerning LGBTQ people, sexual health, and racial issues.

Nicola Kenny writes for the BBC about how Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Penguin Books, 1960) by D. H. Lawrence was banned and became a bestseller in Britain. The trial that followed the publication, which was related to the Obscene Publications Act, brought significant publicity to the book. The novel ultimately sold out of all two hundred thousand copies on its first day of publication and went on to sell three million copies in three months.

Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK), the largest Dutch publishing house, has confirmed plans to use AI to translate a limited number of books into English, the Guardian reports. The press, which was acquired by Simon & Schuster earlier this year, will experiment with translating fewer than ten commercial fiction titles with AI. Vanessa van Hofwegen, the commercial director of VBK said, “No literary titles will nor shall be used,” and added, “we’re only including books where English rights have not been sold, and we don’t foresee the opportunity to sell English rights of these books in the future.” A spokesperson for VBK noted that authors have been asked to consent to this process. Ian Giles, co-chair of the Society of Authors’ Translators Association called the news “concerning” and pointed to a survey that found over a third of translators have lost work due to generative AI.

Electric Literature has compiled a list of books about the history of voting rights in the United States in advance of tomorrow’s election. The list includes The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Basic Books, 2009) by Alexander Keyssar, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (University of Illinois Press, 2000) by Chana Kai Lee, and The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) by Lisa Tetrault.

For Hard Feelings, a series of essays by poets who write about ugly emotions in Poetry, Randall Mann writes about being drawn to poetry that is filled with contempt. He includes examples from work by Emily Dickinson, Reginald Shepherd, and Frederick Seidel, among others. Mann writes, “I’ve always admired poems that dare me not to be there, as if my being there was of no consequence; poems that fail to notice me; poems that even actively deride me.”

A new John Keats sculpture has been unveiled close to his birthplace on Moorgate in London on what would have been his 229th birthday, Fine Books & Collections reports. This latest plaster cast is part of a series that includes a sculpture of poet John Donne, and extends the public commemoration of poets born within the Square Mile. 

Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes (Atria, 2007), a national bestseller about a school shooting, has topped PEN America’s list of books most banned in schools, the Associated Press reports. Picoult added that objections to her book revolved around one page that mentions a date rape. She said, “There was nothing gratuitous about it….  I think that some people are unhappy because it makes you look at the world in a different way. That’s what’s behind a lot of the bans.”

Penguin Random House’s fifth annual demographics report demonstrated gradual but steady improvements in efforts to diversify, Publishers Weekly reports. The company was 68.9 percent white in 2024, down from 70.1 percent white in 2023. Emphasizing its longterm commitment to diversifying its workforce, Penguin Random House said, “This is a marathon, not a sprint…. [W]e remain committed to providing transparency and accountability along the way.”

PEN America has announced that Suzanne Nossel is stepping down as CEO. Summer Lopez and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf will serve as the organization’s interim co-CEOs while the organization begins a national search for its next leader. Lopez has worked in the fields of democracy, human rights, gender equality, and freedom of expression for twenty years and has most recently worked as the Chief Program Officer for free expression programs at PEN America. Rosaz Shariyf worked for over ten years at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and has led PEN America’s literary programming strategy since 2015. Nossel will assume the role of president and CEO of Freedom House. 

Librarians in the United States are in the midst of a crisis of violence and abuse, as libraries have increasingly become gathering places for “people experiencing issues like homelessness, drug dependence, and mental illness,” the New York Times reports. One study surveyed 1,300 U.S. library workers, who reported that they had experienced more than eight thousand incidents that the researchers classified as “traumatic, such as threats, assault, or harassment.” Staffers have said that the job’s stressors, including the culture wars over book banning, are leading to burnout and require attention to protect workers’ mental health.

In a departure from its unlimited subscription model, Scribd has launched a credit-based system for its Everand reading platform, and is offering additional access to books from all five major trade publishers, Publishers Weekly reports. The new service was introduced yesterday and provides access to more than 1.5 million e-books and audiobooks. The pricing for Everand subscriptions are tiered: One premium title is $11.99 per month, and three premium titles cost $16.99 per month. Both subscriptions include “unlimited access to magazines, podcasts, sheet music, and a select catalog of e-books and audiobooks, including Everand Originals.”

A partnership of independent book publishers has launched a campaign to combat book banning called “We Are Stronger Than Censorship,” according to the Bay Area Reporter. The goal is to raise funds to purchase at least two thousand books that have been pulled from library shelves and distribute them to readers across the country. To date, the Independent Book Publishers Association has raised nearly $10,000, which will cover 1,244 books. 

More than a thousand people from the publishing and entertainment industries have signed an open letter against “illiberal and dangerous” cultural boycotts, the Guardian reports. The letter, which includes signatures from authors Howard Jacobson, David Mamet, Herta Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, and others, was released by Creative Community for Peace, a nonprofit that campaigns against cultural boycotts of Israel. This letter follows another letter, signed by more than a thousand figures in the literary world, that pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.”