Daily News

For Electric Literature, Bradley Sides predicts the winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which will be announced by Columbia University on Monday, May 5, at 3:00 PM EST. His list of contenders includes Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (Scribner), Amanda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books), Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars (Knopf), and Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday), among others.

Literary Arts, a community-based nonprofit in Portland, Oregon, announced the 2025 Oregon Book Award winners at a ceremony on Monday. The winner of the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction was Kimberly King Parsons for We Were the Universe (Knopf). The winner of the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry was Charity E. Yoro for ten-cent flower & other territories (First Matter Press). The winner of the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction was Jaclyn Moyer for On Gold Hill: A Personal History of Wheat, Farming, and Family, from Punjab to California (Beacon Press).

More than 1,600 independent bookstores across the United States celebrated Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday, April 26, Publishers Weekly reports. Many bookstores—including forty in the Twin Cities, fifty-five in Chicagoland, and twenty-five in Brooklyn, New York—collaborated on crawls, providing passports for customers visiting multiple stores and offering discounts for future purchases.

D. Graham Burnett wonders if the humanities will survive artificial intelligence in a weekend essay for the New Yorker. He underscores the importance of confronting the widespread use of AI in college classrooms and suggests integrating AI into pedagogy. “An assignment in my class asked students to engage one of the new A.I. tools in a conversation about the history of attention,” he writes. “Reading the results, on my living-room couch, turned out to be the most profound experience of my teaching career…. In a basic way, I felt I was watching a new kind of creature being born, and also watching a generation come face to face with that birth: an encounter with something part sibling, part rival, part careless child-god, part mechanomorphic shadow—an alien familiar.” Burnett goes on to challenge the ideal of knowledge production alone: “But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.”

Two new documentaries, Banned Together (2024) and Free for All: The Public Library (2025), highlight anti-censorship activism amidst an increasing number of book bans in the U.S., Publishers Weekly reports. Banned Together, which is now streaming on Apple+ and Amazon Prime, follows high school students in South Carolina as they combat efforts to remove books from school library shelves. Free for All: The Public Library, which will be released on PBS Independent Lens on April 29, features a compilation of contemporary footage and archival material to trace the history of the library as a civic institution in the U.S.

Megan Mabee writes for Book Riot about how to recommend books like an expert. When recommending a book to someone, Mabee advises, consider that person’s favorite books, authors, genres, and preferred moods and pacing in storytelling. Mabee also encourages recommenders to consider a person’s hobbies, interests, and the media they consume—including television, films, and podcasts.

Literary activist groups have formally condemned Florida House Bill 1539, “legislation they claim would significantly restrict students’ access to books in Florida public schools,” Publishers Weekly reports. The bill would force school districts to remove any book judged to be “harmful to minors” within five days of a challenge, regardless of whether the book has gone through proper review processes. Organizations that signed the letter opposing the bill include American Booksellers for Free Expression, Authors Against Book Bans, the Authors Guild, and PEN America, among others.

Book publishers are observing a surging interest in the U.S. Constitution and have been printing new editions, the Associated Press reports. Random House announced a hardcover combined edition of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to be published in July, followed by a hardcover edition of the Federalist Papers to be published in November. The founding documents are all in the public domain and popular editions have also been released by Skyhorse, Penguin, Barnes & Noble, and others.

Ed Nawotka writes for Publishers Weekly about how emerging tech can help the publishing industry as it advocates for AI licensing frameworks to protect authors. For example, the new firm Valent has developed technology to identify when and how much copyrighted material has been used to train an AI model. Louis Hunt, the cofounder and CEO of Valent, explains that Valent also has algorithms that can quantify how certain data could improve an AI model’s performance, which would give copyright holders leverage in licensing negotiations.

Supreme court justices are considering certain picture books with LGBTQ+ themes after parents in Maryland claimed they have a religious right to withdraw their children from classes on days that stories with gay and transgender themes are discussed, the New York Times reports.

Author Neil Gaiman is seeking more than $500,000 from Caroline Wallner, one of the women who has come forward accusing him of sexual misconduct, New York magazine reports. Gaiman, who denies abusing Wallner, has filed a demand for arbitration, accusing Wallner of breaching the NDA she signed when she shared her story with the media.

The winners of the annual Publishing Triangle Awards, which celebrate LGBTQ+ literary excellence, were announced at the New School Thursday. The list of winners includes Blas Falconer, who won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry for Rara Avis (Four Way Books) and Cass Donish, who won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry for Your Dazzling Death (Knopf). Jiaming Tang won both the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction for Cinema Love (Dutton).

Three hundred people in Chelsea, Michigan, formed a human chain to move thousands of books from the old location of Serendipity Books to its new site, the Washington Post reports. Bookstore owner Michelle Tuplin said she had the idea to create a “book brigade,” but did not expect so many community members to show up. The group relocated 9,100 books in under two hours and a video of the event has been viewed more than 1.6 million times on TikTok. The new Serendipity Books will open on April 26, which is also Independent Bookstore Day.

Alexandra Alter writes for the New York Times about the ethical quandaries of publishing Joan Didion’s journal entries about therapy, as they appear are in Notes to John, forthcoming from Knopf on April 22. The posthumous work collects journal entries she wrote after sessions with a psychiatrist, during which she discussed subjects such as alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and her complex relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The notes are sometimes addressed only to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, another factor that has sparked some fans and friends of Didion to wonder if the publication is invasive. “Didion was famously guarded,” Alter writes, but she was also “a meticulous note taker and record keeper who was savvy about the publishing industry; she likely knew that any literary documents she left behind could be released.”

DOGE has taken over the federal grants website, Grants.gov, the NonProfit Times reports. DOGE staffers will now be able to review grant proposals and make decisions about distributing funds, according to the Washington Post.

Keziah Weir writes for Vanity Fair about how Meta AI staffers concluded that more than seven million books have no “economic value.” Meta, which used millions of pirated books to train its AI, is arguing that the company’s use of copyrighted materials falls under the legal doctrine of “fair use.” The Association of American Publishers has rejected this claim, stating in an amicus brief filed last week, “There is nothing transformative about the systematic copying and encoding of textual works, word by word, into an LLM. It does not involve criticism or commentary, provision of a search or indexing utility, software interoperability, or any other purpose recognized as transformative under fair use precedents.” Meta also claimed that the company does not see the point in compensating authors to license their books because “for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange, but none of Plaintiffs works has economic value, individually, as training data.”

With the off Broadway debut of his 1958 play The Swamp Dwellers, Wole Soyinka, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, reflects on his younger, more optimistic self in the New York Times. Now ninety years old, Soyinka revisits The Swamp Dwellers, which he wrote when he was twenty-four, two years before Nigeria’s independence. “That play now makes me recollect very vividly that eve of independence season when we were all gung-ho about the emergence of a unified society,” he says, adding, “I’ve lost that sense of achievable idealism.” But, he continues, “One never loses a picture, a projection of what you think your society can be. That’s what hurts.”

Seven Stories Press has acquired Two Dollar Radio, Publishers Weekly reports. Two Dollar Radio, which is based in Columbus, Ohio, has approximately eighty titles in print, and is the fourth imprint of Seven Stories, which is based in New York City. Dan Simon, the publisher of Seven Stories, said both presses “are kind of alternative in the best sense: We’re not part of the club.” Eric Obenauf will remain in his role as publisher and editorial director of Two Dollar Radio.

McNally Jackson will host a biannual book festival at its Seaport location in New York City, Publishers Lunch reports. The first festival will take place this spring from May 7 through June with the theme “archives, historiography, and legacies.” McNally Jackson founder and owner Sarah McNally says she hopes the festival will offer “more access to high-level intellectual conversations in the city” and extend publicity for books beyond the few weeks around a title’s publication. This spring’s festival will feature Parul Sehgal and Andrea Long Chu; Lincoln Michel, Helen Phillips, Chloe Cooper Jones, and Kevin Nguyen.

The Hurston/Wright Foundation is celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary by rebranding its annual Legacy Awards as the Zora Awards, People reports. The new name of the award will also come with a larger cash prize of $20,000. The Zora Award for debut fiction celebrates gifted Black authors at the beginning of their careers. The finalists for the 2025 prize will be announced in August.

The Mississippi Library Commission, which offers specialized research assistance to libraries in the state, has ordered the deletion of two research collections: the race relations database and the gender studies database, the Guardian reports. “The collections were stored in what’s called the Magnolia database, which is used by publicly funded schools, libraries, universities, and state agencies in Mississippi.” The commission’s executive director, Hulen Bivins, confirmed that the deletions were in response to the Trump administration’s recent actions against the Institute of Library and Museum Services. “We may lose a lot of materials,” Bivins told the Guardian.

Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu, author of the new essay collection Authority (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), talks with Brittany Luse of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute about “what kind of authority critics have, and why we might need to rethink what criticism should do for us.”

At a ceremony in New York City last night the Whiting Foundation announced the ten winners of the 2025 Whiting Awards. The $50,000 prizes are designed “to recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent, giving most winners the chance to devote themselves full time to their own writing, or to take bold new risks in their work.” The winners in poetry are Karisma Price and Annie Wenstrup; the winners in fiction are Elwin Cotman, Emil Ferris, Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, Claire Luchette, and Shubha Sunder; the winners in nonfiction are Aisha Sabatini Sloan and Sofi Thanhauser; and the winner in drama is Liza Birkenmeier. “These writers demonstrate astounding range; each has invented the tools they needed to carve out their narratives and worlds,” said Courtney Hodell, Whiting’s Director of Literary Programs. “Taken as a whole, their work shows a sharply honed sensitivity to our history, both individual and collective, and a passionate curiosity as to where a deeper understanding of that history can take us.” The Whiting Awards, established in 1985 by the Whiting Foundation, remain one of the most esteemed and largest monetary gifts for emerging writers.

A new Thomas Pynchon novel, Shadow Ticket, will be published later this year, the New York Times reports. The novel is Pynchon’s first in more than a decade and is set in 1932 during the Great Depression. Shadow Ticket, which will be released on October 7 by Penguin Press, follows a private eye named Hicks McTaggart whose mission to find the heir to a Wisconsin cheese empire goes sideways when he ends up on a trans-Atlantic Ocean liner and then in Hungary.

The American Library Association and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, whose members include museum and library workers, have sued Keith Sonderling, the acting director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in addition to the IMLS itself; President Trump; and U.S. DOGE Service acting administrator Amy Gleason, in addition to DOGE itself, Publishers Weekly reports. The lawsuit argues that the Trump administration’s recent actions attempting to defund and shutter the IMLS are both illegal and unconstitutional.

Donovan Arthen, the interim executive director of Orion, has announced that Neal Thompson will be the magazine’s new publisher. Thompson is an author, journalist, editor, and literary arts funder. About his new appointment, Thompson said, “The work we do and the stories we tell are more important than ever. During challenging times—economically, politically, environmentally—we want readers to find comfort and inspiration in our pages, and we aspire to be an urgent and eloquent voice for the planet and all its creatures.”

Jeff O’Neal writes for Book Riot about Publishers Weekly’s decision to charge for review submissions. “[I]n this day and age of big tech platform media dominance, finding a new, sustainable, non-advertising revenue source is both clever and necessary.” He adds that the new policy “also has the secondary effect (perhaps primary?) of reducing the number of submissions.” Especially as AI-generated books flood the marketplace, he points out, the new guidelines will limit the number of books submitted for review consideration.

The shortlist for the International Booker Prize has been announced, the New York Times reports. The list includes On the Calculation of Volume: 1 (Faber) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland; Perfection (Fitzcarraldo Editions) by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes; Small Boat (Small Axes) by Vincent Delecroix, translated from the French by Helen Stevenson; Under the Eye of the Big Bird (Granta Books) by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda; Heart Lamp (And Other Stories) by Banu Mushtaq, translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi; and A Leopard-Skin Hat (Lolli Editions) by Anne Serre, translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson.

On April 3, a federal judge in Rhode Island denied a motion to block the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) from “prohibiting grant recipients from using grant funding to promote ‘gender ideology’ as defined by President Donald Trump in an executive order issued on January 20,” Publishers Weekly reports. The judge noted that following the filing of the lawsuit, the NEA retracted its implementation of the executive order, “pending further administrative review.” In a statement, ACLU senior staff attorney Vera Eidelman said that the opinion “makes clear that the NEA cannot lawfully reimpose its viewpoint-based eligibility bar.”

Boris Kachka writes for the Atlantic about the future of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) in Trump’s America. Though many universities, law firms, and corporations are capitulating to Trump’s demands, AWP’s executive director, Michelle Aielli, said that AWP will remain steadfast in its goals: “As of right now, the plan is not to scrub our website, not to change words, and, more importantly, not to change our mission,” she said. Anticipating the loss of a significant federal grant, the organization will focus on raising funding elsewhere.