Daily News

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Percival Everett and Samantha Harvey have been given the best odds by Ladbrokes of winning the 2024 Booker Prize, which awards £50,000 (approximately $64,321) to the best English-language novel published each year in the United Kingdom, the Guardian reports. Everett’s novel James (Doubleday) is a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s point of view. Harvey’s novel Orbital (Grove Press) follows six astronauts circling the earth in twenty-four hours. The winner of the Booker Prize will be announced at a ceremony in London tomorrow.

M. L. Rio writes for Electric Literature about the fantasy of academic life and the dark reality she explores in her fiction. “Academia demands—and rewards—uncompromising devotion and unquestioning acceptance,” she argues. “The cruelest truth of the academy is how hard it is to keep loving something which is slowly killing you.”

Jennifer Wilson writes for the New Yorker about the fairy tales written by the Brothers Grimm, and how their aim in collecting stories was “to create a cohesive national identity for German speakers.” Wilson explains: “The Grimms’ stories, with their promise of bodying forth an authentically Teutonic spirit, were so sought after during the Nazi years that Allied occupying forces temporarily banned them after the war.” Since then, scholars have emphasized that “their nationalism was rooted in a shared cultural and linguistic heritage, not blood and soil.” Still, as Ann Schmiesing explains in her new book, The Brothers Grimm: A Biography (Yale University Press, 2024), writing about the lives of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is difficult, and requires a balancing act: It “entails navigating between too naively or too judgmentally presenting the nineteenth-century constructions of Germany and Germanness to which they contributed.”

French Algerian author Kamel Daoud, who was awarded the Prix Goncourt earlier this week, and his French publisher Gallimard were not invited to the Algiers International Book Fair, the Associated Press reports. Daoud’s novels have been polarizing in France and Algeria, and center victims of Algeria’s civil war, which began in the nineties. The book fair was publicized as having a special focus on history, but Daoud’s most recent book, Houris, will not be among the three hundred thousand titles present. Several authors and publishers were censored for writing that challenges official narratives.

Books about democracy, dystopia, dictatorship, feminism, and far-right politics have risen in best-seller charts since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, the Guardian reports. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which is set in a dystopian society where women are compelled to reproduce, moved up more than four hundred places and is currently in third place on the U.S. Amazon Best Sellers chart. Other books that have climbed the charts in the past day include Timothy Snyder’s 2017 history On Tyranny and George Orwell’s renowned 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

EveryLibrary, a nonpartisan library political action committee, said that the November 5 election of many politicians who have proposed defunding libraries and targeted library workers, could result in dire consequences for libraries, Publishers Weekly reports. In a statement, EveryLibrary said: “The library industry will need to do significant work over the next four years to mitigate potential cuts to library funding at the local, state, and federal levels,” adding, “This will include organizing communities, providing resources to citizens to push back locally, and raising and spending significant funding on national campaigns to combat misinformation about the role of libraries in American society.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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. 

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.”

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.”

On the occasion of the centennial of Franz Kafka’s death, the Morgan Library and Museum will present the author’s archive, which is usually held at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, for the first time in the United States, Fine Books & Collections reports. The exhibition will be open from November 22, 2024 to April 13, 2025 and feature Kafka’s manuscripts, letters, postcards, personal diaries, and drawings, among other items.

Lettie Y. Conrad writes about how accessible publishing standards are good for the literary community and the publishing business in Publishers Weekly. Conrad argues that accessible publishing is important for overall brand recognition, helps reach the largest group of potential readers, spurs new growth, avoids the risk of higher costs in the future, and increases inclusivity.

In McNeal, which opened on Broadway in September, the playwright Ayad Akhtar explores how artificial intelligence is causing chaos in the literary world and challenging the existence of originality in the age of information. Robert Downey Jr., who plays the title character, delivers a monologue revised by ChatGPT so that it sounds like a computer wrote it. Akhtar says he only ended up using two lines generated by AI, but imitating a computer as a human resulted in “an oddly circular process” and a speech that felt “both intimate and strangely disembodied,” according to the New York Times. Apparently, Akhtar was wary of feeding his whole play into ChatGPT. “Maybe I was scared that it would understand it better than I wanted it to,” he said.

In an interview with Electric Literature, Naomi Cohn discusses her new book, The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight (Rose Metal Press, 2024), and the way sensory reading and writing has expanded her imagination. “[W]hen I began learning braille,” Cohn says, “I reclaimed my love of reading and a way of writing that isn’t digital.” She adds, “What I’m getting at is that one of disability’s gifts is creativity; disability requires creativity just to get through the day.”

Barnes and Noble has announced its 2024 Book of the Year finalists. The list includes Swift River (Simon & Schuster) by Essie Chambers, James (Doubleday) by Percival Everett, and Intermezzo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Sally Rooney, among other titles. The Book of the Year will be announced on November 15.