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The National Coalition Against Censorship released a statement expressing “outrage at the Trump Administration’s recent efforts to establish ideological control over federally-funded cultural initiatives in the United States.” The statement, which is signed by the Authors Guild, the Dramatists Guild of America, and PEN America, among others, goes on to say: “In the face of these blatant efforts to subject the arts to ideological conformity, our nation’s cultural leaders—the curators, librarians, directors of cultural spaces, museum trustees, artists, theater directors, authors, or publishers—are now left to uphold the founding American values of freedom of expression.”

President Trump has threatened lawsuits against authors and publishers who have cited anonymous sources in books about him and his allies, the Hill reports. In a statement, Jonathan Friedman, the Sy Syms managing director for U.S. Free Expression Programs at PEN America, said, “The freedom of citizens to criticize their government without fear of reprisal—including anonymously—is an elemental First Amendment freedom, which is exactly why the President is threatening to go after it. This is part of this administration’s assault on free expression intended to demand ideological capitulation and conformity.”

Rare book collector Rebecca Romney wrote a book called Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, published this month by S&S / Marysue Rucci Books, to draw attention to eight women authors—including Charlotte Lennox, Hannah More, and Maria Edgeworth—who shaped Austen’s literary world, NPR reports.

Twelve of the thirteen books nominated for this year’s International Booker Prize are under two hundred pages long, the New York Times reports. Max Porter, the chair of this year’s judging panel, said the length of the books selected does not represent a “much-prophesied loss of attention span,” and underscored that mastering a short novel is equally difficult to writing a long one. “Some of these books don’t have a wasted word,” he added.

The Authors Guild is encouraging those who have applied for grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and those who have already received NEA funding to “hold tight,” Publishers Lunch reports, since President Trump’s executive orders regarding the termination of programs promoting DEI or “gender ideology” are “likely unenforceable.” Mary Rasenberger, the president of the Authors Guild, says, “There is really clear Supreme Court precedent” that the DEI executive order as implemented by the NEA “is unconstitutional.”

After President Trump put in new leadership at the National Archives, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta canceled events with authors who wrote books about the civil rights movement, climate change, and homelessness, the New York Times reports. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) released a statement that said, “Programs and events must always advance and uphold NARA’s core mission: to preserve the records of the United States and make them available to the public. On this issue, leadership at the Carter Presidential Library is empowered to make their own decisions about scheduling events and programs.”

The 2025 London Book Fair, which will run from March 11 to March 13, will focus on AI and youth reading initiatives, Publishers Weekly reports. The fair is expecting more than thirty thousand attendees.

For Public Books, Sean Hooks interviews Claire Messud about what is distracting people from good writing. When considering if the internet and smartphones “have to some extent divided and conquered us,” Messud says, “I really do believe in our animal selves, the experience of being in a room.” She adds, “I’m big into our embodied selves…. I believe in the amazing complexities of what we can express and convey in language if people will only make the effort and take the time.”

Emily Gould writes for New York magazine about the celebrity book clubs that could actually change your life as an author. The top four book clubs according to one publicist are Oprah’s Book Club, Read with Jenna on the Today show, Reese’s Book Club, and Good Morning America. However, the proliferation of celebrity book clubs has led some in the book business to worry about market oversaturation. Publicist Paul Bogaards notes the inevitable “dilution that takes place because they’re all competing for the same subset of eyeballs,” emphasizing that the “clubs have to continually invent and find ways to engage with their readers and their communities.”

More than 650 books have been seized from stores in Kashmir as Indian police crack down on dissent, the Guardian reports. Most of the titles were written by Abul A’la Maududi, a twentieth-century Islamic scholar who founded Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamic organization banned in Kashmir. The police said that the raids were “based on credible intelligence regarding the clandestine sale and distribution of literature promoting the ideology of a banned organization.”

The Jon A. Lindseth Lewis Carroll collection has been donated to Christ Church College at the University of Oxford, where Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) taught math from 1855 to 1881, Fine Books & Collections reports. The collection features manuscripts, photographs, and early editions of Carroll’s books, including the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland series. To celebrate the gift, the college has opened an exhibition showcasing some of the collection’s highlights.

The finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced this morning and include Andrew Garfield in the audiobook production category, Percival Everett in the fiction category, and Cindy Juyoung Ok in the poetry category, the Los Angeles Times reports. Amanda Gorman, Pico Iyer, and Emily Witt will also be honored at the ceremony on April 25 in Los Angeles.

The law firm Fisher Phillips shares insights for employers as sixteen states take a stand against Trump’s anti-DEI policies. State attorneys general from traditionally “blue” states such as New York, California, Massachusetts, and Illinois maintain that DEI programs remain lawful and are vital to fair and productive workplaces. Fisher Phillips goes on to say that employers should prepare for increased state agency attention, further state-level guidance, and evolving best practices.

Nathalie op de Beeck writes for Publishers Weekly about how authors are reclaiming Indigenous histories. Deborah Jackson Taffa, a citizen of the Yuma Nation and Laguna Pueblo and author of the memoir Whiskey Tender (Harper, 2024), said Indigenous writers are often encouraged to tell their stories “through a socially sanctioned, mainstream lens” to meet supposed market demands. Publishers Weekly spoke with Indigenous authors of forthcoming fiction and nonfiction that defy common stereotypes and tropes. Among the authors interviewed are Dennis E. Staples, Julian Brave NoiseCat, and Mary Annette Pembe.

James Parker writes for the Atlantic about the bad poems Robert Frost wrote before his renowned works and the “huge, unpoetic popularity” that followed. “Many of his poems turn on the problem of having a mind—of simply being conscious, observant, in our weird human way, while existence churns through us and beyond us,” Parker writes.

Sarah Jessica Parker will be this year’s recipient of PEN America’s “Literary Service Award,” and Jon Yaged, the CEO of Macmillan Publishers, will receive the “Business Visionary Award,” the Associated Press reports. The awards will be presented on May 15 at PEN America’s annual spring gala.

The New York Public Library will make the archive of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne open to the public on March 26. The archive is comprised of 336 boxes which include reference material for the authors’ books; interview transcripts, notes, and correspondence with subjects that led to various articles; and the writers’ daybooks, in which they recorded their daily experiences in intricate detail for up to fifty years.

Margaret Atwood will publish her first memoir, Book of Lives, with Doubleday in November, the Guardian reports. In the memoir, Atwood recounts experiences from her untraditional childhood in northern Canada, as well as the evolution of her writing career. “A memoir is what you can remember, and you remember mostly stupid things, catastrophes, revenges, and times of political horror, so I put those in—but I also added moments of joy, and surprising events and, of course, the books,” Atwood said.

Amy Tan, the author of the 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club, planned to have her archive destroyed after her death, but now her papers are going to the University of California in Berkeley, the New York Times reports. The archive contains sixty-two boxes of photographs, notebooks, letters, and manuscripts. Tan was convinced by her longtime editor to share her archive for “posterity,” and she wanted “to clear out space in her garage.”

Salman Rushdie took the stand in the trial over his attempted murder on Tuesday, the Washington Post reports. “It occurred to me quite clearly that I was dying,” Rushdie testified. “That was my predominant thought.” Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses was considered blasphemous by some Muslims and prompted Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa in 1989 calling for Rushdie’s death. The district attorney, Jason Schmidt, has said he will not bring up the issue of the fatwa during the trial, but Rushdie’s assailant, Hadi Matar, will face federal terrorism charges in a later trial.

Court documents show that Meta shared terabytes of pirated material to train AI models and that employees expressed ethical concerns about the practice to one another, PC Gamer reports. One Meta employee wrote in an e-mail, “using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold,” adding that the databases they were using were “distributing content that is protected by copyright and they’re infringing it.” The company ultimately operated in what one AI researcher called “stealth mode” concealing the piracy by only downloading articles and books “outside official Facebook servers.”

Thirty-eight international organizations in the creative arts—including the Association of American Publishers through the International Publishers Association—have released a collective statement calling for the regulation of artificial intelligence development and emphasizing the importance of respecting copyright, Publishers Weekly reports. Other signatories include the European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations, the European Writers’ Council, and the International Authors Forum.

Kelly Jensen offers strategies for critically reading press releases from the federal government for Book Riot. Jensen analyzes the Department of Education’s announcement that book bans were a hoax and presents evidence of book censorship.

Israeli police raided a Palestinian-owned educational bookshop in Jerusalem, citing a children’s book as evidence of inciting terrorism, and detained two of its owners, Mahmoud and Ahmed Muna, the Guardian reports. Protestors gathered outside the courthouse to support the Munas, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Nathan Thrall, and diplomats from nine countries were present at the hearing. The human rights organization B’Tselem called for the immediate release of the two men.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has released the updated guidelines for the 2026 application cycle for Grants for Arts Projects along with a Legal Requirements and Assurance of Compliance page, which states applicants must comply with all executive orders.

ArtNet has compiled a list of the ways the Trump Administration is impacting the arts. The list includes the updated guidelines for National Endowment for the Arts grants; tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China; the dissolution of an arts committee previously restored by President Biden; and renewed plans for a “National Garden of American Heroes.”

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which receives about $200 million in federal funding each year, has announced it will change its 2026 guidelines, terminating a fund for underserved communities and prioritizing projects that honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Washington Post reports. The announcement follows an executive order by President Donald Trump establishing a new task force that includes the president, vice president, various agency leaders, and the chair of the NEA. Applications will be open until July 10, and organizations that already submitted grant applications to the NEA for the 2026 cycle must submit again under the new guidelines.

Author Pico Iyer, whose memoir Aflame: Learning From Silence was published last month by Riverhead Books, gave a talk at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, California, in the wake of the devastating Eaton Fire, the Associated Press reports. Iyer shared how his own family home burned down in Santa Barbara in 1990 and explained that right after the fire, all he could see was loss. But decades later, he said, he sees, “all those doors that have gradually opened.” He added that the fire encouraged him to “write a different way, to live more simply, to remember what is really important in life.” “Today,” he said, “I wouldn’t say it was a calamity, but a dramatic wake-up call for me.”

The Giller Prize has cut ties with Scotiabank, an investor in Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, after more than a year of protests from some in the literary community, the Guardian reports. The prize awards $100,000 Canadian (approximately $69,867) to its winner and $10,000 Canadian (approximately $6,987) to shortlisted authors each year. More than 1,800 writers signed an open letter in support of the protestors in November 2023. In September 2024, the Giller Prize, which was previously known as the Scotiabank Giller Prize, dropped the bank from its name, but only this week announced the end of its twenty-year sponsorship by Scotiabank.

Publishers including the Big Five—Penguin Random House (PRH), Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster—as well as other presses, authors, and the Authors Guild have sued the state of Idaho over the state’s HB 710 law, which prohibits anyone under the age of eighteen from accessing books that contain “sexual content,” Publishers Weekly reports. The law makes no distinction between babies and teenagers, and is “exceptionally broad, vague, and overtly discriminatory,” according to a release from PRH. The plaintiffs also argue that the law encourages private citizens to file legal complaints against public libraries and schools, which will increase and intensify censorship across the state.

Hub City Press, John T. Edge, and Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley M. Jones have announced the Deep South Convening on the Future Success of American Writers. The event will bring together authors, literary nonprofits, journal publishers, book publishers, writing programs, and funders in an effort to address “the historical and contemporary challenges that writers in the South face” while amplifying voices from the region. There will be one hundred participants by way of invitation or application and registration will be free. The literary convening will be held on the campus of the University of Alabama in Birmingham, on May 24, 2025.

Children’s book author Mac Barnett has been named the 2025-2026 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Publishers Weekly reports. The position was established by the Library of Congress and Every Child a Reader in 2008 “to emphasize the importance of developing lifelong literacy in children and teens.” Barnett said, “I’ve devoted pretty much my whole adult life to writing children’s books (and as a kid, I read them). I can’t imagine a more meaningful recognition.”

An initiative called “100 Days of Creative Resistance” offers to send a free e-mail “of encouragement, opposition, and commiseration” to subscribers for the first one hundred days of President Trump’s term. The program began on January 20, 2025, and has already featured words by R. O. Kwon, Melissa Febos, Denne Michele Norris, and others. Writers who will offer messages in the coming days include Larissa Pham, Jenny Xie, and Julia Philips.

On the New Yorker Radio Hour, David Remnick talks with fiction editor Deborah Treisman and poetry editor Kevin Young about the literary anthologies they edited for the magazine’s centennial.