Daily News

Nan Graham will step down from her role as publisher of Scribner in 2025, according to Jonathan Karp, the CEO of Simon & Schuster, Publishers Weekly reports. At Scribner, Graham has edited books by authors including Stephen King, Rachel Kushner, Steve Martin, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and others. The news comes just before the anniversary of the completion of S&S’s sale to private equity firm KKR. In a statement, Graham said, “I’m proud of making Scribner an imprint where editors, publicists, and marketers come of age and thrive, working on behalf of writers who have flourished here.” 

A poem written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón is engraved on the interior panel of Europa Clipper, the largest interplanetary craft NASA has ever constructed, which was launched into space on October 14, the New York Times reports. The poem, titled “In Praise of Mystery,” will travel 1.8 billion miles to Europa, Jupiter’s second moon. The poem had to be submitted in three months, fall under two hundred words, contain water imagery, and be accessible to people on a fourth-grade reading level. Limón accepted the challenge, saying “I wanted to make sure it was a poem of praise and wonder. Yes, we’re going to this incredible place; and yes, we might find all of the ingredients for life and this could be an incredible moment in history.” “But,” she added, “we’re also on the most incredible planet, and it is full of life.”

Small presses are banding together six months after the closure of Small Press Distribution (SPD), KQED reports. A group of presses formerly distributed by SPD, including Kelsey Street Press, Sixteen Rivers Press, and Pelekinesis, gathered and displayed their titles at the Litquake Book Fair at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco on Saturday. 

Denne Michele Norris interviews Danzy Senna about her new novel, Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024), for Electric Literature. Senna discusses the creative labor that is denied to marginalized writers when their work is presumed to be autobiographical. “Somewhere in there is the idea that you are not capable of the complexity of writing fiction, and if it has any resemblance to you, then surely, it’s confessional,” she says. “Unless the reader is in my body, they don’t know how much fictionalizing I did.”

Montgomery County in Texas has reversed its decision to put the children’s book Colonization and the Wampanoag Story, which details European colonization of Native American land, in the fiction section of local libraries, the Guardian reports. The initial decision sparked condemnation from many of the world’s largest publishers and anti-book banning activists. A new committee, composed of county staff members and advised by the county attorney, will review library rules, including policies around the citizen review committee, the group that originally advocated for the reclassification of the title as fiction.

The New Yorker’s Tad Friend shares the story of Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer who has sold the papers and possessions of authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, J. M. Coetzee, and Bob Dylan, and was indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney in 2022. The lawsuit surrounded five legal pads that he had sold a decade earlier with lyrics scrawled on them by the Eagles’ drummer and singer, Don Henley. When the pads went up for auction again, Henley became convinced that the pads were stolen from him, and he accused the collectors of possessing stolen property and Horowitz of forging the provenance of the pads. After interviewing Horowitz, Friend writes, “His mirthless laugh might have suggested Kafkaesque persecution, or Hardyesque inexorability of fate. Either way, he appeared determined to rewrite the ending.”

In an interview with Electric Literature, Kristopher Jansma discusses his latest book and first essay collection, Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers, which was published this month by Quirk Books. Jansma analyzes the drafts of works by authors such as Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Wright to demystify their reputations of literary brilliance. “I suddenly realized: It’s not just this one genius figure who creates a flawless book out of nothing,” he says. “There’s a process that you go through where it starts off bad, and then it gets better and better and better.”

Marc Tracy writes for the New York Times about American descendants of Holocaust survivors who are using the creative arts to reckon with ancestral trauma. “The third-generation perspective on the Holocaust is carefully hedged, defiantly distanced, explicitly filtered, supremely self-aware,” Tracy writes, going on to mention the graphic novel Artificial: A Love Story (Catapult, 2023) by Amy Kurzweil, Joshua Harmon’s play Prayer for the French Republic, which had its Broadway run this year, and two television series, Transparent and Russian Doll, in addition to a number of other projects. He adds: “How the Holocaust will be remembered and its lessons applied—from Bosnia to Darfur to Ukraine to, many have argued, Israel and Gaza—is now up to this cadre, and going forward will be informed by its own ‘anxiety and humility,’ as Kurzweil put it.”

Anti-censorship activists have joined Penguin Random House in condemning Montgomery County in Texas after Linda Coombs’s book Colonization and the Wampanoag Story (2023), which details European colonization of Native American land, was reclassified as fiction, the Guardian reports. According to PEN America, Texas is the state with the second highest number of book bans in the country with 1,567 titles removed from July 2021 to December 2023.

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) announced on Friday a new funding opportunity for small presses impacted by the sudden closure of Small Press Distribution (SPD) in March 2024. Presses distributed by SPD can apply to the Small Press Future Fund for one-year grants of $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 to support them as they secure new warehousing, recover inventory, and improve their operations. The funding is available through a partnership between CLMP and the Mellon Foundation.

The winners of this year’s Kirkus Prizes were announced at a ceremony on October 16, Book Riot reports. The recipients of the prize each receive $50,000, and this year’s winners included Percival Everett for his novel James (Doubleday Books) and Adam Higginbotham for his nonfiction book Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space (Avid Reader Press).

Academic publisher Wiley has launched a new program called Wiley AI Partnerships, which “aims to develop new AI applications, assistants, and agents in partnership with innovative companies, to empower researchers and practitioners and help drive the pace, efficiency, and accuracy of scientific discovery,” Publishers Weekly reports. The program seeks to support researchers with AI tools and resources to improve their work. In the past year, Wiley has signed two content-licensing agreements with technology companies worth a total of $44 million. 

Luis Jaramillo discusses his novel The Witches of El Paso, which was published earlier this month by Primero Sueño Press, and writing about motherhood, magic, and malleable borders in an interview with Electric Literature. Jaramillo describes magic as “a metaphor for creativity, the force that exists in all of us.” He adds: “Anyone who writes knows that you have to be careful what you write about. Writing makes things happen.”

The 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair, which began yesterday and runs until October 20, began with rousing remarks from Karin Schmidt-Frederichs, chairwoman of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, who said, “There are no bots at the book fair,” Publishers Weekly reports. Schmidt-Frederichs added that the fair aspires to be a forum for democracy, diversity, and dialogue—sentiments that were echoed by other speakers. For instance, British Turkish novelist Elif Shafak gave a keynote address in which she addressed the tragedy of global tribalism and proposed literature as a remedy for the discord of the digital age. “The literary mind cannot be isolationist,” she said, “Literature brings the periphery to the center.”

ByteDance, the Chinese technology company that owns TikTok, began publishing digital books last year and is now planning to publish physical books through its imprint, 8th Note Press, the New York Times reports. 8th Note Press is partnering with Zando, an independent publishing company, and the companies together will release ten to fifteen books per year. The target readership will be millennial and Gen Z readers, and the venture will focus on romance, romantasy, and young adult fiction, with the first editions arriving in early 2025.

Nadxieli Nieto will be the next editorial director of Algonquin Books, Publishers Weekly reports. She previously worked at Flatiron Books, where she served as executive editor, and PEN America, where she served as the director of Literary Awards.

Xochitl Gonzalez celebrates the landmark publication of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street in the Atlantic. In her bio note for that novel, which was published forty years ago by Arte Público Press, Cisneros stated she was “nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife.” Gonzalez considers Cisneros’s literary legacy and its particular resonance for contemporary Latina writers who explore pleasure and longing in their books. “After all,” Gonzalez writes, “she was a mother, in a sense, to many—all of the Latinas striving to add to the literary landscape full-throated, complicated women rendered beautiful and bitchy and real.”

The New York Public Library has acquired the archive of Oliver Sacks, Fine Books & Collections reports. The archive contains documents that span eighty years, from Sacks’s birth in 1933 to his death in 2015, including manuscripts for his sixteen books along with his drafts, margin notes, and revisions. It also includes notes for hundreds of speeches, photographs relating to Sacks’s life and work, family correspondence, and handwritten notebooks and travel journals, among other materials.

First editions of Jane Austen’s six novels will be on display for the first time at the house where she wrote them in Chawton, Hampshire, the Guardian reports. The collection includes “her brother Frank’s copy of Emma,” “her brother Edward’s copies of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,” and “a copy of Sense and Sensibility in the original publisher’s binding,” according to the Guardian.

The Nobel Prize in Literature, which was announced today, has the power to bring new readers to previously unknown authors—with financial ramifications for the writers and their publishers, Marketplace reports. For instance, Transit Books, the publisher of Jon Fosse, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, sold out of all the Fosse stock they had within 48 hours of the Swedish Academy’s announcement. Transit decided to print tens of thousands more copies of his work, but they had to pay for printing and royalties to the author before they received revenue from sales. Such a risky decision could bankrupt a publishing house, but in Transit’s case, they hired more staff, started publishing more books in hardcover, and have sold over 50,000 copies of Fosse’s books in the past year. 

South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, NPR reports. Kang is the first Korean writer to win the award. In its citation, the Swedish Academy commended the author “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of life.” In 2016, Kang won the International Booker Prize for her novel The Vegetarian (Portobello Books, 2015). Watch Kang and translator Debora Smith speak about working together on The Vegetarian in the Poets & Writers Theater.

In advance of tomorrow’s announcement for this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, A.O. Scott considers if “great literature” is overrated. “Greatness is not the same as popularity,” he writes in the New York Times. “The great books are the ones you’re supposed to feel bad about not having read. Great writers are the ones who matter whether you read them or not.”

Chinese avant-garde author Can Xue is Ladbrokes’ favorite to win this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the Guardian reports. Others on the list of likely authors include Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Gerald Murnane, and Thomas Pynchon. Can Xue, the pen name of Deng Xiaohua, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize twice: for her novel Love in the New Millennium (Yale University Press, 2018), translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, and for her short story collection I Live in the Slums (Yale University Press, 2020), translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. The Swedish Academy is scheduled to announce the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

The London-based small press Herb Lester lets readers follow in the footsteps of their favorite book characters and writers, the Washington Post reports. Lester’s literary maps offer itineraries but they also feature retro illustrations, typography and graphics, and original art. Upcoming guides include Frida Kahlo’s Mexico City, Joan Didion’s Los Angeles, and Ian Fleming’s London.

Salmon Rushdie, who survived a stabbing attack in 2022, is writing a new work of fiction that will comprise three novellas, each one relating to one of his “three worlds,” India, England, and America, the Guardian reports. Rushdie, whose most recent book, Knife, is a reflection on the attempted murder, made the announcement at Lviv BookForum, the biggest book fair in Ukraine.

Tom Rachman, whose debut novel, The Imperfectionists (The Dial Press, 2010), was a best-seller, writes for the New York Times about going back to school in his late forties following a successful career as a novelist. “I’d glued my dignity to my occupation,” he writes, “and it was a struggle to pry them apart.”

The writer Megan Kamalei Kakimoto recommends books that illuminate Hawaii’s rich history and storytelling spirit for the New York Times. Her list includes This is Paradise (Hogarth, 2013) by Kristiana Kahakauwila, Written In the Sky (Mutual Publishing, 2005) by Matthew Kaopio and Life of the Land (Ai Pohaku Press, 2017) by Dana Naone Hall, among others. 

A federal judge has ordered the Crawford County Public Library in Arkansas to stop segregating books deemed inappropriate by some local residents into special “social sections” and to return the books to general circulation, Publishers Weekly reports. The judge held that “it is indisputable” that the creation and maintenance of the library’s new social sections “was motivated in substantial part by a desire to impede users’ access to books containing viewpoints that are unpopular or controversial in Crawford County.” The decision is a win for advocates fighting book banning efforts in the United States.

The Black British Book Festival is expected to attract about 4,000 people this Saturday at the Barbican Centre in London, the Guardian reports. Selina Brown, who founded the festival in 2021 because of the challenges she and other Black authors face in publishing, said, “There is still a lot of work to be done…. That is why we’re seeing the rise of self-publishing, the rise of hybrid publishing, the rise of people being on social media…. You are forced to take a different route because the route that you are trying is just not feasible.” 

The Bookseller talks to publishers in the UK about their stance on X (formerly Twitter). “As a result of concerns around the future direction of X...we are pausing all activity on the platform,” a spokesperson for Pan Macmillan is quoted as saying. “Disinformation, misinformation and hate speech continue to spread on X with little or no interruption and we expect the recently confirmed changes to the platform’s block feature will further undermine the well-being and safety of users.” Still, many publicists, editors, and booksellers find X a useful resource, despite the diminishing levels of engagement. Bloomsbury, for instance, told the Bookseller it would remain on X because the publisher views it as the “primary text-based social network.”

The National Book Foundation has announced the twenty-five finalists for National Book Awards in the categories of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature. The finalists include Kaveh Akbar, Percival Everett, Salmon Rushdie, Anne Carson, Fady Joudah, and others. The winner in each category, to be announced at a ceremony on November 20, will receive $10,000; the finalists will each receive $1,000.

Amy Stuber writes for Electric Literature about loving short story collections and “the hive of situations and characters” they offer when the publishing world prefers novels. “I liked the quiet pockets I was able to build into short stories,” she writes, “but that felt harder to make work in a novel.”  

Ta-Nehisi Coates has returned to public discourse on social justice with a new book titled The Message (One World, 2024), the New York Times reports. His latest book is a letter to his writing students at Howard University; a meditation on storytelling; a travelogue of his trip to Senegal, where he visited a site of the slave trade; an account of book banning efforts; and, in large part, a reflection on a 2023 trip he took to Israel-Palestine. In The Message, Coates likens his books to his children: “My work is to set the table, craft the argument, render the world as I imagine it and then go,” he says.

Washington State University Press (WSUP), which had been slated for closure after university officials voted to eliminate its $300,000 annual funding, has been granted a second chance, Publishers Weekly reports. WSUP was founded in 1928 and has published more than 260 titles; it also serves as distributor for Spokane independent poetry publisher Lost Horse Press, which focuses on Ukrainian poetry.