Bryan Sinche’s Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) explores the resourcefulness of Black authors as they navigated what author Eric Gardner calls the “exclusionary practices of ‘mainstream’ white print culture,” JSTOR Daily reports. Because self-published authors had to pay for the production and distribution of their own books, literary endeavors came with enormous financial risk. However, self-publishing did allow for more creative freedom, which led to interdisciplinary and multi-genre works that combined fiction, nonfiction, poetry, songs, public documents, newspaper articles, and religious texts. According to JSTOR Daily, “the American Antiquarian Society counts as many as 575 self-published texts” by Black authors “between the antebellum period and the Harlem Renaissance, many of which received no scholarly attention.”
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Every day the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine scan the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know.
Margot Atwell, the executive director and publisher of the Feminist Press at CUNY, will step down in February 2025, Publishers Weekly reports. During her time at Feminist Press, Atwell led its first crowdfunding campaign, acquired and edited a dozen books, and improved employee benefits. In her newsletter, Atwell wrote, “I’m truly excited to see what the next leader of Feminist Press will accomplish, and will be cheering them on as they carry forward this work, which is more necessary than ever.”
Willem Marx writes for Electric Literature about the most popular banned books in Florida, where almost a thousand books have been challenged and banned. The list includes Beloved (Knopf, 1987) by Toni Morrison, Gender Queer (Oni Press, 2019) by Maia Kobabe, and To Kill a Mockingbird (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1960) by Harper Lee, among others.
Jennifer Harlan has created a “Taylor Swift Poetry Quiz” for the New York Times, where readers can guess which Swift song inspired each poem. The quiz follows the publication of the anthology Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift (Ballantine Books, 2024), in which various writers including Diane Seuss, Ilya Kaminsky, and Joy Harjo take inspiration from Swift’s music, “alchemizing it into an original poem.”
The Guardian considers whether literary prizes will survive protests against corporate sponsors and how boycotting writers are changing the publishing industry. In the past year, more than a hundred authors have signed an open letter condemning the “deep-rooted hypocrisy” of the JCB Prize for Literature, which is funded by a British construction equipment manufacturer; Richard Flanagan deferred the receipt of the Baillie Gifford prize money in protest of the fund manager’s investments in fossil fuels; and dozens of demonstrators gathered outside the Giller Prize gala, protesting the award’s lead sponsor, Scotiabank, which holds a stake in the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. Isobel Tarr, codirector of Culture Unstained, an activist group that calls on cultural organizations to divest from fossil fuels, says it’s “a positive thing that writers are not only challenging the status quo in the sector, but actively bringing about alternatives.” Elana Rabinovitch, the chief executive of the Giller Prize, disagrees, noting, “tough economic times” and the importance of sponsorship and government support.
Veronica Chambers commemorates Nikki Giovanni’s revolutionary literary career for the New York Times. Chambers writes that Giovanni’s work carried “a sense of urgency, that the wordplay, the history lessons, the dreaming of the future, the prose tartlets of optimism, inspiration, curiosity, compassion, really mattered.” In awe of Giovanni’s words, “rhythmic, carefully chosen, precise, and elegant,” Chambers remembers “The woman who was once called ‘the princess of Black poetry,’” and “became a doyenne of American arts and letters.”
Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins, discussed the strength of the print book market and the possible uses of AI at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference on Tuesday, Publishers Weekly reports. HarperCollins reported a 6 percent increase in sales and 61 percent rise in profits in the fiscal year that ended on June 30. Murray said his focus was on using AI to increase efficiency in editorial, sales, and marketing departments. He did not provide more detail on HarperCollins’s recent licensing deal with a large tech company but said that the publisher is “an IP company at heart, founded on copyright.”
A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (Oxford University Press, 1949) by Aldo Leopold remains an environmental classic seventy-five years after it was first published, the Washington Post reports. Barbara Kingsolver called the book “the manifesto of a movement,” and Leopold is often considered the father of environmental ethics. The book advocates for wildlife conservation amidst the new technologies of the mid-twentieth century. Leopold encourages readers to shift their values with respect to the environment, writing, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
Caitlin Flanagan writes for the Atlantic about the poem and wisdom Seamus Heaney gave her. She met Heaney in 1970, when she was nine years old and he was spending the year at the University of California in Berkeley, where her father taught English. With the poem, Flanagan says, “Seamus gave me the one thing I desperately needed growing up in that crazy family: my certificate of belonging, in this world and the next.” She later adds, “Seamus didn’t believe in a force as mere as optimism. He believed in something far greater and more powerful: hope.”
Sarah Jessica Parker, the actress and publisher of SJP Lit, will serve on the judging panel for the 2025 Booker Prize alongside the authors Ayòbámi Adébáyò, Kiley Reid, and Chris Power, the New York Times reports. The Irish novelist and screenwriter Roddy Doyle will chair the jury. Parker said helping judge the prize was “the thrill of a life,” but also found the position “daunting.” She added, “I’m just going to listen a lot. That’s the way I’ve probably created a career outside of acting: just being surrounded by people who are expert and listening, listening, listening.”
Constantia Constantinou has been appointed as the new executive director of the Whiting Foundation, Publishers Weekly reports. Most recently, Constantinou served as vice provost and director of libraries at the University of Pennsylvania. In a statement, she said, “I am thrilled to join the Whiting Foundation at a time when the Humanities and Literary programs are making an impact in supporting writers, editors, educators, librarians, and archivists who advance literature and promote the preservation of our shared cultural heritage.”
Merriam-Webster, the American dictionary publisher, announced its word of the year yesterday, Time magazine reports. The chosen word for 2024 is “polarization,” defined as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.” Merriam-Webster introduced other words that reflect contemporary politics, such as “far left,” “far right,” and “MAGA.” Other words that the publisher said “stood out” in search volume this year include “demure” and “democracy.”
Max Norman writes for the New Yorker about Damion Searls, who has translated the work of Nobel Prize–winning author Jon Fosse, and about Searls’s philosophy of translation. Searls does not believe in translation as an art of equivalence or reflection. Rather, he believes translation is, as Norman writes, “fundamentally about experience: the translator’s experience of reading the original, which is then re-created for a new reader.” In that sense, the practice of translation is, for Searls, also about creative freedom and mutual trust.
Weike Wang recommends a list of creative writing craft books for the Rumpus. The list includes The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (HarperCollins, 1989), How Fiction Works (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) by James Wood, and The Art of Revision: The Last Word (Graywolf Press, 2021) by Peter Ho Davies, among other titles.
Nikki Giovanni, a poet who wrote about Black joy, and a public intellectual who discussed race, gender, sex, politics, and love, died yesterday, the New York Times reports. Giovanni was a prolific member of the Black Arts Movement and toured the country as a celebrity author with frequent television appearances and sold-out performances. Among many other prizes, she received seven NAACP awards and thirty-one honorary doctorates. She taught at Rutgers and Queens College before working as a visiting professor and earning tenure at Virginia Tech. Giovanni’s newest book, The New Book: Poems, Letters, Blurbs, and Things, is expected to be published next year.
Chris Vognar writes for the Atlantic about Edna Ferber’s novel Giant (Doubleday, 1952), the reception to the book in Texas, and how Ferber captured aspirations for transformation in the state that resonate with contemporary politics. “Ferber,” Vognar writes, “was attacked not only for being a carpetbagger, but also for having a progressive agenda.” He adds, “Though the state has changed in many ways over the past seventy years—it is more diverse, more urban, and more ideologically varied—political realignment seems just as elusive today.”
Haruki Murakami discusses his latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (Knopf), which began as a novella in 1980, and his evolution as a writer with the New Yorker. “I wasn’t satisfied with the original novella I wrote,” Murakami says. “And that dissatisfaction stuck in my throat like a small fish bone, a sort of loose end for me as a writer. Somehow I wanted to resurrect that world in a more striking form—that was my long-held desire.”
Giles Harvey writes for the New York Times Magazine about how Alice Munro knew and stayed silent about her husband’s sexual abuse of her daughter and other children. Harvey analyzes Munro’s fiction alongside personal letters and accounts from her children. “In Munro’s stories,” Harvey writes, “abused young women invariably keep quiet.”
David J. Morris, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, writes for the New York Times about the decline of literary men, and how literature can combat “the age of Donald Trump and the distorted conceptions of masculinity he helps to foster.” Morris writes that while half of the women who matriculate at four-year public colleges graduate four years later, for men, the rate is under 40 percent. Furthermore, he notes that the creative writing program where he teaches receives 60 percent of their applications from women. Morris draws a connection between reading fiction and improved emotional intelligence, arguing that “young men need better stories—and they need to see themselves as belonging to the world of storytelling.”
Irvine Welsh will publish a sequel to his 1993 cult classic, Trainspotting, the Guardian reports. Men in Love will follow the same cast of characters—Renton, Spud, Sick Boy, and Begbie—as they try to leave drugs behind and pursue romantic relationships. The novel, which is set in the late eighties, will be published in July 2025 by Jonathan Cape.
Karl Ove Knausgaard shows the Washington Post his bookshelves and writing studio. With an eclectic collection including popular science, Danish philosophy, Shakespeare plays, and Russian literature, Knausgaard insists on the importance of re-reading books. “Ten years is enough to forget everything,” he says. Leo Tolstoy and Ursula K. Le Guin are among the authors he returns to regularly. Knausgaard also notes the literary inspiration he received from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which he says, “released my writing.”
The fatal crackdown in Gwangju in 1980, the last time South Korea declared martial law before President Yoon Suk Yeol did so this week, was narrated in Human Acts (Hogarth, 2017) by Han Kang, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the New York Times reports. In the epilogue of the novel, Kang writes about how the tragedy of Gwangju reverberates in violent oppression throughout the world. She writes, “‘Gwangju’ had become another name for whatever is forcibly isolated, beaten down, and brutalized, for all that has been mutilated beyond repair.” Human Acts has raised international awareness about the atrocities that took place in Gwangju. Lee Jae-eui, who was a college student in Gwangju in 1980, said, “For all our efforts, there was a limit, but the book did what we could not for decades until now and for decades to come.”
After more than four years of litigation, the copyright case over the Internet Archive’s scanning and lending of library books is now over, Publishers Weekly reports. The end of the litigation will now trigger a monetary payment to the plaintiff publishers, a sum that will cover the publishers’ attorney fees and litigation costs. In a statement, the Internet Archive said, “While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit’s opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has decided not to pursue Supreme Court review.” The nonprofit added, “We will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers (AAP) agreement to remove books from lending at their member publishers’ requests,” and “advocate for a future where libraries can purchase, own, lend, and preserve digital books.”
Penguin Random House (PRH) will raise its entry-level salary to $51,000, from $48,000, and increase salaries across seven employment levels, effective January 1, Publishers Weekly reports. A person at PRH familiar with the decision said the publisher wants to “lead the market” in compensation as well as in other elements of its business.
In an interview with the Rumpus, Delilah McCrea discusses her debut poetry collection, The Book of Flowers (Pumpernickel House Publishing, 2024), morbid humor, and being prescribed a dedicated poetry practice in therapy. McCrea explains, “I’ve had many great griefs in my life: the deaths of my parents, my divorce, being rejected by people I care about because I’m trans. And often I’ll have emotional responses to those events that I’m not yet able to consciously understand. The first time I’m able to start processing them is when I write a poem.”
Josh Spencer, the founder of the Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, will open another location in Studio City on December 12 for customers enrolled in a membership program, and on December 14 for the wider public, the Los Angeles Times reports. Describing the new store’s aesthetic, Spencer says, “We don’t like to repeat ourselves…. We’ll have nature sounds on the speakers more than rock music, and maybe some water fountains.” Spencer describes selling books as hard work that “offers endless creativity,” adding, “I like creating a space, an experience.”
Writer and advocate Suleika Jaouad publishes an adapted version of the foreword she wrote for the thirtieth anniversary of Lucy Grealy’s memoir Autobiography of a Face (HarperCollins, 1994) in the Washington Post. Jaouad discusses how the book helped her cope with a cancer diagnosis, writing, “the memoir is a companion for those experiencing illness, telling us that what we feel—whether rage, delight, envy, despair or hilarity at the absurdity of it all—is normal and natural.”
Indie bookstores have had a strong start to sales during the holiday season, which officially began on November 29, Publishers Weekly reports. Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday) and Robin Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Scribner) have been flying off the shelves of bookstores nationwide. Andy Hunter, the CEO of Bookshop.org, said the site’s sales “have been up significantly since the election, and that trend carried through to Black Friday, which was up 24 percent over 2023.”
The Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the New York Times have all published lists of the best books of 2024. The only title on all three lists is James (Doubleday) by Percival Everett, winner of the National Book Award in fiction. Two books are mentioned by two of the three publications: I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition (Penguin Press) by Lucy Sante and Martyr! (Knopf) by Kaveh Akbar.
A new exhibit called “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books,” has opened at the Grolier Club in Manhattan, the New York Times reports. The exhibit is curated by Maine-based collector and writer Reid Byers and features over a hundred simulacrums of imaginary books, which have been developed in collaboration with bookbinders, a letterpress printer, a calligrapher, and a magician. The imagined texts include Christopher Marlowe’s unpublished play “The Maiden’s Holiday,” “The Fairy Melusine,” which appears in A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession, and “One Must First Endure,” one of Ernest Hemingway’s first novels that was stolen in 1922 and never recovered.
Henry David Thoreau coined “brain-rot” in 1854, but the term just became Oxford University Press’s word or phrase of 2024, Bill Chappell reports for NPR. “Today,” Chappell writes, “brain rot reflects a worry that consuming the internet’s endless waves of memes and video clips, especially on social media, might numb one’s noggin.” In Walden, Thoreau used the term as he condemned over-simplification, writing, “While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” While we cannot know what Thoreau might have thought of our contemporary distractions, or our new usage of the term, Chappell cites Cristin Ellis, a Thoreau expert, who summarizes Thoreau’s directive: “Devote your attention to what you know, in your heart of heart, really matters: meaning, beauty, love, wonder, and gratitude for this earth.”
Rose Horowitch writes for the Atlantic about how Gen Z came to see reading books as a waste of time. Thirty-three professors told Horowitch the same thing: Students came to college unprepared to read books cover to cover. Part of the diminishing attention span of young people, Horowitch argues, has to do with “a cultural message: Books just aren’t that important.” Gen Z has been encouraged by society at large to de-prioritize humanistic study. So, Horowitch writes, “Everyone who’s upset about the change has a role to play in reversing it.”
Oprah Winfrey has announced Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (Grove Press, 2021) as her latest book club pick and launched The Oprah Podcast, a weekly series airing on YouTube that will feature book club authors, “global newsmakers,” and “cultural changemakers,” the Associated Press reports.
Oscar Schwartz writes for the New Yorker about an avant-garde San Francisco writer named Kevin Killian, who published over a million words on Amazon across hundreds of detailed reviews before his death in 2019. A collected volume of the reviews, which often wander into personal, essayistic vignettes, was published by Semiotext(e) in November. “What’s lost in this printed and bound volume is the risk and pleasure of the online encounter,” Schwartz writes. Nevertheless, the reviews contain traces of Killian’s literary legacy. “The memoiristic impulse is central to Killian’s œuvre,” Schwartz explains. “Much of his writing details his early life in transgressive detail.”
In the latest installment of the New York Times series By the Book, Billy Collins discusses the books he is reading, the books he is embarrassed not to have read, and his own writing. When asked how the internet has changed his writing, he replies: “The internet asks us to speed up. Poetry invites us to slow down. I write with pencil and paper, then use the computer only as a fancy typewriter. So no change really, except in its role as the most persistent distraction in human history.”
A group of Canadian news publishers, including the Canadian Press, Torstar, Postmedia, and others, sued OpenAI for using news content and violating copyright to train ChatGPT, the Associated Press reports. The publishers maintain that “OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners.” In a statement, Open AI said its models are trained on publicly accessible data, adding that the company works “closely with news publishers,” and offers them “easy ways to opt-out should they so desire.” Some news organizations, including the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic, have reached licensing agreements over the past year with OpenAI.
Two literary fixtures in the Twin Cities, Graywolf Press and the Loft, continue to flourish fifty years after their founding, Publishers Weekly reports. In 1974, Graywolf was founded by Scott Walker to publish hand-stitched poetry chapbooks, and the Loft Literary Center opened above Marly Rusoff’s bookstore in Minneapolis as a space where writers could refine their craft. Now, Graywolf is one of the nation’s most experimental and renowned publishers. The press hopes to expand into more international literature and translations, continue to put authors first, and increase multimedia publishing experiments with Graywolf Lab, a new online platform that launched last year. The Loft has also seen huge growth: In 2024 the center hosted more than 250 author events and classes and reached more than five thousand writers. The Loft has also helped establish a poet laureate program in collaboration with the city of Minneapolis, intended to “support the presence of writers in civic forums.” Looking ahead, the Loft will continue to host public keynotes and seminars, and attempt to reach the widest possible audience.
In an essay for Poetry, Ed Simon writes about the poet Jan Beatty, her ability to capture urban working-class life, her influence in Pittsburgh’s poetry scene, and her blunt lyrical style. “For Beatty,” he writes, “poetry is neither intellectual exercise nor fodder for the tenure file, but an incantatory statement of inner life—a protest, a jeremiad, a prophecy, a manifesto.” Some of Beatty’s recently published books include Dragstripping (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), American Bastard (Red Hen Press, 2021), and The Body Wars (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
For Electric Literature, Terria Smith has compiled a list of Native publishers that create space for the full spectrum of Indigenous storytelling and experience. The list is comprised of nearly a dozen presses, including Great Oak Press, which was founded by the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians; Abalone Mountain Press, a Diné woman-owned publishing house, operating on the traditional lands of the Akimel O’odham; Kamehameha Publishing, which was founded in 1888 and amplifies Hawaiian voices, “focusing on ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language), ʻike Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian knowledge), and kuanaʻike Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian perspectives)”; and Arvaaq Press, which is an Inuit-owned company with the goal of safeguarding and promoting the stories, knowledge, and talent of the Inuit.
The startup publisher Spines, which plans to publish up to eight thousand books next year and shorten the publishing process to two to three weeks per title, will charge authors between $1,200 and $5,000 to have their books edited, proofread, formatted, designed, and distributed with the help of AI, the Guardian reports. Spines, which raised $16 million in seed funding, says that authors will retain 100 percent of their royalties and denies being a vanity publisher or “self-publishing” company, insisting instead on being a “publishing platform.” The chief executive of the Society of Authors said: “We would warn authors to think extremely carefully before committing to any author-contribute contract” that requires writers to pay for their work to be published.
A. J. Bermudez writes for Electric Literature about the dangers of reducing women to the muses of creative men. Motivated in part by the recent revelation of Cormac McCarthy’s decades-long relationship with Augusta Britt, whom he met when she was sixteen, and the endless conversations it has spawned about the characters Britt inspired in McCarthy’s oeuvre, Bermudez writes that “this is how many of us—many young women, not exclusively but especially—have been taught to be loved: as an object.” Bermudez adds, “As a muse, I’ve relished the attention, the view from the pedestal. As a writer, I’ve at times exploited others like I was doing them a favor.” “Now,” she says, “I’m working on resisting the writer’s oft-fetishized solipsism in favor of invitation, collaboration, and consent.”
A museum dedicated to Lord Byron will open in Ravenna, Italy, in the same building where Byron pursued an affair with the wife of an aristocrat and completed some of his most renowned works, the Guardian reports. In 1819, Byron moved into Palazzo Guiccioli, a residence owned by the husband of Countess Teresa Guiccioli, whom Byron met at a party in Venice. Visitors will be able to walk through the rooms of the house and see where Byron wrote books such as Don Juan, Sardanapalus, and The Prophecy of Dante. The museum will open to the public on November 29.
Ken Brooks, the founder of the consulting firm Treadwell Media Group and a founding partner of Publishing Technology Partners, writes for Publishers Weekly about how publishers and authors should “capitalize on the growing demands for high-quality training data” and strike AI deals that protect the interests of authors and copyright holders. Brooks argues that publishers should know their value, reach ethical arrangements with authors and agents, maintain transparency in licensing agreements, and embrace the inevitable change that AI brings.
The French Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who is known for his criticism of religious extremism and authoritarianism, went missing after his arrival in Algiers on November 16, Morocco World News reports. Sansal has been detained in Algeria for over a week and is set to appear before a prosecutor in Algeria today. His lawyer, François Zimeray, has called for a fair trial and compliance with Algeria’s international commitments to human rights and legal principles. Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, including Annie Ernaux, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, and Orhan Pamuk, among others, have signed a petition calling for Sansal’s release.
Funded by the Norwegian government and managed by the National Library in Oslo, the Jon Fosse prize for translators has been established to support “a partly invisible” and often poorly compensated profession at increasing risk of being replaced by AI, the Guardian reports. The prize will be one of the highest endowed literary awards in Europe, with one author each year earning 500,000 NOK (approximately $45,000) for making “a particularly significant contribution to translating Norwegian literature into another language.” The award will be for those translating from Bokmål and Nynorsk, the two official written standards of the Norwegian language. The winner of this year’s inaugural prize is Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel, one of Fosse’s longstanding translators into German.
The recent disclosure of a decades-long relationship Cormac McCarthy had with Augusta Britt, who was sixteen when they met, has shocked many readers, but not scholars familiar with McCarthy’s life and letters, the New York Times reports. Britt described her relationship with McCarthy as consensual to Vanity Fair, but a debate has now ensued about the author’s legacy, and about how much Britt inspired the characters in his fiction.
Florida state attorneys have asked a federal judge to dismiss a book banning lawsuit filed by six major publishers, the Authors Guild, students, parents, and several authors, Publishers Weekly reports. The state claims that the plaintiffs lack standing to bring the lawsuit, which challenges the new state law, HB 1069. Activists working to combat book banning maintain the law is fueling a rise in unconstitutional book bans in school libraries. The state argues: “The First Amendment does not require the government to provide access to particular materials in public-school libraries or to have school libraries at all.” A pre-trial conference is set for early December.
Bloomsbury has announced a distribution agreement with Spotify to make its catalogue of audiobooks available through Spotify’s “Audiobooks in Premium” offering. Bloomsbury’s catalogue will be available to Spotify Premium subscribers in the U.K., U.S., Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Listeners without a Premium subscription can purchase titles on an individual basis via Spotify. Authors on Bloomsbury’s list include William Dalrymple, Alan Moore, Madeline Miller, Dan Jones, Ann Patchett, and others, whose words are coupled with audiobook narrations by Meryl Streep, Emilia Clarke, Adjoa Andoh, and Jamie Lee Curtis, among others.
Trump’s promises to conservatives have increased fears of additional book bans, the Los Angeles Times reports. The recent election has emboldened conservative parental groups, including Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, in their efforts to remove books they deem inappropriate for children. Trump’s threat to deny federal funding to schools that recognize transgender identities and studies could also affect curricula and library collections. Linda McMahon, Trump’s appointee as secretary of education, “chairs the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-connected organization that has criticized schools for teaching ‘racially divisive’ theories, notably about slavery and a perspective about the nation’s founding it views as anti-American.”
Microsoft has launched an imprint called 8080 Books (named after an Intel microprocessor) that aims to be faster than traditional book publishing, the Guardian reports. The imprint will focus on books related to technology, science, and business. “Technology has quickened the pace of almost every industry except publishing,” the company said in a statement. 8080 Books seeks to accelerate the process of manuscript to marketplace and will also reissue “significant works” and out of print books that remain relevant to contemporary readers.
Members of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) and the Publishers Association of the West (PubWest) have merged into a single entity this week after a unanimous vote on November 13, Publishers Weekly reports. IBPA, which was founded in 1983, has 3,000 members and is currently the largest trade association for publishing professionals in the United States. PubWest, which was founded in 1977, has about 150 members, who will be transferred into IBPA’s database. The organizations anticipate that combining will serve their collective interests and allow the associations to more easily share resources.
The winners of the 2024 National Book Awards were announced at a ceremony in New York City last night: Jason de León won in the nonfiction category for Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (Viking Books); Lena Khalaf Tuffaha won in the poetry category for Something About Living (University of Akron Press); Yáng Shuāng-zǐ won in the translated literature category for Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press), which was translated by Lin King; and Percival Everett won in the fiction category for James (Doubleday).
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.
Anne Michaels was awarded the 2024 Giller Prize for her novel Held (Knopf) at a gala in Toronto on Monday while outside, pro-Palestinian demonstrators protested the Giller Foundation’s lead sponsor, Scotiabank, which holds a stake in the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, the Toronto Star reports. The past year has been tumultuous for the Giller Foundation with multiple protests including an open letter signed by more than forty authors calling on the foundation to cut ties with Scotiabank, a separate letter signed by more than three hundred members of the literary community calling for a boycott of the prize, and two international judges stepping down from the prize’s committee. Though the Giller Prize removed Scotiabank from its name in early September, the bank remains the lead sponsor of the award. Michaels earned $100,000 with her win this week.
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.
A new study in the journal Scientific Reports has found that nonexpert readers cannot consistently distinguish between poems written by William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, or Sylvia Plath and Chat GPT 3.5 attempting to imitate each of them, the Washington Post reports. Readers even preferred the AI-generated verse, and were more likely to guess the AI-generated poems were written by humans than real works by renowned poets. In fact, the five poems most often judged to be written by AI were all penned by human writers.
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.
HarperCollins has confirmed it has plans to sell authors’ work to an AI technology company, 404 Media reports. A spokesperson for HarperCollins said, “While we believe this deal is attractive, we respect the various views of our authors, and they have the choice to opt in to the agreement or to pass on the opportunity…. HarperCollins has a long history of innovation and experimentation with new business models.” One HarperCollins author, Daniel Kibblesmith, who received a non-negotiable one-time offer of $2,500 to include his book in the AI deal, said, “I see it as the beginning of two diverging markets, readers who want to connect with other humans across time and space, or readers who are satisfied with a customized on-demand content pellet fed to them by the big computer so they never have to be challenged again.”
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.
Independent bookstores have become a new battleground in China in the ongoing suppression of dissent and free speech but Chinese-language bookstores are thriving abroad, the Associated Press reports. At least a dozen bookstores in China have been shut down in the last few months, and the climate has been “chilling” for China’s publishing industry. In recent years, however, Chinese bookstores have appeared in Japan, France, the Netherlands, and the United States due to the policing of free expression in China and growing Chinese communities abroad.
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.