Daily News

Belt Publishing has announced that it will publish the final issue of Creative Nonfiction, the literary magazine founded thirty years ago by Lee Gutkind. 

The Southwest Review, the literary magazine founded in 1915 at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, is launching a book-publishing arm called New Pony Press that aims to publish a single title a year, with an emphasis on literary works. Greg Brownderville, the Southwest Review’s editor in chief, told Publishers Weekly that the press “aims to spotlight ‘cult authors’ and ‘maverick writers’ who have devoted followings but may not have achieved widespread recognition.” The first title, an art book by Barry Gifford titled Disappearances, will be published on October 8.

Barnes & Noble is set to purchase Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore for $1.83 million, Denverite reports. 

Alexandra Schwartz of the New Yorker explores two new books that attempt to identify what it takes to live a life of sustained creativity: Stacey D’Erasmo’s The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry and Adam Moss’s The Work of Art.

East Bay Booksellers, a popular bookstore in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, California, was destroyed in a fire early Tuesday morning, the Oaklandside reports. 

The Atlantic examines a new documentary, How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer (A Cautionary Tale), directed by Jeff Zimbalist, that “offers a model for reassessing the lives of monstrous men.” In addition to writing dozens of books, including two winners of the Pulitzer Prize (The Executioner’s Song and The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel / The Novel as History) during a career that spanned six decades, in 1960 Mailer stabbed his second wife (of six), nearly killing her.

Jim Hicks is stepping down as executive editor of the Massachusetts Review after fifteen years on the job. The Daily Hampshire Gazette looks back at his tenure. 

The Guardian remembers Edna O’Brien, the Irish author whose early novels, including The Country Girls, won international acclaim but were banned in Ireland. O’Brien died on Saturday at the age of 93.

NPR tells the story of Baldwin & Co., a Black-owned bookstore in New Orleans, that is counting down the days to what would have been the 100th birthday of its namesake, James Baldwin.

A spokesperson for HarperCollins told the Associated Press that more than 650,000 copies of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis have been sold since Donald Trump selected J. D. Vance as his running mate on July 15. Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly points out that BookScan numbers for the week following President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, leaving Vice President Kamala Harris, the author of The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, will not be available for another week or so.

Lisa Jewell and Rebecca Yarros were among the winners of the 2024 TikTok Book Awards, the BBC reports. Thousands of members of the #BookTok community on the video-sharing app voted for their favorite authors as part of the second annual competition. 

New York Times book critic Dwight Garner makes the case for why the work of Larry Brown, Harry Crews, and Barry Hannah—three of the best writers in “a genre sometimes referred to as Grit Lit, or Rough South,” according to Garner—are still worth reading.

Publishers Weekly reports that the National Book Foundation’s Book Rich Environments (BRE) program “has surpassed the two million mark for free books distributed to young people and families in public housing communities across the United States.”

Books about show business that once belonged to famed editor Robert Gottlieb, who died last June at the age of 92, were sold last weekend at a fair in the lobby of the Metrograph theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the New York Times reports.

The Guardian reports that almost 400 votes for the pretigious Hugo Award for science fiction and fantasy writing “were fraudulently paid for to help one finalist win.” On Monday the Hugo administration subcommittee issued a statement saying that 377 votes “with obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics” had been disqualified.

Fine Books & Collections magazine highlights the latest installment in Montblanc’s Writers Edition series of fancy writing instruments. The Jane Austen fountain pen features, among others details, “a cap ring with the inscription ‘XLIII,’ a reference to Chapter 43 of Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth sees Pemberley Woods for the first time.” The pen is listed on the Montblanc website for the jaw-dropping price of $4,700. 

Despite a deadly attack on one of Ukraine’s largest book-printing plants in May in Kharkiv, the Ukrainian Book Institute tells NPR that bookstore chains have opened dozens of new stores in the past year alone and that independent bookshops such as Sens, in Kyiv, are thriving.

In the mood to listen to something other than political news and commentary? Electric Literature recommends thirteen literary podcasts, including The Lonely Voice and LARB Radio Hour.

Dubbing the current era of celebrity book clubs a “reading revolution,” Elle considers how “the literary world became 2024’s biggest trend.”

The papers of former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo have been acquired by Brown University’s John Hay Library. “The acquisition, which primarily consists of Harjo’s materials from 2021 through 2024, advances a commitment at Brown to stewarding scholarly resources that include Native and Indigenous voices and work,” according to a statement from the university.

The New York Times profiles Ko Maung Saungkha, a poet who leads a rebel militia fighting Myanmar’s dictatorial government. He is “one of at least three [poets] who are leading rebel forces in Myanmar and inspiring young people to fight on the front lines of the brutal civil war.”

Dominican American author Julia Alvarez—author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies, among other books—is the subject of a new American Masters documentary from PBS, scheduled to be released in September, reports Variety. 

Publishers Weekly reports on Disobedience Press, a new imprint from the University of Michigan’s Michigan Publishing Services that specializes in books addressing resistance to power. The press’s inaugural title, published this month, is Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right’s Assault on Public Education and the Teachers Who Are Fighting Back, which compiles narratives from more than a dozen teachers and librarians across the United States about the recent rise in book banning by conservative activists.

Publishing houses were busy buying various media properties during the first half of the year, including “a flurry of smaller deals among indies, with tough economics forcing smaller presses to either cash out or scale up,” reports Publishers Weekly.

Publishers Weekly reports on a series of changes underway at Penguin Random House’s Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group after a company restructure that led to the loss of several major employees. Among the news is the promotion of Jenny Jackson to editorial director of fiction.

The New York City Poetry Festival will descend on Governor’s Island this weekend, with headliners Kazim Ali, Kate Farris, Safia Elhillo, and Ilya Kaminsky.

Novelist Lauren Groff has launched a nonprofit called the Lynx Watch, which will distribute books throughout the state of Florida that have been targeted by book banners. The nonprofit is an extension of Groff’s bookstore in Gainesville, Florida. Books are Magic in Brooklyn, New York—owned by author Emma Straub—is joining efforts to help raise money for the Lynx Watch, reports Publishers Weekly.

Reagan Arthur has been tapped to lead an unnamed boutique imprint at Grand Central Publishing Group, part of Hachette Book Group, where she will also “edit major authors across HBG’s publishing divisions,” reports Publishers Weekly. Arthur had been laid off two months ago by Penguin Random House, where she was Knopf’s executive vice president and publisher.

After a four-year closure the house of author Margaret Mitchell has reopened to the public in Atlanta. New exhibitions offer a more critical view of her writing, particularly Gone With the Wind, unpacking “the myths undergirding the classic novel—especially the book’s views on slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction,” writes Now Habersham.

McKay’s, a beloved used book and music store in the South, has launched a scavenger hunt of sorts in honor of its fiftieth anniversary, spurring hundreds of participants to take “an epic road trip” across North Carolina and Tennessee to visit all five of the store’s locations, writes Axios, which calls the event “a sign of enthusiasm for old books in the digital age.”

In Esquire author Gabino Iglesias reflects on the different reception writers receive in France compared with the United States.

Esquire asks whether writers are “doomed” by the rise of AI or if the language-generative technology holds promise for “new ways of making a living” and a “lucrative future” for book publishing.

The New York Times reports on reactions to a published account by the daughter of Nobel laureate Alice Munro, Andrea Skinner, of sexual abuse by her stepfather and Munro’s refusal to leave the man despite her knowledge of the abuse. Fans, including many prominent authors, were devastated by the news. “These revelations not only crush Munro’s legacy as a person, but they make the stories that were, in retrospect, so clearly about those unfathomable betrayals basically unreadable as anything but half-realized confessions,” novelist Rebecca Makkai told the New York Times. “To me, that makes them unreadable at all.”

In the Nation Sasha Frere-Jones writes about the Poetry Project in New York City. “What began in 1966 as a response to a bunch of poets getting kicked out of two cafés has, over its 58 years, become a nonprofit nestled in one of New York’s oldest churches. The Poetry Project is a home for genuinely experimental poetry and performance, a loving refuge that has persisted in a New York where not much else has.”

Andrea Skinner, the daughter of the late Canadian Nobel laureate Alice Munro, has published an account of sexual abuse by her stepfather, saying her mother stayed with the man despite knowledge of the abuse. The New York Times reports on Skinner’s account, originally published in the Toronto Star. “What I wanted was some record of the truth, some public proof that I hadn’t deserved what had happened to me,” Skinner wrote. “I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother.”