Audiobook fans can look forward to a uniquely immersive listening experience this May, when Audible runs a “pop up listening lounge” in New York City, Publishers Lunch reports. The three-story Audible Story House will feature a browsable library of “story tiles” with headphones for listening, and will play host to events including panels and book clubs. Entry is free. “Story House arrives at a cultural inflection point where audio storytelling is one of the fastest-growing formats in entertainment, and passionate fan culture around books and audiobooks has never been more alive,” stated a press release quoted by Publishers Lunch. “Story House taps into the nostalgia and community feel of book culture while bringing it fully into the present—reimagining the bookstore as an innovative destination for the next frontier of storytelling.”

The National Book Foundation has announced its 2026 5 Under 35 honorees: Megan Kamalei Kakimoto for Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury, 2023), Anika Jade Levy for Flat Earth (Catapult, 2025), Carrie R. Moore for Make Your Way Home (Tin House, 2025), Maggie Su for Blob: A Love Story (Harper, 2025), and Stephanie Wambugu for Lonely Crowds (Little, Brown, 2025). Conferred annually to recognize “outstanding debut fiction writers under the age of 35,” the honor has previously been bestowed on luminaries including Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Angela Flournoy, Valeria Luiselli, Karen Russell, Bryan Washington, Claire Vaye Watkins, Tiphanie Yanique, and Charles Yu. Writers who published a debut novel or story collection within the previous five years were eligible for consideration; this year’s recipients were selected by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sigrid Nunez, Danielle Evans, Charles Yu, and Kaveh Akbar. Each honoree will receive $1,250 and be honored at a ceremony in New York City this June.

The Trump administration has dropped an attempt to appeal a 2025 federal court ruling that protected the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) from dismantlement, Publishers Weekly reports. “Last spring, Trump issued an executive order demanding that IMLS and other federal agencies be reduced to their minimum statutory functions. To enforce the executive order, the executive branch appointed an IMLS acting director, put 85 percent of IMLS staff members on paid administrative leave, dissolved the agency’s board of directors, and curtailed the administration of grants.” However, Attorneys General from twenty-one states filed a lawsuit to stop the dismantlement of IMLS, and a Rhode Island district court judge ruled in their favor. As the Trump adminstration withdraws its appeal, the action “finally lays to rest President Trump’s executive order that threatened countless library services available to anyone who walks into one of our nation’s 115,000 public, school, academic and other libraries,” said American Library Aassociation president Sam Helmick in a statement.

Six bookstores in Tehran have been damaged or destroyed following military attacks by the United States and Israel, according to the CEO of Book City, the largest chain of bookstores in Iran, Publishing Perspective reports. Despite the ongoing war, Ali Jafarabadi says Book City’s shops have been busy. “We are doing daily activities but sometimes it is really hard when you have no perspective of your next seconds and you might be surprised by a bomb, which was the experience that we had in our stores several times,” he said.

Mahreen Sohail’s Small Scale Sinners (A Public Space) has been named winner of the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Sohail will receive $15,000. The other finalists—Addie E. Citchens for Dominion (FSG), Quiara Alegría Hudes for The White Hot (One World), Jonas Hassen Khemiri for The Sisters (FSG), and Lily King for Heart the Lover (Grove Press)—will receive $5,000. Judges Samantha Hunt, Tania James, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow considered 387 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the U.S. during the 2025 calendar year. Submissions came from 155 publishing houses, including independent and academic presses.

The Correspondent(Crown, 2025) by Virginia Evans has been selected as the inaugural winner of the $15,000 James Patterson + Bookshop.org Prize. The $10,000 runner-up prize goes to The Lilac People (Counterpoint, 2025) by Milo Todd. Every nomination and selection was made by booksellers at qualifying independent bookstores, “a direct expression of Bookshop.org’s mission to amplify the expertise of indie booksellers and the voices of local readers.”

Today is National Black Bookstore Day, a national observance established by the National Association of Black Bookstores “to recognize, elevate, and drive support to Black-owned bookstores across the United States.” The day also honors the legacy of Georgia “Mother Rose” West, founder of Underground Books and a central figure in Black literary culture and community.

Wes Enzinna, deputy editor of The Baffler, details the financial realities of being a writer, for a symposium titled “The Profession That Does Not Exist: Writing Won’t Make You a Living,” featuring Philip Connors, Bertrand Cooper, Sara Nović, Chris Rose, Bud Smith, Timmy Straw, and May Syeda. Citing the Authors Guild’s latest income survey, which showed that the median book-related income for “traditionally published trade authors” in 2023 was $15,000-$18,000, Enzinna introduces the personal essays that follow by writing: “The accounts here describe the financial compromises, the emotional costs, the physical exhaustion, the moral injury, and the drain on the imaginative reserves that are the costs of a side gig. They describe the way that writing itself can serve as a form of spiritual recovery from the labor that funded it.” 

Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel, The Corrections, is set to stream with Netflix, featuring Meryl Streep as a lead actor and Cord Jefferson as the director of the limited series drama, reports IndieWire. Originally adapted for HBO in 2012, with Noah Baumbach as the director, and starring actors Dianne Wiest, Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Greta Gerwig, the would-be series was passed on by the cable network. This time around Franzen is writing the adaptation of his book, with Streep and Jefferson set to be executive producers.

The latest data from Circana BookScan reveals that unit sales of print books fell 3.1% compared to the first quarter of 2025, reports Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly. “Though the young adult category had the steepest percentage decline, adult nonfiction, the industry’s biggest category, lost the most sales, selling some 5.5 million fewer copies in the most recent quarter than a year ago.” Only the children’s category had a sales increase over last year’s first quarter, with sales most likely benefitting from an earlier Easter this year. 

“Visitors to Norway during Easter might find the streets emptier than usual, thanks to the nation’s cherished Eastertime obsession: retreating to isolated cabins to binge crime fiction,” reports the BBC. The Påskekrim (“Easter crime”) tradition dates to the days preceding Easter in 1923 when, thanks to savvy marketing, the title for the Norweigan crime novel Bergenstoget plyndret i nat (The Bergen Train Was Looted Last Night) appeared at the top of the national newspaper, confusing readers about what was fact and what was best-selling fiction. “Ever since, the Easter period has become associated with crime fiction, and eventually Norwegians began celebrating by reading suspenseful stories, from murder mysteries and heists to detective tales and true crime.”

Ursula K. Le Guin’s personal blog is finding new life as a podcast, Reactor reports. From 2010 to 2017, the iconic writer used her posts to weigh matters of politics, discuss publishing developments, consider imagined floor plans for fictional spaces from her work, and even share cat photos. Now, each and every blog entry—including the cat tributes—will get its own episode in In Your Spare Time: From the Blog of Ursula K. Le Guin. Every episode will be narrated by a different writer, reader, editor, librarian, or other literary friend from Le Guin’s circles, with installments slated from David Mitchell, Emily Wilson, Rick Riordan, Darcie Little Badger, Molly Gloss, and Karen Joy Fowler, among many others. The first episode will be released on April 8. “Over the years, many readers have told me they wish they could hear Ursula’s blog posts read by her. I do too, but for me, this is the next best thing—to hear so many fascinating people, connected to my mother in many different ways, bringing the blog into current conversation,” Theo Downes-Le Guin, Le Guin’s son and the podcast’s coproducer, said in a statement quoted by Reactor.

After two decades cultivating a now-thriving book culture in the city, the “Literary King of Tulsa” is bound for Seattle, the New York Times reports. In 2016, Jeff Martin launched the nonprofit bookstore Magic City Books in his Nebraska hometown, modeling its business structure on that of art museums and drawing on connections in the industry to draw literary luminaries to a destination that hadn’t previously been on many book tour maps. “I knew all the publishers, I knew all the publicists,” Martin said to the Times. “But once I was detached from the machine, I had to figure out, How am I going to get people here?” The answer involved galvanizing local businesses to help, sometimes “ponying up gas money” to authors, and pouring countless unpaid personal hours into the project. Martin will continue as president of Magic City Books even as he begins his new role as chief of creative strategy and storytelling at the Seattle Art Museum, Tulsa never far from mind. “The place felt like a black hole when I was a teenager, and at some point, it became a blank canvas,” Martin told the Times. “Tulsa will survive without me just fine. But it feels nice knowing I made a difference.”

The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, one of the remaining LGBTQ+ bookstores in Manhattan, may be acquired by Hive Mind, a queer indie bookstore in Brooklyn, to prevent the Bureau from closing, reports Publishers Weekly. To aid with the transfer of ownership, Hive Mind’s owner, Jules Wernersbach, has started a GoFundMe to raise the funds needed for the acquisition process. In a release, Wernersbach stated: “We’re in a moment when queer literature is under extreme censorship nationwide and trans people are being targeted by legislation that threatens their human rights. Just this month, HR 7661, a bill that would censor books in schools nationwide, was sent to the House. We must keep this invaluable resource of trans and queer literature open in our city. We need it.”

This fall World Editions will launch Read the World A to Z, a translation series featuring novels by authors from countries representing every letter of the alphabet. In October the press will publish the first three titles in the series, highlighting authors from Argentina (All That Dies in April by Mariana Travacio), Belgium (The Woman Who Fed the Dogs by Kristien Hemmerechts), and China (Cocoon by Zhang Yueran). The rollout for this series will include “special information packages about the literary landscape of the featured country” as well as events with the authors and translators. 

The bestselling novel Go as a River has led literary tourists to Gunnison Valley, Colorado, looking for the lost town written about in the book, reports Nancy Lofholm of the Colorado Sun. Penned by author Shelley Read, the novel is set in a historic location called Iola that existed six decades ago and is now a “barren stretch of lake bottom” in Western Colorado. Tourists began flooding the area looking for remnants of Iola, as written by Read, in the summer of 2023, with the hopes of running into the author as well. “I have learned much of the rest of the world is enthralled by Colorado,” says Read. “I can still say that I am so honored by it.”

Nearly $350,000 was awarded to writers, editors, and translators at last night’s annual PEN America Literary Awards held in New York City, Publishers Weekly reports. Those honored included Jamaica Kincaid, who received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974– (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Nicholas Boggs, who received  the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Edwidge Danticat received the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, honoring the Haitian American novelist, short story writer, and memoirist for her extraordinary body of work. The evening “marked a return to form for the free speech organization’s flagship literary prizes, which had been diminished in recent years by a boycott, led by Writers Against the War in Gaza, which was lifted on December 31, 2025. Due to numerous authors withdrawing their books from consideration, the ceremony and a number of awards were canceled in 2024. Last year, the ceremony returned but one of its top prizes, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was not conferred due to author withdrawals.”

As audiobooks and romantasy novels converge in popularity, Vanessa Romo of NPR talks to Antony Palmini, the audiobook rising star who has voiced the “book boyfriends” of some of the romantasy genre’s biggest titles. Palmini has offered his resonant baritone to leading characters in series including A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fae & Alchemy, participating in the recordings of more than fifty audiobooks last year. Early hints of Palmini’s path to “admittedly niche celebrity” came while working at a Blockbuster video store as a teenager, when a coworker admired his voice on the phone to customers: “‘There’s like a voice that’s coming out that sounds kind of, dare I say, sexy,’ he said, recalling his friend’s words.”

JD Vance has announced the publication of his second memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, with HarperCollins this June, the Guardian reports. Vance’s earlier memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper, 2016), became a best-seller, “spending more than two hundred weeks on the New York Times list and selling more than five million copies worldwide, and was later adapted into a film by Ron Howard starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.” The new book is seen as a calculated move as Vance contends for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. 

A freelance writer is in hot water after the New York Times discovered he used artificial intelligence “to help write a book review that inadvertently incorporated elements of a Guardian review on the same title,” the Wrap reports. The Times has cut ties with the freelancer, Alex Preston, who used AI to write his January 6 review of the novel Watching Over Her (Simon & Schuster, 2026) by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, translated from French by written Frank Wynne, after a reader wrote in to alert the newspaper to the similarities with the Guardian review. “The Times then launched a review and spoke to Preston, who admitted he used an AI tool to help draft the piece and that he failed to catch the Guardian material before the paper published the review.”