A partnership of independent book publishers has launched a campaign to combat book banning called “We Are Stronger Than Censorship,” according to the Bay Area Reporter. The goal is to raise funds to purchase at least two thousand books that have been pulled from library shelves and distribute them to readers across the country. To date, the Independent Book Publishers Association has raised nearly $10,000, which will cover 1,244 books. 

More than a thousand people from the publishing and entertainment industries have signed an open letter against “illiberal and dangerous” cultural boycotts, the Guardian reports. The letter, which includes signatures from authors Howard Jacobson, David Mamet, Herta Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, and others, was released by Creative Community for Peace, a nonprofit that campaigns against cultural boycotts of Israel. This letter follows another letter, signed by more than a thousand figures in the literary world, that pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.”

Literary publishers have been embracing the midnight release party, which results in eager readers arriving at bookstores at midnight “to get their copy of a buzzy new book,” Publishers Weekly reports. The origin of this trend in the book business can be traced to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which was first published in the U.S. in 1998. Stephanie Meyers’s Twilight series and the final book in the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins also followed this pattern. Some recent examples in literary fiction include Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) and Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls (Knopf, 2024), translated by Philip Gabriel. 

On the occasion of the centennial of Franz Kafka’s death, the Morgan Library and Museum will present the author’s archive, which is usually held at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, for the first time in the United States, Fine Books & Collections reports. The exhibition will be open from November 22, 2024 to April 13, 2025 and feature Kafka’s manuscripts, letters, postcards, personal diaries, and drawings, among other items.

More than a thousand writers and publishing professionals have signed a letter pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians,” according to the Guardian. The signatories include authors Sally Rooney, Arundhati Roy, Rachel Kushner, and others. The campaign was organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature among other groups. UK Lawyers for Israel, a consortium of lawyers supporting Israel, has sent its own letter to the Society of Authors, the Publishers Association, and the Independent Publishers Guild that claims the boycott is “plainly discriminatory against Israelis.”

Lettie Y. Conrad writes about how accessible publishing standards are good for the literary community and the publishing business in Publishers Weekly. Conrad argues that accessible publishing is important for overall brand recognition, helps reach the largest group of potential readers, spurs new growth, avoids the risk of higher costs in the future, and increases inclusivity.

The Archer City Writers Workshop (ACWW) has announced the purchase and transformation of Booked Up, Larry McMurtry’s internationally recognized bookstore in Archer City, Texas. ACWW, a nonprofit inspired by and committed to “‘the minor regional writer’s’ clear-eyed vision and unvarnished realism about Texas and the American West” will turn Booked Up into a robust literary center that features McMurtry’s legacy as a cowboy, novelist, screenwriter, and rare book collector.

In McNeal, which opened on Broadway in September, the playwright Ayad Akhtar explores how artificial intelligence is causing chaos in the literary world and challenging the existence of originality in the age of information. Robert Downey Jr., who plays the title character, delivers a monologue revised by ChatGPT so that it sounds like a computer wrote it. Akhtar says he only ended up using two lines generated by AI, but imitating a computer as a human resulted in “an oddly circular process” and a speech that felt “both intimate and strangely disembodied,” according to the New York Times. Apparently, Akhtar was wary of feeding his whole play into ChatGPT. “Maybe I was scared that it would understand it better than I wanted it to,” he said.

Poets for Appalachia, a mutual aid relief effort among poets and publishers of poetry, is aiming to organize the wider literary community to help the people of Appalachia recover and rebuild after Hurricane Helene, according to Birds, LLC. If you make a donation of thirty dollars to a select organization, the fundraising team will send you a poetry book from one of their publishing partners, which include Fonograf Editions, Soft Skull, Ugly Ducking Presse, and Birds, LLC, among others.

In an interview with Electric Literature, Naomi Cohn discusses her new book, The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight (Rose Metal Press, 2024), and the way sensory reading and writing has expanded her imagination. “[W]hen I began learning braille,” Cohn says, “I reclaimed my love of reading and a way of writing that isn’t digital.” She adds, “What I’m getting at is that one of disability’s gifts is creativity; disability requires creativity just to get through the day.”

Sheila Heti writes for the Paris Review about Sam Shelstad’s third book, The Cobra and the Key (Touchwood Editions, 2023), which satirizes writing advice and the people who give it. Heti writes, “I think what confuses me so much about those who have prescriptions for how to write is that they assume all humans experience the world the same way.” She asks rhetorically, “Shouldn’t a writer be trained to pay attention to what they notice about life, what they think life is, and come up with ways of highlighting those things?”

Barnes and Noble has announced its 2024 Book of the Year finalists. The list includes Swift River (Simon & Schuster) by Essie Chambers, James (Doubleday) by Percival Everett, and Intermezzo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Sally Rooney, among other titles. The Book of the Year will be announced on November 15. 

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.” 

Bernardine Evaristo, the president of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), will offer her Kent cottage to low-income writers and those without a dedicated space to work, the Guardian reports. The residency offering will be part of the new RSL Scriptorium awards, which will give ten writers the opportunity to stay in the cottage for up to a month. Evaristo said, “Literature receives the least public funding out of all the art forms and most writers earn very little, which is no reflection on the quality of their writing.” Interested writers living in the United Kingdom will be able to apply in the spring of next year. 

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.”

Danny Caine, an activist for independent bookstores, has sold Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, to his co-owners, Publishers Weekly reports. Caine will move on from bookselling to assume the role of multimedia content creator for the Institute of Local Self-Reliance, “an advocacy organization that supports local retailers against big-box stores and other corporations.” The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association named Caine its Bookseller of the Year in 2019, and the Raven received the Bookstore of the Year award in 2022 from Publishers Weekly.

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. 

The American Library Association has announced the longlist of forty-six books for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, Publishers Weekly reports. The list includes books by Morgan Talty, Hisham Matar, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and others. The shortlist will be announced on November 12 and two winners will be announced at a celebratory event on Sunday, January 26, in Philadelphia.

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.”

A rare typescript of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (1943), which features original handwritten revisions by the author, is going up for sale, the Guardian reports. The artifact includes what is believed to be the first written version of the renowned lines, which, translated to English read: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” The typescript will be on display at Abu Dhabi Art, an annual art fair at the end of November, where it will be priced at $1.25 million.