The New York Times has published a list of books their readers loved in 2024. The list includes All Fours (Riverhead Books) by Miranda July, Creation Lake (Scribner) by Rachel Kushner, and Blue Ruin (Knopf) by Hari Kunzru, among other titles.

According to data from over twelve hundred publishers, book publishing sales increased over 8 percent in October, Publishers Weekly reports. Adult fiction sales rose 17.5 percent, with hardcover sales increasing 28.2 percent and digital audiobook sales rising 25.7 percent. Adult nonfiction sales fell 0.5 percent, with hardcover sales dropping 2.4 percent and digital audiobook sales rising 9.9 percent.

Ron Charles writes for the Washington Post about how a shared library serves “as an index” of “bound lives.” He narrates his love story with his wife Dawn and how “reverence for the written word was always [their] lingua franca,” adding “literature seemed to us like a perfectly natural way to sanctify a new marriage.”

In an interview with Electric Literature, three literary translators discuss writing their debut novels and how their backgrounds in translation shaped the creative process. Bruna Dantas Lobato, the author of Blue Light Hours (Black Cat, 2024), says her work in translation pushed her to consider “narrative possibilities beyond American conventions” and “emboldened [her] to take risks.” Mike Fu, the author of Masquerade (Tin House, 2024), says that in moments of his novel he “did try to parrot a certain kind of diction commonly seen in English translations of early-twentieth-century Chinese literature.” Julia Kornberg, the author of Berlin Atomized (Astra House, 2024), says that her experience with translation gave her and her translator “tremendous freedom” because they “don’t have a ‘sacred’ vision of the original or of what translation should be.”

In the centennial of James Baldwin’s birth, Brooklyn Public Library has opened an exhibition titled Turkey Saved My Life—Baldwin in Istanbul, 1961–1971, Fine Books & Collections reports. The exhibition, which will run until February 28, 2025, features rare photographs by the Turkish photographer Sedat Pakay and commemorates an important chapter in Baldwin’s life. During his time in Turkey, Baldwin wrote some of his most renowned works, including Another Country (Dial Press, 1962) and The Fire Next Time (Dial Press, 1963).

The Authors Guild has released a statement on AI licensing agreements for authors. The statement asserts that AI training is not covered under standard publishing agreements, subsidiary rights do not include AI rights, authors retain copyright of their original works, publishers must seek permission from authors before striking deals with AI companies, authors should get a majority share in AI licensing deals, and that the Authors Guild is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against companies that have blatantly violated copyright.

Sophia Nguyen writes for the Washington Post about how young readers have been inspired by craft videos on social media and discovered the old-fashioned art of bookbinding. “They’re turning paperbacks into hardbacks, re-casing them in cloth or leather, and adding foil, vinyl, or even LED lights to the covers,” Nguyen writes. Publishers, too, are joining the trend with limited editions: “Packaged in a luxe format, debuts and reissues alike have broken through to the bestseller lists.”

Next fall Kiran Desai will publish her first novel since she wrote The Inheritance of Loss (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), which won the Booker Prize, the Associated Press reports. Her forthcoming book The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny will be published by Hogarth in September.

Liz Pelletier, who transformed Entangled Publishing from a “scrappy digital-first startup” into a “publishing powerhouse” has been named Person of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Four notables have also been named by Publishers Weekly, including Regina Brooks, the CEO of Serendipity Literary Agency and president of the Association of American Literary Agents; Skip Dye, a senior vice president of Penguin Random House; Mary Gannon, the executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses; and Nigel Newton, the founder and CEO of Bloomsbury Publishing.

Hilton Als writes for the New Yorker about Belle da Costa Greene, who became the first director of the Morgan Library & Museum in 1924, and how the talented archivist concealed her own history. An exhibition titled “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy,” co-curated by Erica Ciallela and Philip S. Palmer, will be on view at the Morgan Library & Museum until May 2025.  “Although her parents were Black, the light-skinned Greene passed as white, attributing her olive coloring to a Portuguese grandmother or to a father with ‘Spanish Cuban’ blood,” Als writes. “Greene’s tale is part of the legacy of passing in this country, and it’s alternately heartbreaking, infuriating, and astonishing to walk through a show devoted to a life that was built on repression and erasures.”

Meg Day, the Guggenheim’s poet in residence for 2024, is highlighting the work of Deaf and hard-of-hearing artists at the museum, the New York Times reports. At an event on December 11, some of these poets, including Noah Buchholz, Raymond Luczak, Abby Haroun, and Raymond Antrobus, who “compose to various degrees” in signed language and English, performed their poems on the ground floor of the Guggenheim. An exhibition titled “Ekphrasis in Air,” presented on the sixth floor of the rotunda and on view until March 9, 2025, features three video screens projecting poems in American and British Sign Languages, including those by Day, Haroun, and Douglas Ridloff.

“The Accomplice,” a story by John D. MacDonald, who wrote The Executioners (Simon & Schuster, 1957), will be published for the first time in the Strand Magazine, the Guardian reports. “The Accomplice” was found in the archives at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and follows a young man “caught in a moral dilemma, torn between loyalty to his employer, his strange fascination with a one-of-a-kind femme fatale, and the lure of material gain,” says Andrew Gulli, managing editor of the Strand. MacDonald published seventy-eight books and hundreds of stories over the course of his life and died in 1986.

J. D. Biersdorfer has created a quiz for the New York Times in which readers can test their knowledge of Charles Dickens’s nineteenth-century London. The quiz focuses on locations and landmarks around the city that are mentioned in five of Dickens’s books.

Dwight Garner, a critic for the New York Times writes about Percival Everett’s poetry in the wake of Everett’s 2024 National Book Award in Fiction. In addition to dozens of novels, Everett has published six poetry books. Of Everett’s verse, Garner writes, “The best of it puts on display his deep reading and his willingness, so often apparent in his fiction, to tinker with the reputations of characters both historical and literary.”

Michael S. Roth writes for the Atlantic about the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, whose letters were published by Knopf in November. Roth writes that Sacks “discovered in himself an almost uncanny ability to pay attention to the lives of people most doctors want quickly to analyze, classify, and medicate.” Roth also emphasizes how Sacks’s correspondences reveal “a man who feared abandonment and craved acknowledgment but discovered through his practice the rewards of his great gifts of feeling, of thoughtfulness, and of care.”

John Ingram has received the 2024 Frederic G. Melcher Lifetime Achievement Award, Publishers Weekly reports. John Ingram oversaw the transformation of Ingram, which was founded in 1970 as a book wholesaler and has grown into a $2 billion publishing operation. His vision for the company is aligned with its customers: “The better our customers do,” he says, “the better we do.”

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.”

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.”