Despite the statement that four Archway Editions staff members, including two founders and publishers as well as a senior editor and publicist, posted online earlier this week, announcing that they had all left the imprint, owner Daniel Power told Publishers Lunch that all powerHouse imprints have been on hiatus “in many ways” since May. “Planned fall books and other delayed titles are now scheduled to be published in spring 2026.”

A week after he fired a lecturer and two administrators at Texas A&M University in response to a video of a student “who filmed herself arguing with the instructor that a children’s literature course broke the law because the coursework recognized more than two genders,” the president of the university is stepping down, the New York Times reports. President Mark Welsh, whose last day is today, had said his decision to fire the instructor, Melissa McCoul, was not “about academic freedom; it’s about academic responsibility.” After the video was shared by a state lawmaker, Republican politicians in Texas, including the governor, criticized the university and accused the lecturer of “blatantly indoctrinating students in gender ideology.” The president’s decision to fire McCoul was met with criticism from some students and faculty, however, who said “her termination was indeed a threat to academic freedom.”

A new nonprofit organization, Viva la Book Review, hopes to match book reviews with local media outlets amid what one of the cofounders, former Beacon Press director Helene Atwan, calls the “erosion” of book criticism, Publishers Weekly reports. “Atwan said Viva plans to place reviews in all types of local media, but acknowledged it will most likely find homes in digital, rather than print, vehicles.”

Sally Rooney, author of Normal People, Conversations With Friends, Intermezzo, and other novels, was unable to attend the UK’s Sky Arts Awards ceremony on Tuesday because, the author says, she can “no longer safely enter the UK” without potentially facing arrest for her support of Palestine Action, a pro-Palestinian network based in the UK that was formally banned as a terrorist organization by the UK government in July, the Guardian reports.

HarperCollins plans to “commemorate the 250th anniversary of American independence” with its new American Classics series, forthcoming in May 2026, Publishers Weekly reports. The thirty-five trade paperbacks will be drawn from the poetry, fiction, and children’s literature published by HarperCollins since it was founded in 1817, including books by Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Erdrich, Zora Neal Hurston, Herman Melville, N. Scott Momaday, and E.B. White.

The ongoing online conversation about the difference between writing produced by humans versus AI chatbots has reached an inevitable subject—the em-dash, according to Nitsuh Abebe of the New York Times. 

Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch shares the latest developments in the Anthropic lawsuit, the $1.5 billion settlement of which is being questioned by Judge William Alsup, who last week gave a list of seventeen questions for the attorneys and has now added to that list with seventeen more. Among them, Cader writes, are questions about the “situation in which multiple claims are submitted for the same work” and the claims process itself, asking for it “to involve the submission of documents—such as contracts—that would confirm who has legal standing and how proceeds are to be split.”

Barnes & Noble has announced the finalists for the 2025 Discover Prize for debut novels. They are Kaplan’s Plot (Flatiron Books) by Jason Diamond, Great Black Hope (Summit Books) by Rob Franklin, Tilt (Marysue Rucci Books) by Emma Pattee, The Artist and the Feast (Union Square) by Lucy Steeds, Lonely Crowds (Little, Brown) by Stephanie Wambugu, and Maggie: Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar (Summit Books) by Katie Yee. The winner will be announced on October 9.

Anne Enright, Annie Ernaux, Deborah Levy, Max Porter, Sally Rooney, and Viet Thanh Nguyen are among a group of authors who have signed a letter urging French president Emmanuel Macron to resume a program for evacuating Palestinian writers, scholars, and artists from Gaza, the Guardian reports. The program was “abruptly suspended by the French government at the beginning of August over a Palestinian student’s allegedly antisemitic online remarks, a decision that the letter-writing authors said amounted to a ‘collective punishment.’” The Pause program was established in 2017 to help “foreign researchers, scientists, intellectuals, and artists who find themselves in emergency situations.”

“I think these are dangerous times,” says former U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón in a video produced by the Associated Press. “I think that as artists we really have to hold true to what we believe in; we have to maintain our moral center even as funding resources dry up and even as we are asked to toe the line.... I think it’s really important to remember who we are.” Limón, the twenty-fourth poet laureate, will be succeeded by Arthur Sze, whose term starts October 9. 

Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against Penguin Random House, the New York Times, and four New York Times reporters, including Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, authors of Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success (Penguin Press, 2024), arguing that three New York Times articles and the subsequent book are “malicious, defamatory, and disparaging,” and written “with actual malice, calculated to inflict maximum damage upon President Trump during the height of a presidential election,” Katy Hershberger of Publishers Lunch reports. The lawsuit “also accuses the newspaper as being ‘a leading, and unapologetic, purveyor of falsehoods against President Trump.’” Spokespersons for Penguin Random House and the New York Times say the lawsuit has no merit.

The third annual Banned Wagon Tour, a program sponsored by Penguin Random House in parternship with EveryLibrary and First Book, will visit libraries and bookstores in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia beginning October 5. The annual tour is organized “to celebrate the freedom to read and express ideas, highlight the value of free and open access to information, and confront the harms of censorship.” Among the banned books the wagon will give away are The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Beloved by Toni Morrison, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez, and Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.

Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch untangles some of the complex issues surrounding Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright infringment settlement, including what one Big 5 publisher is doing about copyrights that were not properly registered to participate in the class-action lawsuit. Macmillan “has been communicating to authors and agents who have inquired about unregistered copyrights, acknowledging, ‘From what we currently understand, this was largely our mistake and we take full responsibility. If your work was excluded from the settlement for this reason, we will make you whole by paying you what you otherwise would have been paid under the settlement.’” Cader adds that “agents and authors hope that Macmillan’s position will inspire others.”

The Poetry Foundation has announced the recipients of its annual Pegasus Awards. Rigoberto González, the author of seventeeen books and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, will receive the 2025 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which recognizes a U.S. poet for outstanding lifetime achievement with an award of $100,000. Amy Stolls, who recently completed twenty-six years at the National Endowment for the Arts, wiil receive the $25,000 Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry, which is given “in recognition of commitment and extraordinary work in poetry and the literary arts through administration, advocacy, education, publishing, or service.” And Kazim Ali will receive the 2025 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism a $10,000 prize that “commends an outstanding book-length work of criticism published in the United States in the prior calendar year.”

Arthur Sze has been named the new U.S. poet laureate, succeeding Ada Limón, who has held the position since 2022. The winner of the Library of Congress’s 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, and other honors, Sze will begin his laureateship with a reading on October 9. During his term as poet laureate, Sze, who lives in Santa Fe, plans to have a special focus on poetry in translation.

Kelly Jenson of Book Riot unpacks the Institute of Museum and Library Services’s new project, Freedom Trucks: “six mobile exhibits intended to crisscross the country and ‘share the story of our nation’s founding’ to celebrate America’s 250th birthday in 2026.”

The former co-owners of Denver’s Tattered Cover Book Store have launched a new publishing, Left Field Publishing, which will publish both adult and children’s books, Publishers Weekly reports. “According to its mission statement, Left Field is committed to publishing ‘powerful, beautifully-told stories that fall outside the traditional lines.’ It will focus on authors ‘whose work blends genres, expands minds, and invites conversation.’” 

Capping off a week of announcements by the National Book Foundation, the New Yorker shares the longlist for the National Book Award in fiction: Rabih Alameddine for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove), Susan Choi for Flashlight (FSG), Angela Flournoy for The Wilderness (Mariner), Jonas Hassen Khemiri for The Sisters (FSG), Megha Majumdar for A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf), Kevin Moffett for Only Son (McSweeney’s), Karen Russell for The Antidote (Knopf), Ethan Rutherford for North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther (A Strange Object), Bryan Washington for Palaver (FSG), and Joy Williams for The Pelican Child (Knopf).

Capping off a week of announcements by the National Book Foundation, the New Yorker shares the longlist for the National Book Award in fiction: Rabih Alameddine for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove), Susan Choi for Flashlight (FSG), Angela Flournoy for The Wilderness (Mariner), Jonas Hassen Khemiri for The Sisters (FSG), Megha Majumdar for A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf), Kevin Moffett for Only Son (McSweeney’s), Karen Russell for The Antidote (Knopf ), Ethan Rutherford for North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther (A Strange Object), Bryan Washington for Palaver (FSG), and Joy Williams for The Pelican Child (Knopf ). 

Richard Smith, the man who impersonated Henry David Thoreau at the Walden Pond State Reservation in Concord, Massachusetts, for the past twenty-six years, has retired, the New York Times reports. His last day on the job was September 6, which was 178 years to the day after the 19th-century transcendentalist writer left Walden Pond.