Print book sales through the first nine months of 2025 are down about 1 percent from the comparable period in 2024, Publishers Weekly reports. According to data provided by Circana BookScan, the category with the steepest decline in sales is Adult Nonfiction, down 2 percent, while Children’s Nonfiction rose 2.7 percent. Adult Fiction was down 1.3 percent over last year.

A new collection of poems by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney contains a selection of verse never before seen in book form, including poems that “originally appeared in newspapers, journals and magazines under different pen names” and other previously unpublished poems housed in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, “where the poet bequeathed his works before his death in 2013,” the BBC reports. The Poems of Seamus Heaney was recently published in the U.K. by Faber and is forthcoming in November from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Terri Lesley, the former director of the Campbell County Public Library in Gillette, Wyoming, was awarded a $700,000 settlement after she was fired two years ago for refusing to remove books with sexual content and LGBTQ themes from the library, the New York Times reports. The federal lawsuit accused the county, its board of commissioners, the library board, and members of both government boards of violating her First Amendment right to free speech “and of firing Ms. Lesley in a retaliatory and discriminatory way.”

Erin Somers of Publisher Lunch reports on the “chaos” at Baker & Taylor, the book distributor that earlier this week announced it would close following the cancellation of its acquisition by ReaderLink. “Staffers, even those in supervisory positions, report that they do not have any information about what the ‘wind down’ of the company will look like. It is unclear whether books are still shipping to accounts, whether customers will get refunds, or whether books will be returned to publishers. Employees also don’t have language or information to relay to their customers,” Somers writes. Ingram, meanwhile, is “rolling out a new cataloging and processing system” to help onboard new customers. 

Lucas Schaefer, Scott Anderson, and Thao Lam are the winners of this year’s Kirkus Prizes, given annually for works of exceptional merit in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature. Schaefer won the prize in fiction for his debut novel, The Slip (Simon & Schuster); Anderson won the nonfiction award for King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation (Doubleday); and Lam won the prize in young readers’ literature for Everbelly (Groundwood). Each winner received $50,000.

The Swedish Academy today announced that it had awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai for his “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” His most recent book published in English is Herscht 17769 (New Directions, 2024), translated by Ottilie Mulzetan, an experimental novel written in a single continuous sentence about a character named Florian Herscht who attempts to warn Chancellor Angela Merkel about the world’s impending destruction.

The MacArthur Foundation today announced the 2025 MacArthur Fellows, including fiction writer Tommy Orange. The MacArthur Fellowship is a “no-strings-attached” award “in support of people, not projects.” Each fellowship comes with an award of $800,000 paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years. 

Scarlett Pavlovich’s sexual assault lawsuit against Neil Gaiman has been dismissed by a Wisconsin federal judge, Vulture reports. “The judge did not rule on the facts of the case, but rather that the suit should have been filed in New Zealand and not Wisconsin.” Pavlovich has accused the author “of assaulting her while she worked as the nanny to his and then-wife Amanda Palmer’s child” at Palmer’s home on Waiheke Island. Palmer had filed for divorce from Gaiman in 2022, two years before Pavlovich and other women accused Gaiman of sexual misconduct and assault. Pavlovich “filed on human-trafficking charges under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, choosing Wisconsin as the venue for the suit because Gaiman has a residence there.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina yesterday filed a lawsuit against State Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver citing “unjust book bans,” on behalf of the South Carolina Association of School Librarians and three public school students, Book Riot reports. Regulation 43-170, which became law in June 2024, “bans all materials in public kindergarten through 12th grade classrooms if that material contains any ‘sexual conduct.’ The regulation has led to the banning of 22 books across the state, putting South Carolina at the top of the list for most state-sanctioned book bans.”

Library distributor Baker & Taylor (B&T), the acquistion of which by ReaderLink was recently canceled, is shutting down, Publishers Weekly reports. “As a result, B&T let go about 520 employees yesterday and plans to wind down the business by January. Employees who were laid off had their severance plans canceled as well. B&T had undergone some layoffs earlier this year, but recently had as many as 1,500 full-time and part-time employees.”

The National Book Foundation has announced the finalists for the 2025 National Book Awards. The finalists in poetry are Gabrielle Calvocoressi for The New Economy (Copper Canyon Press), Cathy Linh Che for Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press), Tiana Clark, for Scorched Earth (Washington Square Press), Richard Siken for I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press), and Patricia Smith for The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner). The finalists in fiction are Rabih Alameddine for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove Press), Megha Majumdar for A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf), Karen Russell, for The Antidote (Knopf), Ethan Rutherford for North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther (A Strange Object), and Bryan Washington, Palaver (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The finalists in nonfiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature can be found on the National Book Foundation’s website. The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on November 19.

The Maine Arts Commission is taking applications for the next Maine State Poet Laureate. The selected poet will serve a five-year term beginning July 1, 2026, and concluding June 30, 2031. “The laureate is charged with advancing public appreciation for poetry through community engagement, events, and projects, as well as supporting the Commission’s administration of the national Poetry Out Loud program.” The position comes with an honorarium of $5,000 per year for five years. Eligible applicants must be full-time Maine residents “with a distinguished body of poetic work.” The state’s current poet laureate is Julia Bouwsma.

Sophia Nguyen of the Washington Post speculates about who might win the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday. Among the guesses are Chinese fiction writer Can Xue, Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, Australian fiction writer Gerald Murnane, and Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas.

Book editor Chuck Adams has died, Publishers Lunch reports. A longtime editor at Algonquin Books, Adams was the subject of an early installment of the Agents & Editors series, telling contributing editor Jofie Ferrari-Adler in 2008: “I believe very strongly that books are not about writers, and they’re definitely not about editors—they’re about readers. You’ve got to grab the reader right away with your voice and with the story you’re telling. You can’t just write down words that sound pretty. It’s all about the reader.” Adams was honored with the Editor’s Award from Poets & Writers, the nonprofit organization that publishes Poets & Writers Magazine, in 2013. 

It is officially Banned Books Week, an annual event highlighting “the value of free and open access to information” and bringing together “the entire book community—librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types—in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.” The week leads up to a call to action on Let Freedom Read Day, October 11. 

Quirk Books, the publisher of titles such as the debut novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) by Ransom Riggs and the parody novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) by Seth Grahame-Smith, has been sold to Andrews McMeel Publishing, according to Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch.

Richard Flannagan has rejected the £50,000 Baillie Gifford prize for his latest book, Question 7 (Knopf, 2024), after he failed to persuade the sponsor, fund management firm Baillie Gifford, to divest from its hydrocarbon interests, the Times reports. “It can also be revealed that Baillie Gifford—which was effectively hounded out of its long-standing sponsorship of literary festivals by activist campaigns—has not yet committed to continuing its sponsorship of the nonfiction prize.”

The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday, the New York Times reports. Six Nobel Prizes are awarded every year; the other fields recognized are medicine (“awarded on Monday to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries around peripheral immune tolerance”), physics, chemistry, economic science, and peace work. 

The Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association and the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association have announced that Ross Gay has been selected as the recipient of the 2025 Voice of the Heartland Award. The annual honor “celebrates individuals who exemplify the values and spirit of independent bookselling, and whose work resonates deeply with readers and communities across the region.” Gay, the author of the essay collections The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy as well as four books of poetry, will receive the award during the Heartland Fall Forum Book Awards ceremony on October 14.

The Association of American Publishers will present its annual International Freedom to Publish Award to Freedom Letters, a Russian publishing house “that operates out of Ukraine, Latvia, Georgia, and other locations, and has released hundreds of works in Russian and Ukrainian by anti-war writers and other opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin,” the Associated Press reports. The award will also honor its founder, Georgy Urushadze, “a onetime literary prize official in Moscow who fled in 2022 after opposing the Russian invasion of Ukraine and being designated a ‘foreign agent’ by the Russian government.”