A judge has ordered that a group of authors cannot include six different AI companies in a single lawsuit for copyright infringement, according to Publishers Lunch. The issue, the judge said, is that there wasn’t clear evidence of conspiracy between the companies. The plaintiffs must instead sue Anthropic, Google, xAI, Perplexity, Apple, and NVIDIA separately. “Each defendant trained on a mixture of different data repositories at different times between 2020 and 2024,” the court writes. “Even accepting plaintiff’s argument that there is a ‘reasonable inference’ that each defendant used Anna’s Archive to train their LLMs, that would not be enough for the Court to find a common transaction or occurrence.”

The trustees of the International Griffin Poetry Prize have announced that the $65,000 Canadian (approximately $46,679) Canadian Poetry Prize will be reinstated. The $130,000 Canadian (approximately $93,359) International Poetry Prize will remain unchanged, and Canadian poets are eligible for that prize as well, though a Canadian poet cannot win both prizes at the same time. These changes are the result of comments and recommendations from the Canadian poetry community. The trustees also announced that the longlist for the International Prize will be twelve books and will feature Canadian representation, and that the panel of three judges will always include a Canadian.

Tessa McWatt, a Guyanese author and professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, has been awarded the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, BBC reports. The $10,000 prize is considered the leading international award for Caribbean writing. McWatt received the honor for The Snag: A Mother, A Forest, and Wild Grief (Random House Canada, 2025), her account of losing her mother to dementia. She said that getting the award was a “real joy, as it feels like a win for my mother, who is the central figure in the book and my heart's inspiration.”

Barnes & Noble has announced the six finalists for its annual Discover Prize, Kirkus Reviews reports. The award, which is given for an outstanding debut novel, was established in 1995 and the winner will be announced on June 25. This year’s shortlist includes Yesteryear (Knopf) by Caro Claire Burke, Lost Lambs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Madeline Cash, The Golden Boy (Cardinal) by Patricia Finn, Upward Bound (Hogarth) by Woody Brown, Seek Immediate Shelter (Flatiron) by Vincent Yu, and Waiting on a Friend (Hogarth) by Natalie Adler. “It’s such a joy to spend so much time talking in depth about new writers—their prose style, their characters, the worlds they create—and their future potential with other booksellers around the country,” Barnes & Noble campaign manager for fiction Lexie Smyth said in a statement.

The Literary Arts Fund is now accepting applications for its 2026 Innovation Project Grant program. These grants will range from $25,000 to $100,000 and offer literary nonprofits funds for “new, one-time, and forward-thinking projects that aim to address critical structural challenges that, if improved or solved, would ultimately strengthen literary arts nonprofits’ abilities to serve creative writers.” Proposed projects must commence after January 1, 2027, and conclude by December 31, 2027, and the deadline for applications is August 17. (Read more about the fund in “A Lifeline From Literary Arts Fund” by Adrienne Raphel, from the March/April 2026 issue.)

The Booker Prize Foundation is publishing a short story collection this week that aims to make prize-winning fiction more accessible to people who face barriers to reading, according to the Guardian. The collection, All Around the World, includes pieces by Booker Prize winners like Anne Enright and David Szalay and will be distributed through the Quick Reads initiative, which aims to improve adult literacy at a time when more than a third of adults in the UK struggle to read a book in its entirety. Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, who curated the collection, said that “Quick Reads is like dipping your toe in the water of literature, with some of the barriers that might put people off removed. A lot of people might feel there is nothing about their world in books. The stories in All Around the World have access points, and I hope they alert readers to the fact that, actually, their life might be in here somewhere.”

Audiobook industry sales revenue grew nine percent in 2025, a 43 percent increase from 2024, Publishers Weekly reports. These numbers come from the Audio Publishers Association’s annual sales survey, which also found that general fiction accounted for the largest share of audiobook revenue, while the fastest growing genres were humor, general fiction, and children’s books. “Convenience remains the primary driver of audiobook consumption,” Ed Nawotka writes. “Among listeners, 86 percent cited the ability to multitask while listening, and 84 percent cited the ability to listen on the go as the top benefit, with 70 percent describing audiobooks as an alternative to screen time.” AI-narrated audiobooks don’t seem to be holding listeners’ interests; only sixteen percent of listeners said they had listened to a title voiced by AI.

An unfinished and never before published short story by Edith Wharton has been printed in the most recent issue of the Strand Magazine, the Associated Press writes. The piece, titled “The Men Who Saved the World,” tells the story of a young American nurse who finds herself seated next to a war hero at a dinner party, and animates the strange divide between civilian and military life that Wharton witnessed during World War I. As Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli writes in his introduction, “Wharton asks a question that is as relevant today as it was over a century ago: What is the cost of refusing to see the horrors beyond the softly curtained windows—and who pays for it?”

Pamela Drucker Mann, a former chief executive at Condé Nast, is spearheading a new media startup that aims to monetize short stories, the Wall Street Journal reports. The company, called Run-A-Muck, has launched an ad-supported Substack called Drafting where it will publish short stories to see what readers respond to and potentially then pursue other ventures like films and podcasts. The company is hoping that younger generations who grew up with short-form videos and Instagram posts will take to short fiction. “Rather than starting with a medium and searching for an audience, we start with the story we want to tell and then determine the format that best serves that story,” Drucker Mann said.

In the Yale Review, writing professor Sheila Liming reflects on some universities’ decision to deaccession many of the books in their libraries. Liming draws on her own research into Edith Wharton’s book collection—half of which was destroyed after her death—to make an argument for the library as a crucial step in making text accessible to all manner of readers. “The speed of the digital world connives to make us feel ashamed of certain sorts of slowly won knowledge. But to persist in caring about books, and to do so in the face of those who tell us not to, is to fight for a world that takes knowledge seriously,” she writes. “That fight will have to happen on many fronts; preserving the library alone will not rescue reading. But it is a good place to begin. After all, it is easier to preserve than it is to create.”

HarperCollins announced yesterday that it will be reorganizing its U.S. trade division into seven groups, according to Publishers Lunch. Dey Street and Avon will now each be their own groups rather than part of Morrow; the other groups will be Harper, HarperCollins Children’s, Harper One, and Mariner. “This new alignment will allow each group to operate with greater autonomy, deeper category expertise, and a strategic focus on author development, positioning the imprints for continued growth,” CEO and president of the trade division Liate Stehlik said in a release.

In the wake of last month’s allegations that a prize-winning short story published in Granta was written using an LLM, New York reports on how literary magazines are dealing with AI-written submissions. It seems that many are not yet on high alert about having to weed out AI writing. The editors interviewed pointed out that they can take their time reviewing submissions and expressed reservations about relying on AI detectors or adding more to editors’ workloads by asking them to build familiarity with AI-generated style. More importantly, they reinforced that using AI to write runs counter to the goals of most writers. “I think we’d be having a different conversation if the technology could do the things we like and want,” said Samuel Rutter, editor in chief of Kismet. “We’re still working with a lot of writers for whom the ideating and the writing is almost the more exciting part than the publishing.”

Kevin Young has been named winner of the 2026 international Griffin Poetry Prize for Night Watch (Knopf, 2025). The prize was established in 2000 to “encourage and celebrate excellence in poetry,” and books of poetry written in or translated into English and submitted from anywhere in the world are eligible. The winner receives $130,000 Canadian (approximately $93,527) and finalists each receive $10,000 Canadian (approximately $7,194).

The Literary Arts Fund has announced that it will distribute $7.7 million in grant funding to forty organizations across nineteen states, the Associated Press reports. The fund was started by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and six other philanthropies. This year’s grants range from $40,000 to $500,000 and recipients include the National Book Foundation, Graywolf Press, Copper Canyon Press, and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. For a full list of funded organizations, visit the Literary Arts Fund's website. (Read more about the fund in “A Lifelife From Literary Arts Fund” by Adrienne Raphel, from the March/April 2026 issue.)

The office of President Emmanuel Macron of France announced today that Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian French author of Persepolis, has died at 56, the New York Times reports. Satrapi was born in Iran in 1969 and lived through the rise of the clerics and the Iran-Iraq war before moving to Austria for school at fourteen. She later moved to Paris and published the first Persepolis book in French in 2000 to wide acclaim. Her books were subsequently translated into English and turned into an Academy Award-nominated animated film. “Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and a freedom-loving artist whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” Macron’s office said in a statement.

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller list for the week ending May 31, 2026. The list is compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identifies “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” New to the list this week are Homer's The Illiad (Norton), translated by Emily Wilson, at no. 17; Son of Nobody (Norton) by Yann Martel at no. 21; Losers: Part Two: Deluxe Limited Edition (Kensington) by Harley Laroux at no. 24; Birds of a Feather: The Secrets of a Knight (Ravenhood Legacy #3) (Kensington) by Kate Stewart at no. 28; Playground (Norton) by Richard Powers at no. 31; Just My Luck: Deluxe Limited Edition (The Kings #2) (Kensington) by Lena Hendrix at no. 33; and Wings of Life: Deluxe Limited Edition (Dragonbound Chronicles #1) (Page & Vine) by Meghan Le Fay at no. 40.

Applications for the National Book Critics Circle’s Emerging Critics Fellowship are open until Friday, June 5, at midnight Pacific Time. The fellowship is open to critics of all experience levels who want to review and write about books, though they need not have published book reviews already. Over the course of the fellowship year, fellows will have access to one-on-one mentorship, professional development and craft lectures over Zoom, and dues-free NBCC membership, among other things. “As a published author of fiction and nonfiction, my time as an NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow has been immensely valuable—giving me a comfortable and inclusive forum to learn how to partake in the national conversation about books, publishing, and prizes in America,” 2021–2022 fellow Rishi Reddi said of the program. “I got to spend a year ‘inside’ the erudite and necessary field of literary criticism and for me—for whom books have always been a lifeline and an immense pleasure—the experience has been priceless.”

Ten cultural organizations sent a letter to Congress calling for expanded funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in the run-up to meetings about the 2027 fiscal year later this week, according to Publishers Weekly. The White House tried to dismantle the IMLS last year and has once again proposed eliminating it in 2027. In their letter, the organizations emphasized the importance of museums, libraries, and archives in American cultural life. “For many, the library is the only no-fee access to information, education, and career development,” Sem Helmick, president of the American Library Association, which was one of the letter’s signatories, emphasized in a statement.

Julia Elliott has been named this year’s winner of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for her short story collection Hellions, published by Tin House in 2025, NPR reports. The $150,000 award is given each year to a novel, short story collection, or graphic novel by a woman or nonbinary author in the United States or Canada. Elliott is known for writing fiction that blends Southern gothic horror, surrealism, and fairytales, and her latest collection is no exception. “This eerie, eclectic, genre-leaping collection takes no half-measures; every sentence of Hellions crackles or crawls,” the prize jury wrote in a statement. “But for all its wildness, there is tremendous control.”

Netflix has launched a hub for “book-inspired storytelling,” Publishers Lunch reports. The hub, called Watch Your Favorite Books, will recommend content based on books on the Netflix homepage. “The experience is organized around reader ‘types,’” according to the streaming service, “think: plot-twist lovers, romance enthusiasts, nonfiction fans, and more, making it easy for members to find adaptations that match how they like to read and watch.”