Daily News

Some former clients of Small Press Distribution, which announced its closure in March, have inked new distribution deals with Independent Publishers Group (IPG) and Itasca Books, reports Publishers Weekly. Black Lawrence Press, Blackwater Press, Bull City Press, Chax Press, Grid Books, Marsh Hawk Press, Ronsdale Press (excluding Canada), Roof Books, and Sinister Wisdom have signed with IPG. Epiphany Magazine, IF SF Publishing, River River Books, Rescue Press, and Threadsuns Press have signed with Itasca.

Smithsonian Magazine looks at the history of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which will reopen next month after a major renovation.

In honor of Little Free Library week—which began May 12 and runs through May 18—ThriftBooks is partnering with Little Free Library, the nonprofit in Saint Paul that is behind the national effort to offer free books through small collections individuals and organizations store on front lawns or in other locations. The company will donate more than 10,000 books to Little Free Library as well as money to help create new Little Free Libraries nationwide, “including many new Impact Libraries, which focus on communities where books are scarce and needed the most.”

The Guardian rounds up its picks for the best of the literary internet, from New Yorker critic Merve Emre’s podcast to bots on X (formerly Twitter) channeling Anaïs Nin and Virginia Woolf.

A short story by Rod Serling, creator and host of the original TV show the Twilight Zone, has been published for the first time in the Strand, a magazine that releases previously unpublished work by classic authors and new fiction by contemporary best-selling writers. The story, based on Serling’s experience fighting in World War II, is called “First Squad, First Platoon,” and it “was discovered in a collection of Serling’s writings at the University of Wisconsin,” reports NPR.

A spreadsheet that purports to identify authors’ political stances toward Israel has gone viral on social media. Beside each author name—including Emily St. John Mandel, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and others—columns mark them as “Zionist” or not and provide reasoning for the designation. “Many responses accuse the spreadsheet of antisemitism, calling it a list of Jews and comparing it to Nazi lists; the majority of the authors listed are not Jewish. Others thanked the creator for doing research to guide their purchasing and reading,” writes the Forward.

In the Paris Review Palestinian author Adania Shibli reflects on the practice of book banning. Last year Shibli’s novel Minor Detail had received a major literary award in Germany, the ceremony for which was cancelled after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 and criticism that the novel could be deemed anti-Semitic. “Writers often write fiction in order to leave behind the oppressiveness of the lived world. To force a link between fiction and the real is an act of violence against the imagination,” Shibli writes.

For Esquire, Jonathan Russell Clark considers “Why We Love Time Travel Stories” and reads into Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel, The Ministry of Time, and Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life,” among other titles, looking for answers.

New Literary Project announced that Ben Fountain, whose most recent novel is Devil Makes Three (Flatiron, 2023), has won the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. The $50,000 prize is given annually to a midcareer author of fiction. Fountain was chosen from a shortlist that included Jamel Brinkley, Patricia Engel, Idra Novey, and Bennett Sims.

The Guardian profiles Argentinian author César Aira, reportedly a favorite to win the next Nobel Prize in Literature. “He has published more than one hundred novels, gives his work away, and his surrealist books have a massive cult following.”

The winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced, including Jayne Anne Phillips’s Night Watch for fiction, Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice for memoir or autobiography, and Brandon Som’s Tripas for poetry.

University of Washington Magazine reflects on the legacy of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers fifty years after its first publication: “Aiiieeeee!  became a foundational text in Asian American Literature, and its editors were credited for both rescuing stories out of time and opening readers to a diversity of voices and experiences from the Asian American community.”

The Asian American Literature Festival will return this September without the involvement of the Smithsonian Institution, which last year cancelled it with little warning. “And instead of only being in Washington, D.C., the in-person and virtual events will be spread out nationwide,” reports ABC News.

On JSTOR Daily Matthew Wills explores the origin of the penguin in the logo of Penguin Random House, previously Penguin Books, which launched in 1935.

The detention and imprisonment of writers reached a five-year peak last year, with at least 339 writers jailed worldwide, according to PEN America’s 2023 Freedom to Write Index. “War and conflict had a significant impact on writers in 2023, as the crackdown on dissent in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and in Russia resulted in substantial increases in the number of jailed writers, placing both countries in the top 10 for the first time,” according to the report.

The Denver Post reports that this year’s Readers Take Denver, an annual festival for fans of romance literature held earlier this month, is being denounced by attendees as “disorganized and chaotic,” on par with the 2017 Fyre Festival that led to prison time for its organizer, Billy McFarland. Next year’s festival has been canceled as a result.

Publishers Weekly offers a dispatch from the Independent Book Publishers Association’s Publishing University event held in Denver last week, including ideas from a “roundtable [that] addressed alternatives—or creative tweaks—to traditional publishing models.”  

The New York Times investigates the theft of 170 rare books by Russian classic authors worth more than $2.6 million from European libraries. “How Russian rare books came to be at the center of a possible multinational criminal conspiracy is a story of money and geopolitics as much as of crafty forgers and lackluster library security.”

Liese Mayer has been appointed as executive editor of Little, Brown. “Mayer was most recently editorial director of fiction at Bloomsbury US, where she acquired and edited such titles as Women Talking by Miriam Toews, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy, Girlhood by Melissa Febos, and Zorrie by Laird Hunt,” writes Publishers Weekly.

The New Yorker investigates the “Order of the Third Bird,” which is “an underground international fellowship, made up of artists, authors, booksellers, professors, and avant-gardists who try to understand what attention is, how to channel it, what it can do.”

Publishers Weekly reports on festivities held across the nation on Independent Bookstore Day, which was April 27. “Many stores partnered on organized crawls for book lovers, who received passports and stamps to mark their progress. Some booksellers in areas with large concentrations of stores—such as Chicagoland, which had 45 participating stores—went so far as to commission shuttle buses to more efficiently transport customers to different locations. (One bookseller reported that she took the opportunity to handsell a favorite read to customers during the bus ride.)”

The Tampa Bay Times speaks with novelist Lauren Groff about her new bookstore in Florida, The Lynx, which opened on Sunday. “‘We did this because of book bans,’ Groff says. ‘We want to fight back against the chill of authoritarianism that is creeping across Florida.’”

On NPR Maureen Corrigan reviews a new collection of epistles by one of American poetry’s foundational voices: “The Letters of Emily Dickinson reads like the closest thing we'll probably ever have to an intimate autobiography of the poet.”

The Hudson Valley Book Trail in New York State has grown from a “doodle on the back of a bookmark” to a major tourist attraction leading literary pilgrims across eight counties and nearly forty bookstores that not only sell books but offer readings, trivia, live music, food, beer, and more, writes the Middletown Times Herald-Record.

Was Shakespeare a writer of fan fiction? “Many of his major works draw their narrative core from classical or popular source material, ranging from Ovid to the Bible to the Decameron,” writes Betsy Golden Kellem at JSTOR Daily.

The New York Times profiles Deep Vellum, an independent publisher and bookstore owner that has “put Dallas on the literary map.”

A group of thieves has been arrested by European police for the heist of at least 170 rare books written by Russian authors, reports Barron’s. “The suspected thieves posed as researchers at libraries, distracting staff while an accomplice replaced the valuable first editions with a copy of ‘outstanding quality’.”

Linda Ewing is the new executive director of Coffee House Press, an independent publisher in Minnesota, reports Publishers Weekly. Ewing had been serving as interim executive director since last year, after the resignation Anitra Budd in 2022 and during “a wave of further resignations,” in which Coffee House lost one-third of its staff. Jeremy M. Davis will become Coffee House’s editor in chief after serving in the role of executive editor since last summer.

In the Financial Times Nilanjana Roy contemplates the particular joys and insights to be found in reading the letters of prominent authors.

Public Books interviews novelist Francisco Goldman, who for the past thirty years “has produced a steady stream of ambitious, experimental works that resemble little else that has been published in the Anglophone world.” 

On Literary Hub the duo behind Street Books—a bicycle-powered mobile library in Portland, Oregon—reflect on their work supporting unhoused readers by delivering books, eyeglasses, and other supplies needed to engage with literature.

Vox reports on “garbage e-books” overtaking Amazon: “It’s partly AI, partly a get-rich-quick scheme, and entirely bad for confused consumers”—and legitimate authors and publishers whose books are getting lost in the shuffle.

Today is World Book and Copyright Day. In 1995 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated April 23 as an annual date “to recognize the contributions of books and authors globally,” writes the Business Standard.

PEN America has canceled its 2024 literary awards ceremony after many authors withdrew their books from consideration in protest of the free speech organization’s response to the war in Gaza, Publishers Weekly reports. At the direction of the Literary Estate of Jean Stein, PEN America will donate the $75,000 prize for the PEN/Stein award to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Winners will not be named for an award if the winning title had been withdrawn; PEN America is considering how to allocate prize money for categories in which no winner will be announced.

Literary-themed vacations are apparently a “hot new trend.” Esquire investigates the custom cruises, special libraries, and resort-hosted book clubs that are luring well-heeled readers and writers around the globe.

Publishers Weekly speaks with newer bookstore owners who have entered the business “as a career and as a means to advance personal priorities. They’re stocking shelves with books from BIPOC, LGBTQ, and global perspectives, seeking out local and underrepresented authors, and creating spaces for historically marginalized customers.”