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In a statement to Retail Brew, Amazon claimed its annual book sale “unintentionally overlapped” with Independent Bookstore Day on April 26, but Amazon did not promise to avoid the national indies sales event in the future. This year, Amazon held its annual book sale from April 23 to April 28, which Ray T. Daniels, the chief communications officer of the American Booksellers Association (ABA) criticized as “predatory.” Ironically, Amazon’s ill-timed sale may have driven even more customers to indies this year in protest. Among the 560 bookstores that use ABA’s e-commerce platform, there was a 77.41 percent increase in online sales over Independent Bookstore Day in 2024. Bookshop.org also saw a 170 percent sales increase over last year.

Alexandra Alter writes for the New York Times about the complicated deliberation process that led to Percival Everett winning the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for James (Doubleday). The prize went to Everett after the Pulitzer committee’s board could not agree on the three finalists that the fiction jury initially presented: Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot (Viking), Stacey Levine’s Mice 1961 (Verse Chorus Press), and Gayl Jones’s The Unicorn Woman (Beacon Press). Alter notes that “some observers expressed skepticism about this year’s process,” quoting the writer and bookseller Drew Broussard, who questioned whether the Pulitzer board had overruled the jury’s selections of a “world-shaking all-woman trio of finalists in a year when one novel by a male writer has taken up quite a lot of the available oxygen.” But Levine, one of the finalists, dismissed that speculation, emphasizing that in a moment when diversity initiatives and public funding for the arts are in danger, the Pulitzer Prize stands for integrity. In an e-mail, Levine wrote, “Percival’s book is so important in this regard…. Is this really the time to fuss about what might or might not be gender politics in a literary contest?”

Ploughshares has appointed Jenny Molberg as its new editor in chief. Molberg joins Ploughshares from the University of Central Missouri where she worked as a professor of creative writing, directed Pleiades Press, and edited Pleiades: Literature in Context. In addition to serving as the new editor in chief of Ploughshares, she will work as a professor of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College in Boston. In a letter announcing her new role, Molberg wrote, “I think of great writing as advocacy for conditions of peace—a repurposing of toxic power and suffering—a call for action, for radical joy. Through this lens, I recognize my responsibilities to the authors I help edit and usher into the world, the students I teach, and the literary world writ large.”

The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association has announced Bernard Shapero as its new president, Fine Books & Collections reports. Shapero joins with forty-five years of experience in the rare book world and runs his own bookshop and gallery in London called Shapero Rare Books. He said, “I look forward to working with all our members to carry on with their good work and hope that the rare book world will continue to thrive in the U.K.”

The 2025 Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday by Columbia University. Percival Everett won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for James (Doubleday); Marie Howe won the prize in poetry for New and Selected Poems (Norton); Edda L. Fields-Black won the prize in history for Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press) along with Kathleen DuVal for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House); Jason Roberts won the prize in biography for Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life (Random House); Tessa Hulls won the prize in memoir or autobiography for Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir (MCD); and Benjamin Nathans won the prize in general nonfiction for To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press). The winners each received $15,000.

Publishers Weekly has reported more details about the termination of dozens of NEA grants as well as staff changes at the agency in light of Trump’s executive orders and Friday’s budget proposal.

Author Canisia Lubrin, primarily known for her poetry, has won this year’s Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which celebrates women and nonbinary storytellers in the U.S. and Canada and awards $150,000 annually, NPR reports. Lubrin’s debut fiction work, Code Noir (Soft Skull), is composed of fifty-nine short stories that explore the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and violence in France and the French colonies.

Following the release on Friday of President Trump’s budget proposal that would eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as well as other arts agencies, the NEA began withdrawing and cancelling grant offers to arts organizations around the country, the New York Times reports. “The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the president,” a portion of the e-mail said. “Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities.”

Judge Richard J. Leon has agreed to “grant in part” the temporary restraining order requested by the American Library Association (ALA) and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to “prevent additional harm” to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Publishers Weekly reports. In a statement, ALA president Cindy Hohl said, “The immediate halt to the gutting of IMLS is a win for America's libraries and the millions of Americans who rely on them.” Trump’s administration has been attempting to dismantle the IMLS, with only twelve of approximately seventy-five employees remaining at the agency and the rest on administrative leave since April 4. In their lawsuit, the ALA and AFSCME have been advocating for a preliminary injunction to prohibit further destruction of the IMLS.

Electric Literature (EL) has announced it is leaving X (formerly known as Twitter). Halimah Marcus, the executive director of EL, explains that the organization has stayed on X as long as it has because, as of last year, 11 percent of EL readers were still finding articles on the platform. When Literary Hub suggested a joint departure from X, the EL staff agreed. Marcus writes that X is now “a dystopian shadow of itself, a vanity project of a destructive, dangerous billionaire—and a very bad place for literature (and most everything else).”

The BBC has used AI to create writing classes taught by “Agatha Christie,” the Guardian reports. The videos featuring the author, who died in 1976, have been generated with AI-enhanced technology, licensed images, and restored recordings. The writing advice, which includes how to structure a story, craft plot twists, and artfully build suspense, has been drawn from her writings and archival interviews. The videos will be available on the subscription-based education streaming platform BBC Maestro and were made in collaboration with the Agatha Christie estate with the full support of her family.

Maya Angelou and Malcom X manuscripts will be on display at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City starting May 8, Fine Books & Collections reports. The manuscripts will be part of a larger celebration of the center’s centenary, which will include a summer festival, book giveaways, a limited edition library card, and a yearlong exhibition called 100: A Century of Collections, Community, and Creativity.

For Electric Literature, Bradley Sides predicts the winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which will be announced by Columbia University on Monday, May 5, at 3:00 PM EDT. His list of contenders includes Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (Scribner), Amanda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books), Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars (Knopf), and Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday), among others.

Literary Arts, a community-based nonprofit in Portland, Oregon, announced the 2025 Oregon Book Award winners at a ceremony on Monday. The winner of the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction was Kimberly King Parsons for We Were the Universe (Knopf). The winner of the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry was Charity E. Yoro for ten-cent flower & other territories (First Matter Press). The winner of the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction was Jaclyn Moyer for On Gold Hill: A Personal History of Wheat, Farming, and Family, from Punjab to California (Beacon Press).

More than 1,600 independent bookstores across the United States celebrated Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday, April 26, Publishers Weekly reports. Many bookstores—including forty in the Twin Cities, fifty-five in Chicagoland, and twenty-five in Brooklyn, New York—collaborated on crawls, providing passports for customers visiting multiple stores and offering discounts for future purchases.

D. Graham Burnett wonders if the humanities will survive artificial intelligence in a weekend essay for the New Yorker. He underscores the importance of confronting the widespread use of AI in college classrooms and suggests integrating AI into pedagogy. “An assignment in my class asked students to engage one of the new A.I. tools in a conversation about the history of attention,” he writes. “Reading the results, on my living-room couch, turned out to be the most profound experience of my teaching career…. In a basic way, I felt I was watching a new kind of creature being born, and also watching a generation come face to face with that birth: an encounter with something part sibling, part rival, part careless child-god, part mechanomorphic shadow—an alien familiar.” Burnett goes on to challenge the ideal of knowledge production alone: “But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.”

Two new documentaries, Banned Together (2024) and Free for All: The Public Library (2025), highlight anti-censorship activism amidst an increasing number of book bans in the U.S., Publishers Weekly reports. Banned Together, which is now streaming on Apple+ and Amazon Prime, follows high school students in South Carolina as they combat efforts to remove books from school library shelves. Free for All: The Public Library, which will be released on PBS Independent Lens on April 29, features a compilation of contemporary footage and archival material to trace the history of the library as a civic institution in the U.S.

Megan Mabee writes for Book Riot about how to recommend books like an expert. When recommending a book to someone, Mabee advises, consider that person’s favorite books, authors, genres, and preferred moods and pacing in storytelling. Mabee also encourages recommenders to consider a person’s hobbies, interests, and the media they consume—including television, films, and podcasts.

Literary activist groups have formally condemned Florida House Bill 1539, “legislation they claim would significantly restrict students’ access to books in Florida public schools,” Publishers Weekly reports. The bill would force school districts to remove any book judged to be “harmful to minors” within five days of a challenge, regardless of whether the book has gone through proper review processes. Organizations that signed the letter opposing the bill include American Booksellers for Free Expression, Authors Against Book Bans, the Authors Guild, and PEN America, among others.

Book publishers are observing a surging interest in the U.S. Constitution and have been printing new editions, the Associated Press reports. Random House announced a hardcover combined edition of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to be published in July, followed by a hardcover edition of the Federalist Papers to be published in November. The founding documents are all in the public domain and popular editions have also been released by Skyhorse, Penguin, Barnes & Noble, and others.

Ed Nawotka writes for Publishers Weekly about how emerging tech can help the publishing industry as it advocates for AI licensing frameworks to protect authors. For example, the new firm Valent has developed technology to identify when and how much copyrighted material has been used to train an AI model. Louis Hunt, the cofounder and CEO of Valent, explains that Valent also has algorithms that can quantify how certain data could improve an AI model’s performance, which would give copyright holders leverage in licensing negotiations.

Supreme court justices are considering certain picture books with LGBTQ+ themes after parents in Maryland claimed they have a religious right to withdraw their children from classes on days that stories with gay and transgender themes are discussed, the New York Times reports.

Author Neil Gaiman is seeking more than $500,000 from Caroline Wallner, one of the women who has come forward accusing him of sexual misconduct, New York magazine reports. Gaiman, who denies abusing Wallner, has filed a demand for arbitration, accusing Wallner of breaching the NDA she signed when she shared her story with the media.

The winners of the annual Publishing Triangle Awards, which celebrate LGBTQ+ literary excellence, were announced at the New School Thursday. The list of winners includes Blas Falconer, who won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry for Rara Avis (Four Way Books) and Cass Donish, who won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry for Your Dazzling Death (Knopf). Jiaming Tang won both the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction for Cinema Love (Dutton).

Three hundred people in Chelsea, Michigan, formed a human chain to move thousands of books from the old location of Serendipity Books to its new site, the Washington Post reports. Bookstore owner Michelle Tuplin said she had the idea to create a “book brigade,” but did not expect so many community members to show up. The group relocated 9,100 books in under two hours and a video of the event has been viewed more than 1.6 million times on TikTok. The new Serendipity Books will open on April 26, which is also Independent Bookstore Day.

Alexandra Alter writes for the New York Times about the ethical quandaries of publishing Joan Didion’s journal entries about therapy, as they appear are in Notes to John, forthcoming from Knopf on April 22. The posthumous work collects journal entries she wrote after sessions with a psychiatrist, during which she discussed subjects such as alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and her complex relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The notes are sometimes addressed only to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, another factor that has sparked some fans and friends of Didion to wonder if the publication is invasive. “Didion was famously guarded,” Alter writes, but she was also “a meticulous note taker and record keeper who was savvy about the publishing industry; she likely knew that any literary documents she left behind could be released.”

DOGE has taken over the federal grants website, Grants.gov, the NonProfit Times reports. DOGE staffers will now be able to review grant proposals and make decisions about distributing funds, according to the Washington Post.

Keziah Weir writes for Vanity Fair about how Meta AI staffers concluded that more than seven million books have no “economic value.” Meta, which used millions of pirated books to train its AI, is arguing that the company’s use of copyrighted materials falls under the legal doctrine of “fair use.” The Association of American Publishers has rejected this claim, stating in an amicus brief filed last week, “There is nothing transformative about the systematic copying and encoding of textual works, word by word, into an LLM. It does not involve criticism or commentary, provision of a search or indexing utility, software interoperability, or any other purpose recognized as transformative under fair use precedents.” Meta also claimed that the company does not see the point in compensating authors to license their books because “for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange, but none of Plaintiffs works has economic value, individually, as training data.”

With the off Broadway debut of his 1958 play The Swamp Dwellers, Wole Soyinka, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, reflects on his younger, more optimistic self in the New York Times. Now ninety years old, Soyinka revisits The Swamp Dwellers, which he wrote when he was twenty-four, two years before Nigeria’s independence. “That play now makes me recollect very vividly that eve of independence season when we were all gung-ho about the emergence of a unified society,” he says, adding, “I’ve lost that sense of achievable idealism.” But, he continues, “One never loses a picture, a projection of what you think your society can be. That’s what hurts.”

Seven Stories Press has acquired Two Dollar Radio, Publishers Weekly reports. Two Dollar Radio, which is based in Columbus, Ohio, has approximately eighty titles in print, and is the fourth imprint of Seven Stories, which is based in New York City. Dan Simon, the publisher of Seven Stories, said both presses “are kind of alternative in the best sense: We’re not part of the club.” Eric Obenauf will remain in his role as publisher and editorial director of Two Dollar Radio.

McNally Jackson will host a biannual book festival at its Seaport location in New York City, Publishers Lunch reports. The first festival will take place this spring from May 7 through June with the theme “archives, historiography, and legacies.” McNally Jackson founder and owner Sarah McNally says she hopes the festival will offer “more access to high-level intellectual conversations in the city” and extend publicity for books beyond the few weeks around a title’s publication. This spring’s festival will feature Parul Sehgal and Andrea Long Chu; Lincoln Michel, Helen Phillips, Chloe Cooper Jones, and Kevin Nguyen.

The Hurston/Wright Foundation is celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary by rebranding its annual Legacy Awards as the Zora Awards, People reports. The new name of the award will also come with a larger cash prize of $20,000. The Zora Award for debut fiction celebrates gifted Black authors at the beginning of their careers. The finalists for the 2025 prize will be announced in August.