For the Book Currents series in the New Yorker, Rachel Kushner shares some of the books she recently taught at Stanford University in a course about “the sacred art of stealing from the world.” The list includes Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) by Nathanael West, The Recognitions (1955) by William Gaddis, Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison, and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) by Carson McCullers.

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs has announced Michelle Aielli, who has served as interim executive director since September 2024, as its executive director. Aielli has worked in book publishing for over twenty-five years and most recently served as vice president and publishing director of Hachette Books at Hachette Book Group.

PEN America and the Eleanor Roosevelt Center have announced the ten winners of the 2025 Eleanor Roosevelt Awards for Bravery in Literature, which recognize authors whose works advance human rights amidst a surge in book bans and censorship. The honorees include Malinda Lo for Last Night at the Telegraph Club (Dutton Books for Young Readers, 2021); Peter Parnell for And Tango Makes Three (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2005); and Margaret Atwood, who will receive the Eleanor Roosevelt Lifetime Achievement Award and be interviewed on stage at a ceremony in Poughkeepsie, New York, on October 11. Jennifer Finney Boylan, PEN America’s president, will be the keynote speaker.

Katy Hershberger writes for Publishers Lunch about yesterday’s senate hearing on copyright and AI. The Association of American Publishers submitted written testimony, and professors and copyright experts testified that the piracy of copyrighted books by tech companies is both unlawful and unethical.

The American Booksellers Association (ABA) has named Emily Nason as its education director, Publishers Weekly reports. The ABA announced yesterday that it is reorganizing and growing its education department, following the departures of director of education Lee Hooyboer and senior manager of children’s bookselling education and programs Gen de Botton. Nason will oversee the organization’s educational strategy and programming.

New Hampshire’s governor, Kelly Ayotte, vetoed a bill on July 15 that would have allowed parents to request certain books and materials be removed from their child’s school unless the school could show they had “serious” scientific, educational, artistic, or political value, New Hampshire Public Radio reports. “I do not believe the State of New Hampshire needs to, nor should it, engage in the role of addressing questions of literary value and appropriateness,” Ayotte wrote.

Korea’s Kakao Entertainment announced it will close the “mobile-first serialized fiction platform” Radish Fiction, which the company bought four years ago for $440 million, Publishers Weekly reports. The end-of-service date, the company said in a statement, is December 31, 2025. 

Erik Ofgang of the New York Times reports on the challenge facing librarians who try to provide access to e-books and audiobooks and find that they “generally cost much more” than the print version of the same books. “Librarians complain that publishers charge so much to license e-books that it’s busting library budgets and frustrating efforts to provide equitable access to reading materials,” Ofgang writes. “Big publishers and many authors say that e-book library access undermines their already struggling business models. Smaller presses are split.”

A couple hundred miles east of Asheville, the site of major flooding from Hurricane Helene in September 2024, as described in Jonathan Vatner’s report “Healing From Helene” (March/April 2025), lies Chapel Hill, North Carolina, home of a University of North Carolina campus, which suffered flood damage from Tropical Storm Chantal on July 6. The Daily Tar Heel reports that the flooding “damaged some UNC students’ housing and essentials on and off campus” and that students “in need of immediate support are eligible for aid from the university.” UNC Chapel Hill offers a major and minor in creative writing; the faculty includes Gabriel Bump, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Tyree Daye, and Carlina Duan. 

Danika Ellis of Book Riot makes a case for why joining a book club may be the best option for introverts looking to make new friends. “In all the book clubs I’ve gone to, there’s a round of introductions before getting into discussing the book. Usually, that means names, pronouns, and a quick sentence of what you thought about the book,” Ellis writes. “For anyone shy about social interactions, this is a great structure to get the chance to both learn people’s names and introduce yourself without having to wait for the right moment to jump in.” 

Celebrated poet and performance artist Andrea Gibson has died, the Associated Press reports. They were 49 and had battled terminal ovarian cancer for four years. Gibson, along with their wife, Megan Falley, are the main subjects of the documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, which is scheduled to air in the fall on Apple TV+.

Ella Stern of Cambridge Day reports on protests by faculty, students, and alumni of Lesley University’s MFA program against “recent hiring practices and changes to the program,” which unionized adjunct professors say have violated the terms of their collective bargaining agreement and have had an effect “on student admissions and experience.” Stern points to an April 2024 article in the Harvard Crimson reporting that Lesley’s enrollment has dropped 45 percent and the university has laid off almost 20 percent of its core faculty since 2019. “Lesley administrators, who did not respond to requests for comment, have cited their ongoing market research and desire to find a novel approach to the program as reasoning for these changes, said third-semester creative writing MFA student Audrey Lee and the program’s poetry chair, Erin Belieu,” Stern writes. “Administrators have also said that the university is not making money from the creative writing masters program; Belieu said she believes that administrators’ changes and mismanagement created this situation.”

In an essay in the Washington Post, book critic Michael Dirda takes on what he sees as the futility of book banning as he recalls his early memories of being prohibited from checking out books from the library that were deemed too difficult for him. “At heart, book censorship, like Comstockery and Prohibition, ultimately aims to make human beings into little saints,” he writes. “Ain’t never gonna happen.”

Independent publisher John Martin, who brought the work of authors such as Paul Bowles, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, and Wyndham Lewis to readers through Black Sparrow Press, died on June 23 at his home in Santa Rosa, California, the New York Times reports. He was 94. Martin founded Black Sparrow Press in 1966 and over the years elevated the scrappy indie press to become what the Los Angeles Times called “California’s premier literary publisher.” In 2002 he sold it to Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins, as Poets & Writers Magazine’s Joy Jacobson reported at the time. 

Earlier this month Rhode Island governor Dan McKee signed into law the Freedom to Read Act, which “contains protections for school and local librarians and staff and is, notably, the first to guarantee writers and readers a right to sue for censorship,” Publishers Weekly reports. Rhode Island joins a growing number of states such as New Jersey, Maryland, and Minnesota “in codifying their citizens’ right to read amid nationwide book bans.”

In an op-ed for the New York Times, David Brooks claims “literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanizing effect on our culture,” pointing to the absence “of literary fiction on the Publisher’s Weekly yearly Top 10 best-selling list since 2001” and the NEA’s survey showing that the number of people “who even claim to read literature has been declining steadily since 1982.” 

Penguin is delaying the publication of Raynor Winn’s new book, On Winter Hill, amid allegations that the author fabricated details of her 2018 memoir, The Salt Path, the Guardian reports. The decision was taken to “support the author,” according to a statement. On Winter Hill, a book of nonfiction, was scheduled for publication in October; a new publication date has not been set. 

Alexandra Alter of the New York Times writes about novelist Hannah Pittard, whose marriage to author Andrew Ewell ended nearly ten years ago, and the thorny issue of who gets to tell the story of the breakup between two writers. In this case, Pittard wrote a memoir, We Are Too Many (Henry Holt, 2023), then Ewell wrote a novel, Set for Life (Simon & Schuster, 2024), with a plot that “so closely mirrored their troubled past that at first Pittard thought it must be a memoir,” then Pittard wrote a satirical novel of her own about it, If You Love It, Let It Kill You, out next week from Henry Holt.

Carolina Ciucci recommends ten perfect bookends for readers whose “books breach containment,” for Bookriot. From Pride and Prejudice to Michaelangelo’s David, there’s a theme for any libary in need of support, because after all, “[d]eath by book avalanche, however fitting, sounds like an unpleasant way to go.”

Fanny Howe, the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including the poetry collection Second Childhood (Graywolf Press, 2014), died on July 9 at the age of 84. Kazim Ali, cofounder and chairperson of Nightboat Books, which published Howe’s book-length essay Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken as its very first title in 2005, writes: “There would be no Nightboat Books without Fanny Howe. It would be wrong to say she was a polar star or a beacon in the darkness, because Fanny believed in mystery, in unknowing, in bewilderment. She didn’t mean to shine a light, but rather to see in the darkness.” In celebration of her life and work, the Paris Review unlocked her Art of Poetry interview from its archive.