The National Book Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry. The list includes poets at all stages of their publishing careers, and nine of the ten poets are first-time National Book Award honorees, including Fady Joudah and Diane Seuss. Winners will be announced at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday, November 20.

Nick Long discusses how he designed the sound for the audiobook adaptation of Darrin Bell’s graphic memoir The Talk (Henry Holt, 2023) with Publishers Weekly. Long explains that the audio effects “had to both complement and extend the spoken words—in addition to reflecting the absent images.” 

A major Canadian literary award has dropped the reference to its sponsor, Scotiabank, from its name following months of protests over the bank’s investments in Elbit Systems, which supplies military equipment to Israel’s military, the Guardian reports. The Giller Prize, formerly known as the Scotiabank Giller Prize, will keep the bank as its main sponsor despite the rebrand. The change comes after more than thirty authors whose books would have been eligible for the 2024 Giller Prize withdrew their work from consideration in a collective statement published in July. In mid-2023, Scotiabank’s 1832 Asset Management was the third largest shareholder in Elbit Systems, and as of mid-August, the asset manager is the seventh largest shareholder, though they deny the protests influenced the reduction of their stake.

Tim O’Connell has been promoted from vice president and editorial director of fiction at the flagship Simon & Schuster imprint to vice president and publisher of Saga Press, the publisher’s speculative fiction imprint, Publishers Weekly reports. O’Connell will continue to acquire literary fiction and select nonfiction at Saga Press, which is approaching its tenth anniversary.

Former Doubleday executive editor Gerald Howard writes for the New York Times about Wilfrid Sheed's 1966 novel, Office Politics, and how it prepared Howard for his life in books. “The core insight I gained from my second reading of Office Politics was that if I thought I could stand at a remove from my place of employment and regard it as a kind of diorama or spectacle, I was deluding myself,” Howard writes. “As Rilke wrote, in a very different context: All this seems to require us. I was going to have to work with the materials at hand, pedestrian and unpromising as they might seem, to make of my life and career something meaningful. This was no small gift of self-knowledge to receive from a novel.”

The National Book Foundation has announced the longlist for translated literature, which includes titles originally published in Arabic, Danish, French, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Swedish. Winners will be announced at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday, November 20. 

Maggie Doherty writes for the New Yorker about Seamus Heaney and how he struggled to reconcile his vision of poetry with the brutality of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Heaney wanted to honor the “secret and natural” elements of poetry while acknowledging the violent realities of the world around him. “The public poet concerned himself with the polis and its problems,” Doherty writes. 

Elizabeth Harris interviews Liane Moriarty, author of eight best-sellers, including Big Little Lies (Penguin, 2014), for the New York Times. Moriarty has sold over twenty million books and several of her novels have been adapted for television, but the author is not interested in becoming a “brand,” she says. 

In an interview with Electric Literature, Vietnamese German author Khuê Phạm discusses her debut novel, Brothers and Ghosts (Scribe, 2024), translated by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey. The book explores how a Vietnamese diaspora family remains ensconced in historical trauma. “The dark experiences of being a refugee, of being in a country at war, they’re covered in silence,” Phạm says, “but somehow that silence is passed on from one generation to the next.”

For the By the Book series from the New York Times, Garth Greenwell discusses how foundational texts, such as James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, can be both lifesaving to queer people as well as homophobic. Greenwell seeks “more productive, less facile conversations about ‘affirming’ literature and ‘positive representation.’”

Katy Waldman writes about the “literary bratdom” trend in contemporary fiction for the New Yorker. Focusing on books by the Zoomer and young millennial writers Gabriel Smith, Frankie Barnet, and Honor Levy, Waldman analyzes protagonists who identify as “brats” are “exuberantly ‘unlikable’” and jaded about the status quo.

Aaron Coleman writes about the Cuban poet Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista and his under-examined masterpiece, The Great Zoo, for Poetry magazine. Coleman’s English translation of the collection, which originally appeared in Spanish in 1967, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in October.

A new exhibition at New York City’s Morgan Library & Museum will focus on the life and career of its inaugural director, Belle da Costa Greene, honoring the centennial of her appointment, Fine Books & Collections reports. The exhibition, which will run from October 25 to May 4, 2025, will trace her roots in a predominantly Black community in Washington D.C., to her career at the helm of the library, where she was an authority on illuminated manuscripts.

Big publishers saw earnings rebound in the first half of 2024, Publishers Weekly reports. The news of first-half profit gains for HarperCollins, Lagardère Publishing, and Penguin Random House comes after extensive restructuring at all three companies that included job cuts.

Little Free Library has produced an interactive map in collaboration with the American Library Association and PEN America in response to the nationwide surge in efforts to ban books from public and school libraries, Publishers Weekly reports. The map includes two main features: highlights, indicating where book bans are in effect at the state and county levels, and pinpoints, indicating the locations of Little Free Library’s book-sharing containers. The purpose of the initiative is to raise awareness about book banning and to leverage little free libraries to help distribute restricted books.

The National Book Foundation will present the 2024 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL) to Barbara Kingsolver at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on November 20. Author of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, investigative journalism, and science writing, Kingsolver has been honored by the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association, the James Beard Foundation, and the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, among others. Her most recent novel, Demon Copperhead, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

Brendan Chambers puts Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso Books, 2024) in conversation with Daniel Wright’s The Grounds of the Novel (Stanford University Press, 2024) in an essay for Public Books on the value of literary theory. “To them,” Chambers writes, “literary theory can be either avant-garde or lyric, a tool for stepping back from the world or for more fully inhabiting it. Even as crises multiply, they assert that theory remains valuable.”

The New York Public Library will be opening a new exhibition on Lord Byron tomorrow, September 7. The exhibition explores the life of Byron (1788-1824) and features the cantos of Don Juan and other literary manuscripts, a portrait by Thomas Hargreaves, and letters from Byron’s mother, friends, and mistresses. 

NaNoWriMo, an annual challenge in which participants write a novel of at least 50,000 words in one month, has refused to “explicitly support” or “explicitly condemn” the use of AI assistance, the Atlantic reports. Many participants were angry at the organization’s decision but Gal Beckerman, a staff writer at the Atlantic, does not mind: “The world needs fewer novels, certainly fewer novels that have been written in a month,” he writes. “And artificial intelligence is itchy for distractions; we need to give the robots something to do before they start messing with nuclear codes or Social Security numbers.”

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a March 2023 court decision finding Internet Archive’s program to scan and lend print library books is copyright infringement, Publishers Weekly reports. Judge John G. Koeltl forcefully rejected the Internet Archive’s fair use defense and concluded that the organization’s use of the Works is “not transformative” as their counsel argued.