The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the finalists for the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. This year’s judges—Rachel Beanland, Dionne Irving, and Taymour Soomro—chose the following three finalists from among 146 eligible novels: The Correspondent (Crown) by Virginia Evans, Awake in the Floating City (Pantheon) by Susanna Kwan, and Blob (Harper) by Maggie Su. The winner, to be announced in early April, will receive $10,000.

Harlequin, one of the biggest publishers of romance novels in the world, plans to shut down its historical romance line in September 2027, according to a report by Reactor. “The move includes ceasing U.S. and U.K. retail efforts as well as digital publishing related to the line in those markets. The company reportedly will not acquire any new works for the line moving forward.”

The Associated Press reports on the International Damascus Book Fair, which wrapped up on Monday, the first book fair to be held in the capital of Syria following the end of the rule of Bashar Assad, who was overthrown in 2024 after the Syrian civil war. “The first book fair since Assad was unseated in December 2024 witnessed high turnout, with state media reporting that 250,000 people attended on the first day, Feb. 6, trekking out to fairgrounds where it was held about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the city center. The fair’s director, Ahmad Naasan, said about 500 publishing companies from some 35 countries took part.”

Ahead of the Valentine’s Day weekend, the New York Times Book Review has shared a glossary of romance novel terms and tropes, from amnesia and apron tugger to yearning and zombies. The guide parses the evolving (and sometimes cultish) culture surrounding the booming genre—Publishers Weekly estimates nearly 44 million copies of romance novels sold in 2026—and invites new readers to understand its niches, so as “to achieve maximum swoon.”

In a statement to the Wire, author Arundhati Roy has announced her withdrawal from the 2026 Berlinale film festival, where she had been set to make an appearance at a screening of her film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. Roy’s withdrawal comes in response to controversy surrounding comments from the film festival’s jury president about the place of politics at the festival, and particularly discussion of Palestine. “This morning, like millions of people across the world, I heard the unconscionable statements made by members of the jury of the Berlin film festival when they were asked to comment about the genocide in Gaza. To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping,” said Roy. “It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time—when artists, writers, and filmmakers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.”

Does every writer need a room of one’s own? In the latest installment of his Open Questions column, Joshua Rothman mulls this truism for the New Yorker. Writers’ spaces hold a particular mystique for their literary acolytes, and a peek inside a beloved writer’s space can promise to reveal the “route of creativity,” as Katie da Cunha Lewin, author of The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love, describes it. Nevertheless, Rothman and da Cunha Lewin argue, we “might do better to imagine a writer as someone conversing, exercising, socializing, and interacting, instead of merely observing—someone who is out in the world instead of shut away in a room.” (Journalist Alissa Greenberg considered the experience of writers retreats in the homes of literary heroes in the March/April 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)

For the Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper reports on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the virtual monopoly it has on American arts and letters. There is no single entity, the federal government included, that has “a more profound influence on the fiscal health and cultural output of the humanities than the Mellon Foundation.” Some of the questions that Harper grapples with are: “What are the consequences when eye-watering sums of money are put behind the idea that the purpose of American arts and letters is not wisdom but advocacy? What happens when the humanities are seen not as having intrinsic worth, but as valuable only insofar as they can be of service to a cause?” 

Senators Adam Schiff (California) and John Curtis (Utah) have introduced the bipartisan CLEAR Act (Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting Act), Publishers Lunch reports. This bill “would require tech companies to submit a list of the copyrighted works used to create AI products to the register of copyrights” at least thirty days before a generative AI tool is released. Should a company violate the act, they would pay a penalty of at least $5,000 for each instance, and creators could take legal action against them. 

Federal judges have dismissed three lawsuits accusing author Neil Gaiman of sexual assault in New Zealand four years ago, reports the Associated Press. The former nanny of his children, Scarlett Pavlovich, filed the suits against Gaiman and his wife in February of last year, “accusing Gaiman of multiple sexual assaults while she worked as the family’s nanny in 2022.” Pavlovich was demanding at least $7 million in damages. 

Claire Kirch of Publishers Weekly looks at the ways in which Minnesota’s literary community “is coming together to support immigrants and others under attack by ICE agents, who have been an unwelcome presence in the state for the past six weeks.” Among the activities is the forthcoming publication by two affiliated publishers based in Minneapolis of an anthology, ICE Out: Minnesota Writers Rising Up, edited by Ian Leask and featuring more than fifty writers responding to ICE’s presence through poetry and prose. “In yet another show of solidarity, mystery authors Jess Lourey and Kristi Belcamino have organized Authors for Minnesota Day, slated for February 28, in which more than 50 Minnesota-based authors—including Allen Eskens, William Kent Krueger, Bao Phi, Margi Preus, and Curtis Sittenfeld—will stop by more than two dozen indie bookstores around the state to sign copies of their latest releases and give them out, along with swag kits in some cases, to anyone who donates to either the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota or the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota Immigration Rapid Response Fund.”

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) has announced that Host Publications is the winner of the 2026 Constellation Award. The press, based in Austin, Texas, will receive $10,000. CavanKerry Press, located in Fort Lee, New Jersey, was selected as a finalist. Given to honor an independent literary press that champions the writing of people of color, including Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American Pacific Islander individuals, the Constellation Award was launched in 2021 by CLMP with the support of Penguin Random House. “With a current focus on poetry, Host publishes radical writing by emerging LGBTQ+, BIPOC, intersectional feminist, and immigrant voices, championing experimental writing that queers language and meaning-making, and engages with a poetics of liberation. Host works to empower its community of writers whose work inspires social transformation and creates a new sense of what is possible in writing.”

The New York Times reveals the quick responses and careful considerations that are triggered inside a publishing house when a forthcoming book, in this case the novel Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack, hews a little too close to the news cycle for comfort. Avid Reader Press, the publisher of Novack’s novel about a sex worker who assassinates a right-wing politician, had already sent out hundreds of prepublication copies of the book, emblazoned with the words “Somebody had to do it” and the image of a bleeding American flag, when Charlie Kirk was killed in September, prompting Novack’s team to reconsider the publishing plan. In the end, they decided to remove certain biographical information about the author from the finished book and the publisher’s website. “The circumstances surrounding Murder Bimbo were particularly extreme. But any publisher putting out a book in the current news environment faces significant marketing and publicity challenges.”

Literary Arts has announced the finalists for this year’s Oregon Book Awards. Thirty-five titles by Oregon authors across seven genre categories were chosen as finalists by panels of out-of-state judges, from a total of two hundred submitted titles. The winners will be revealed at an awards ceremony on April 20. The finalists for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction are Olufunke Grace Bankole for The Edge of Water (Tin House), Ling Ling Huang for Immaculate Conception (Dutton), Kevin Maloney for Horse Girl Fever (Clash Books), Madeline McDonnell for Lonesome Ballroom (Rescue Press), and Karen Thompson Walker for The Strange Case of Jane O. (Random House). The finalists for the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry are H. G. Dierdorff for Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter (University of Nevada Press), Garrett Hongo for Ocean of Clouds (Knopf), Jennifer Perrine for Beautiful Outlaw (Kelsey Street Press), Lisa Wells for The Fire Passage (Four Way Books), and Joe Wilkins for Pastoral, 1994 (River River Books). The finalists for the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction are Judith Barrington for Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs (Oregon State University Press), Karleigh Frisbie Brogan for Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts (Steerforth), Justin Hocking for A Field Guide to the Subterranean: Reclaiming the Deep Earth and Our Deepest Selves (Counterpoint Press/Catapult), Wayne Scott for The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined (Black Lawrence Press), and Lidia Yuknavitch for Reading the Waves (Riverhead Books).

The estate of Maya Angelou has joined Kurt Vonnegut’s estate in its case against Utah’s Sensitive Materials Law, Erin Somers of Publishers Lunch reports. Under the law, which was passed in 2022 and amended in 2024 to require public schools and their libraries “to remove certain ‘inappropriate’ books or books with any reference to sex,” Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings were banned by two school districts in Utah. Other banned books include Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.

The longlist for the inaugural James Patterson and Bookshop.org Prize has been revealed. The award honors outstanding full-length debut books published in the United States within the past twelve months. All nominations and selections are made by booksellers working in qualifying independent bookstores. The winner will be announced on April 6 and will receive $15,000; the runner-up will receive $10,000. The longlisted books are The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders (Catapult) by Sarah Aziza, The Correspondent (Crown) by Virginia Evans, When the Tides Held the Moon (Erewhon Books) by Vanessa Vida Kelley, Aftertaste (Simon & Schuster) by Daria Lavelle, It’s Different This Time (Dell) by Joss Richard, My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women (Curbstone Press) by Christina Rivera, The Slip (Simon & Schuster) by Lucas Schaefer, My Mother’s Boyfriends (7.13 Books) by Samantha Schoech, The Nature of Pain: Roots, Recovery, and Redemption Amid the Opioid Crisis (University Press of Kentucky) by Mandi Fugate Sheffel, and The Lilac People (Counterpoint) by Milo Todd. 

Becca Rothfeld, a former nonfiction critic for the Washington Post’s Book World, laments last week’s shuttering of the stand-alone books section in a Page-Turner essay for the New Yorker, pointing out that the New York Times Book Review is the last discrete newspaper books section standing. “There are still plenty of places to read about literature, many of them excellent,” Rothfeld writes. “There are older and more established outlets, like the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books; cult favorites, like Bookforum; and irreverent newcomers, like the Drift and the Point, the latter of which I edit. These magazines are delightful and, in their own way, consistently surprising; I love reading them, and I have loved writing for them. But they are produced for an audience that already knows it cares about literature. The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits.”

The romance genre, known for its prolific authors and voracious readers, is at the vanguard of implementing A.I. tools, reports the New York Times. As the publishing industry’s best-selling genre, romance “relies on familiar narrative formulas” and is “built around popular tropes,” making the community particularly vulnerable to A.I.-generated work, especially since most authors don’t reveal when they have used chatbots, so as not to alienate readers. A contentious topic for writers and readers alike, one book-club leader, Zoë Mahler, noted, “Romance is about human connection, and there’s nothing more human than being vulnerable and falling in love. Why would I want to read a story written by a machine trying to emulate that?”  

Publishers Lunch has announced that the Tuesday Agency, an Iowa City-based speakers agency for authors, has closed its doors. Agency president Trinity Ray said, “We have suffered the economy and politics of the day and we’re doing our best to take care of all those who put their trust in us,” as changes to rules around government loan repayments, NEA grants, and other such financial factors have made it impossible for the company to keep running. Ray is working to pay the six authors the agency still owes money to and is launching a smaller company, Goliath Jones, to continue platforming important voices. 

Cengage and Hachette have responded to Google’s recent opposition to their motion to join the class action infringement suit against the tech company, reports the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The authors who started this suit welcome the participation of publishers, saying, “Proposed Interventors . . . [would] ensure the publishing industry’s discrete interests are fairly treated in class litigation where both authors and publishers’ rights are at stake.” AAP added that, per the publishers’ response, “Google’s opposition misrepresents the clear legal interests of publishers in this matter and misstates the law on timeliness of the motion to intervene.” 

On the heels of the Washington Post’s elimination of its Book World supplement, Adam Kirsch of the Atlantic considers the decline of book reviews and the implications that has on the literary ecosystem as a whole. “A book critic, or a newspaper book section, is a convener, bringing people together around a new book or writer, a literary trend or controversy,” he writes. Though the disappearance of the book review does not mean the end of literary criticism overall, readers, publishers, and authors suffer in different ways. Relatedly, NPR has shared that the Post’s CEO and publisher, Will Lewis, has stepped down.