Booksellers in the South are organizing to provide information and assistance to fellow booksellers most affected by Hurricane Helene, Publishers Weekly reports. Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) has compiled a database of local relief agencies and fundraising efforts sponsored by SIBA bookstores, a list of tools for emergency preparedness, and a spreadsheet containing information received by the organization about the impact of the hurricane on a number of the 200 member bookstores in Helene’s path. 

The writer Megan Kamalei Kakimoto recommends books that illuminate Hawaii’s rich history and storytelling spirit for the New York Times. Her list includes This is Paradise (Hogarth, 2013) by Kristiana Kahakauwila, Written In the Sky (Mutual Publishing, 2005) by Matthew Kaopio and Life of the Land (Ai Pohaku Press, 2017) by Dana Naone Hall, among others. 

For Electric Literature, Esther Kim interviews Janet Poole about translating Choe Myeongik’s Patterns of the Heart (Columbia University Press, 2024), a collection of northern and North Korean short stories written about a century ago. Poole nuances the widespread belief that “[s]omething written in the so-called West or South Korea...can only be literature and free, whereas something written in North Korea can only be propaganda.” Poole explains: “I think that dramatically reduces the complexity of the situation and what writing means. Not to mention, it diminishes the individual achievements of the writers.”

A federal judge has ordered the Crawford County Public Library in Arkansas to stop segregating books deemed inappropriate by some local residents into special “social sections” and to return the books to general circulation, Publishers Weekly reports. The judge held that “it is indisputable” that the creation and maintenance of the library’s new social sections “was motivated in substantial part by a desire to impede users’ access to books containing viewpoints that are unpopular or controversial in Crawford County.” The decision is a win for advocates fighting book banning efforts in the United States.

Cal Newport considers the writing style of Chat GPT for the New Yorker. He concludes that Chat GPT is not the perfect plagiarism tool many feared AI would provide but rather an alternative to staring at a blank page. “The chatbot couldn’t produce large sections of usable text,” Newport writes, “but it could explore ideas, sharpen existing prose, or provide rough text for the student to polish. It allowed writers to play with their own words and ideas.”

The Black British Book Festival is expected to attract about 4,000 people this Saturday at the Barbican Centre in London, the Guardian reports. Selina Brown, who founded the festival in 2021 because of the challenges she and other Black authors face in publishing, said, “There is still a lot of work to be done…. That is why we’re seeing the rise of self-publishing, the rise of hybrid publishing, the rise of people being on social media…. You are forced to take a different route because the route that you are trying is just not feasible.” 

Yasmine Ameli writes for Poetry about how she has navigated audience, Orientalism, family mythology, and reductive categories by embracing the prose poem. “Prose poetry’s hybridity exposes and disrupts a genre binary (poetry versus prose) that we sometimes still forget is, after all, a construct—not unlike race, gender, and class,” she writes. Ameli adds that one of “the greatest assets of the prose poem is that its form provides breathing room for expansive characterization, scene, setting, dialogue, plot, and tension alongside sound play.”

The Bookseller talks to publishers in the UK about their stance on X (formerly Twitter). “As a result of concerns around the future direction of X...we are pausing all activity on the platform,” a spokesperson for Pan Macmillan is quoted as saying. “Disinformation, misinformation and hate speech continue to spread on X with little or no interruption and we expect the recently confirmed changes to the platform’s block feature will further undermine the well-being and safety of users.” Still, many publicists, editors, and booksellers find X a useful resource, despite the diminishing levels of engagement. Bloomsbury, for instance, told the Bookseller it would remain on X because the publisher views it as the “primary text-based social network.”

Macmillan has launched a limited-editions brand, Fablelistik Editions, to underscore books as artistic objects, Publishers Weekly reports. The imprint’s first offering is a collection of three distinct limited editions of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The publisher describes the “top-tiered” edition of the book as “hot metal letterpressed on handmade paper, handbound with a stone leaf veneer laser-cut from a drawing inspired by the landscape of Washington Irving’s estate, Sunnyside,” and “housed in a clothbound handmade articulated clamshell case, lined in suede.” It is priced at $3,950.

The National Book Foundation has announced the twenty-five finalists for National Book Awards in the categories of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature. The finalists include Kaveh Akbar, Percival Everett, Salmon Rushdie, Anne Carson, Fady Joudah, and others. The winner in each category, to be announced at a ceremony on November 20, will receive $10,000; the finalists will each receive $1,000.

The MacArthur Foundation has announced the 2024 MacArthur fellows, including poets Jericho Brown and Juan Felipe Herrera, fiction writer Ling Ma, transdisciplinary scholar and author Ruha Benjamin, writer and disability justice activist Alice Wong, and children’s and young adult writer Jason Reynolds. Each recipient of the so-called “Genius” Fellowship receives $800,000 paid in quarterly installments over five years. 

Amy Stuber writes for Electric Literature about loving short story collections and “the hive of situations and characters” they offer when the publishing world prefers novels. “I liked the quiet pockets I was able to build into short stories,” she writes, “but that felt harder to make work in a novel.”  

The shortlist for the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize contains a strong strain of elegy, the Guardian reports. The shortlisted poets include Gboyega Odubanjo, whose debut collection was published posthumously; Carl Phillips; Raymond Antrobus; and Karen McCarthy Woolf. The judging chair, poet Mimi Khalvati, said the thread of elegy throughout the collections is “responding to our dark times with testaments of loss and grief.” 

Ta-Nehisi Coates has returned to public discourse on social justice with a new book titled The Message (One World, 2024), the New York Times reports. His latest book is a letter to his writing students at Howard University; a meditation on storytelling; a travelogue of his trip to Senegal, where he visited a site of the slave trade; an account of book banning efforts; and, in large part, a reflection on a 2023 trip he took to Israel-Palestine. In The Message, Coates likens his books to his children: “My work is to set the table, craft the argument, render the world as I imagine it and then go,” he says.

The Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc), a nonprofit organization that coordinates charitable programs to strengthen the bookselling community, shared an Instagram post over the weekend while Hurricane Helene flooded wide swaths of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee: “If you are a bookstore or comic shop owner or staff member, and the storm creates a financial emergency, reach out and we’ll help if we can.” Assistance inquiries can be made through Binc’s website.

Washington State University Press (WSUP), which had been slated for closure after university officials voted to eliminate its $300,000 annual funding, has been granted a second chance, Publishers Weekly reports. WSUP was founded in 1928 and has published more than 260 titles; it also serves as distributor for Spokane independent poetry publisher Lost Horse Press, which focuses on Ukrainian poetry.

The Washington Post’s Sophia Nguyen writes about author Zadie Smith’s ability to get rid of physical copies of books after she has read them. Notable exceptions include certain philosophy titles, Italian dictionaries, and books gifted to her by family. “I feel like the record of your books are in the books you write, if you’re a writer,” she says.

Over thirty years, 40 percent of publishing jobs disappeared, Publishers Weekly reports. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people employed in book publishing in the United States fell to 54,822 in 2023, down from 91,000 in 1997. New technology, consolidation, and outsourced labor are all cited as possible reasons for downsizing in the industry.

Author and writing teacher Tom Spanbauer has died at age seventy-eight, Willamette Week reports. Spanbauer was known for mentoring many local Portland authors, including Monica Drake, Suzy Vitello, and Chuck Palahniuk, through his “Dangerous Writing” workshops. More than fifty of his former students went on to publish novels or memoirs.

Verso Books is holding a Kickstarter campaign to help get its books into the U.K. trade market, Publishers Weekly reports. In a thread posted on X, Verso explained that Marston Book Services, a subsidiary of United Independent Distributors, which went bankrupt over the summer, owes the press almost £1 million for book sales stretching back to January.