Simon & Schuster today announced that Jonathan Karp intends to step down from his role as CEO. Karp will remain with Simon & Schuster and will become the publisher of a new imprint, Simon Six. In order to ensure a smooth transition and continued focus on Simon & Schuster’s authors, Karp will continue to serve as CEO during the transition.  Karp was named CEO of Simon & Schuster in 2020, following ten years as publisher of the company’s flagship imprint. Prior to joining Simon & Schuster, he was the publisher, and editor in chief of Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group.

PEN America has received a $1.4 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its work on the freedom to read, with a heightened focus on supporting public libraries and librarians. “This gift will enable PEN America to extend its groundbreaking research and analysis, public awareness campaigns, and coalition building to include public libraries and librarians who are facing escalating threats to their work, safety and core mission,” PEN America writes.

Matt Enis of Library Journal writes about a new online hub designed for libraries that was launched earlier this summer by Amazon Business, a division of the online retailer. “The hub offers office supplies, IT equipment, furniture, facility maintenance products, and more, as well as a curated selection of print books available for individual purchase at discounts ranging from 30 to 40 percent.” The collections, including books in categories such as biographies and memoirs, literature and fiction, and nonfiction, are selected by Amazon editors based partly on top selling new and preorder titles, Enis writes, with Amazon editors evaluating collections “by taking into consideration lists that appeal to a broad audience and collections that help libraries optimize their ordering,” according to Amazon’s spokesperson.

C-SPAN has announced a new TV series that will feature “thought-provoking conversations with leading authors, policymakers, business innovators and cultural figures,” People magazine reports. Set to debut in the fall, America’s Book Club will be hosted by David Rubenstein, who will be joined by authors John Grisham, Walter Isaacson, Stacy Schiff, and David Grann as well as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Harvard University professor and historian Henry Louis Gates, and chef-restauranteur José Andrés, among others.

According to a report from the BBC, the organizers of the U.K.’s Polari Prize, which celebrates LGBTQ+ literature, have cancelled this year’s prize over objections from nominated authors, judges, and more than 800 people in the publishing industry to the inclusion on the longlist of author John Boyne, whose stance and statements on trans issues and women’s rights, they say, are “inappropriate and hurtful” and “incompatible with the LGBTQ+ community’s most basic standards of inclusion.” The organizers said they hoped the prize would return in 2026.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post writes about the future of book reviews in light of the Associated Press’s decision to no longer produce them. “If you subscribe to one of the few major newspapers with its own books coverage, you’ll be fine,” he writes. “But readers of papers across the country won’t see reviews syndicated from the AP after Aug. 31.”

The National Endowment for the Arts has cancelled its 2026 Creative Writing Fellowships program, Publishers Weekly reports. Writers who had applied were informed by e-mail that their applications were withdrawn and would not be reviewed.

Malcolm Margolin, the founder of the independent press Heyday, died on August 20, Publishers Weekly reports. The recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, Margolin led the Berkeley-based press for over forty years, during which time he built a reputation for commitment to regional authors and resistance to corporate conglomerates, registering the press as a nonprofit in 2001 to protect its longevity without acquisition by a larger publisher. In a 2015 interview on the occasion of his retirement, Margolin reflected on his life’s work with “pride and amazement at the hundreds of books we’ve published, the communities we’ve nourished, and the wealth of ideas we’ve put forth.” 

A new study shows that reading for pleasure has dropped by 40 percent in the United States, the Guardian reports. Collecting data over twenty years, researchers at the University of Florida and University College London found that between 2003 and 2023, daily reading in America, for reasons outside of work or study, fell by around 3 percent each year. Study coauthor Jill Sonke notes, “Our digital culture is certainly part of the story. But there are also structural issues—limited access to reading materials, economic insecurity, and a national decline in leisure time.” 

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced “an agency-wide reorganization to consolidate its grantmaking programs and divisions.” In a press release, the agency stated plans, effective immediately, to “merge the functions and staff of seven grantmaking offices and divisions into four new divisions to support projects that advance humanities research, education, public programs, infrastructure, and cultural preservation.” The news of this reorganization follows a June reduction in force (RIF) that eliminated two-thirds of the agency’s workforce.

Ahead of a September 1 deadline in a class action lawsuit against the AI company Anthropic, the Authors Guild is recommending authors share their contact information and book titles with the law firm representing writers’ interests in the matter, Publishers Weekly reports. An estimated seven million books are alleged to have been pirated for use in training Anthropic’s AI model, and the Authors Guild believes payouts may range from “$750 per title up to a maximum of $150,000 per title” if the lawsuit is successful. While authors do not need to take any action to be a member of the class, registering with Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein will ensure that writers are apprised of developments with the lawsuit. The case is set to go to trial in December 2025.

Shira Perlmutter, the former register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office who is suing the federal government after the Trump administration fired her in May, has once more asked the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., to grant “an injunction pending appeal and to end Defendants’ lawless attempt to take over the Library of Congress,” Publishers Weekly reports. Perlmutter’s legal team is urging the court to see the connection between the Office of Copyright’s report on AI, which revealed “the copyright implications for training generative artificial intelligence models,” and Perlmutter’s subsequent dismissal.

A new effort at Riverhead Books will bring more Chinese language literature in translation to American readers, NPR reports. Led by editor Han Zhang, the initiative aims to circumvent systemics obstacles, “both real and imagined,” to “doing business with a country with a pretty intensive censorship structure in place” and offer translations that convey the richness and range of contemporary Chinese literature. The first book in Zhang’s program, Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang, was released last week. “I think, for a long time, the perception of Chinese literature among Western readers has been quite fixed,” says Yeuran. “It’s often seen as either heavily influenced by Chinese culture, or focused on people living rural, impoverished lives. Which has nothing to do with our lives today.” Other books in Zhang’s lineup include titles from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Ana Hein writes for Electric Literature about how friendship and collaboration are part of her creative process. Hein explains, “writing need not be inherently isolating…. Writing can be collaborative: reading each other’s notebooks and making margin comments, swapping laptops back and forth to edit at the coffee shop, sending emails and texts and voice notes, asking for ideas and jotting them down to use later, even just talking through a story plot with a trusted ear.” For Hein, writing through friendship transforms the “failures” of “writing—the distractions, the procrastination, the frustrations at [her] limitations and circumstances—and turns them into opportunities for connection.”

The technology studio Hidden Door has opened early access to its literary role-playing platform, Publishers Weekly reports. Hidden Door promises fans of titles such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz an “immersive entertainment” experience through choose-your-own-adventure storytelling within the worlds of their favorite books. The studio uses a mix of machine learning technology and partnerships with publishers to give readers the power to “explore, expand, and remix” fictional narratives. Hidden Door is primarily using titles in the public domain but is working on licensing agreements for select titles that will involve a revenue-sharing component.

The next manuscript by Amitav Ghosh will not be read for eighty-nine years, as he becomes the twelfth author to participate in the Future Library project, the Guardian reports. Ghosh joins Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong, and other renowned authors who have written manuscripts, which will be locked in a public library in Oslo until 2114. The full anthology of texts will be printed using paper made from the Future Library’s forest of spruce trees, which were planted in 2014. (Read “A Library Grows in Norway” from the January/February 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine).

An exhibition featuring the prolific yet often overlooked British poet, literary critic, translator, novelist, anthologist, and biographer Richard Aldington will open at the Grolier Club in New York City next month, Fine Books & Collections reports. Richard Aldington: Versatile Man of Letters will celebrate Aldington’s life and legacy through more than a hundred objects including first editions, typescripts, letters, photographs, and ephemera. The exhibition will run from September 11 through November 15.

Waterstones, a U.K. bookselling chain, which, like Barnes & Noble, is owned by Elliott Management and led by James Daunt, has secured £125 million (approximately $169,180,685) in new financing to support its expansion plans, Publishers Weekly reports.

A federal judge has sided with six publishers, the Authors Guild, and several authors and students in their lawsuit against Florida over a law that bans books that “describe sexual content” in school libraries, Publishers Lunch reports. The law banned books such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

The inaugural Westchester Book Festival, conceived by W. W. Norton vice president John Glusman last spring, will launch on November 8 in Katonah, New York, Publishers Weekly reports. The one-day event will feature sessions run by industry professionals, and authors such as Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Emma Straub. All proceeds from ticket sales will benefit local libraries.