The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, one of the remaining LGBTQ+ bookstores in Manhattan, may be acquired by Hive Mind, a queer indie bookstore in Brooklyn, to prevent the Bureau from closing, reports Publishers Weekly. To aid with the transfer of ownership, Hive Mind’s owner, Jules Wernersbach, has started a GoFundMe to raise the funds needed for the acquisition process. In a release, Wernersbach stated: “We’re in a moment when queer literature is under extreme censorship nationwide and trans people are being targeted by legislation that threatens their human rights. Just this month, HR 7661, a bill that would censor books in schools nationwide, was sent to the House. We must keep this invaluable resource of trans and queer literature open in our city. We need it.”

This fall World Editions will launch Read the World A to Z, a translation series featuring novels by authors from countries representing every letter of the alphabet. In October the press will publish the first three titles in the series, highlighting authors from Argentina (All That Dies in April by Mariana Travacio), Belgium (The Woman Who Fed the Dogs by Kristien Hemmerechts), and China (Cocoon by Zhang Yueran). The rollout for this series will include “special information packages about the literary landscape of the featured country” as well as events with the authors and translators. 

The bestselling novel Go as a River has led literary tourists to Gunnison Valley, Colorado, looking for the lost town written about in the book, reports Nancy Lofholm of the Colorado Sun. Penned by author Shelley Read, the novel is set in a historic location called Iola that existed six decades ago and is now a “barren stretch of lake bottom” in Western Colorado. Tourists began flooding the area looking for remnants of Iola, as written by Read, in the summer of 2023, with the hopes of running into the author as well. “I have learned much of the rest of the world is enthralled by Colorado,” says Read. “I can still say that I am so honored by it.”

Nearly $350,000 was awarded to writers, editors, and translators at last night’s annual PEN America Literary Awards held in New York City, Publishers Weekly reports. Those honored included Jamaica Kincaid, who received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974– (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Nicholas Boggs, who received  the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Edwidge Danticat received the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, honoring the Haitian American novelist, short story writer, and memoirist for her extraordinary body of work. The evening “marked a return to form for the free speech organization’s flagship literary prizes, which had been diminished in recent years by a boycott, led by Writers Against the War in Gaza, which was lifted on December 31, 2025. Due to numerous authors withdrawing their books from consideration, the ceremony and a number of awards were canceled in 2024. Last year, the ceremony returned but one of its top prizes, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was not conferred due to author withdrawals.”

As audiobooks and romantasy novels converge in popularity, Vanessa Romo of NPR talks to Antony Palmini, the audiobook rising star who has voiced the “book boyfriends” of some of the romantasy genre’s biggest titles. Palmini has offered his resonant baritone to leading characters in series including A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fae & Alchemy, participating in the recordings of more than fifty audiobooks last year. Early hints of Palmini’s path to “admittedly niche celebrity” came while working at a Blockbuster video store as a teenager, when a coworker admired his voice on the phone to customers: “‘There’s like a voice that’s coming out that sounds kind of, dare I say, sexy,’ he said, recalling his friend’s words.”

JD Vance has announced the publication of his second memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, with HarperCollins this June, the Guardian reports. Vance’s earlier memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper, 2016), became a best-seller, “spending more than two hundred weeks on the New York Times list and selling more than five million copies worldwide, and was later adapted into a film by Ron Howard starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.” The new book is seen as a calculated move as Vance contends for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. 

A freelance writer is in hot water after the New York Times discovered he used artificial intelligence “to help write a book review that inadvertently incorporated elements of a Guardian review on the same title,” the Wrap reports. The Times has cut ties with the freelancer, Alex Preston, who used AI to write his January 6 review of the novel Watching Over Her (Simon & Schuster, 2026) by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, translated from French by written Frank Wynne, after a reader wrote in to alert the newspaper to the similarities with the Guardian review. “The Times then launched a review and spoke to Preston, who admitted he used an AI tool to help draft the piece and that he failed to catch the Guardian material before the paper published the review.”

The New York Times recently announced updates to its best-seller lists. “With audiobooks making up a larger share of how people consume books, we are broadening our audio offerings by adding two new lists: Audio Children’s (top 15) and Audio Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous (top 10). These additions round out our coverage of the audiobook segment, which currently includes Audio Fiction and Audio Nonfiction, and reflect [the newspaper’s] goal to publish lists that cover different formats through which readers—and increasingly listeners—purchase books.” The newspaper also announced that it would cease publication of the monthly Mass Market list; the weekly Paperback Nonfiction list will shift to monthly. The changes will go into effect online on April 1 and in print on April 12.

The judging panel of the 2026 International Booker Prize today announced the shortlist of six books that are competing for this years’ prize for fiction translated into English. They are The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin; She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel; The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin; On Earth as It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan; The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump; and Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. The winner of the International Booker Prize, which will be announced on May 19, will receive £50,000 (approximately $66,226), with the money divided equally between the winning author and translator. Each shortlisted title will be awarded a prize of £5,000 (approximately $6,622), split between the author and the translator.

New legislation may aid prison libraries in delivering materials and preparing incarcerated individuals to transition home, reports Publishers Weekly. As the majority of the U.S.’s nine-hundred-plus prison libraries are often under-resourced and understaffed, the introduction of the Prison Libraries Act into the U.S. House of Representatives aims to offer one-year grants to “advance reintegration efforts, reduce recidivism, and increase educational opportunities,” per the bill. This would require $10 million in federal spending each year through 2031 and would allow “for more free resources to be made available, for people who are incarcerated to be viewed as members of the public, and for the public to think about how this is for the good of all of us,” says Jeanie Austin, a librarian at the San Francisco Public Library, which has a Jail and Reentry Services department.

Harlequin, a division of HarperCollins known for its romance books, is partnering with the AI entertainment company Dashverse to create microdramas inspired by the imprint’s titles, reports Publishers Lunch. These illustrated short-form videos will be available in English with the goal of offering readers a new way of experiencing beloved books such as Catherine Mann’s A Fairy-Tail Ending and JC Harroway’s Forbidden Fiji Nights With Her Rival. “This partnership with Dashverse represents an exciting opportunity to reimagine these cherished stories for a new audience, leveraging cutting-edge technology to bring them to life in an innovative and engaging medium,” says Harlequin EVP and publisher Brent Lewis.

April 7th is National Black Bookstore Day, established by the National Association of Black Bookstores (NAB2) “to increase visibility, drive engagement, and strengthen the long-term sustainability of Black-owned bookstores.” This nationwide movement is also meant to honor Georgia “Mother Rose” West, founder of Underground Books in Oak Park, California, and a notable figure in the Black literary community who passed in December 2024 at the age of 75. Among the resources the NAB2 provides in association with this special day are a bookstore directory to enable readers to find Black-owned bookstores throughout the U.S. and a report on the current state of Black bookstores, including the fact that Black-owned bookstores represent only eight percent of independent bookstores nationwide. 

Ahead of the 30th annual celebration of National Poetry Month this April, the Academy of American Poets has announced its lineup of festivities: “free programs, resources, and events designed to make poetry accessible to everyone.” Offerings include curation of the Academy’s free Poem-A-Day e-mail series by chancellor emerita Dorianne Laux; free National Poetry Month posters featuring artwork by Alfredo Richner and words from U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze; and the annual Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day, celebrated on April 30. A virtual benefit for the Academy will take place on April 28, with benefits going to the organization’s K-12 poetry education programs.

The European and International Booksellers Federation has issued a statement condemning the arrest of four employees of a Hong Kong bookstore. The founder of the bookshop Book Punch, Pong Yat-ming, has been taken into police custody along with three booksellers from the shop; they stand accused of selling a biography of the imprisoned pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai. “The arrest of booksellers for distributing literature is an attack on the core mission of booksellers to provide access to diverse ideas and on the fundamental principle of intellectual freedom,” reads a statement from the EIBF. “EIBF calls for the immediate release of the arrested booksellers and urges the international community to join us in condemning these actions and to stand in solidarity with booksellers and publishers worldwide who face repression for their work.”

Winners of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) book awards for publishing year 2025 were announced last night at a ceremony in New York City. In a statement to the press, the NBCC spoke to the breadth and impact of this year’s honorees: “This year’s NBCC winners include books on timely and timeless topics: the present and future impact of new technologies, the power of storytelling in shaping a life, the importance of shining a light on forgotten or ignored histories, the lasting repercussions of sexual abuse, the complexity of geopolitics, the beauty of transformative narratives.” Kevin Young (Night Watch, Knopf), Han Kang (We Do Not Part, Hogarth, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris), Karen Hao (Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Penguin Press), Alex Green (A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled, Bellevue Literary Press) and Arundhati Roy (Mother Mary Comes to Me, Scribner) took home awards in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, biography, and autobiography, respectively. Critic Rhoda Feng received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, given to an NBCC member for exceptional work in the field. Other honors bestowed included the Toni Morrison Achievement Award, which recognizes “institutions that have made significant contributions to book culture,” and which was was jointly awarded to NPR and PBS. “At a time when some question the value of public, service-minded media, we salute PBS and NPR for all you have done for both book culture and American democracy,” said board member Jacob M. Appel of the award.

Bertelsmann, the parent company of Penguin Random House, is stepping up legal efforts to combat book bans, CEO Thomas Rabe told Reuters. “In January 2025, the Trump administration dismissed 11 complaints related to books banned by local school districts. ‘These are indeed factual book bans,’ Rabe said. Bertelsmann and its publishing arm are contesting ​the measures in ​court, and ⁠the group has so far won every legal case that has been decided, he added.”

“The Gathering,” a poem about the “relentlessness of the news cycle” by Partridge Boswell, has won the National Poetry Competition sponsored by the British arts organization Poetry Society, the Guardian reports. The poem was picked from more than 21,000 entries by poets in 113 countries. Boswell received £5,000 (approximately $6,680). “The speaker reflects on the tensions of personal grief against the backdrop of state violence in Gaza and elsewhere,” the judges said of the winning poem. “How do we maintain language’s potency amid the anaesthetising relentlessness of the news cycle? How do we resist false narratives, eclipsed histories?”

Marianthe Dresios and Omer Korkmaz, both first-year students at Johns Hopkins University, have penned a love letter to the semicolon, the disrespected and little-used punctuation mark that Kurt Vonnegut advised writers to avoid (“All they do is show you’ve been to college,” according to Vonnegut) for the school’s News-Letter. “The semicolon does not draw a sentence to a close. It holds its breath, waiting for the next clause to continue the message of the first. In the same way, the semicolon is not dead; it merely waits for us to love it again.”

The Associated Press reports that Tracy Kidder, the author of a dozen acclaimed nonfiction books, including The Soul of a New Machine (Little, Brown, 1981), which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, has died of lung cancer. He was 80. 

Random House has announced its publication this September of Gloria Steinem’s memoir, An Unexpected Life, Publishers Marketplace reports. “Moving between memory and the present, Steinem examines the progress and setbacks of more than sixty years of activism and offers a message to new generations about what the ongoing fight will require—and the imagination it will demand,” said the publisher in a press release. The book was acquired by Random House vice president and executive editor Jamia Wilson; read a conversation between Wilson and Vivian Lee about Wilson’s beginnings at Feminist Press and the work of building a list in the September/October 2023 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.