Danny Caine, an activist for independent bookstores, has sold Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, to his co-owners, Publishers Weekly reports. Caine will move on from bookselling to assume the role of multimedia content creator for the Institute of Local Self-Reliance, “an advocacy organization that supports local retailers against big-box stores and other corporations.” The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association named Caine its Bookseller of the Year in 2019, and the Raven received the Bookstore of the Year award in 2022 from Publishers Weekly.

Small presses are banding together six months after the closure of Small Press Distribution (SPD), KQED reports. A group of presses formerly distributed by SPD, including Kelsey Street Press, Sixteen Rivers Press, and Pelekinesis, gathered and displayed their titles at the Litquake Book Fair at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco on Saturday. 

The American Library Association has announced the longlist of forty-six books for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, Publishers Weekly reports. The list includes books by Morgan Talty, Hisham Matar, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and others. The shortlist will be announced on November 12 and two winners will be announced at a celebratory event on Sunday, January 26, in Philadelphia.

Denne Michele Norris interviews Danzy Senna about her new novel, Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024), for Electric Literature. Senna discusses the creative labor that is denied to marginalized writers when their work is presumed to be autobiographical. “Somewhere in there is the idea that you are not capable of the complexity of writing fiction, and if it has any resemblance to you, then surely, it’s confessional,” she says. “Unless the reader is in my body, they don’t know how much fictionalizing I did.”

A rare typescript of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (1943), which features original handwritten revisions by the author, is going up for sale, the Guardian reports. The artifact includes what is believed to be the first written version of the renowned lines, which, translated to English read: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” The typescript will be on display at Abu Dhabi Art, an annual art fair at the end of November, where it will be priced at $1.25 million.

Montgomery County in Texas has reversed its decision to put the children’s book Colonization and the Wampanoag Story, which details European colonization of Native American land, in the fiction section of local libraries, the Guardian reports. The initial decision sparked condemnation from many of the world’s largest publishers and anti-book banning activists. A new committee, composed of county staff members and advised by the county attorney, will review library rules, including policies around the citizen review committee, the group that originally advocated for the reclassification of the title as fiction.

An online statement denouncing the unlicensed use of creative works to train generative AI has reached 13,500 signatories, including the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, comedian and upcoming National Book Awards host Kate McKinnon, and a number of publishing organizations, Publishers Weekly reports. Representatives for the Association of American Publishers, which also signed the petition, said this is “a crucial time for AI policy development globally” and emphasized that “human authorship is the basis of Generative AI.”

The New Yorker’s Tad Friend shares the story of Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer who has sold the papers and possessions of authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, J. M. Coetzee, and Bob Dylan, and was indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney in 2022. The lawsuit surrounded five legal pads that he had sold a decade earlier with lyrics scrawled on them by the Eagles’ drummer and singer, Don Henley. When the pads went up for auction again, Henley became convinced that the pads were stolen from him, and he accused the collectors of possessing stolen property and Horowitz of forging the provenance of the pads. After interviewing Horowitz, Friend writes, “His mirthless laugh might have suggested Kafkaesque persecution, or Hardyesque inexorability of fate. Either way, he appeared determined to rewrite the ending.”

Brian Cleary, a clinical pharmacist in Dublin, discovered a new story by Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, at the archives of the National Library of Ireland, the New York Times reports. The story, titled “Gibbet Hill,” was published in a now-defunct Irish newspaper in 1890, but had not been mentioned in any bibliographies. Paul Murray, an expert on Stoker, noted that the story is “an important new addition to the canon.” 

In an interview with Electric Literature, Kristopher Jansma discusses his latest book and first essay collection, Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers, which was published this month by Quirk Books. Jansma analyzes the drafts of works by authors such as Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Wright to demystify their reputations of literary brilliance. “I suddenly realized: It’s not just this one genius figure who creates a flawless book out of nothing,” he says. “There’s a process that you go through where it starts off bad, and then it gets better and better and better.”

The Guadalajara International Book Fair will run from November 30 to December 8 and feature 18,000 publishing professionals from fifty-four countries, Publishers Weekly reports. The event, which is widely known as “the most significant Spanish-language event on the global publishing calendar,” will also be expecting more than 850 authors writing in nineteen languages.  

Marc Tracy writes for the New York Times about American descendants of Holocaust survivors who are using the creative arts to reckon with ancestral trauma. “The third-generation perspective on the Holocaust is carefully hedged, defiantly distanced, explicitly filtered, supremely self-aware,” Tracy writes, going on to mention the graphic novel Artificial: A Love Story (Catapult, 2023) by Amy Kurzweil, Joshua Harmon’s play Prayer for the French Republic, which had its Broadway run this year, and two television series, Transparent and Russian Doll, in addition to a number of other projects. He adds: “How the Holocaust will be remembered and its lessons applied—from Bosnia to Darfur to Ukraine to, many have argued, Israel and Gaza—is now up to this cadre, and going forward will be informed by its own ‘anxiety and humility,’ as Kurzweil put it.”

The Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, California, has announced Louisa Gloger as its new executive director, KQED reports. Gloger joins Headlands from the Bolinas Museum, where she served as executive director since 2022, and succeeds Maricelle (Mari) Robles, who will be leaving the role at Headlands after four years. 

Anti-censorship activists have joined Penguin Random House in condemning Montgomery County in Texas after Linda Coombs’s book Colonization and the Wampanoag Story (2023), which details European colonization of Native American land, was reclassified as fiction, the Guardian reports. According to PEN America, Texas is the state with the second highest number of book bans in the country with 1,567 titles removed from July 2021 to December 2023.

Agent Elena Giovinazzo and author Jason Reynolds are partnering to establish Heirloom Literary and Media, a new literary agency, Publishers Weekly reports. Reynolds will serve in a mentorship role, offering his insight as an author with vast experience in publishing, and Giovinazzo will assume the role of agent, managing the everyday tasks of working with authors.

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) announced on Friday a new funding opportunity for small presses impacted by the sudden closure of Small Press Distribution (SPD) in March 2024. Presses distributed by SPD can apply to the Small Press Future Fund for one-year grants of $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 to support them as they secure new warehousing, recover inventory, and improve their operations. The funding is available through a partnership between CLMP and the Mellon Foundation.

Maya Hawke will narrate a new audiobook edition of Joan Didion’s classic Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968) People reports. “It’s an honor to have the opportunity to narrate her brilliant work and introduce her iconic prose to a new generation,” Hawke said in a statement.

The winners of this year’s Kirkus Prizes were announced at a ceremony on October 16, Book Riot reports. The recipients of the prize each receive $50,000, and this year’s winners included Percival Everett for his novel James (Doubleday Books) and Adam Higginbotham for his nonfiction book Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space (Avid Reader Press).

The University of Cincinnati has announced the closure of the University of Cincinnati Press, which will cease operations on June 30, 2025, because it “is not in a self-sustaining financial position.” As of July 1, 2025, scholarly titles in print and e-book formats will be distributed by University of Minnesota Press. 

Academic publisher Wiley has launched a new program called Wiley AI Partnerships, which “aims to develop new AI applications, assistants, and agents in partnership with innovative companies, to empower researchers and practitioners and help drive the pace, efficiency, and accuracy of scientific discovery,” Publishers Weekly reports. The program seeks to support researchers with AI tools and resources to improve their work. In the past year, Wiley has signed two content-licensing agreements with technology companies worth a total of $44 million.