Artificial intelligence company Anthropic says it will pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit from a group of authors and publishers afer a judge ruled it had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books, the New York Times reports. “The settlement is the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright cases. Anthropic will pay $3,000 per work to 500,000 authors.”

Fran Hoepfner of New York magazine takes readers into the world of Tiny Bookshop, a management-style video game from Skystone Games in which the player makes decisions about the little bookstore housed in a trailer parked in the small coastal town of Bookstonbury-by-the-Sea. “Every day follows the same pattern: You decide where in Bookstonbury you want to set up shop (outside the supermarket, by a café downtown, at the beach, etc.), stock your store with real books (titles include everything from Pride and Prejudice to Angels & Demons) and seasonal or environmentally appropriate decorations (ranging from plants to an umbrella stand on rainy days), and then you open up shop out of a wagon hitched to your hatchback.”

Publishers Weekly previews the 25th annual National Book Festival, which is set to begin on Saturday in Washington, D.C. The event, hosted by the Library of Congress, will feature Geraldine Brooks, winner of the 2025 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction; U.S. poets laureate Joy Harjo, Ada Limón, and Tracy K. Smith; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; and others. 

George Saunders will receive the 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 19, the National Book Foundation announced. A Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow, Saunders is the author of thirteen books, including the story collection Liberation Day (Random House, 2022). A new novel, Vigil, is forthcoming in January 2026.

One of Australia’s longest-running literary journals, Meanjin, will cease operations, the Guardian reports. Run by Melbourne University Publishing (MUP) for the last eight-five years, Meanjin will publish its last issue in December. “In a statement, the MUP chair, Prof Warren Bebbington, confirmed Meanjin’s demise, saying it was ‘a matter of deep regret. ... The decision was made on purely financial grounds, the board having found it no longer viable to produce the magazine ongoing.’”

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Books Inc., the Bay Area’s oldest independent bookstore, is seeking bankruptcy court approval to be acquired by Barnes & Noble for $3.25 million. “The San Leandro-based bookseller, which filed for Chapter 11 protection in January after years of financial strain, said the proposed sale will preserve its seven neighborhood stores and two locations at San Francisco International Airport.” If the acquisition goes through, it would be similar to Barnes & Noble’s 2024 purchase of Denver’s Tattered Cover Book Store, which also filed for Chapter 11.

Bucknell University Press will cease operations on June 30, 2026, citing “a need to redirect funds to more ‘student-focused’ functions,” Publishers Weekly reports. The press will “fulfill all existing author contracts,” but will no longer accept new work. Founded in 1968, the press has published more than 1,200 titles.

Best-selling novelist James Patterson has launched his “Go Finish Your Book” campaign by announcing the first twelve recipients of grants to authors, CBS News reports. Each author will receive up to $50,000 to help them complete their manuscript. The new new program was organized in partnership with PEN America, the Authors Guild, and other organizations.

Zach Helfand writes about the New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checking department. “Fiction is full of facts—sometimes too many. Dates are facts, clothes are facts, actions are facts. Quotes are facts, and they contain them; facts can be nesting, like a Russian doll.”

Riley Dunn of the Daily Iowan writes about the life cycle of a book and the many hands and sets of eyes a manuscript passes through on its way to publication, using the editorial and production processes at the University of Iowa Press as examples. “Sometimes, writers feel as though changes to their work mean they have done something wrong or that their work is not sufficient. Editors realize this stress but recognize the benefits of an extra set of eyes on work,” Dunn writes.

Roxane Gay will receive this year’s Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation for her service to the American literary community, the Los Angeles Times reports. 

Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch reports on authors who are finding “that their publishers may not have formally registered copyright for their books with the U.S. Copyright Office as stipulated by contract—which means those titles would not be eligible to participate in the Anthropic class action settlement.” The settlement agreement will be filed with the court on September 5; a hearing on a motion for preliminary approval will be held on September 8.

According to Book Riot, Margaret Atwood has written a satirical short story in response to the banning of The Handmaid’s Tale, among other books, by the Edmonton Public School Board following a ministerial order by the Alberta government. “Here’s a piece of literature by me, suitable for seventeen-year-olds in Alberta schools, unlike—we are told—The Handmaid’s Tale,” Atwood wrote on X. “(Sorry, kids; your Minister of Education thinks you are stupid babies.)” 

Julie Schaper, the president of Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, will step down in June 2026, Publishers Weekly reports. Consortium represents nearly 170 companies, including a number of literary presses and publishers of poetry. A search for Schaper’s successor is underway.

People magazine reports that Geraldine Brooks has won the 2025 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. The annual award is given to an American literary writer “whose body of work is distinguished by not only its mastery of the art, but also its originality of thought and imagination.” Brooks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her novel March. Her latest book, the novel Memorial Days, was published by Viking in February.

Spoken, a new AI audiobook company based in Portland, Oregon, claims to offer a process that “deeply analyzes each manuscript and its characters to recommend or custom-generate the perfect voices. These voices—whether drawn from our AI voice actor catalog or crafted from character descriptions—are used to deliver single, dual, or full-cast narration that reflects your story’s tone, texture, and emotional depth.”

Jim Millot of Publishers Weekly reports on the decline in sales for Penguin Random House in the first half of 2025, citing rising costs and uncertainty over the tarrifs imposed by the Trump administration. “Revenue rose to €2.3 billion ($2.6 billion), but operating EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) fell 12 percent, to €255 million ($297.5 million),” Millot writes. “In his letter to employees, PRH global CEO Nihar Malaviya said rising costs were up ‘in nearly all areas of our business.’”

Japanese novelist Rie Qudan talks to John Self of the Guardian about her rationale for using ChatGPT to write her novel Sympathy Tower Tokyo, which won the Akutagawa Prize last year and will be published by Simon & Schuster, in an English translation by Jesse Kirkwood, on September 2. Self writes, “Qudan said that part of it—5 percent was the figure given, though she now says that was only an approximation—was written using artificial intelligence. This, she tells me, comprised parts of the novel which are presented as a character’s exchange with ChatGPT. But Qudan also ‘gained a lot of inspiration’ for the novel through ‘exchanges with AI and from the realisation that it can reflect human thought processes in interesting ways.’ Qudan’s use of AI, in other words, seeks not to deceive the reader but to help us to see its effects.”

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers shared a message on Popville in which she cancelled her appearance at the National Book Festival “due to current events in Washington, D.C.” Jeffers, whose most recent book is Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings, published by Harper in June, was scheduled to appear in conversation with scholar Imani Perry. Jeffers went on to explain that “given all that’s happening, frankly, as an African American, I’m just afraid to be in that city.” The annual festival is scheduled for September 6 amid President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents in Washington, D.C.

The finalists for the 2025 Kirkus Prize have been revealed, with eighteen books in three categories—fiction, nonfiction, and young reader’s literature—in contention for the annual awards. The winner in each category will receive $50,000. The finalists in fiction are The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy, Isola by Allegra Goodman, A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar, The Slip by Lucas Schaefer, and Flesh by David Szalay. The winners will be announced on October 8.