Ella Stern of Cambridge Day reports on protests by faculty, students, and alumni of Lesley University’s MFA program against “recent hiring practices and changes to the program,” which unionized adjunct professors say have violated the terms of their collective bargaining agreement and have had an effect “on student admissions and experience.” Stern points to an April 2024 article in the Harvard Crimson reporting that Lesley’s enrollment has dropped 45 percent and the university has laid off almost 20 percent of its core faculty since 2019. “Lesley administrators, who did not respond to requests for comment, have cited their ongoing market research and desire to find a novel approach to the program as reasoning for these changes, said third-semester creative writing MFA student Audrey Lee and the program’s poetry chair, Erin Belieu,” Stern writes. “Administrators have also said that the university is not making money from the creative writing masters program; Belieu said she believes that administrators’ changes and mismanagement created this situation.”

In an essay in the Washington Post, book critic Michael Dirda takes on what he sees as the futility of book banning as he recalls his early memories of being prohibited from checking out books from the library that were deemed too difficult for him. “At heart, book censorship, like Comstockery and Prohibition, ultimately aims to make human beings into little saints,” he writes. “Ain’t never gonna happen.”

Independent publisher John Martin, who brought the work of authors such as Paul Bowles, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, and Wyndham Lewis to readers through Black Sparrow Press, died on June 23 at his home in Santa Rosa, California, the New York Times reports. He was 94. Martin founded Black Sparrow Press in 1966 and over the years elevated the scrappy indie press to become what the Los Angeles Times called “California’s premier literary publisher.” In 2002 he sold it to Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins, as Poets & Writers Magazine’s Joy Jacobson reported at the time. 

Earlier this month Rhode Island governor Dan McKee signed into law the Freedom to Read Act, which “contains protections for school and local librarians and staff and is, notably, the first to guarantee writers and readers a right to sue for censorship,” Publishers Weekly reports. Rhode Island joins a growing number of states such as New Jersey, Maryland, and Minnesota “in codifying their citizens’ right to read amid nationwide book bans.”

In an op-ed for the New York Times, David Brooks claims “literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanizing effect on our culture,” pointing to the absence “of literary fiction on the Publisher’s Weekly yearly Top 10 best-selling list since 2001” and the NEA’s survey showing that the number of people “who even claim to read literature has been declining steadily since 1982.” 

Penguin is delaying the publication of Raynor Winn’s new book, On Winter Hill, amid allegations that the author fabricated details of her 2018 memoir, The Salt Path, the Guardian reports. The decision was taken to “support the author,” according to a statement. On Winter Hill, a book of nonfiction, was scheduled for publication in October; a new publication date has not been set. 

Alexandra Alter of the New York Times writes about novelist Hannah Pittard, whose marriage to author Andrew Ewell ended nearly ten years ago, and the thorny issue of who gets to tell the story of the breakup between two writers. In this case, Pittard wrote a memoir, We Are Too Many (Henry Holt, 2023), then Ewell wrote a novel, Set for Life (Simon & Schuster, 2024), with a plot that “so closely mirrored their troubled past that at first Pittard thought it must be a memoir,” then Pittard wrote a satirical novel of her own about it, If You Love It, Let It Kill You, out next week from Henry Holt.

Carolina Ciucci recommends ten perfect bookends for readers whose “books breach containment,” for Bookriot. From Pride and Prejudice to Michaelangelo’s David, there’s a theme for any libary in need of support, because after all, “[d]eath by book avalanche, however fitting, sounds like an unpleasant way to go.”

Fanny Howe, the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including the poetry collection Second Childhood (Graywolf Press, 2014), died on July 9 at the age of 84. Kazim Ali, cofounder and chairperson of Nightboat Books, which published Howe’s book-length essay Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken as its very first title in 2005, writes: “There would be no Nightboat Books without Fanny Howe. It would be wrong to say she was a polar star or a beacon in the darkness, because Fanny believed in mystery, in unknowing, in bewilderment. She didn’t mean to shine a light, but rather to see in the darkness.” In celebration of her life and work, the Paris Review unlocked her Art of Poetry interview from its archive. 

Following allegations by the Observer that claimed author Raynor Winn “fabricated or gave misleading information about some elements of her 2018 nonfiction best-seller” The Salt Path, the book’s publisher, Penguin, says it “undertook all the necessary due dilligence” before releasing the book, the BBC reports. The novel was adapated into a movie, released last year, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. Both the novel and the film tell the story of a couple “who decide to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path after their home is repossessed.” The Observer alleges that Winn misrepresented the events leading up to the couple losing their home.

Publishers Weekly outlines efforts by independent booksellers to counter Amazon’s annual Prime Day sale, which this year runs from July 8 to July 11. Among the “anti–Amazon Prime Day promotions” are Bookshop.org’s “anti-Prime” sale, which offers free shipping, and Libro.fm’s offer of three audiobook credits for the price of one to new members (to counter Amazon-owned Audible). 

Prominent translators as well as the UK’s Society of Authors’ Translators Association are expressing concern over a new AI fiction translation service, GlobeScribe.ai, which charges $100 per book, per language for its use, the Guardian reports. GlobeScribe.ai founders Fred Freeman and Betsy Reavley, who previously founded Bloodhound Books, say the service “opens the door to new opportunities, making translation a viable option for a much broader range of fiction.”

In an essay for Business Insider, Alice Amayu writes about being accepted into the University of Sydney’s creative writing graduate program and deciding not to enroll after seeing how AI is “ruining the media landscape and the book industry.” Amayu writes: “There are days when I wonder what my classes would have been like, and it makes me sad that I’ll never experience them. Many people are still pursuing MFAs, and it’s still worth it.”

According to Publishers Weekly, Humanities Tennesee recently announced that Southern Festival of Books will return this year after months of uncertainty “following federal funding cuts.” Thanks to “community support, new donations, and an expanded partnership with Vanderbilt University,” the festival will be held from October 18 to October 19.

In an interview with the Guardian’s Hannah Marriott, Barbara Kingsolver talks about Higher Ground, the recovery residence that she recently established using royalties from her best-selling novel Demon Copperhead, a retelling of Dickens during Virginia’s opioid crisis. The residence, Marriott writes, “provides a safe place to live for women whose lives have been torn apart by addiction, who are seeking long-term recovery.”

Emma Alpern of New York magazine explores the lasting appeal of literary authors on Substack, such as George Saunders, Garth Greenwell, Brandon Taylor, and Ottessa Moshfegh. “[M]uch of what’s popping up on Substack is appealingly specific, the kind of stuff that’s unpublishable elsewhere,” Alpern writes.

The BBC’s Steven McIntosh unpacks the details of an investigation by the Observer’s Chloe Hadjimatheou into author Raynor Winn’s best-selling book The Salt Path. Hadjimatheou alledges that Winn fabricated or gave misleading information about some parts of the narrative of her book, which chronicles the author’s 630-mile walk on the South West Coast Path in England with her husband, who had received a diagnosis of a terminal illness. Winn has described the Observer’s article as “highly misleading.”

Sophia Valchine of the Detroit Free Press argues in USA Today that authors who use AI are lazy, pointing to AI prompts accidentally embeded in novels by authors Lena McDonald and K.C. Crowne. “I believe authors are turning to AI because they don’t want to think,” Valchine writes.

Rachel Brooks writes for Monitor on Psychology about how psychologists are combatting censorship to keep culturally diverse books accessible to the public. Research has shown that stories featuring marginalized characters have positive effects such as increasing children’s reading time and reducing in-group favoritism. Another study showed that thirty books frequently challenged in Florida were not connected to negative behavior in terms of civic involvement, mental health, school grade point average, or crime. Ironically, in some cases, the reading was associated with positive outcomes like improved civic and volunteering behavior. Brooks writes that psychologists are well-positioned advocates in the book banning conflict because they can address the important role books play in children’s development.

The 150th issue of the Believer is being published today. The anniversary issue features work by writers including Sheila Heti, Charles Johnson, and Joan Silber, among others.