Last Friday, Lambda Literary announced its 2026 prizewinners. The awards, also known as the Lammys, “were created in 1989 to garner national visibility for LGBTQ books, which had established a foothold through a nascent network of lesbian and gay publishers and bookstores.” This year’s winners were selected by a panel of eighty literary professionals from more than 1,300 submissions. Among the winners are Hungerstone (Zando) by Kat Dunn, which won the award for lesbian fiction; Nova Scotia House (Nightboat Books) by Charlie Porter, which won the award for gay fiction; Guest Privileges (Dzanc Books) by Gaar Adams, which won the award for LGBTQ+ nonfiction; and YEET! (Omnidawn Publishing) by jason b crawford, which won the award for LGBTQ+ poetry.
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Every day the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine scan the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know.
Recently, it has seemed as though new books are getting more and more expensive, but USA Today reports that book prices actually haven’t kept up with inflation. Part of the reason they seem so costly is that e-books have shifted our perception of how much a book ought to cost. And then, of course, there is the reality that the rest of life’s expenses—groceries, insurance, gas—are inflating, and there’s less wiggle room left in the budget for readers to spend thirty dollars on a hardcover book. While many people think that publishers keep most of the money, the reality is that they are struggling too. “A twenty dollar book ends up netting two or three dollars for the publisher at the end of the day,” Keith Riegert, president of the independent publishing collective the Stable Book Group, said.
Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman, the new owners of the online literary magazine the Rumpus, have detailed some of their plans for the publication to Publishers Weekly. Though they plan to retain the spirit of the Rumpus, some coverage areas will be different: There will be more of a focus on politics, and on cultural criticism. The magazine is also diversifying its audience with a Spanish-language vertical called El Alboroto helmed by three editors who are fluent in the language, and a column written and edited by people who are or have been incarcerated. “With America being seduced by AI, there’s going to be even more of an appetite for craft, for soul, for work that still is original and heartbreaking and bone-tingling,” Millman said. “More than ever there needs to be original voices that are beholden to no one but the reader.”
This year marks a century since the founding of the Book of the Month Club, Publishers Weekly writes, and a decade since chairman John Lippman relaunched the service with the goal of appealing to younger readers and those who are more likely to buy books online. Lippman said that the organization has grown every year since its rebrand, and that its membership now skews towards Gen Z women rather than millennials. To celebrate its centennial, Book of the Month launched a splashy ad campaign poking fun at the idea that “nobody reads anymore,” and is also offering special editions of classics like Catcher in the Rye and Native Son. “Just like in the 1920s,” Lippman said, “we fundamentally believe in the book business.”
Libraries, which could always benefit from funding for digitization efforts, are being approached by AI companies offering to pay for materials to be digitized in order for that data to be used to train models, Library Journal reports. While these arrangements can benefit libraries, there’s reason to be cautious. To ensure that proper care is taken when partnering with AI companies, the University of Virginia recently published a statement enumerating shared practices for AI training requests, which sixteen other universities have cosigned. These institutions have jointly agreed to separate digitization from AI use, apply scrutiny to broad training requests, and preserve the ability to share information, among other things. “We have responsibilities to the people who donated these materials to us,” UVA dean of libraries and university librarian Leo S. Lo said. “We want to make sure that we can fulfill our stewardship [duties] and have accountability.”
In an article for the New Yorker, writer Jessica Winter argues that in order to get kids to want to read, the adults in their lives need to champion all different kinds of reading rather than “book-shaming.” Research has found that the percentage of people who read for pleasure has dropped from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023, and that the proportion of parents who read aloud to infants before they turn three months old has dropped six points in the last four years. And yet, many books that clearly appeal to kids, like highly commercial graphic novels, are often disparaged by adults in their lives, potentially to a young person’s detriment. “When someone starts exercising for their health, we don’t criticize their choice of exercise or belittle them for not being able to run a marathon on the first day,” Deborah Reed, director of the Tennessee Reading Research Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is quoted saying. “Once the habit is formed, they do more and are encouraged to try new things they previously didn’t think were possible. Shouldn’t we approach reading the same way?”
This year, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (LBYR) is celebrating its hundredth birthday, Publishers Weekly notes. The division has been known for publishing critically acclaimed books from the beginning, including numerous Newbery and Caldecott Award winners. Over the course of its centennial year, LBYR is launching two new imprints: Requited, a new adult imprint, and Alvina Ling Books, which will be headed by Ling, who has been with LBYR for 25 years. It will also celebrate its anniversary by introducing new initiatives to promote reading for fun among children and to support writers telling stories of underserved communities. “In this age when consumers are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of books published each year as well as concerned about AI content, I think boutique imprints are more meaningful than ever,” Megan Tingley, LBYR’s publisher, said. “Readers crave authentic voices and works that have been carefully curated by trusted and respected editorial experts. We have to lean in to what makes reading such a uniquely intimate and emotional experience.”
Earlier this week, a library book that was due back in October 1949 was finally returned to a Norfolk library, according to the BBC. The fine for the overdue book, when adjusted for inflation, should have been around £800 (approximately $1,072), but the library said that it would waive the fine this time. The book, The Devil Held the Aces (W.H. Allen, 1944) by Patrick Doncaster, was returned after being found in an attic. “This return definitely caught us by surprise, but in the very best way,” Will Buhler, a mobile libraries manager at the Norfolk County Council, said. “We like to think it’s had quite the life wherever it’s been tucked away, whether that’s an attic box or a well-loved bookshelf.”
Virginia Evans and Lyse Doucet have won the 2026 Women’s Prize for fiction and nonfiction respectively, the Associated Press reports. Evans’ The Correspondent (Crown, 2025) became a runaway bestseller, making her a literary star after writing seven unpublished novels. “Why did I keep going? I didn’t know how not to, I guess,” she said. Lyse Doucet, chief international correspondent for the BBC, won for The Finest Hotel in Kabul (Allen Lane, 2025). Both prizes come with a £30,000 (approximately $40,200) and are open to female writers from any country who work in English.
Texas Monthly is teaming up with Penguin Random House to relaunch Texas Monthly Press. The relaunch will build on the house’s initial publishing run from the late-1970s to the early-1990s, the magazine’s strong storytelling, and the publishing house’s national reach to publish books across genres and formats about the mythos of Texas. “As a native Texan and lifelong reader of Texas Monthly, I was thrilled to learn of the magazine’s plans to relaunch Texas Monthly Press. The opportunity to help bring this iconic imprint back to life felt deeply personal,” said Amanda D’Acierno, president of Penguin Random House Audio Global, which is managing the collaboration. The imprint will release its inaugural slate of books in fall 2027.
A new study from the Authors Guild has found that average author earnings have declined 42 percent since 2009, the year Kindles became available, according to Publishers Weekly. The survey also found that only 19 percent of print and e-books read in the last month were bought new, and six percent were read through a paid subscription, which means that authors were earning less in royalties. Another ten percent of books were bought used and 29 percent were obtained through a library. “While the Guild stresses it strongly supports the availability of books through various channels and formats, it also notes that authors aren’t benefitting from the wider availability of their books,” Jim Milliot writes.
The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller list for the week ending June 7, 2026. The list is compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identifies “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” New to the list this week are I See You’ve Called in Dead (Zibby Publishing) by John Kenney, at no. 7; The King in Yellow, Deluxe Edition (Pushkin Press) by Robert W. Chambers, at no. 11; The Clock House Murders (The Bizarre House Mysteries) (Pushking Vertigo) by Yukito Ayatsuji, at no. 16; She Walks at Night (Detective Kindaichi Mysteries) (Pushkin Vertigo) by Seishi Yokomizo, at no. 25; Puck: A Novel (Zando) by Samantha Allen, at no. 29; Homosexual Intifada: A Queer Palestinian Anthology (Olive Branch Press), edited by George Abraham, at no. 32; and The Fire Agent (Spiegel & Grau) by David Baerwald, at no. 39.
A judge has ordered that a group of authors cannot include six different AI companies in a single lawsuit for copyright infringement, according to Publishers Lunch. The issue, the judge said, is that there wasn’t clear evidence of conspiracy between the companies. The plaintiffs must instead sue Anthropic, Google, xAI, Perplexity, Apple, and NVIDIA separately. “Each defendant trained on a mixture of different data repositories at different times between 2020 and 2024,” the court writes. “Even accepting plaintiff’s argument that there is a ‘reasonable inference’ that each defendant used Anna’s Archive to train their LLMs, that would not be enough for the Court to find a common transaction or occurrence.”
The trustees of the International Griffin Poetry Prize have announced that the $65,000 Canadian (approximately $46,679) Canadian Poetry Prize will be reinstated. The $130,000 Canadian (approximately $93,359) International Poetry Prize will remain unchanged, and Canadian poets are eligible for that prize as well, though a Canadian poet cannot win both prizes at the same time. These changes are the result of comments and recommendations from the Canadian poetry community. The trustees also announced that the longlist for the International Prize will be twelve books and will feature Canadian representation, and that the panel of three judges will always include a Canadian.
Tessa McWatt, a Guyanese author and professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, has been awarded the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, BBC reports. The $10,000 prize is considered the leading international award for Caribbean writing. McWatt received the honor for The Snag: A Mother, A Forest, and Wild Grief (Random House Canada, 2025), her account of losing her mother to dementia. She said that getting the award was a “real joy, as it feels like a win for my mother, who is the central figure in the book and my heart's inspiration.”
Barnes & Noble has announced the six finalists for its annual Discover Prize, Kirkus Reviews reports. The award, which is given for an outstanding debut novel, was established in 1995 and the winner will be announced on June 25. This year’s shortlist includes Yesteryear (Knopf) by Caro Claire Burke, Lost Lambs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Madeline Cash, The Golden Boy (Cardinal) by Patricia Finn, Upward Bound (Hogarth) by Woody Brown, Seek Immediate Shelter (Flatiron) by Vincent Yu, and Waiting on a Friend (Hogarth) by Natalie Adler. “It’s such a joy to spend so much time talking in depth about new writers—their prose style, their characters, the worlds they create—and their future potential with other booksellers around the country,” Barnes & Noble campaign manager for fiction Lexie Smyth said in a statement.
The Literary Arts Fund is now accepting applications for its 2026 Innovation Project Grant program. These grants will range from $25,000 to $100,000 and offer literary nonprofits funds for “new, one-time, and forward-thinking projects that aim to address critical structural challenges that, if improved or solved, would ultimately strengthen literary arts nonprofits’ abilities to serve creative writers.” Proposed projects must commence after January 1, 2027, and conclude by December 31, 2027, and the deadline for applications is August 17. (Read more about the fund in “A Lifeline From Literary Arts Fund” by Adrienne Raphel, from the March/April 2026 issue.)
The Booker Prize Foundation is publishing a short story collection this week that aims to make prize-winning fiction more accessible to people who face barriers to reading, according to the Guardian. The collection, All Around the World, includes pieces by Booker Prize winners like Anne Enright and David Szalay and will be distributed through the Quick Reads initiative, which aims to improve adult literacy at a time when more than a third of adults in the UK struggle to read a book in its entirety. Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, who curated the collection, said that “Quick Reads is like dipping your toe in the water of literature, with some of the barriers that might put people off removed. A lot of people might feel there is nothing about their world in books. The stories in All Around the World have access points, and I hope they alert readers to the fact that, actually, their life might be in here somewhere.”
Audiobook industry sales revenue grew nine percent in 2025, a 43 percent increase from 2024, Publishers Weekly reports. These numbers come from the Audio Publishers Association’s annual sales survey, which also found that general fiction accounted for the largest share of audiobook revenue, while the fastest growing genres were humor, general fiction, and children’s books. “Convenience remains the primary driver of audiobook consumption,” Ed Nawotka writes. “Among listeners, 86 percent cited the ability to multitask while listening, and 84 percent cited the ability to listen on the go as the top benefit, with 70 percent describing audiobooks as an alternative to screen time.” AI-narrated audiobooks don’t seem to be holding listeners’ interests; only sixteen percent of listeners said they had listened to a title voiced by AI.
An unfinished and never before published short story by Edith Wharton has been printed in the most recent issue of the Strand Magazine, the Associated Press writes. The piece, titled “The Men Who Saved the World,” tells the story of a young American nurse who finds herself seated next to a war hero at a dinner party, and animates the strange divide between civilian and military life that Wharton witnessed during World War I. As Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli writes in his introduction, “Wharton asks a question that is as relevant today as it was over a century ago: What is the cost of refusing to see the horrors beyond the softly curtained windows—and who pays for it?”
Pamela Drucker Mann, a former chief executive at Condé Nast, is spearheading a new media startup that aims to monetize short stories, the Wall Street Journal reports. The company, called Run-A-Muck, has launched an ad-supported Substack called Drafting where it will publish short stories to see what readers respond to and potentially then pursue other ventures like films and podcasts. The company is hoping that younger generations who grew up with short-form videos and Instagram posts will take to short fiction. “Rather than starting with a medium and searching for an audience, we start with the story we want to tell and then determine the format that best serves that story,” Drucker Mann said.
In the Yale Review, writing professor Sheila Liming reflects on some universities’ decision to deaccession many of the books in their libraries. Liming draws on her own research into Edith Wharton’s book collection—half of which was destroyed after her death—to make an argument for the library as a crucial step in making text accessible to all manner of readers. “The speed of the digital world connives to make us feel ashamed of certain sorts of slowly won knowledge. But to persist in caring about books, and to do so in the face of those who tell us not to, is to fight for a world that takes knowledge seriously,” she writes. “That fight will have to happen on many fronts; preserving the library alone will not rescue reading. But it is a good place to begin. After all, it is easier to preserve than it is to create.”
HarperCollins announced yesterday that it will be reorganizing its U.S. trade division into seven groups, according to Publishers Lunch. Dey Street and Avon will now each be their own groups rather than part of Morrow; the other groups will be Harper, HarperCollins Children’s, Harper One, and Mariner. “This new alignment will allow each group to operate with greater autonomy, deeper category expertise, and a strategic focus on author development, positioning the imprints for continued growth,” CEO and president of the trade division Liate Stehlik said in a release.
In the wake of last month’s allegations that a prize-winning short story published in Granta was written using an LLM, New York reports on how literary magazines are dealing with AI-written submissions. It seems that many are not yet on high alert about having to weed out AI writing. The editors interviewed pointed out that they can take their time reviewing submissions and expressed reservations about relying on AI detectors or adding more to editors’ workloads by asking them to build familiarity with AI-generated style. More importantly, they reinforced that using AI to write runs counter to the goals of most writers. “I think we’d be having a different conversation if the technology could do the things we like and want,” said Samuel Rutter, editor in chief of Kismet. “We’re still working with a lot of writers for whom the ideating and the writing is almost the more exciting part than the publishing.”
Kevin Young has been named winner of the 2026 international Griffin Poetry Prize for Night Watch (Knopf, 2025). The prize was established in 2000 to “encourage and celebrate excellence in poetry,” and books of poetry written in or translated into English and submitted from anywhere in the world are eligible. The winner receives $130,000 Canadian (approximately $93,527) and finalists each receive $10,000 Canadian (approximately $7,194).
The Literary Arts Fund has announced that it will distribute $7.7 million in grant funding to forty organizations across nineteen states, the Associated Press reports. The fund was started by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and six other philanthropies. This year’s grants range from $40,000 to $500,000 and recipients include the National Book Foundation, Graywolf Press, Copper Canyon Press, and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. For a full list of funded organizations, visit the Literary Arts Fund's website. (Read more about the fund in “A Lifelife From Literary Arts Fund” by Adrienne Raphel, from the March/April 2026 issue.)
The office of President Emmanuel Macron of France announced today that Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian French author of Persepolis, has died at 56, the New York Times reports. Satrapi was born in Iran in 1969 and lived through the rise of the clerics and the Iran-Iraq war before moving to Austria for school at fourteen. She later moved to Paris and published the first Persepolis book in French in 2000 to wide acclaim. Her books were subsequently translated into English and turned into an Academy Award-nominated animated film. “Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and a freedom-loving artist whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” Macron’s office said in a statement.
The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller list for the week ending May 31, 2026. The list is compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identifies “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” New to the list this week are Homer's The Illiad (Norton), translated by Emily Wilson, at no. 17; Son of Nobody (Norton) by Yann Martel at no. 21; Losers: Part Two: Deluxe Limited Edition (Kensington) by Harley Laroux at no. 24; Birds of a Feather: The Secrets of a Knight (Ravenhood Legacy #3) (Kensington) by Kate Stewart at no. 28; Playground (Norton) by Richard Powers at no. 31; Just My Luck: Deluxe Limited Edition (The Kings #2) (Kensington) by Lena Hendrix at no. 33; and Wings of Life: Deluxe Limited Edition (Dragonbound Chronicles #1) (Page & Vine) by Meghan Le Fay at no. 40.
Applications for the National Book Critics Circle’s Emerging Critics Fellowship are open until Friday, June 5, at midnight Pacific Time. The fellowship is open to critics of all experience levels who want to review and write about books, though they need not have published book reviews already. Over the course of the fellowship year, fellows will have access to one-on-one mentorship, professional development and craft lectures over Zoom, and dues-free NBCC membership, among other things. “As a published author of fiction and nonfiction, my time as an NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow has been immensely valuable—giving me a comfortable and inclusive forum to learn how to partake in the national conversation about books, publishing, and prizes in America,” 2021–2022 fellow Rishi Reddi said of the program. “I got to spend a year ‘inside’ the erudite and necessary field of literary criticism and for me—for whom books have always been a lifeline and an immense pleasure—the experience has been priceless.”
Ten cultural organizations sent a letter to Congress calling for expanded funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in the run-up to meetings about the 2027 fiscal year later this week, according to Publishers Weekly. The White House tried to dismantle the IMLS last year and has once again proposed eliminating it in 2027. In their letter, the organizations emphasized the importance of museums, libraries, and archives in American cultural life. “For many, the library is the only no-fee access to information, education, and career development,” Sem Helmick, president of the American Library Association, which was one of the letter’s signatories, emphasized in a statement.
Julia Elliott has been named this year’s winner of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for her short story collection Hellions, published by Tin House in 2025, NPR reports. The $150,000 award is given each year to a novel, short story collection, or graphic novel by a woman or nonbinary author in the United States or Canada. Elliott is known for writing fiction that blends Southern gothic horror, surrealism, and fairytales, and her latest collection is no exception. “This eerie, eclectic, genre-leaping collection takes no half-measures; every sentence of Hellions crackles or crawls,” the prize jury wrote in a statement. “But for all its wildness, there is tremendous control.”
Netflix has launched a hub for “book-inspired storytelling,” Publishers Lunch reports. The hub, called Watch Your Favorite Books, will recommend content based on books on the Netflix homepage. “The experience is organized around reader ‘types,’” according to the streaming service, “think: plot-twist lovers, romance enthusiasts, nonfiction fans, and more, making it easy for members to find adaptations that match how they like to read and watch.”
Lately publishers have been moving away from printing hardcover books at 6-by-9 inches, choosing instead to make them the slightly smaller 5-by-8 inches, Adam Messinger writes for the Los Angeles Times. Some attribute this shift to the fact that smaller books are more Instagram-friendly, easier to carry around, and generally more approachable. “It’s a tone,” offered Gretchen Achilles, the director of interior design at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “Smaller trim sizes have an intimacy…. You want to echo what’s going on in the text as an experience for the reader.”
The UK’s Publishers Association has reported that it is seeing growing numbers of AI-narrated pirated audiobooks online, according to the Bookseller. This discovery comes on the heels of a recent New York Times article about the spread of pirated audiobooks on platforms like YouTube. “For the past few years, a key part of our content protection and enforcement strategy has been working directly with online platforms to tackle piracy and wider content protection issues. This includes working with YouTube and Spotify to improve detection and takedown processes,” said Jack Newton, head of content protection and enforcement for the Publishers Association. Spotify, for instance, “has a recent track record of tackling music piracy, and we are applying that same collaborative approach to protect the rights of authors and publishers.”
Last week the American Booksellers Association held a virtual community forum in which some members pushed back against the move away from in-person meetings, Publishers Weekly reports. After tumultuous forums the previous two years, this year the ABA switched to the virtual format. During the Q&A portion of the meeting many of the questions that participants asked the organization’s CEO and board president pertained to this switch. “This community forum was meant to be more democratic, but for a democratic outcome people have to show up,” Lucy Kogler, manager of Talking Leaves...Books in Buffalo, New York, told Publishers Weekly. “Given that out of more than 3,500 possible attendees, only 137 at its peak attended—and that number includes about two dozen who are ABA board and staff and media—proves that membership is not being served as a cohesive unit.... Ideas and concerns need to be vocalized and heard in physical proximity.”
The Library of Virginia has announced the twelve finalists for its annual People’s Choice Awards. The prize, which was established in 2004, honors the most-requested fiction and nonfiction books by Virginia authors or about the Commonwealth published during the previous year. This year’s finalists in fiction are Strangers in Time (Grand Central) by David Baldacci, King of Ashes (Flatiron) by S.A. Cosby, The Correspondent (Crown) by Virginia Evans, Culpability (Spiegel & Grau) by Bruce Holsinger, All Too Well (Sourcebooks) by Corinne Michaels, and The View From Lake Como (Dutton) by Adriana Trigiani. The finalists in nonfiction are Mailman (Simon & Schuster) by Stephen Starring Grant, Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance (Black Dog & Leventhal) by Jane Harrington, A Perfect Frenzy (Atlantic Monthly Press) by Andrew Lawler, The Determined Spy (Dutton) by Douglas Waller, Bad Naturalist (Timber Press) by Paula Whyman, and Lincoln’s Lady Spymaster (Harper) by Gerri Willis. Members of the public can vote any time between June 1 and July 15 at: lvafoundation.org/peopleschoiceawards. The winners will be announced at the 29th annual Virginia Literary Awards Celebration on September 19.
In the wake of revelations that Steven Rosenbaum’s new book, The Future of Truth, contains quotes made up by AI, WIRED spoke to Rosenbaum to learn more about how he uses AI. Over the course of the interview, Rosenbaum denied using AI explicitly to write or edit passages in the book, but also maintained that he finds it a valuable writing partner and continues to use the technology today. “If the only way for me to not end up with a mistake ever again is to literally stop using AI, that’s just not realistic. If the answer is to stop writing, that’s not out of the realm of possibility,” he is quoted saying.
The Ink Book Prize, an annual award that aims to celebrate “unique voices and compelling storytelling while promoting the spirit of independent publishing,” announced last week that it was removing a title from this year's shortlist after discovering that AI was used in parts of the illustration design, according to the Bookseller. In a statement, the team behind the prize said that they received two e-mails after the shortlist was announced expressing concerns about the use of AI to create the cover of one of the selected titles. The author’s representative subsequently chose to pull out of the shortlist. In a social media post, Kirsten McNeil, who published another book on the shortlist, also announced that she would be withdrawing from the prize. “AI imagery is created using large language models which use copyrighted human-created art to generate images. It is a huge threat to our creative industry, especially in children’s picture books,” she wrote. “Although it is always an honor to be recognized for our book, we believe in putting human-created stories first and do not want to risk being associated alongside any AI-generated publications.”
Increasingly, disabled authors are undertaking book tours that challenge the industry to be more inclusive and also reenvision what book events can look like, Publishers Weekly writes. For example, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha recently planned their first in-person tour in more than six years for their new poetry collection, The Way Disabled People Love Each Other (Arsenal Pulp). For the tour they requested an American Sign Language interpreter, real-time captions, and wheelchair access—half of the book stores they worked with provided all three, and all at least had spaces that were accessible. “It’s just nuts-and-bolts access,” Piepzna-Samarasinha says. “I need it for myself as a disabled writer. But it’s not just for me; I want disabled people to come to my readings.”
Three hundred incarcerated people at twelve prisons across the country are in the process of selecting the winner of this year’s Inside Literary Prize, Minnesota Public Radio News writes. The prize, which was first awarded in 2024, is a collaboration between Freedom Reads, the Center for Justice and Innovation, and the National Book Foundation, and is determined entirely by a jury of incarcerated readers. “There were times where I walked in the room and I'm like, ‘I'm not with this book, I don't get it,’” Makayla Richardson, one of the prize’s judges, says of the selection process. “But then, to sit in a room with other people and get their perspectives…it's just very helpful and educational.” (Read about the launch of the award program in “Prize Judged by Incarcerated Readers” by Alissa Greenberg, from the May/June 2024 issue.)
Workers at the American Library Association voted overwhelmingly in favor of unionizing earlier this week, Publishers Weekly reports. Employee concerns include anxiety about multi-round layoffs and desire for better pay and benefits as well as more professional development opportunities. “We couldn’t be happier with the strong and definitive victory we saw, and we’re gratified to see the staff so unified,” David Connolly, an employee of the ALA, is quoted saying. “It’s been a difficult time for the association's budget…in particular with the elimination of salary increases this year and the rollback in retirement benefits.”
The American Booksellers Association has reported that its membership has grown by more than five hundred in the last year, with the total number of associated bookstores nearly triple what it was a decade ago and the highest it has been since the late 1990s, according to the Associated Press. This surge (to a total of 3,417 members at 3,783 locations) is partially thanks to a recent proliferation of stores specializing in the popular genres of romance, fantasy, and romantasy. “People are craving connection, especially in-person connection,” Kelley Hartnett, the owner of Double Dog Bookshop in Wentzville, Missouri, is quoted saying. “People are over the internet and virtual meetings and algorithms. They’re not the same as having a human-to-human connection. It feels really healing.”
Recent reports that Steven Rosenbaum's book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality contains quotes made up by AI have underscored the extent to which nonfiction book publishers are ill-equipped to handle the onset of AI, Charlotte Klein writes for New York magazine. Publishers typically do not pay for books to be fact-checked, which means that authors must either pay an outside checker themselves—which typically costs somewhere between $7,000 and $10,000—or forgo this process. And there is no industry standard as to what AI usage, if any, is permissible. “A lot of authors are well intentioned in their use of AI and don’t want to rely on AI to generate work that they would then present as their own,” Todd Shuster, cofounder of the literary agency Aevitas, told Klein. “But they might rely on AI for some research or ideas around the structure of the book or outline. And the author then sort of forgets or denies or suppresses the extent to which they relied on the AI for such research.”
In the wake of last week’s revelations that an AI detection tool raised red flags about a Commonwealth Prize-winning short story, the Authors Guild put five of the top AI detection tools to the test to see how likely they are to mistakenly flag human-written work as AI-generated. The Authors Guild selected ten of its articles published in 2022 or earlier, before generative AI was widely available, and ran them through the five AI detectors. Three were almost entirely accurate, while two—ZeroGPT and Sidekicker.ai—were either unpredictable or totally inaccurate. Ironically, the Authors Guild points out, because AI models are trained on polished writing, "The more refined and controlled a writer’s style, the more it may resemble the output these tools are designed to flag. This creates a troubling paradox. A writer who has spent decades honing clarity, economy, and precision is, by definition, writing in a way that overlaps with what AI has learned to produce.”
Five North American public library organizations issued a statement yesterday calling on the Big Five publishers to negotiate e-book lending models on the grounds that digital pricing is straining library budgets, according to Publishers Weekly. This statement is just the latest chapter in the ongoing battle between libraries and publishers concerning digital licensing. In their defense, publishers have stressed the importance of making sure that authors are compensated within lending systems. On the other hand, Angela Goodrich, COO of the Urban Libraries Council, told Publishers Weekly that many large, high-circulating library systems are spending more than 50 percent of their collections budget on licensing. “That’s exponentially larger than what we were doing eight years ago, and part of that is because e-books and audiobooks are more expensive than print books,” she pointed out.
The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller list for the week ending May 24, 2026. The list is compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identifies “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” New to the list this week are Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press) by Yang Shuang-zi, which was named the winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize last week, at no. 7; She Who Remains (Sandorf Passage) by Rene Karabash at no. 32; Plastic, Prism, Void: Part One (Littlepuss Press) by Violet Allen at no. 35; Riverwork (Coach House Books) by Lisa Robertson at no. 38; and Cat Poems (New Directions), edited by Tynan Kogane, at no. 40.
A 2022 reprint of the 2006 young adult novel Pretty Little Liars has generated backlash online because it replaced references to the early aughts with more current mentions of TikTok, Snapchat, and Billie Eilish, the New York Times reports. Modernization, or updating cultural and technological references, has long been a practice in publishing, especially in middle-grade and young adult books. Proponents of this strategy say that dated references can prevent younger readers from feeling fully engrossed in a story and even sometimes from simply understanding what’s going on. But others argue that there’s something to be said for trusting young readers. “There’s no single, universal idea of what kids want,” Jennifer Buehler, a young adult literature scholar at Saint Louis University, is quoted saying. “You can’t assume all kids will be turned off when they sense the adult behind the book.”
A Canadian company named Zoom Books has been accused of buying tens of thousands of books from shops around the world to train AI models, Publishers Lunch writes. The Spanish news outlet Demócrata first alleged that bookstores in Germany, Australia, Spain, and elsewhere were receiving the bulk orders. Badalona bookstore owner Marçal Font told the publication that he had received seven orders in a row for large numbers of obscure Catalon nonfiction titles. “On average, they are books of five or ten euros, many practically impossible to find,” he is quoted as saying. Zoom Books subsequently responded to the accusations, saying in a statement to Publishers Lunch that the Demócrata allegations are false. “To be unequivocally clear: Zoom Books does not digitize or destroy used or new books for the purpose of training AI models, nor for any other purpose,” the company wrote. “Any claim or implication to the contrary is inaccurate.”
A recent survey by the Association of American Literary Agents found that members, particularly those who are early in their careers, are concerned about financial instability, delays brought about by publisher consolidation and staffing reductions, and the effects of AI on the industry, according to Publishers Weekly. The results indicate that the average literary agent today holds more than one position within their agency; works more than forty hours a week, including on weekends; and receives more than twenty queries from potential new authors each week. “The survey makes clear that literary agents are carrying an increasingly complex and demanding set of responsibilities in a rapidly changing publishing environment,” AALA president Regina Brooks said in a statement. “These findings reflect larger concerns about sustainability, workload, compensation, and the long-term health of the publishing ecosystem.” (Read “Q&A: Regina Brooks Leads AALA” by Katie Arnold-Ratliff.)
In an essay for Inside Higher Ed, Katherine J. Chen debunks the notion that a humanities PhD can easily double as an opportunity to work on one’s creative writing. While it’s true that creative writers and academics share many of the same skills, Chen pushes back on the idea that a PhD is anything less than an intensive, full-time commitment. “If pursuing a PhD is intellectually demanding, so, too, is creative writing,” she writes. “To combine the two in the hopes that one will support the other seems a surefire recipe for burnout. At the end of the day, a PhD program isn’t the equivalent of a multiyear Yaddo or MacDowell residency, and it shouldn’t be mistaken for such.”
The Association of American Publishers announced last week that it is partnering with the AI licensing and protection platform Vermillio to find and take down unauthorized copies of audiobooks produced or reproduced by AI, according to Publishers Weekly. Vermillio will use its TraceID tool, which is available to individuals for free, to identify protected intellectual property and help remove pirated content on generative AI platforms as well as distribution platforms like YouTube. “Publishers are moving strategically from defense to offense in the AI era,” Dan Neely, cofounder and CEO of Vermillio, said in a statement. “We need independent solutions, not ones owned by the very platforms seeking to monetize work that isn't theirs.”
Authors and editors who are concerned about the threat that AI poses to their profession may be well served by trying to understand this new technology a little better, Boris Kachka argues in the Atlantic. Last week’s revelations that a short story awarded a prize from the Commonwealth Foundation and published in Granta may be AI-generated, that Nobel Prize-winning writer Olga Tokarczuk uses AI while brainstorming, and that a nonfiction book about AI contains chatbot-generated quotes all underscored not just how pervasive AI-inflected writing is becoming but also how ill-equipped many literary organizations are to address this shift. “Like many organizations, Granta and the Commonwealth Foundation are in a very tough spot: To advance their noble goal of promoting exciting work, they need to build trusting, protective relationships with writers even as they hold them to exacting standards, all in the face of unprecedented challenges to literary integrity,” Kachka writes. “But managing the risks of LLM technology requires understanding it.”
Last week Spotify introduced a new AI-powered tool for self-publishing audiobooks, TechCrunch reports. Powered by the AI voice generator ElevenLabs, the tool will be rolled out within the Spotify for Authors platform starting this June, albeit initially by invitation only. In recent years Spotify has invested heavily in building out its audiobook offerings; at present there are a million subscribers to its Audiobook+ plans, and its catalogue features 700,000 titles. “The company brought the program to international markets, made an investment in non-English titles, enabled in-app purchases, and released audiobook charts. This year, it also started a program for authors to sell physical books in the U.S. and the U.K.,” Ivan Mehta writes. “Through these initiatives, the company has managed to bump up listening hours by 60 percent year-on-year, the company claims.”