Daily News

Simon & Schuster has launched a new audio imprint, Simon Maverick, featuring content from self-published authors, according to Publishers Weekly. Led by Jason Pinter, former publisher of Polis Books, the imprint aims to publish more than fifty titles in 2025, and will be “dedicated to shining a light on works from talented, diverse, and emerging independent authors.”

Publishers Weekly reports on bookstores and publishers that have been closed or evacuated due to the ongoing fires, power outages, and severe weather in the Los Angeles metro area. Among the bookstores affected are Vroman’s and Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena, Book Soup in West Hollywood, and Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica.

Two literary agencies, Park & Fine Literary and Media and Brower Literary & Management, have merged to form Park, Fine & Brower Literary Management, Publishers Weekly reports. “The new agency represents more than 300 authors of all genres and in all stages of their careers, with Park & Fine cofounder Celeste Fine and Brower founder Kimberly Brower serving as co-CEOs.”

Jenna Bush Hager, who in 2019 joined the ranks of celebrity book club hosts like Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Emma Roberts when she launched Read With Jenna on the Today show, is starting her own publishing venture with Penguin Random House, the New York Times reports. Thousand Voices x RHPG will publish four to six books a year across genres, including literary fiction, memoir, historical fiction, and romance, at various imprints within Random House.

Both the director and chair of London’s Royal Society of Literature (RSL), “a learned society founded in 1820 by King George IV to ‘reward literary merit and excite literary talent,’” are stepping down from their posts ahead of the results of the society’s first ever governance review, conducted by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, according to the Guardian. Last year the RSL was “widely criticised for alleged censorship, changes to the way it elects fellows, and not taking a strong enough stance in response to the stabbing of Salman Rushdie.”

The Dallas-based literary arts nonprofit and publishing house Deep Vellum has acquired the British small press Fum d’Estampa Press, which has published thirty titles of literature in translation, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, since it was founded in 2020, Publishers Weekly reports. Deep Vellum publisher Will Evans calls it a “perfect alignment of missions to champion global voices.”

Fable, a popular app for talking about and tracking books, is changing the way it creates personalized summaries for its users after complaints that an AI model used offensive language, Christine Hauser reports for the New York Times. 

An exhibition of rare items connected to Charles Dickens will open in February and be on display until the end of June at the museum dedicated to his life and work in London, the BBC reports. The new show includes “a blubber-stained copy” of David Copperfield (1850) brought to Antarctica by Captain Scott’s 1910–1912 Terra Nova expedition, preliminary illustrations for the first publication of A Christmas Carol (1843), personal effects, photographs, and other treasures. The exhibition marks one hundred years since the establishment of the Charles Dickens Museum, which is located in the property where Dickens lived from 1837 to 1839. 

NPR reports on the most-borrowed books from public libraries in 2024. The list includes Kristin Hannah’s The Women (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing (Red Tower Books, 2023), and Emily Henry’s Happy Place (Berkley, 2023). The most checked-out adult book in New York City was Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Knopf, 2022) by Gabrielle Zevin.

The recently restored Notre-Dame cathedral is displaying its library of medieval manuscripts, prints, and books at the Musée de Cluny in Paris until March 16, 2025, Fine Books & Collections reports. The collection features theology texts, church history, canon and civil law, biblical and liturgical books, as well as the works of classic authors.

The Charles Dickens Museum has announced that Frankie Kubicki, its current deputy director, will become director of the museum in March 2025, Fine Books & Collections reports. “I am truly delighted and honored to be stepping into this new role and to be able to help to shape the future of this special place,” Kubicki said, adding, “Charles Dickens is as compelling as he ever has been and the issues and themes that absorbed him remain strikingly relevant.” 2025 marks the centennial of the museum at 48 Doughty Street, Holborn, the only remaining London house in which Dickens lived.

Alexandra Alter writes for the New York Times about intricately designed books with decorated borders and other artistic effects—a trend that started in romance and fantasy but has now spread throughout the publishing industry. “Publishers are investing in colorful patterned edges, metallic foil covers, reversible jackets, elaborate artwork on the endpapers, ribbon bookmarks and bonus content,” Alter writes. “Deluxe editions have also proliferated because of TikTok, which has reshaped book publishing and marketing strategies,” especially when appealing to younger audiences.

In an interview with the Creative Independent, writer and literary agent Jaclyn Gilbert discusses resisting the pressures of the market while honoring nuance and offering feedback. In 2021 Gilbert founded Driftless Literary, an agenting collective dedicated to supporting authors as they develop experimental and genre-bending work. “Driftless began as an experiment for creating a process-driven space for empowering authors to stay true to their vision in ways the traditional market hasn’t yet made space for,” Gilbert says, adding that her goal when providing feedback “is for it to be always generative.” In considering how polarized the political climate is today, she wonders, “why can’t we allow multiple points of view to coexist in a given work, just as we allow paradoxical dualities to coexist in our human condition as we navigate our mortality, grief, and loss?”

Lily Meyer writes for the Atlantic about how recent books on parenting offer divergent views on fatherhood. Meyer notes that most books explore the father-son relationship from the perspective of the son, citing authors such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, and others. However, Meyer focuses her essay on books by two contemporary male authors who underscore their transformations into fathers: I Will Do Better: A Father’s Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love (Abrams Press, 2024) by Charles Bock, and Childish Literature (Penguin Books, 2024), by Alejandro Zambra. Meyer writes about “the philosophical distinction between Childish Literature and I Will Do Better: The former is exterior, the latter interior.”

Bloom, a romance publisher that was founded in 2021, landed twenty-five books on the best-seller list this year, the New York Times reports. E. L. James, the author of the Fifty Shades of Grey series, was the first writer to join the press, which helped Bloom solidify its brand and attract submissions. The press took on self-published authors who already had an online fan base and helped them distribute their books, becoming the fastest-growing imprint in romance.

According to data from over twelve hundred publishers, book publishing sales increased over 8 percent in October, Publishers Weekly reports. Adult fiction sales rose 17.5 percent, with hardcover sales increasing 28.2 percent and digital audiobook sales rising 25.7 percent. Adult nonfiction sales fell 0.5 percent, with hardcover sales dropping 2.4 percent and digital audiobook sales rising 9.9 percent.

In an interview with Electric Literature, three literary translators discuss writing their debut novels and how their backgrounds in translation shaped the creative process. Bruna Dantas Lobato, the author of Blue Light Hours (Black Cat, 2024), says her work in translation pushed her to consider “narrative possibilities beyond American conventions” and “emboldened [her] to take risks.” Mike Fu, the author of Masquerade (Tin House, 2024), says that in moments of his novel he “did try to parrot a certain kind of diction commonly seen in English translations of early-twentieth-century Chinese literature.” Julia Kornberg, the author of Berlin Atomized (Astra House, 2024), says that her experience with translation gave her and her translator “tremendous freedom” because they “don’t have a ‘sacred’ vision of the original or of what translation should be.”

The Authors Guild has released a statement on AI licensing agreements for authors. The statement asserts that AI training is not covered under standard publishing agreements, subsidiary rights do not include AI rights, authors retain copyright of their original works, publishers must seek permission from authors before striking deals with AI companies, authors should get a majority share in AI licensing deals, and that the Authors Guild is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against companies that have blatantly violated copyright.

Next fall Kiran Desai will publish her first novel since she wrote The Inheritance of Loss (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), which won the Booker Prize, the Associated Press reports. Her forthcoming book The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny will be published by Hogarth in September.

Hilton Als writes for the New Yorker about Belle da Costa Greene, who became the first director of the Morgan Library & Museum in 1924, and how the talented archivist concealed her own history. An exhibition titled “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy,” co-curated by Erica Ciallela and Philip S. Palmer, will be on view at the Morgan Library & Museum until May 2025.  “Although her parents were Black, the light-skinned Greene passed as white, attributing her olive coloring to a Portuguese grandmother or to a father with ‘Spanish Cuban’ blood,” Als writes. “Greene’s tale is part of the legacy of passing in this country, and it’s alternately heartbreaking, infuriating, and astonishing to walk through a show devoted to a life that was built on repression and erasures.”

“The Accomplice,” a story by John D. MacDonald, who wrote The Executioners (Simon & Schuster, 1957), will be published for the first time in the Strand Magazine, the Guardian reports. “The Accomplice” was found in the archives at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and follows a young man “caught in a moral dilemma, torn between loyalty to his employer, his strange fascination with a one-of-a-kind femme fatale, and the lure of material gain,” says Andrew Gulli, managing editor of the Strand. MacDonald published seventy-eight books and hundreds of stories over the course of his life and died in 1986.

Dwight Garner, a critic for the New York Times writes about Percival Everett’s poetry in the wake of Everett’s 2024 National Book Award in Fiction. In addition to dozens of novels, Everett has published six poetry books. Of Everett’s verse, Garner writes, “The best of it puts on display his deep reading and his willingness, so often apparent in his fiction, to tinker with the reputations of characters both historical and literary.”

John Ingram has received the 2024 Frederic G. Melcher Lifetime Achievement Award, Publishers Weekly reports. John Ingram oversaw the transformation of Ingram, which was founded in 1970 as a book wholesaler and has grown into a $2 billion publishing operation. His vision for the company is aligned with its customers: “The better our customers do,” he says, “the better we do.”