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The L.A. Times Festival of Books, taking place on April 18 and 19 this year and including almost 100 panels/programs as well as 550 storytellers, recently announced a literary lineup that includes Roxane Gay and Margaret Atwood, alongside recent Booker Prize judge Sarah Jessica Parker. Comedian Larry David, musician Lionel Richie, and scholar Reza Aslan will also be featured. As part of the festival, on April 17 the forty-sixth annual L.A. Times Book Prizes will be held, honoring Amy Tan with the Robert Kirsch Award, We Need Diverse Books with the Innovator’s Award, and Adam Ross with the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, alongside many others.

Aspen Words has announced the five finalists for the 2026 Aspen Words Literary Prize: Rabih Alameddine for The True, True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove Press), Sonora Jha for Intemperance (HarperVia), Charlotte McConaghy for Wild Dark Shore (Flatiron Books), Maria Reva for Endling (Doubleday), and Jess Walter for So Far Gone (Harper). Given annually for “an influential work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture,” the prize confers a cash award of $35,000, one of the largest for fiction writing in the United States. Past winners include Mohsin Hamed, Tayari Jones, and Tommy Orange. This year’s winner will be revealed on April 23.

In a keynote address to attendees of the London Book Fair, Pan Macmillan CEO Joanna Prior argued that concerns about AI have led publishers to neglect a more urgent threat: the declining number of book readers. “AI changes how we work,” said Prior. “But the reading crisis changes whether we have a business at all.” Prior made the case that the shift in reader engagement “is neurological as much as cultural,” Publishers Weekly reports, describing “a generation rewired for the scroll over the page.” Prior called for literary advocacy “as relentless as the algorithms we are competing with,” and for following readers’ interests to make “the book as accessible, as urgent, and as socially relevant as the notification.”

Book Riot unpacks the State Department’s recent decision to halt passport services at certain public libraries due to their status as a nonprofit/non-governmental organization. “In rural areas, these libraries may have acted as the primary passport agency for many people who would have otherwise had to drive long distances and take time off work to apply for a passport.”

Last week Amy Griffin, best-selling memoirist of The Tell (The Dial Press), was sued by a former classmate who accused the author of using her story of sexual abuse for her book, reports the New York Times. The lawsuit was filed in California almost one year following the publication of the book, stating, “‘The Tell’ constitutes neither a genuine nor harmless memoir.” Selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club last year, the memoir mentions detailed memories from childhood that Griffin claims to have recovered while under the influence of MDMA therapy.

Former Amazon executive Greg Greeley has been named the new CEO of Simon & Schuster, effective immediately, reports Publishers Lunch. At age sixty-two, Greeley is one of the first Big Five CEOs from outside the literary industry. Richard Sarnoff, a company board chair, commented: “Greg Greeley is a talented and strategic leader with wide-ranging experience managing enterprises across physical and digital markets. His depth of expertise and avid love of books give us the confidence that he is the right CEO to take Simon & Schuster forward as it begins its next 100 years….” He is following Jonathan Karp, who served as CEO of Simon & Schuster for five years and will remain with the company as publisher of the new Simon Six imprint.

Publishers Lunch reports that thirteen publishers, including Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster, together with the Association of American Publishers (AAP), have brought a lawsuit against Anna’s Archive, a website used by tech companies to source pirated books for training AI models. The suit alleges that the copyrights of more than 140 million texts have been violated by Anna’s Archive. “Anna’s Archive is a brazen pirate operation that steals and distributes millions of literary works while outrageously offering access to AI developers in exchange for crypto payments,” said Maria A. Pallante, president and CEO of AAP, in a statement to the press. “To fight back, we must use all available tools and believe this action in U.S. court will make a difference. The unfortunate reality is that creators face a level of digital piracy today that is so staggering it is almost unbelievable—it is an affront to the public interest.”

Ina Steiner reports on the end of Amazon’s book club program for EcommerceBytes. Last Friday, the technology company notified customers that it was winding down Amazon Book Clubs as of March 1 to “focus on other book discovery features for readers.” Steiner notes that “the Book Club feature had allowed members to use a widget to suggest books to fellow members and to endorse suggestions made by other members.” Amazon’s offered alternative to customers was exploring Goodreads, which was acquired by Amazon in 2013. 

Wikipedia is now restricting certain contributors who were paid to implement AI in translating existing Wikipedia articles into other languages, as the editors discovered that these translations include “hallucinations,” reports 404 Media. These AI-generated errors have also led to new policies for the online encyclopedia, including the use of an independent AI model to peer review the current AI translations. 

Sixteen novels have been announced as the longlist for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction, “with settings ranging from climate-ravaged islands to a near-future Kolkata” and including nine titles from independent presses and seven debuts, the Guardian reports. The annual award confers a prize of £30,000 (approximately $40,100) to a work of fiction written in the English language by a woman. The titles comprising this year’s longlist are Gloria Don’t Speak (Weatherglass Books) by Lucy Apps, Paradiso 17 (4th Estate) by Hannah Lillith Assadi, Moderation (Atlantic Books) by Elaine Castillo, Flashlight (Jonathan Cape) by Susan Choi, Dominion (Europa Editions) by Addie E Citchens (Europa Editions), The Benefactors (Sceptre) by Wendy Erskine, The Correspondent (Michael Joseph) by Virginia Evans, The Mercy Step (Cassava Republic Press) by Marcia Hutchinson, The Others (Fly on the Wall Press) by Sheena Kalayil, Kingfisher (Saraband) by Rozie Kelly, Heart the Lover by Lily King (Canongate), Audition by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press), A Guardian and a Thief (Scribner) by Megha Majumdar, Wild Dark Shore (Canongate) by Charlotte McConaghy, The Best of Everything (Tinder Press) by Kit de Waal, and A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing (Dead Ink) by Alice Evelyn Yang.

The Authors Guild has launched its Human Authored certification program, Publishers Lunch reports. For $10 per book (free to Authors Guild members), authors “can register to use the Human Authored certification mark to distinguish their human-written books from AI-generated books.” According to the program’s usage guidelines, “The certification mark may only be used in connection with literary works for which the text itself was fully authored by one or more human beings and not generated by AI, except for a de minimis amount (such as through the use of AI-powered spelling and grammar check applications). Use of generative AI to create a table of contents, indices, or other auxiliary parts of a book, or for researching, brainstorming, outlining, or any purposes other than generating text does not disqualify a work from being Human Authored.”

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has revealed the five finalists for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Judges Samantha Hunt, Tania James, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow considered 387 eligible novels and short story collections by American authors published in the U.S. in 2025 and selected the following finalists: Dominion (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Addie E. Citchens, The White Hot (One World) by Quiara Alegría Hudes, The Sisters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Heart the Lover (Grove Press) by Lily King, and Small Scale Sinners (A Public Space Books) by Mahreen Sohail. The winner, to be announced in early April, will receive $15,000; the remaining four finalists will each receive an honorarium of $5,000.

The digital catalog service Edelweiss has announced a discount tier for publishers, allowing presses to make their titles searchable within the platform, visible in saved filter results, and eligible for inclusion in curated collections for bookstores, libraries, and media sources, reports Publishers Weekly. The company’s CEO, John Rubin, said, “This new offering is designed to provide a clear, affordable option for title visibility, while still preserving the functionality and value that our full-service publisher partners rely on.” This announcement comes on the heels of criticism from the literary community when Edelweiss raised prices and fees following its acquisition by Valsoft in December 2024. Details on the rollout will be announced in the coming months, and the launch of this new offering is expected later this year.

The American Library Association has taken to social media to “strongly denounce” House Resolution 7661 (H.R. 7661), new legislation initiated on Tuesday aimed at censoring trans narratives and “sexually-oriented material” in public school libraries. Earlier this week, Kelly Jensen wrote about the resolution for Book Riot. “Such a broad definition also ensures that this kind of bill could be applicable in any situation where it would benefit the banners,” argued Jensen. “It isn’t a stretch to see a bill like this used to outright ban all books by or about LGBTQ+ people under the guise of it being ‘sexually oriented.’”

Tom Hanks is set to star in the film adaptation of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Kirkus Reviews reports. The acclaimed novel, for which Saunders received the Booker Prize, imagines a grieving Abraham Lincoln amid a polyvocal chorus of ghosts as Lincoln’s recently deceased son lingers between death and rebirth. The film adaptation will combine live action and stop-motion animation, and will mark the prolific actor’s first time portraying an American president. (Saunders spoke about conceiving of the novel as such and cultivating “narrative alertness” in a feature by Kevin Larimer in the March/April 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)

Tyrant Books, an independent publisher based in Rome, Italy, and New York City, will resume publishing, reports Publishers Weekly, after being largely dormant following the sudden death of its founder Giancarlo DiTrapano in 2021. Luke Goebel, who previously worked as an unpaid assistant at Tyrant Books, will now oversee its editorial direction and expansion, serving as one of two individuals having an acquisition of 50 percent ownership. Regarding the reason behind this acquisition, Goebel notes, “I did it for one reason: to ensure that Tyrant would never be absorbed into any corporate ecosystem whose financial roots trace back to power structures fundamentally misaligned with what this press represents.” The other owner is Matthew Johnson of Fat Possum Records, who provided early funding for the press.

Spotify has announced the launch of Audiobook Charts, a publicly-available list of its most popular audiobook titles of the week, Book Riot reports. In addition to listing its overall most-streamed audiobooks, Audiobook Charts will offer breakdowns of popularity by genre in categories including romance, science fiction and fantasy, and memoir. At the top of the inaugurual chart for overall listens is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as narrated by Billie Fulford-Brown.

The Booker Prize Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2026 International Booker Prize, an eclectic group “featuring stories of witchcraft, warfare, trauma, transformation, and more.” The list comprises thirteen titles translated from eleven langauges, and includes three debuts. The longlisted titles are The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran (Scribe) by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin; We Are Green and Trembling (New Directions) by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers; The Remembered Soldier (New Vessel) by Anjet Daanje, translated from Dutch by David McKay; The Deserters (New Directions) by Mathias Énard, translated from French by Charlotte Mandell; Small Comfort (HarperCollins) by Ia Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson; She Who Remains (Sandorf Passage) by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel; The Director (Summit) by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin; On Earth As It Is Beneath (Charco) by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan; The Duke (Foundry) by Matteo Melchiorre, translated from Italian by Antonella Lettieri; The Witch (Vintage) by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump; Women Without Men (Syracuse University Press) by Shahrnush Parsipur, translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh; The Wax Child (New Directions) by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken; and Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf) by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. The winner will be announced on May 19.

A new study by the National Literacy Trust shows that only 10 percent of boys age 14 to 16 read daily for pleasure in the UK, according to a report by the Guardian. “While reading declines for both boys and girls in early adolescence, there are ‘signs of recovery’ among girls in later teenage years, but boys’ engagement remains persistently low.”

The New Yorker’s Casey Cep covers the unlikely success of a bookstore in Alabama with a unique business model. The Alabama Booksmith, run by ninety-year-old Jake Reiss, only sells signed, first editions of hardcover books, mostly at the publishers’ prices. Cep writes, “Because Reiss guarantees sales of several hundred copies, he can sometimes convince publicists to add a book-tour stop in Birmingham, even if it’s just for a lightning signing during which he and his team serve as a kind of human conveyor belt, shuffling signature-ready books by so speedily that the author can make it to a nearby city for another event that same night. When that strategy doesn’t work, he’s not above begging authors directly.”

A New Jersey school district faces controversy after pulling a title from its curriculum in response to a mental health crisis at its schools, NPR reports. After five reported suicide attempts by students at Columbia High School in Maplewood, administrators’ “most immediate response” to the crisis was to remove The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz from its AP English Literature and Composition curriculum. After pushback from parents, students may now read the book with signed permission—terms that PEN America says amount to a book ban. “Book restrictions in schools and libraries are often linked to objections to their treatments of sexuality or to their discussions of race. But the situation in New Jersey is part of a much larger trend, according to PEN America. In a November 2024 report, the group found nearly 60 percent of banned books are young adult titles that specifically depict grief, death, suicide, substance abuse, depression and other mental health concerns, and sexual violence.”

For the New York Times, Parul Sehgal considers Toni Morrison as “a wave of Morrisoniana” deepens scholars’ sense of her ambition: “to confront the immense silences in the archives where Black life and thought are concerned.” Recent works including Toni at Random by Dana A. Williams, On Morrison by Namwali Serpell, and Language as Liberation, a volume collecting Morrison’s Princeton lectures, comprise an ever-richer portrait of her genius and legacy, also felt in the reissuing of Morrison’s eleven novels with new introductions by contemporary literary luminaries. “When a writer dies, what survives of her work is often that which is most legible, that which can be taught—her craft and technique, the public statements that distill her aims and themes. But what gives Morrison’s novels their force lies below the skin of language and outside the logic of neat précis. Morrison seems to know forbidden things—all the secrets of childhood and maternity and the marriage bed.” (An excerpt from Toni at Random, on Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House, appears in the July/August 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)

Michael Silverblatt, the host of KCRW’s Bookworm for over three decades, passed away on February 14, reports the Los Angeles Times. He was 73 years old. Known for his in-depth 30-minute interviews with authors such as David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion, and Zadie Smith, and his wide breadth of literary knowledge, Silverblatt became a prominent personality thanks to his unique voice and voracious reading style. During a talk at Cornell University in 2010, he said, “I’m as fantastical a creature as anything in Oz or in Wonderland. I like it if people can say, ‘I never met anyone like him,’ and by that they should mean that it wasn’t an unpleasant experience.”

A year-long celebration of Toni Morrison kicks off today in the legendary author’s home state of Ohio, on what would have been her 95th birthday. First festivities of Beloved: Ohio Celebrates Toni Morrison include a community gathering hosted by members of Morrison’s family in her hometown of Lorain; a Lit Cleveland event featuring Namwali Serpell, author of the new essay collection On Morrison; and library events for children honoring Morrison’s work for young readers. A statewide virtual book club will also invite participants to read all eleven of Morrison’s novels over the course of the year in the order of the time they were set, beginning with Mercy. 

This August, Zando will launch a new horror imprint, Evil Twin, with hopes of replicating the “explosive success” of its Slowburn romance line, Publishers Weekly reports. Nancy Trypuc will lead as publishing director for the imprint while continuing in the role of deputy director of marketing for Zando, where Trypuc has used the press’s social media reach to cultivate an enthusiastic community of romance readers. “We know how to build a robust and playful presence both online and IRL to meet genre readers where they gather,” said Trypuc in a statement. 

Harlequin, one of the biggest publishers of romance novels in the world, plans to shut down its historical romance line in September 2027, according to a report by Reactor. “The move includes ceasing U.S. and U.K. retail efforts as well as digital publishing related to the line in those markets. The company reportedly will not acquire any new works for the line moving forward.”