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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.
Irvine Welsh will publish a sequel to his 1993 cult classic, Trainspotting, the Guardian reports. Men in Love will follow the same cast of characters—Renton, Spud, Sick Boy, and Begbie—as they try to leave drugs behind and pursue romantic relationships. The novel, which is set in the late eighties, will be published in July 2025 by Jonathan Cape.
Karl Ove Knausgaard shows the Washington Post his bookshelves and writing studio. With an eclectic collection including popular science, Danish philosophy, Shakespeare plays, and Russian literature, Knausgaard insists on the importance of re-reading books. “Ten years is enough to forget everything,” he says. Leo Tolstoy and Ursula K. Le Guin are among the authors he returns to regularly. Knausgaard also notes the literary inspiration he received from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which he says, “released my writing.”
The fatal crackdown in Gwangju in 1980, the last time South Korea declared martial law before President Yoon Suk Yeol did so this week, was narrated in Human Acts (Hogarth, 2017) by Han Kang, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the New York Times reports. In the epilogue of the novel, Kang writes about how the tragedy of Gwangju reverberates in violent oppression throughout the world. She writes, “‘Gwangju’ had become another name for whatever is forcibly isolated, beaten down, and brutalized, for all that has been mutilated beyond repair.” Human Acts has raised international awareness about the atrocities that took place in Gwangju. Lee Jae-eui, who was a college student in Gwangju in 1980, said, “For all our efforts, there was a limit, but the book did what we could not for decades until now and for decades to come.”
After more than four years of litigation, the copyright case over the Internet Archive’s scanning and lending of library books is now over, Publishers Weekly reports. The end of the litigation will now trigger a monetary payment to the plaintiff publishers, a sum that will cover the publishers’ attorney fees and litigation costs. In a statement, the Internet Archive said, “While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit’s opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has decided not to pursue Supreme Court review.” The nonprofit added, “We will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers (AAP) agreement to remove books from lending at their member publishers’ requests,” and “advocate for a future where libraries can purchase, own, lend, and preserve digital books.”
Penguin Random House (PRH) will raise its entry-level salary to $51,000, from $48,000, and increase salaries across seven employment levels, effective January 1, Publishers Weekly reports. A person at PRH familiar with the decision said the publisher wants to “lead the market” in compensation as well as in other elements of its business.
In an interview with the Rumpus, Delilah McCrea discusses her debut poetry collection, The Book of Flowers (Pumpernickel House Publishing, 2024), morbid humor, and being prescribed a dedicated poetry practice in therapy. McCrea explains, “I’ve had many great griefs in my life: the deaths of my parents, my divorce, being rejected by people I care about because I’m trans. And often I’ll have emotional responses to those events that I’m not yet able to consciously understand. The first time I’m able to start processing them is when I write a poem.”
Josh Spencer, the founder of the Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, will open another location in Studio City on December 12 for customers enrolled in a membership program, and on December 14 for the wider public, the Los Angeles Times reports. Describing the new store’s aesthetic, Spencer says, “We don’t like to repeat ourselves…. We’ll have nature sounds on the speakers more than rock music, and maybe some water fountains.” Spencer describes selling books as hard work that “offers endless creativity,” adding, “I like creating a space, an experience.”
Writer and advocate Suleika Jaouad publishes an adapted version of the foreword she wrote for the thirtieth anniversary of Lucy Grealy’s memoir Autobiography of a Face (HarperCollins, 1994) in the Washington Post. Jaouad discusses how the book helped her cope with a cancer diagnosis, writing, “the memoir is a companion for those experiencing illness, telling us that what we feel—whether rage, delight, envy, despair or hilarity at the absurdity of it all—is normal and natural.”
Indie bookstores have had a strong start to sales during the holiday season, which officially began on November 29, Publishers Weekly reports. Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday) and Robin Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Scribner) have been flying off the shelves of bookstores nationwide. Andy Hunter, the CEO of Bookshop.org, said the site’s sales “have been up significantly since the election, and that trend carried through to Black Friday, which was up 24 percent over 2023.”
The Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the New York Times have all published lists of the best books of 2024. The only title on all three lists is James (Doubleday) by Percival Everett, winner of the National Book Award in fiction. Two books are mentioned by two of the three publications: I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition (Penguin Press) by Lucy Sante and Martyr! (Knopf) by Kaveh Akbar.
A new exhibit called “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books,” has opened at the Grolier Club in Manhattan, the New York Times reports. The exhibit is curated by Maine-based collector and writer Reid Byers and features over a hundred simulacrums of imaginary books, which have been developed in collaboration with bookbinders, a letterpress printer, a calligrapher, and a magician. The imagined texts include Christopher Marlowe’s unpublished play “The Maiden’s Holiday,” “The Fairy Melusine,” which appears in A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession, and “One Must First Endure,” one of Ernest Hemingway’s first novels that was stolen in 1922 and never recovered.
Henry David Thoreau coined “brain-rot” in 1854, but the term just became Oxford University Press’s word or phrase of 2024, Bill Chappell reports for NPR. “Today,” Chappell writes, “brain rot reflects a worry that consuming the internet’s endless waves of memes and video clips, especially on social media, might numb one’s noggin.” In Walden, Thoreau used the term as he condemned over-simplification, writing, “While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” While we cannot know what Thoreau might have thought of our contemporary distractions, or our new usage of the term, Chappell cites Cristin Ellis, a Thoreau expert, who summarizes Thoreau’s directive: “Devote your attention to what you know, in your heart of heart, really matters: meaning, beauty, love, wonder, and gratitude for this earth.”
Rose Horowitch writes for the Atlantic about how Gen Z came to see reading books as a waste of time. Thirty-three professors told Horowitch the same thing: Students came to college unprepared to read books cover to cover. Part of the diminishing attention span of young people, Horowitch argues, has to do with “a cultural message: Books just aren’t that important.” Gen Z has been encouraged by society at large to de-prioritize humanistic study. So, Horowitch writes, “Everyone who’s upset about the change has a role to play in reversing it.”
Oprah Winfrey has announced Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (Grove Press, 2021) as her latest book club pick and launched The Oprah Podcast, a weekly series airing on YouTube that will feature book club authors, “global newsmakers,” and “cultural changemakers,” the Associated Press reports.
Oscar Schwartz writes for the New Yorker about an avant-garde San Francisco writer named Kevin Killian, who published over a million words on Amazon across hundreds of detailed reviews before his death in 2019. A collected volume of the reviews, which often wander into personal, essayistic vignettes, was published by Semiotext(e) in November. “What’s lost in this printed and bound volume is the risk and pleasure of the online encounter,” Schwartz writes. Nevertheless, the reviews contain traces of Killian’s literary legacy. “The memoiristic impulse is central to Killian’s œuvre,” Schwartz explains. “Much of his writing details his early life in transgressive detail.”
In the latest installment of the New York Times series By the Book, Billy Collins discusses the books he is reading, the books he is embarrassed not to have read, and his own writing. When asked how the internet has changed his writing, he replies: “The internet asks us to speed up. Poetry invites us to slow down. I write with pencil and paper, then use the computer only as a fancy typewriter. So no change really, except in its role as the most persistent distraction in human history.”
A group of Canadian news publishers, including the Canadian Press, Torstar, Postmedia, and others, sued OpenAI for using news content and violating copyright to train ChatGPT, the Associated Press reports. The publishers maintain that “OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners.” In a statement, Open AI said its models are trained on publicly accessible data, adding that the company works “closely with news publishers,” and offers them “easy ways to opt-out should they so desire.” Some news organizations, including the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic, have reached licensing agreements over the past year with OpenAI.
Two literary fixtures in the Twin Cities, Graywolf Press and the Loft, continue to flourish fifty years after their founding, Publishers Weekly reports. In 1974, Graywolf was founded by Scott Walker to publish hand-stitched poetry chapbooks, and the Loft Literary Center opened above Marly Rusoff’s bookstore in Minneapolis as a space where writers could refine their craft. Now, Graywolf is one of the nation’s most experimental and renowned publishers. The press hopes to expand into more international literature and translations, continue to put authors first, and increase multimedia publishing experiments with Graywolf Lab, a new online platform that launched last year. The Loft has also seen huge growth: In 2024 the center hosted more than 250 author events and classes and reached more than five thousand writers. The Loft has also helped establish a poet laureate program in collaboration with the city of Minneapolis, intended to “support the presence of writers in civic forums.” Looking ahead, the Loft will continue to host public keynotes and seminars, and attempt to reach the widest possible audience.
In an essay for Poetry, Ed Simon writes about the poet Jan Beatty, her ability to capture urban working-class life, her influence in Pittsburgh’s poetry scene, and her blunt lyrical style. “For Beatty,” he writes, “poetry is neither intellectual exercise nor fodder for the tenure file, but an incantatory statement of inner life—a protest, a jeremiad, a prophecy, a manifesto.” Some of Beatty’s recently published books include Dragstripping (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), American Bastard (Red Hen Press, 2021), and The Body Wars (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
For Electric Literature, Terria Smith has compiled a list of Native publishers that create space for the full spectrum of Indigenous storytelling and experience. The list is comprised of nearly a dozen presses, including Great Oak Press, which was founded by the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians; Abalone Mountain Press, a Diné woman-owned publishing house, operating on the traditional lands of the Akimel O’odham; Kamehameha Publishing, which was founded in 1888 and amplifies Hawaiian voices, “focusing on ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language), ʻike Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian knowledge), and kuanaʻike Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian perspectives)”; and Arvaaq Press, which is an Inuit-owned company with the goal of safeguarding and promoting the stories, knowledge, and talent of the Inuit.
The startup publisher Spines, which plans to publish up to eight thousand books next year and shorten the publishing process to two to three weeks per title, will charge authors between $1,200 and $5,000 to have their books edited, proofread, formatted, designed, and distributed with the help of AI, the Guardian reports. Spines, which raised $16 million in seed funding, says that authors will retain 100 percent of their royalties and denies being a vanity publisher or “self-publishing” company, insisting instead on being a “publishing platform.” The chief executive of the Society of Authors said: “We would warn authors to think extremely carefully before committing to any author-contribute contract” that requires writers to pay for their work to be published.
A. J. Bermudez writes for Electric Literature about the dangers of reducing women to the muses of creative men. Motivated in part by the recent revelation of Cormac McCarthy’s decades-long relationship with Augusta Britt, whom he met when she was sixteen, and the endless conversations it has spawned about the characters Britt inspired in McCarthy’s oeuvre, Bermudez writes that “this is how many of us—many young women, not exclusively but especially—have been taught to be loved: as an object.” Bermudez adds, “As a muse, I’ve relished the attention, the view from the pedestal. As a writer, I’ve at times exploited others like I was doing them a favor.” “Now,” she says, “I’m working on resisting the writer’s oft-fetishized solipsism in favor of invitation, collaboration, and consent.”
A museum dedicated to Lord Byron will open in Ravenna, Italy, in the same building where Byron pursued an affair with the wife of an aristocrat and completed some of his most renowned works, the Guardian reports. In 1819, Byron moved into Palazzo Guiccioli, a residence owned by the husband of Countess Teresa Guiccioli, whom Byron met at a party in Venice. Visitors will be able to walk through the rooms of the house and see where Byron wrote books such as Don Juan, Sardanapalus, and The Prophecy of Dante. The museum will open to the public on November 29.
Ken Brooks, the founder of the consulting firm Treadwell Media Group and a founding partner of Publishing Technology Partners, writes for Publishers Weekly about how publishers and authors should “capitalize on the growing demands for high-quality training data” and strike AI deals that protect the interests of authors and copyright holders. Brooks argues that publishers should know their value, reach ethical arrangements with authors and agents, maintain transparency in licensing agreements, and embrace the inevitable change that AI brings.
The French Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who is known for his criticism of religious extremism and authoritarianism, went missing after his arrival in Algiers on November 16, Morocco World News reports. Sansal has been detained in Algeria for over a week and is set to appear before a prosecutor in Algeria today. His lawyer, François Zimeray, has called for a fair trial and compliance with Algeria’s international commitments to human rights and legal principles. Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, including Annie Ernaux, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, and Orhan Pamuk, among others, have signed a petition calling for Sansal’s release.
Funded by the Norwegian government and managed by the National Library in Oslo, the Jon Fosse prize for translators has been established to support “a partly invisible” and often poorly compensated profession at increasing risk of being replaced by AI, the Guardian reports. The prize will be one of the highest endowed literary awards in Europe, with one author each year earning 500,000 NOK (approximately $45,000) for making “a particularly significant contribution to translating Norwegian literature into another language.” The award will be for those translating from Bokmål and Nynorsk, the two official written standards of the Norwegian language. The winner of this year’s inaugural prize is Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel, one of Fosse’s longstanding translators into German.
The recent disclosure of a decades-long relationship Cormac McCarthy had with Augusta Britt, who was sixteen when they met, has shocked many readers, but not scholars familiar with McCarthy’s life and letters, the New York Times reports. Britt described her relationship with McCarthy as consensual to Vanity Fair, but a debate has now ensued about the author’s legacy, and about how much Britt inspired the characters in his fiction.
Florida state attorneys have asked a federal judge to dismiss a book banning lawsuit filed by six major publishers, the Authors Guild, students, parents, and several authors, Publishers Weekly reports. The state claims that the plaintiffs lack standing to bring the lawsuit, which challenges the new state law, HB 1069. Activists working to combat book banning maintain the law is fueling a rise in unconstitutional book bans in school libraries. The state argues: “The First Amendment does not require the government to provide access to particular materials in public-school libraries or to have school libraries at all.” A pre-trial conference is set for early December.
Bloomsbury has announced a distribution agreement with Spotify to make its catalogue of audiobooks available through Spotify’s “Audiobooks in Premium” offering. Bloomsbury’s catalogue will be available to Spotify Premium subscribers in the U.K., U.S., Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Listeners without a Premium subscription can purchase titles on an individual basis via Spotify. Authors on Bloomsbury’s list include William Dalrymple, Alan Moore, Madeline Miller, Dan Jones, Ann Patchett, and others, whose words are coupled with audiobook narrations by Meryl Streep, Emilia Clarke, Adjoa Andoh, and Jamie Lee Curtis, among others.
Trump’s promises to conservatives have increased fears of additional book bans, the Los Angeles Times reports. The recent election has emboldened conservative parental groups, including Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, in their efforts to remove books they deem inappropriate for children. Trump’s threat to deny federal funding to schools that recognize transgender identities and studies could also affect curricula and library collections. Linda McMahon, Trump’s appointee as secretary of education, “chairs the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-connected organization that has criticized schools for teaching ‘racially divisive’ theories, notably about slavery and a perspective about the nation’s founding it views as anti-American.”
Microsoft has launched an imprint called 8080 Books (named after an Intel microprocessor) that aims to be faster than traditional book publishing, the Guardian reports. The imprint will focus on books related to technology, science, and business. “Technology has quickened the pace of almost every industry except publishing,” the company said in a statement. 8080 Books seeks to accelerate the process of manuscript to marketplace and will also reissue “significant works” and out of print books that remain relevant to contemporary readers.
Members of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) and the Publishers Association of the West (PubWest) have merged into a single entity this week after a unanimous vote on November 13, Publishers Weekly reports. IBPA, which was founded in 1983, has 3,000 members and is currently the largest trade association for publishing professionals in the United States. PubWest, which was founded in 1977, has about 150 members, who will be transferred into IBPA’s database. The organizations anticipate that combining will serve their collective interests and allow the associations to more easily share resources.
The winners of the 2024 National Book Awards were announced at a ceremony in New York City last night: Jason de León won in the nonfiction category for Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (Viking Books); Lena Khalaf Tuffaha won in the poetry category for Something About Living (University of Akron Press); Yáng Shuāng-zǐ won in the translated literature category for Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press), which was translated by Lin King; and Percival Everett won in the fiction category for James (Doubleday).
Tasha Sandoval writes for Public Books about a new and developing “abuelita canon” that features grandmothers, their sacrifices, and their legacies. She argues that these novels are “shedding light on the lives of the women who came before us: writing them into full human existence, beyond caricature.” The canon includes Catalina (One World, 2024) by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Oye (Hogarth, 2024) by Melissa Mogollon, and Candelaria (Astra House, 2023) by Melissa Lozada-Oliva. (Read Ten Questions for Karla Cornejo Villavicencio). “Honest intergenerational conversations are what make the writing of this new abuelita canon possible,” Sandoval adds.
Anne Michaels was awarded the 2024 Giller Prize for her novel Held (Knopf) at a gala in Toronto on Monday while outside, pro-Palestinian demonstrators protested the Giller Foundation’s lead sponsor, Scotiabank, which holds a stake in the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, the Toronto Star reports. The past year has been tumultuous for the Giller Foundation with multiple protests including an open letter signed by more than forty authors calling on the foundation to cut ties with Scotiabank, a separate letter signed by more than three hundred members of the literary community calling for a boycott of the prize, and two international judges stepping down from the prize’s committee. Though the Giller Prize removed Scotiabank from its name in early September, the bank remains the lead sponsor of the award. Michaels earned $100,000 with her win this week.
The independent distributor National Book Network (NBN), which was founded in 1986 by Jed Lyons, will close next year, and its 150 clients have been offered the chance to move to Simon & Schuster (S&S) Distribution Services, Publishers Weekly reports. After the sudden closure of Small Press Distribution in March, and the imminent closure of NBN, the largest independent distributor left in the United States is Independent Publishers Group. The distribution segment of the publishing industry is now dominated by the distribution divisions of Penguin Random House, S&S, Hachette, and Macmillan, as well as the distribution segment of Ingram Content Group, Ingram Publisher Services.
A new study in the journal Scientific Reports has found that nonexpert readers cannot consistently distinguish between poems written by William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, or Sylvia Plath and Chat GPT 3.5 attempting to imitate each of them, the Washington Post reports. Readers even preferred the AI-generated verse, and were more likely to guess the AI-generated poems were written by humans than real works by renowned poets. In fact, the five poems most often judged to be written by AI were all penned by human writers.
Three candidates—Lindsay Cronk, the Dean of Libraries at Tulane University; Andrea Jamison, an assistant professor of school librarianship at Illinois State University; and Maria McCauley, the director of libraries at the Cambridge Public Library in Massachusetts—are under consideration for the role of president of the American Library Association (ALA) from 2026–2027, Publishers Weekly reports. Ballot mailing for the ALA election will begin on March 10, 2025, and end on April 2, 2025.
HarperCollins has confirmed it has plans to sell authors’ work to an AI technology company, 404 Media reports. A spokesperson for HarperCollins said, “While we believe this deal is attractive, we respect the various views of our authors, and they have the choice to opt in to the agreement or to pass on the opportunity…. HarperCollins has a long history of innovation and experimentation with new business models.” One HarperCollins author, Daniel Kibblesmith, who received a non-negotiable one-time offer of $2,500 to include his book in the AI deal, said, “I see it as the beginning of two diverging markets, readers who want to connect with other humans across time and space, or readers who are satisfied with a customized on-demand content pellet fed to them by the big computer so they never have to be challenged again.”
Barnes & Noble has announced the sale of Sterling Publishing Co. Inc. to Hachette Book Group. Barnes & Noble acquired Sterling in 2003 and the publisher now includes adult imprints Union Square & Co., Puzzelwright Press, Sterling Ethos, and SparkNotes as well as several children’s and gift and stationary imprints. Since 2021, Sterling has been led by Emily Meehan, who oversaw the publisher’s rebranding in January 2022 to Union Square & Co.
Independent bookstores have become a new battleground in China in the ongoing suppression of dissent and free speech but Chinese-language bookstores are thriving abroad, the Associated Press reports. At least a dozen bookstores in China have been shut down in the last few months, and the climate has been “chilling” for China’s publishing industry. In recent years, however, Chinese bookstores have appeared in Japan, France, the Netherlands, and the United States due to the policing of free expression in China and growing Chinese communities abroad.
Unionized bookstore workers held a rally outside the Barnes & Noble flagship store in New York City on November 14 in advance of holiday sales, Publishers Weekly reports. The rally, organized by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, was part of efforts to reach a contract with workers by the end of the year, with an agreement on wages being the final major point to negotiate. Workers from Barnes & Noble, Book Culture, Greenlight, McNally Jackson, and the Strand Book Store were in attendance.
Stephen King, the Guardian, and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia are among those who have said they will stop posting on X (formerly Twitter), due to concerns about disturbing content on the social media platform, the Guardian reports. King noted a “toxic” atmosphere, and La Vanguardia said the site had become an “echo chamber” for disinformation and conspiracy theories.
Elizabeth Nunez, a Trinidad-born academic and writer whose fiction explored family obligations, the pernicious effects of colonialism, and the immigrant’s nostalgia for home, has died, the New York Times reports. Dr. Nunez was the author of eleven novels, including her most recent title, Now Lila Knows (Akashic Books, 2022), and served as the director of the National Black Writers Conference from 1986 to 2000. Dr. Nunez wrote about her homeland, but also resisted the reduction of her identity. She told the Miami Herald in 2006: “I don’t mind being classified as a Caribbean writer, as long as it’s a subcategory in literary fiction.” Read Dr. Nunez’s essay, “Widening the Path: The Importance of Publishing Black Writers” in the January/February 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Black Garnet Books, the first Black woman-owned brick-and-mortar bookstore in Minnesota has found a new owner five months after Dionne Sims announced it was for sale, Publishers Weekly reports. Sims founded Black Garnet in July 2020, two months after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. The bookstore initially operated as a pop-up to sell works by BIPOC authors but changed to a brick-and-mortar model when Sims received a $100,000 matching grant from the City of St. Paul after raising $113,900 through a GoFundMe campaign. The new owner, who has not yet disclosed her identity, describes herself as a “proud Black queer woman” and leverages creativity in her social justice activism and community organization. She is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota and will introduce herself to the store and its community on Thursday, November 21.
Alexis Wright, a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria, was awarded the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature for her novel Praiseworthy (Giramondo Publishing, 2023), the Guardian reports. The book, told in ten parts, follows more than two hundred years of colonization through the story of a remote Aboriginal town. Wright spent ten years writing Praiseworthy and said the novel is the consequence of “really deep thought and hard work over a long period of time, with many, many false starts and reworking and reworking...until I’m absolutely sure that every page, every part of that book stands up and won’t fall over.” The novel also received the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the $60,000 Stella Prize, among other awards.
Georgia Bodnar has launched a boutique literary agency called Noyan Literary in New York, Publishers Weekly reports. The agency is hoping to represent “writers of ambition who are writing books of enduring consequence in both fiction and nonfiction,” Bodnar said. The initial list of authors includes Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde, who won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2019, and Debra Kamin, a reporter for the New York Times, among others. Bodnar hopes that running an independent agency will make her “a little bit more accessible to writers…who don’t really know the people to know, who don’t really have the relationships, but who have the talent.”
Katherine Rundell, whose book The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure (Faber and Faber, 2022) was published in the United States yesterday by Doubleday under the title Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures, will donate all her royalties from the book’s sale to climate charities in protest of Donald Trump’s re-election, the Guardian reports. “In the scheme of things, it’s very small—but I want my book to be a tiny part of the urgent fight ahead of us,” Rundell said.
Willem Marx writes for Electric Literature about the closure of Banned Books USA and the persistent movement to ban books in the state of Florida. Banned Books USA has been working to counteract censorship efforts in schools and libraries over the past year. In collaboration with Bookshop.org and Electric Literature, Banned Books USA offered Florida residents free access to over nine hundred banned books. Banned Books USA also made targeted gifts to Florida organizations such as Gainesville’s Pride Community Center of North Central Florida and Read Aloud Florida. In total, the organization donated 2,362 books, sponsored fourteen events, and reached thousands of Florida readers. On October 31, 2024, Banned Books USA paused operations after using the funds that were part of a one-time donation from Paul English as well as funds raised with community support.
Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital (Grove Press, 2024), Publishers Weekly reports. In an interview after the announcement of this year’s longlisted titles, Harvey said, “I wanted to write about our human occupation of low earth orbit for the last quarter of a century—not as sci-fi but as realism. Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer? Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral? These were the challenges I set myself.”
Lynn Steger Strong writes for the Atlantic about how Lili Anolik’s new book Didion and Babitz, out this month from Scribner, fixates on the alleged rivalry between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. Strong observes: “Every time Anolik noses her way toward parallels between Didion and Babitz, she veers away, doubling down instead on the split between them.” Strong wonders about the compulsion to pit women against each other, and asks, “What has the world done to us, and particularly to women, to make us so quick to make such blanket statements, to make us think that only a single type of woman writer might have a right to make it out intact?”
Though Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) has been banned for decades in India, the prohibition is now in doubt because of “some missing paperwork,” the Associated Press reports. Last week, a court in New Delhi concluded proceedings on a petition filed five years ago that challenged the then-government’s ban on the import of the novel. Because authorities could not produce the notification of the ban, the judges declared, “We have no other option except to presume that no such notification exists.” The petitioner’s lawyer, Uddyam Mukherjee, said that the court’s ruling means that at least for now, nothing prohibits someone from importing the book into India.
Louis Menand writes for the New Yorker about Edwin Frank’s book Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and its argument linking twentieth-century authors as disparate as Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and Chinua Achebe. Menand relays Frank’s view that “the twentieth-century novel is a distinct literary genre,” and deems the book “an ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious effort to map it.” In distinguishing Frank from academic literary critics, Menand writes, “Frank is interested, as literature professors generally are not, in the feel of certain books and writers, and he is adept at capsule characterizations.”
Percival Everett and Samantha Harvey have been given the best odds by Ladbrokes of winning the 2024 Booker Prize, which awards £50,000 (approximately $64,321) to the best English-language novel published each year in the United Kingdom, the Guardian reports. Everett’s novel James (Doubleday) is a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s point of view. Harvey’s novel Orbital (Grove Press) follows six astronauts circling the earth in twenty-four hours. The winner of the Booker Prize will be announced at a ceremony in London tomorrow.
A children’s book titled Billy and the Epic Escape (Penguin Random House, 2024) penned by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has been retracted after it was condemned for being offensive to Indigenous Australians, the Associated Press reports. In one subplot of the book, an Indigenous girl lives in foster care, and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Corporation criticized the story and its perpetuation of stereotypes about Indigenous Australians. In a statement, Oliver said, “It was never my intention to misinterpret this deeply painful issue,” and added that he and his publishers “have decided to withdraw the book from sale.”
M. L. Rio writes for Electric Literature about the fantasy of academic life and the dark reality she explores in her fiction. “Academia demands—and rewards—uncompromising devotion and unquestioning acceptance,” she argues. “The cruelest truth of the academy is how hard it is to keep loving something which is slowly killing you.”
A group of Hachette Book Group (HBG) employees has written a letter condemning the new conservative imprint, Basic Liberty, and the appointment of Thomas Spence, the former president and publisher of Regnery, and senior advisor of the Heritage Foundation to lead it, Publishers Weekly reports. Two days after the presidential election, HBG announced that the “new conservative imprint will publish serious works of cultural, social, and political analysis by conservative writers of original thought.” The letter from the protesting employees declares, “We condemn HBG’s decision to put profit before its own people, to let the promise of financial gain overtake morality and conscience, and to platform a person who contributes to the advancement of the Heritage Foundation’s vision for America.” The Heritage Foundation is the publisher of the political initiative known as Project 2025. At least one HBG employee—Alex DiFrancesco—has resigned.
