Daily News

Kyle Chayka writes for the New Yorker about recent studies that demonstrate how AI is homogenizing our thoughts and writing. One study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that people who used ChatGPT to write an essay demonstrated less brain activity than those who did not. Another finding was that the texts produced by AI converged around common words and ideas. “A.I. is a technology of averages,” Chayka writes, “large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus, both in the quality of the writing, which is often riddled with clichés and banalities, and in the calibre of the ideas.”

The Supreme Court has ruled that parents can opt their children out of classes using LGBTQ+ books on religious grounds, Publishers Lunch reports.

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) has announced the 2025 CLMP Firecracker Awards—annual prizes that celebrate the work of independent literary publishers. Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) by Mubanga Kalimamukwento won the prize in fiction, Low: Notes on Art & Trash (Fonograf Editions, 2024) by Jaydra Johnson won the prize in creative nonfiction, and Mirror Nation (Wave Books, 2024) by Don Mee Choi won the prize in poetry. Each winner in the book categories receives $2,000 to be split evenly between the press and the author. Revel, a biannual magazine based in Atlanta, won the award for best debut magazine, and Circumference, a biannual journal founded in 2020, won the award for general excellence in magazines. Each winner in the magazine categories receive $1,000.

Though bookseller James Daunt has received widespread praise for rehabilitating Barnes & Noble (B&N) since he was named CEO in 2019, many independent publishers are frustrated with how little attention B&N has paid to their lists, Publishers Weekly reports. Nearly every one of the dozen independent presses Publishers Weekly interviewed said that their business with B&N has dropped significantly since Daunt took over, though all the indies emphasized they are glad B&N is in business. As one nonfiction publisher said, “Daunt’s entitled to running his business as he sees fit. Opening more stores is good. Sales being up is good. What he is doing is working—it’s just not working for us.”

Jenny Singer writes for the Washington Post about the BookTok phenomenon of the “book boyfriend,” as romance book sales continue to soar. The term refers to characters “who seem to have stridden, galloped, or brooded onto the page from somewhere in the recesses of the reader’s deepest desires,” Singer writes. “Simply put, a book boyfriend is a character you can’t stop thinking about—and longing for—beyond the page.” Singer notes the history of idealized and problematic book boyfriends, adding that the trend even existed in 1848 when “a literary magazine reported that ‘New England states were visited by a distressing mental epidemic, passing under the name of the Jane Eyre fever.’”

In the Poets on Translation series in Poetry, Heather Green writes about translating the work of Tristan Tzara and “using new sounds to root a poem in a partially shared soil of linguistic meaning.”

To celebrate the centennial of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald scholars and fans joined a boat tour around Manhasset Bay that shows how little the place has changed since 1925, the New York Times reports.

Digital audiobook sales, which have been the primary driver of sales since Spotify entered the market in November 2023, sank in April, Publishers Weekly reports. Total revenue across 1,325 publishers saw a 4 percent overall decline compared to April 2024 due, in part, to a 12.5 percent drop in digital audiobook sales across both the adult and children’s/YA categories. Adult trade fiction digital audio sales dropped 9 percent in April, and adult nonfiction digital audio sales dropped 17.6 percent.

A new prize for translated poetry has been launched by Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo Publishing, and New Directions, the Guardian reports. The biennial Poetry in Translation Prize will award an advance of $5,000 to be shared equally between the poet and translator. The winning collection will be published in the U.K. and Ireland by Fitzcarraldo Editions, in Australia and New Zealand by Giramondo, and in North America by New Directions. Submissions are open from July 15 to August 15 to poets writing in any language other than English. The winner will be announced in January 2026 and publication of the winning collection is scheduled for 2027.

Authors are posting videos of themselves editing their manuscripts on TikTok to refute allegations that they are using generative AI and to bring readers into the drafting process, Alana Yzola reports for Wired. “The publishing market is expected to grow by $18.9 million between now and 2029, according to market research firm Technavio, partially due to an influx of self-published authors,” Yzola writes. “But with scammy rewrites and digitally fabricated authors entering the market, artificial intelligence has made searching for human-made content more difficult, causing independent authors to combat what some are calling an AI-generated ‘witch hunt.’”

Five years after it was discontinued along with the industry trade show BookExpo, BookCon will return to New York City’s Javits Center next April, according to ReedPop, a boutique arm of events organizer Reed Exhibitions. Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly reports that Jenny Martin, “who headed up the earlier iteration of BookCon as well as BookExpo,” will serve as event director. Milliot writes: “Martin stressed that the revived event will bear no resemblance to BookExpo, an industry trade show, saying that the BookCon team is ‘focused wholly on delivering a consumer event.’”

A book publisher that was launched in 2023 to take advantage of the success of #BookTok, appears to be closing, the Bookseller reports. 8th Note Press, which is owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, had acquired the rights to more than thirty novels and also announced a print publishing arm in partnership with Zando, the independent publishing company that recently acquired Tin House. However, Matilda Battersby of the Bookseller writes, “[A]uthors and agents are currently negotiating the return of rights to titles acquired by the publisher, and the business’ digital presence has apparently been quietly deleted.”

Clare Mulroy writes for USA Today about how the Trump administration could change the way we read—from book bans to border policies and anti-DEI efforts that affect authors. Mulroy describes authors who, shaken by new immigration and border policies, are canceling tours and events in the U.S., budget cuts that have affected libraries and other public humanities programs, and legal actions that permit educational censorship and book bans.

Joshua Rothman writes for the New Yorker about how AI may bring the age of traditional reading to an end. He traces a history through various technological developments like e-books and audio narration, writing, “The old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become almost anachronistic.” Rothman wonders, “What will happen to reading culture as reading becomes automated?” In such a world, he writes, “It will be difficult to separate the deep readers from the superficial ones…. Text may get treated like a transitional medium, a temporary resting place for ideas.”

Katya Zimmer writes for the BBC about the trend of people turning to “creative bibliotherapy”—tailored reading recommendations with the goal of improving mental health. Zimmer cites studies that find immersion in great literature can “help relieve, restore, and reinvigorate the troubled mind—and can play a part in relieving stress and anxiety,” but she also concedes that “the evidence that reading helps mental health is complicated.” Though readers tend to be less stressed, depressed, and lonely than non-readers, it is unclear if reading fiction improves well-being, or if people with better well-being are the ones reading fiction in the first place. What is more, some research points to the fact that books can actually trigger readers with the same addictions as the characters they are reading about. Yet another study found that people with depression reported better mental health after attending reading groups for poetry and fiction.

Ellen Oh reflects on the tenth anniversary of We Need Diverse Books in an interview with Publishers Weekly. She discusses the organization’s advocacy for sustainable diversity in all parts of the publishing industry, book banning, and the Trump administration’s assault on DEI initiatives, among other topics.

Keith Woodhouse writes about an emerging literary subgenre he calls “climate assessment dramas,” Stephen Markley’s The Deluge (Simon & Schuster, 2023), and the future of climate fiction for Public Books. “Narrativizing climate change means writing about environmental catastrophe in a way that cuts against the grain of established environmental commitments,” he writes, “it means imagining unprecedented political dynamics from within the limits of our own political moment, and it means describing a near-totalizing phenomenon through what is inevitably a narrow aperture.”

Yael van der Wouden has won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel, The Safekeep (Penguin, 2024), the Guardian reports. The nonfiction award went to Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart: Two Families, One Heart, and the Medical Miracle That Saved a Child’s Life (Little, Brown, 2024). Each author received £30,000 (approximately $40,742).

The literary journal Lapham’s Quarterly is now attached to Bard College and will begin its revival with a website and podcast, Alexandra Alter reports for the New York Times. The journal is relaunching its digital presence and audio content under the editorial direction of writers Donovan Hohn and Francine Prose. Lewis Lapham, who founded the journal in 2007, died in 2024. Toward the end of his life, it was unclear if the journal would survive him—the journal was struggling financially, furloughed its staff, and stopped publishing issues. Lapham’s Quarterly’s “survival is all the more remarkable at a time when many literary journals are struggling,” Alter writes, especially due to new funding challenges presented by the Trump administration’s budget cuts to the NEA.

The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is celebrating its hundredth anniversary at a moment when Black history is under attack, the New York Times reports. The Schomburg Centennial Festival will take place on June 14, feature various literary and cultural events, and culminate with an outdoor block party and a performance by Slick Rick. The anniversary comes as the Trump Administration continues to attack diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and decimate federal funding for libraries, museums, and arts organizations in service of what Trump calls patriotic history.

Everand, the online e-book and audiobook subscription service subsidiary of Scribd, has acquired the online book club platform Fable, Publishers Weekly reports. All Fable employees will join Scribd, with Tony Grimminck, CEO of Scribd, taking over as the CEO of Fable, and Padmasree Warrior, Fable’s founder, moving into an advisory role.

Children’s reading enjoyment in the U.K. has fallen to the lowest recorded level in two decades, the Guardian reports. The decline is particularly evident in teenage boys. Of girls aged eight to eighteen, 39.1 percent said they enjoyed reading in their free time, compared to 25.7 percent of boys. Only one in three children aged eight to eighteen reported enjoying reading “very much” or “quite a lot” this year. The number of children that reported reading something daily in their free time has halved in the last twenty years, from 38.1 percent to 18.7 percent.

A federal judge has denied a preliminary injunction in American Library Association v. Sonderling, a lawsuit that seeks to stop the destruction of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Publishers Weekly reports. The court’s decision rested on an interpretation of the case that prioritized contractual issues over constitutional ones.

Pauline McLean writes for the BBC about the Victorian bookbinders who used arsenic, as well as mercury and chrome, to make striking green covers for books. Prolonged exposure to these books, which are stored in archives around the world, can cause low-level arsenic poisoning. The Poison Book Project, a collaboration in Delaware between the Winterthur Museum and the state university, compiled a list of titles that could harm humans. Inspired by this initiative, Erica Kotze, a preservative conservator at the University of St. Andrews, and Pilar Gil, a biochemist, developed a technology to examine thousands of historic books. The affordable testing device is designed to flash red when detecting toxic elements. The device will allow librarians and conservators to identify toxic books, safely store them, and still enjoy controlled access.

Sam Dolnick writes for the New York Times about the author James Frey and his relationship to art, truth, and public shaming after the scandal that followed the fabrication of some facts in his memoir A Million Little Pieces (Doubleday, 2003). Frey says he was “working in autofiction before that word existed.” This month he is publishing a novel called Next to Heaven (Authors Equity) about a swingers party and a murder.