Kelly Jensen of Book Riot offers an overview of the anti-book ban laws that have passed in a number of states in 2025, including examples of the four Rs of book censorship (a term and classification coined by Emily Knox): Restriction, Redaction, Relocation, and Removal. 

Shira Perlmutter, the former copyright office director, has been denied temporary reinstatement as the lawsuit over her firing by the Trump administration continues, Publishers Lunch reports.

The Academy of American Poets has awarded $1.1 million to twenty-three poet laureate fellows across the United States. As part of the initiative, Lester Graves Lennon and Sehba Sarwar, the poet laureate fellows of Altadena, California will launch “After the Fires: Healing from Histories,” a poetry project that seeks to provide space for the Altadena/Pasadena community to document history and heal from the devastation caused by the 2025 Eaton Fire. Lennon and Sarwar will collaborate with the library district and local arts organizations to offer monthly workshops and readings that will culminate in a publication and daylong literary festival.

The finalists for the thirty-seventh annual Lambda Literary Awards, celebrating outstanding LGBTQ+ voices in literature, have been announced. This year’s shortlist includes Anyone’s Ghost (Penguin Press) by August Thompson, Good Dress (Tin House) by Brittany Rogers, Cinema Love (Dutton) by Jiaming Tang, Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press) by Saretta Morgan, and Pretty (Knopf) by KB Brookins, among other titles.

Bookshop.org, the online bookselling platform, reported 65 percent year-over-year growth for the first half of 2025, Publishers Weekly reports. The platform has already sold $1 million in e-books, after introducing the format in January. Bookshop.org works with 2,471 bookstores and with around 90 percent of the American Booksellers Association members, according to Andy Hunter, the CEO of Bookshop.org. To counter Amazon’s Prime Day event earlier this month, Bookshop.org conducted an “Anti-Prime sale,” offered free shipping, and ultimately earned $1.5 million in sales.

The Booker Prize longlist has been announced, and it features authors from nine different countries, making it the most global list of books the award has seen in a decade, the Guardian reports. The list includes The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hamish Hamilton) by Kiran Desai, The South (4th Estate) by Tash Aw, and Flashlight (Jonathan Cape) by Susan Choi, among others. The shortlist will be announced at a ceremony in London on September 23, and the winner will be announced on November 10.

A preliminary injunction has found that the mass cancellation of previously awarded National Endowment for the Humanities grants violated the constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act, Publishers Lunch reports.

The second novel by George Saunders will be published in January 2026 by Random House, Kirkus Reviews reports. The novel, which is titled Vigil, follows K.J. Boone, an oil company CEO on his deathbed who is guided into the afterlife by Jill “Doll” Blaine, a woman who died young in 1976. “I found myself wondering about that generation of climate change deniers who, through obfuscation and spin, put progress on hold for twenty or thirty years, and are now old and passing away,” Saunders said in a statement. “I wondered whether such a person might, at the end of his life, feel inclined to repentance. If he had a chance to explain himself, would he try?”

The same day the White House released an AI strategy document that emphasized rapid AI integration within government operations and the importance of eliminating obstacles to AI development, Trump said adhering to copyright was “not doable,” Publishers Weekly reports. Trump also compared training AI models on copyrighted material to human beings reading a book or article.

For Electric Literature, the staff of the Brooklyn Public Library recommends books that changed the shape of politics and reading in the United States. The list includes Parable of the Sower (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993) by Octavia E. Butler, A People’s History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980) by Howard Zinn, and Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) by Rachel Carson, among other titles.

Bookstagram entrepreneurs, independent bookstores, and Libro.fm are encouraging audiobook listeners to gather for walks outside, Publishers Weekly reports. Readers meet at a predetermined location, listen to their book of choice, or discuss it with others, all while following an easy walking route at a conversational pace. The walks let readers turn a solitary activity into a social, outdoor experience.

Elisabeth Egan writes for the New York Times about the trend of independent bookstores showcasing their pets. Egan writes that these dogs, cats, birds, fish, lizards, and bunnies “serve as quiet mascots—steadfast and loyal, deigning to have their heads patted or ears scratched while humans tend to the business of words.” Social media has also put some bookstores on the map thanks to their nonhuman residents. “Books and animals both provide joy, companionship, and windows into other worlds,” Egan writes. “The former are, admittedly, a lot tidier.”

In the Poets on Translation series in Poetry, Layla Benitez-James writes about her anxiety around titles, names, and naming. But in recalling T. S. Eliot’s phrase, “good writers borrow, great writers steal,” Benitez-James finds solace. “If I can begin to think of the writer as the original thief, some of my own preciousness around translation lessens,” she writes, “and the weight of this question of translating titles in particular begins to fall away.”

Meghan O’Rourke writes for the New York Times about how AI is affecting creative writing students. O’Rourke began experimenting with AI to understand what it could offer humanities students. She writes: “My conversations with AI showcased its seductive cocktail of affirmation, perceptiveness, solicitousness, and duplicity—and brought home how complicated this new era will be.”

The American Library Association has released its 2025 strategic plan, which focuses on advocacy and activism, Publishers Weekly reports. Objectives include developing partnerships with organizations whose civic missions align with library priorities and fundraising in an increasingly precarious landscape for the arts and humanities.

The Giller Prize, which is the largest literary award in Canada, will be forced to shut down at the end of this year without federal funding, the Globe and Mail reports. The annual $100,000 prize for fiction is in urgent need of financial assistance after severing ties to its lead sponsor, Scotiabank, earlier this year. The Giller Foundation faced criticism and protests for its association with Scotiabank, whose subsidiary 1832 Asset Management was at one point the biggest global investor in Elbit Systems Ltd., Israel’s most prominent publicly traded arms company.

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs has announced Michelle Aielli, who has served as interim executive director since September 2024, as its executive director. Aielli has worked in book publishing for over twenty-five years and most recently served as vice president and publishing director of Hachette Books at Hachette Book Group.

Katy Hershberger writes for Publishers Lunch about yesterday’s senate hearing on copyright and AI. The Association of American Publishers submitted written testimony, and professors and copyright experts testified that the piracy of copyrighted books by tech companies is both unlawful and unethical.

New Hampshire’s governor, Kelly Ayotte, vetoed a bill on July 15 that would have allowed parents to request certain books and materials be removed from their child’s school unless the school could show they had “serious” scientific, educational, artistic, or political value, New Hampshire Public Radio reports. “I do not believe the State of New Hampshire needs to, nor should it, engage in the role of addressing questions of literary value and appropriateness,” Ayotte wrote.

Erik Ofgang of the New York Times reports on the challenge facing librarians who try to provide access to e-books and audiobooks and find that they “generally cost much more” than the print version of the same books. “Librarians complain that publishers charge so much to license e-books that it’s busting library budgets and frustrating efforts to provide equitable access to reading materials,” Ofgang writes. “Big publishers and many authors say that e-book library access undermines their already struggling business models. Smaller presses are split.”

Danika Ellis of Book Riot makes a case for why joining a book club may be the best option for introverts looking to make new friends. “In all the book clubs I’ve gone to, there’s a round of introductions before getting into discussing the book. Usually, that means names, pronouns, and a quick sentence of what you thought about the book,” Ellis writes. “For anyone shy about social interactions, this is a great structure to get the chance to both learn people’s names and introduce yourself without having to wait for the right moment to jump in.” 

Ella Stern of Cambridge Day reports on protests by faculty, students, and alumni of Lesley University’s MFA program against “recent hiring practices and changes to the program,” which unionized adjunct professors say have violated the terms of their collective bargaining agreement and have had an effect “on student admissions and experience.” Stern points to an April 2024 article in the Harvard Crimson reporting that Lesley’s enrollment has dropped 45 percent and the university has laid off almost 20 percent of its core faculty since 2019. “Lesley administrators, who did not respond to requests for comment, have cited their ongoing market research and desire to find a novel approach to the program as reasoning for these changes, said third-semester creative writing MFA student Audrey Lee and the program’s poetry chair, Erin Belieu,” Stern writes. “Administrators have also said that the university is not making money from the creative writing masters program; Belieu said she believes that administrators’ changes and mismanagement created this situation.”

Independent publisher John Martin, who brought the work of authors such as Paul Bowles, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, and Wyndham Lewis to readers through Black Sparrow Press, died on June 23 at his home in Santa Rosa, California, the New York Times reports. He was 94. Martin founded Black Sparrow Press in 1966 and over the years elevated the scrappy indie press to become what the Los Angeles Times called “California’s premier literary publisher.” In 2002 he sold it to Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins, as Poets & Writers Magazine’s Joy Jacobson reported at the time. 

In an op-ed for the New York Times, David Brooks claims “literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanizing effect on our culture,” pointing to the absence “of literary fiction on the Publisher’s Weekly yearly Top 10 best-selling list since 2001” and the NEA’s survey showing that the number of people “who even claim to read literature has been declining steadily since 1982.” 

Alexandra Alter of the New York Times writes about novelist Hannah Pittard, whose marriage to author Andrew Ewell ended nearly ten years ago, and the thorny issue of who gets to tell the story of the breakup between two writers. In this case, Pittard wrote a memoir, We Are Too Many (Henry Holt, 2023), then Ewell wrote a novel, Set for Life (Simon & Schuster, 2024), with a plot that “so closely mirrored their troubled past that at first Pittard thought it must be a memoir,” then Pittard wrote a satirical novel of her own about it, If You Love It, Let It Kill You, out next week from Henry Holt.

Fanny Howe, the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including the poetry collection Second Childhood (Graywolf Press, 2014), died on July 9 at the age of 84. Kazim Ali, cofounder and chairperson of Nightboat Books, which published Howe’s book-length essay Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken as its very first title in 2005, writes: “There would be no Nightboat Books without Fanny Howe. It would be wrong to say she was a polar star or a beacon in the darkness, because Fanny believed in mystery, in unknowing, in bewilderment. She didn’t mean to shine a light, but rather to see in the darkness.” In celebration of her life and work, the Paris Review unlocked her Art of Poetry interview from its archive. 

Publishers Weekly outlines efforts by independent booksellers to counter Amazon’s annual Prime Day sale, which this year runs from July 8 to July 11. Among the “anti–Amazon Prime Day promotions” are Bookshop.org’s “anti-Prime” sale, which offers free shipping, and Libro.fm’s offer of three audiobook credits for the price of one to new members (to counter Amazon-owned Audible). 

In an essay for Business Insider, Alice Amayu writes about being accepted into the University of Sydney’s creative writing graduate program and deciding not to enroll after seeing how AI is “ruining the media landscape and the book industry.” Amayu writes: “There are days when I wonder what my classes would have been like, and it makes me sad that I’ll never experience them. Many people are still pursuing MFAs, and it’s still worth it.”

In an interview with the Guardian’s Hannah Marriott, Barbara Kingsolver talks about Higher Ground, the recovery residence that she recently established using royalties from her best-selling novel Demon Copperhead, a retelling of Dickens during Virginia’s opioid crisis. The residence, Marriott writes, “provides a safe place to live for women whose lives have been torn apart by addiction, who are seeking long-term recovery.”

The BBC’s Steven McIntosh unpacks the details of an investigation by the Observer’s Chloe Hadjimatheou into author Raynor Winn’s best-selling book The Salt Path. Hadjimatheou alledges that Winn fabricated or gave misleading information about some parts of the narrative of her book, which chronicles the author’s 630-mile walk on the South West Coast Path in England with her husband, who had received a diagnosis of a terminal illness. Winn has described the Observer’s article as “highly misleading.”