Bethanne Patrick writes for the Washington Post about V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night (Random House, 2023) and how the novel illuminates the experiences of civilian women during the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. Ganeshananthan says she wanted “to put those women at the center…. Students, dissidents, health-care workers, people living in proximity to those bearing arms, people displaced from their homes, all of that.” She adds, “my novel is in part about a woman’s mind and consciousness. I’m thrilled to get the opportunity to go beyond why that’s a worthy topic and delve into what she thinks, the very real and varied kinds of labor she undertakes in a world that would try to give her less agency than she would seize for herself.” Brotherless Night has received multiple awards including the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024, and the Asian Prize for Fiction in 2023.

The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that Amanda Jones’s 2022 defamation case against two men who accused her of promoting pornography to children can continue, Publishers Weekly reports. Jones, a school librarian, spoke up against proposed book bans and the censorship of books about LGBTQ people and people of color. After the men claimed she was advocating to make pornography accessible to children and grooming them, she filed a defamation lawsuit. After multiple dismissals and denied appeals, the Louisiana Supreme Court ordered the appeals court to hear the case on the merits. One of the justices filed a concurrence, stating, “The burden will be on defendants to prove that plaintiff did in fact do the acts they have publicly accused her of.” Jones is not seeking significant damages—just $1 and an apology. “We teach our children to report and speak out against bullying, and that is what I am doing,” she said.

Emily Eakin writes for the New York Times about the “plagiarism plot” in contemporary literature. Referencing works such as Yellowface (William Morrow, 2023) by R. F. Kuang, A Lonely Man (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) by Chris Power, and Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024) by Danzy Senna, among others, Eakin writes, “it would be possible to assemble an entire library of diverting and accomplished contemporary work fixated on literary imitation, appropriation, and theft.” While she understands the “anxiety of influence” for writers of fiction as a “hazard of the trade,” Eakin argues that the presence of these stories has oversaturated the literary landscape.

The BBC has compiled a list of the twenty-four best books of 2024. The list includes Martyr! (Knopf) by Kaveh Akbar, Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Garth Greenwell, and All Fours (Riverhead Books) by Miranda July, among other titles. (Read “The Triumph of a Heart: A Profile of Garth Greenwell” in the September/October 2024 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine).

Freedom to Read activists celebrate a major legal victory in Arkansas in the fight against book bans, Publishers Weekly reports. Timothy Brooks, a federal judge in Arkansas, found the polarizing “harmful to minors law,” which aims “to protect younger minors from accessing inappropriate sexual content in libraries and bookstores” unconstitutional. Brooks added that the law “will only achieve that end at the expense of everyone else’s First Amendment rights” and that the law “deputizes librarians and booksellers as the agents of censorship.”

Poet Michael Palma published a translation of The Divine Comedy (Liveright) this month that includes several changes to his 2002 translation of Dante’s Inferno (Norton), NPR reports. In the new translation, Palma retains the terza rima rhyme scheme Dante invented: The first and third lines of each stanza rhyme, and the second line sets up the rhyme scheme in the following tercet. Palma says that without reproducing the rhyme scheme, “You’re losing the music of the poem.”

Literary agent Richard Curtis has chronicled the state of publishing in Hudibrastic verse for nearly forty years, and to honor the end of this tradition, Publishers Weekly has compiled all the installments published in the magazine over the years. Among his many influential poems, Curtis published a prescient installment in 2007 that observed publishers turning their authors into “brands” and his last poem to close out 2024 shares insights about the rise of book bans and generative AI.

The New York Times has published a list of books their readers loved in 2024. The list includes All Fours (Riverhead Books) by Miranda July, Creation Lake (Scribner) by Rachel Kushner, and Blue Ruin (Knopf) by Hari Kunzru, among other titles.

Ron Charles writes for the Washington Post about how a shared library serves “as an index” of “bound lives.” He narrates his love story with his wife Dawn and how “reverence for the written word was always [their] lingua franca,” adding “literature seemed to us like a perfectly natural way to sanctify a new marriage.”

In the centennial of James Baldwin’s birth, Brooklyn Public Library has opened an exhibition titled Turkey Saved My Life—Baldwin in Istanbul, 1961–1971, Fine Books & Collections reports. The exhibition, which will run until February 28, 2025, features rare photographs by the Turkish photographer Sedat Pakay and commemorates an important chapter in Baldwin’s life. During his time in Turkey, Baldwin wrote some of his most renowned works, including Another Country (Dial Press, 1962) and The Fire Next Time (Dial Press, 1963).

Sophia Nguyen writes for the Washington Post about how young readers have been inspired by craft videos on social media and discovered the old-fashioned art of bookbinding. “They’re turning paperbacks into hardbacks, re-casing them in cloth or leather, and adding foil, vinyl, or even LED lights to the covers,” Nguyen writes. Publishers, too, are joining the trend with limited editions: “Packaged in a luxe format, debuts and reissues alike have broken through to the bestseller lists.”

Liz Pelletier, who transformed Entangled Publishing from a “scrappy digital-first startup” into a “publishing powerhouse” has been named Person of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Four notables have also been named by Publishers Weekly, including Regina Brooks, the CEO of Serendipity Literary Agency and president of the Association of American Literary Agents; Skip Dye, a senior vice president of Penguin Random House; Mary Gannon, the executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses; and Nigel Newton, the founder and CEO of Bloomsbury Publishing.

Meg Day, the Guggenheim’s poet in residence for 2024, is highlighting the work of Deaf and hard-of-hearing artists at the museum, the New York Times reports. At an event on December 11, some of these poets, including Noah Buchholz, Raymond Luczak, Abby Haroun, and Raymond Antrobus, who “compose to various degrees” in signed language and English, performed their poems on the ground floor of the Guggenheim. An exhibition titled “Ekphrasis in Air,” presented on the sixth floor of the rotunda and on view until March 9, 2025, features three video screens projecting poems in American and British Sign Languages, including those by Day, Haroun, and Douglas Ridloff.

J. D. Biersdorfer has created a quiz for the New York Times in which readers can test their knowledge of Charles Dickens’s nineteenth-century London. The quiz focuses on locations and landmarks around the city that are mentioned in five of Dickens’s books.

Michael S. Roth writes for the Atlantic about the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, whose letters were published by Knopf in November. Roth writes that Sacks “discovered in himself an almost uncanny ability to pay attention to the lives of people most doctors want quickly to analyze, classify, and medicate.” Roth also emphasizes how Sacks’s correspondences reveal “a man who feared abandonment and craved acknowledgment but discovered through his practice the rewards of his great gifts of feeling, of thoughtfulness, and of care.”

Bryan Sinche’s Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) explores the resourcefulness of Black authors as they navigated what author Eric Gardner calls the “exclusionary practices of ‘mainstream’ white print culture,” JSTOR Daily reports. Because self-published authors had to pay for the production and distribution of their own books, literary endeavors came with enormous financial risk. However, self-publishing did allow for more creative freedom, which led to interdisciplinary and multi-genre works that combined fiction, nonfiction, poetry, songs, public documents, newspaper articles, and religious texts. According to JSTOR Daily, “the American Antiquarian Society counts as many as 575 self-published texts” by Black authors “between the antebellum period and the Harlem Renaissance, many of which received no scholarly attention.”

Willem Marx writes for Electric Literature about the most popular banned books in Florida, where almost a thousand books have been challenged and banned. The list includes Beloved (Knopf, 1987) by Toni Morrison, Gender Queer (Oni Press, 2019) by Maia Kobabe, and To Kill a Mockingbird (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1960) by Harper Lee, among others.

The Guardian considers whether literary prizes will survive protests against corporate sponsors and how boycotting writers are changing the publishing industry. In the past year, more than a hundred authors have signed an open letter condemning the “deep-rooted hypocrisy” of the JCB Prize for Literature, which is funded by a British construction equipment manufacturer; Richard Flanagan deferred the receipt of the Baillie Gifford prize money in protest of the fund manager’s investments in fossil fuels; and dozens of demonstrators gathered outside the Giller Prize gala, protesting the award’s lead sponsor, Scotiabank, which holds a stake in the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. Isobel Tarr, codirector of Culture Unstained, an activist group that calls on cultural organizations to divest from fossil fuels, says it’s “a positive thing that writers are not only challenging the status quo in the sector, but actively bringing about alternatives.” Elana Rabinovitch, the chief executive of the Giller Prize, disagrees, noting, “tough economic times” and the importance of sponsorship and government support.

Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins, discussed the strength of the print book market and the possible uses of AI at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference on Tuesday, Publishers Weekly reports. HarperCollins reported a 6 percent increase in sales and 61 percent rise in profits in the fiscal year that ended on June 30. Murray said his focus was on using AI to increase efficiency in editorial, sales, and marketing departments. He did not provide more detail on HarperCollins’s recent licensing deal with a large tech company but said that the publisher is “an IP company at heart, founded on copyright.”

Caitlin Flanagan writes for the Atlantic about the poem and wisdom Seamus Heaney gave her. She met Heaney in 1970, when she was nine years old and he was spending the year at the University of California in Berkeley, where her father taught English. With the poem, Flanagan says, “Seamus gave me the one thing I desperately needed growing up in that crazy family: my certificate of belonging, in this world and the next.” She later adds, “Seamus didn’t believe in a force as mere as optimism. He believed in something far greater and more powerful: hope.”

Constantia Constantinou has been appointed as the new executive director of the Whiting Foundation, Publishers Weekly reports. Most recently, Constantinou served as vice provost and director of libraries at the University of Pennsylvania. In a statement, she said, “I am thrilled to join the Whiting Foundation at a time when the Humanities and Literary programs are making an impact in supporting writers, editors, educators, librarians, and archivists who advance literature and promote the preservation of our shared cultural heritage.”

Max Norman writes for the New Yorker about Damion Searls, who has translated the work of Nobel Prize–winning author Jon Fosse, and about Searls’s philosophy of translation. Searls does not believe in translation as an art of equivalence or reflection. Rather, he believes translation is, as Norman writes, “fundamentally about experience: the translator’s experience of reading the original, which is then re-created for a new reader.” In that sense, the practice of translation is, for Searls, also about creative freedom and mutual trust.

Nikki Giovanni, a poet who wrote about Black joy, and a public intellectual who discussed race, gender, sex, politics, and love, died yesterday, the New York Times reports. Giovanni was a prolific member of the Black Arts Movement and toured the country as a celebrity author with frequent television appearances and sold-out performances. Among many other prizes, she received seven NAACP awards and thirty-one honorary doctorates. She taught at Rutgers and Queens College before working as a visiting professor and earning tenure at Virginia Tech. Giovanni’s newest book, The New Book: Poems, Letters, Blurbs, and Things, is expected to be published next year.

Haruki Murakami discusses his latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (Knopf), which began as a novella in 1980, and his evolution as a writer with the New Yorker. “I wasn’t satisfied with the original novella I wrote,” Murakami says. “And that dissatisfaction stuck in my throat like a small fish bone, a sort of loose end for me as a writer. Somehow I wanted to resurrect that world in a more striking form—that was my long-held desire.”

David J. Morris, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, writes for the New York Times about the decline of literary men, and how literature can combat “the age of Donald Trump and the distorted conceptions of masculinity he helps to foster.” Morris writes that while half of the women who matriculate at four-year public colleges graduate four years later, for men, the rate is under 40 percent. Furthermore, he notes that the creative writing program where he teaches receives 60 percent of their applications from women. Morris draws a connection between reading fiction and improved emotional intelligence, arguing that “young men need better stories—and they need to see themselves as belonging to the world of storytelling.”