Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed Salman Rushdie, has been found guilty of attempted murder, and faces up to thirty-two years in prison, the New York Times reports.

Sophia Stewart writes for Publishers Weekly about Stephanie Anderson’s book Women in Independent Publishing: A History of Unsung Innovators, 1953–1989 (University of New Mexico Press, 2024). The book features interviews with twenty-five visionary women and nonbinary editors and publishers who helped shape the small press landscape from the 1950s to the 1980s. As to why women continue to dominate the independent publishing landscape, Carey Salerno, the publisher of the poetry press Alice James Books, says, “I think women—and other individuals who have been historically marginalized—are drawn to independent publishing because it’s a more caring and democratic landscape.” Michelle Dotter, publisher and editor in chief of Dzanc Books, offers another theory: “Is it too cynical to say, because there’s less money and power involved? Sincerely, I think it’s partly that, and partly that the Big Five hasn’t always made space for women in the top ranks.”

For Book Riot, Kathleen Schmidt, the founder and CEO of KMS Public Relations, discusses how tariffs will impact book costs for readers. The tariff on Chinese imports will likely increase the price of books that are more expensive to print. Schmidt explains that those books include board books for children, illustrated books, four color cookbooks, and special edition hardcovers. If readers “notice that the price of books is increasing, it’s not to punish the consumer,” Schmidt adds. “It’s to keep the publishing ecosystem flowing” and to fairly compensate the people working on those books.

The American Booksellers Association will celebrate its 125th anniversary as an organization supporting and advocating for independent booksellers at this year’s Winter Institute, which runs from February 23 to February 26 in Denver, Colorado, Publishers Weekly reports. The conference will include talks, presentations, and networking with editors, publishers, booksellers, and more than a hundred authors.

The social media readers’ platform StoryGraph, which uses AI to offer readers tracking tools and recommend their next books, has now reached 3.8 million users, the Guardian reports. StoryGraph founder, software engineer and developer Nadia Odunayo, says, “I think the number one thing, if people are comparing us with Goodreads, is that a lot of people do go: ‘It’s just not owned by Amazon.’”

Oprah Winfrey’s latest book club pick is Dream State (Doubleday, 2025) by Eric Puchner, the Associated Press reports. Set mostly in Montana and California, the novel is about a love triangle among two college friends and the woman they both wanted to marry. In a statement, Winfrey said, “This is the kind of book you won’t want to put down written by a brilliant storyteller.”

Hundreds of poets, playwrights, dancers, visual artists, and others have signed a letter calling on the National Endowment for the Arts to reverse the current administration’s grant requirements that forbid the promotion of diversity or “gender ideology,” the New York Times reports. The letter states: “Obedience in advance only feeds authoritarianism,” and adds that “the arts are for and represent everybody.”

Fatima Jalloh offers advice on how to host poetry workshops for the Creative Independent. They advise facilitators to understand the different types of workshops (academic, community, generative, craft, etc.), create a safe, welcoming environment, manage time, filter feedback, and adapt to the needs of the participants.

Six publishers have come together to form the Stable Book Group, Publishers Weekly reports. Chris Gruener and Keith Riegert launched the collective, which merges four existing publishers—She Writes Press, Trafalgar Square Books, Ulysses Press, and VeloPress—with the recently founded Galpón Press joining as a client, and Mountain Gazette Books joining as a partner. Staff will work across all the companies allowing the publishers to share resources as well as editorial, production, and accounting operations.

Hachette Book Group grew sales by 7 percent in 2024, with Grand Central, Orbit, and Little, Brown Books for Young readers delivering “particularly exceptional results,” according to CEO David Shelley, Shelf Awareness reports.

San Francisco Center for the Book (SFCB) has announced its second national mentorship award in book arts for this summer, Fine Books & Collections reports. The upcoming mentors will be Julie Chen and Zach Clark, and applications are open until March 2. SFCB will offer two mentees a $3,000 stipend to cover program expenses, travel, accommodation, materials, and other costs. The award “provides mid-career and established artists from underrepresented communities with the opportunity to learn from professionals in the bookbinding, letterpress, and artists book fields.”

HarperCollins has announced an upcoming edition of “Hansel and Gretel” that will combine Stephen King’s words and the late Maurice Sendak’s illustrations, the Associated Press reports. Sendak created sketches for set and costume designs for the Humperdinck opera adaptation of “Hansel and Gretel” in 1997. The new edition, which is set to be published in September, will pair those drawings with King’s retelling of the renowned tale.

Faber, a renowned independent publisher in the U.K., has launched Faber U.S., a new division in the United States, Publishers Weekly reports. Faber’s international sales director, Mallory Ladd, will be the director of the division, which plans to publish forty books this year. Publishers Group West will oversee distribution.

Arts organizations are reacting to the announcement from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) that it will prioritize programs that celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States and defund a program that supports diversity, equity, and inclusion, and underserved communities, NPR reports. The funding that has been cut primarily served small organizations that have “limited access to the arts relative to geography, ethnicity, economics, and/or disability.” The NEA also stated that applicants must adhere to “all applicable executive orders” from the White House.

Salman Rushdie, who wrote the memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House, 2024), will face his attacker in court, NPR reports. The trial of his assailant, Hadi Matar, who has plead not guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault, began on Monday.

Yale Library has awarded two prizes for the highest achievement in American poetry. Arthur Sze has been announced the winner of the 54th Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, which includes a cash prize of $175,000. Sze is the author of twelve books of poetry, a chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Major Jackson is the first recipient of the recently created Patricia Cannon Willis Prize for American Poetry, which includes a cash prize of $25,000. The book prize recognizes Jackson’s collection Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002-2022 (Norton, 2023).

Adam Gopnik writes for the New Yorker about the story behind Lillian Ross’s famous profile of Hemingway, which the public perceived as ridiculing the renowned novelist. Letters between the friends reveal Hemingway as “admirably stoic and steadfast” about the piece, according to Gopnik. In one letter to Ross, Hemingway writes: “I always explain to people that we are good friends and that you had no malice toward me and they act as though I were getting soft in the brain and could not tell when I had been devastated and irreparably harmed.”

The Emerson Collective, the LLC founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, is helping indie bookstores develop community outreach as well as “not-for-profit and hybrid business models that could help them ‘supercharge’ their programming,” Publishers Weekly reports. Will Ames, the portfolio director for philanthropy at the Emerson Collective, called booksellers “curators” who excel at executing “mission-related work” like readings, educational projects, and literacy programs, adding, “I want every small town that needs a bookstore to have one that is really thriving.”

Barbara Kingsolver has donated royalties from her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Demon Copperhead (Harper, 2022) to create a home for women in recovery in Lee County, where the novel is set, the New York Times reports. The center, “Higher Ground Women’s Recovery Residence,” will house between eight and twelve women recovering from drug addiction and offer counseling and other forms of educational support. Kingsolver, who grew up in rural Kentucky and lives on a farm in Virginia, felt she had to engage with the opioid epidemic in the region in her writing. She said, “The first week that this book hit the stores and was so successful, I said...I’m going to be able to do something concrete with this book that will help the people who told me their stories.”

Dozens of literary organizations and publishers have released a collective statement condemning President Trump’s executive order that declares his administration will enact “language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male,” Publishers Weekly reports. The statement, which is signed by the American Booksellers Association, the National Book Critics Circle, PEN America, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and many others, asserts: “The ripple effect of this order will undoubtedly affect public schools, public libraries, and the literature that is shelved in both. Among the many harms it causes, the order targeting transgender, intersex, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming Americans threatens unconstitutional censorship that could have a grave impact on literature for years to come.”

Ukraine’s Chytomo Award recipients for 2024 have been announced and honored in Kyiv, Publishing Perspectives reports. Anton Martynov, the founder and former director of Laboratoria, was honored as the Book Publishing Market Trendsetter; BaraBooka received the Book Initiative That Promotes Reading award for “consistent efforts to cultivate a community of professionals and readers of Ukrainian children’s literature”; PEN Ukraine was named the Ukrainian Book Ambassador for amplifying the voices of Ukrainian authors and promoting Ukrainian culture on a global stage; and a special award provided by Frankfurter Buchmesse went to Creative Women Publishing, “the first feminist publishing house in Ukraine focused on literature for and about women.”

Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins, has been elected chair of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for the 2025–2026 term, Publishers Weekly reports. In a statement, he said: “Our dynamic and rapidly evolving industry faces complex challenges, from addressing AI copyright issues to safeguarding freedom of expression. Now more than ever, the AAP’s mission to champion outcomes that protect and incentivize creative works is critical.”

Author Neil Gaiman is accused of human trafficking and sexual abuse in a new lawsuit filed by Scarlett Pavlovich, who worked for Gaiman and his estranged wife Amanda Palmer as their family’s nanny, New York magazine reports. The suit also names Palmer for finding Pavlovich for Gaiman and failing to warn her about Gaiman’s past alleged sexual misconduct.

The diary Joan Didion kept twenty-five years ago is about to be made public, the New York Times reports. Didion started the diary around her sixty-fifth birthday and wrote in it after sessions with her psychiatrist. The diary includes notes about her conversations in therapy, which touched on her anxiety, depression, at times fraught relationship with her daughter, and her reflections on her work and legacy. The diary will be published on April 22 by Knopf under the title Notes to John.

Salman Rushdie is set to testify at the trial of Hadi Matar, the man accused of attempting to murder Rushdie at a literary event in 2022, the Guardian reports. The trial, which begins jury selection today, was postponed from early 2023 when Matar’s defense team requested the manuscript of Rushdie’s memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House, 2024). Rushdie has attributed surviving the assault to a series of “man-made miracles.”

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2025 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The list includes James (Doubleday) by Percival Everett, Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Garth Greenwell, and Creation Lake (Scribner) by Rachel Kushner, among other titles. (Read “The Triumph of a Heart: A Profile of Garth Greenwell” in the September/October 2024 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine).

Granta Trust is launching a new publishing imprint called Granta Magazine Editions, with three titles in translation forthcoming in 2025, Publishers Weekly reports. The first books are We Would Have Told Each Other Everything, written by Judith Hermann and translated by Katy Derbyshire; Allegro Pastel, written by Leif Randt and translated by Peter Kuras; and Hunter, written by Shuang Xuetao and translated by Jeremy Tiang.

Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm (Entangled Publishing) has sold 2.7 million copies in its first week, the New York Times reports. Onyx Storm, which belongs to the romantasy genre and is the third book in a series, has become the fastest-selling adult novel in twenty years.

Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint, writes for Publishers Weekly about why he will no longer require blurbs for books. He offers other artistic industries as examples: “How often does a blurb from a filmmaker appear on another filmmaker’s movie poster? A blurb from a musician on another musician’s album cover?” Manning argues that the amount of time required by authors to obtain blurbs distracts them from writing. He does offer a caveat: “If a writer reads a book because they want to (not because they feel beholden) and comes away so moved by it that they can’t resist offering an endorsement, we will be all too happy to put it to use…. But there will no longer be an excessive amount of time spent on blurb outreach.”

The Authors Guild has launched a “Human Authored” certification to preserve the authenticity of literature written by people and distinguish it from works that are AI-generated. Mary Rasenberger, the CEO of the Authors Guild, said, “The Human Authored initiative isn’t about rejecting technology—it’s about creating transparency, acknowledging the reader’s desire for human connection, and celebrating the uniquely human elements of storytelling…. In a market increasingly filled with AI-generated content, readers deserve to know whether they’re experiencing authentic human creativity.”

Students in Utah have been prohibited from bringing in their own copies of books that have been banned in libraries and classrooms, the Washington Post reports. Among the titles banned are Oryx and Crake (Doubleday, 2003), by Margaret Atwood, Tilt (Simon & Schuster, 2012) by Ellen Hopkins, and Forever (Bradbury Press, 1975) by Judy Blume.

In an essay titled “In Search of Logged Time,” Mahika Dhar writes for Public Books about how leaving memory to technology risks the loss of individual and collective stories. Dhar uses Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as an example of how literature can engage “the rigorous and painstaking task of capturing a memory.” “Yet,” she writes, “the value—and methods of access—of memories are growing increasingly tenuous in the digital age as information on the internet is deleted at random while projecting the illusion of omnipresence.”

Digital borrowing of e-books, audiobooks, and digital magazines rose by 17 percent in 2024 from the previous year at OverDrive, Publishers Weekly reports. Around 366 million e-books were borrowed last year, the most of any format, though the rate of increase was highest in digital magazines with checkouts rising to 95.1 million. The most borrowed digital checkouts through OverDrive aligned with print book sales.

Bookshop.org is launching an app that will allow independent bookstores to sell e-books to readers, the New York Times reports. Andy Hunter founded Bookshop in 2020 as an online bookstore alternative to Amazon, but Amazon has dominated e-book sales with its Kindle since 2007. Lea Bickerton, the owner of the Tiny Bookstore in Pittsburgh, said, “With our current political environment, I suspect there are going to be more people who want to pivot out of the Amazon ecosystem.” Eventually, Hunter also hopes to build an alternative to Goodreads, the book review site owned by Amazon.

The U.S. Department of Education has decided to end their investigations into book bans, the Guardian reports. In the official press release, the book ban investigation initiative is referred to as a “hoax” and the bans proliferating in school districts are described as “commonsense processes by which to evaluate and remove age-inappropriate materials.” Various advocacy organizations have responded, including Authors Against Book Bans with a statement that they stand “with the 71 percent of Americans who are opposed to book bans,” and the American Library Association with an assertion that “the new administration is not above the U.S. constitution.”

An exhibition celebrating a century of the New Yorker will open at the New York Public Library on February 22 and run until February 21, 2026, Fine Books & Collections reports. The show includes “founding documents,” of the magazine, “rare manuscripts, photographs, and cover and cartoon art drawn from the library’s holdings.” In addition to spotlighting the contributions of renowned writers such as E. B. White, Hannah Arendt, and Vladimir Nabokov, the exhibition draws attention to the often overlooked creators of the magazine, including artists, copyeditors, typists, and fact-checkers.