The New York Public Library has acquired the archive of Oliver Sacks, Fine Books & Collections reports. The archive contains documents that span eighty years, from Sacks’s birth in 1933 to his death in 2015, including manuscripts for his sixteen books along with his drafts, margin notes, and revisions. It also includes notes for hundreds of speeches, photographs relating to Sacks’s life and work, family correspondence, and handwritten notebooks and travel journals, among other materials.

First editions of Jane Austen’s six novels will be on display for the first time at the house where she wrote them in Chawton, Hampshire, the Guardian reports. The collection includes “her brother Frank’s copy of Emma,” “her brother Edward’s copies of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,” and “a copy of Sense and Sensibility in the original publisher’s binding,” according to the Guardian.

The Nobel Prize in Literature, which was announced today, has the power to bring new readers to previously unknown authors—with financial ramifications for the writers and their publishers, Marketplace reports. For instance, Transit Books, the publisher of Jon Fosse, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, sold out of all the Fosse stock they had within 48 hours of the Swedish Academy’s announcement. Transit decided to print tens of thousands more copies of his work, but they had to pay for printing and royalties to the author before they received revenue from sales. Such a risky decision could bankrupt a publishing house, but in Transit’s case, they hired more staff, started publishing more books in hardcover, and have sold over 50,000 copies of Fosse’s books in the past year. 

South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, NPR reports. Kang is the first Korean writer to win the award. In its citation, the Swedish Academy commended the author “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of life.” In 2016, Kang won the International Booker Prize for her novel The Vegetarian (Portobello Books, 2015). Watch Kang and translator Debora Smith speak about working together on The Vegetarian in the Poets & Writers Theater.

In advance of tomorrow’s announcement for this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, A.O. Scott considers if “great literature” is overrated. “Greatness is not the same as popularity,” he writes in the New York Times. “The great books are the ones you’re supposed to feel bad about not having read. Great writers are the ones who matter whether you read them or not.”

Chinese avant-garde author Can Xue is Ladbrokes’ favorite to win this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the Guardian reports. Others on the list of likely authors include Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Gerald Murnane, and Thomas Pynchon. Can Xue, the pen name of Deng Xiaohua, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize twice: for her novel Love in the New Millennium (Yale University Press, 2018), translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, and for her short story collection I Live in the Slums (Yale University Press, 2020), translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. The Swedish Academy is scheduled to announce the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

The London-based small press Herb Lester lets readers follow in the footsteps of their favorite book characters and writers, the Washington Post reports. Lester’s literary maps offer itineraries but they also feature retro illustrations, typography and graphics, and original art. Upcoming guides include Frida Kahlo’s Mexico City, Joan Didion’s Los Angeles, and Ian Fleming’s London.

Salmon Rushdie, who survived a stabbing attack in 2022, is writing a new work of fiction that will comprise three novellas, each one relating to one of his “three worlds,” India, England, and America, the Guardian reports. Rushdie, whose most recent book, Knife, is a reflection on the attempted murder, made the announcement at Lviv BookForum, the biggest book fair in Ukraine.

Tom Rachman, whose debut novel, The Imperfectionists (The Dial Press, 2010), was a best-seller, writes for the New York Times about going back to school in his late forties following a successful career as a novelist. “I’d glued my dignity to my occupation,” he writes, “and it was a struggle to pry them apart.”

The writer Megan Kamalei Kakimoto recommends books that illuminate Hawaii’s rich history and storytelling spirit for the New York Times. Her list includes This is Paradise (Hogarth, 2013) by Kristiana Kahakauwila, Written In the Sky (Mutual Publishing, 2005) by Matthew Kaopio and Life of the Land (Ai Pohaku Press, 2017) by Dana Naone Hall, among others. 

A federal judge has ordered the Crawford County Public Library in Arkansas to stop segregating books deemed inappropriate by some local residents into special “social sections” and to return the books to general circulation, Publishers Weekly reports. The judge held that “it is indisputable” that the creation and maintenance of the library’s new social sections “was motivated in substantial part by a desire to impede users’ access to books containing viewpoints that are unpopular or controversial in Crawford County.” The decision is a win for advocates fighting book banning efforts in the United States.

The Black British Book Festival is expected to attract about 4,000 people this Saturday at the Barbican Centre in London, the Guardian reports. Selina Brown, who founded the festival in 2021 because of the challenges she and other Black authors face in publishing, said, “There is still a lot of work to be done…. That is why we’re seeing the rise of self-publishing, the rise of hybrid publishing, the rise of people being on social media…. You are forced to take a different route because the route that you are trying is just not feasible.” 

The Bookseller talks to publishers in the UK about their stance on X (formerly Twitter). “As a result of concerns around the future direction of X...we are pausing all activity on the platform,” a spokesperson for Pan Macmillan is quoted as saying. “Disinformation, misinformation and hate speech continue to spread on X with little or no interruption and we expect the recently confirmed changes to the platform’s block feature will further undermine the well-being and safety of users.” Still, many publicists, editors, and booksellers find X a useful resource, despite the diminishing levels of engagement. Bloomsbury, for instance, told the Bookseller it would remain on X because the publisher views it as the “primary text-based social network.”

The National Book Foundation has announced the twenty-five finalists for National Book Awards in the categories of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature. The finalists include Kaveh Akbar, Percival Everett, Salmon Rushdie, Anne Carson, Fady Joudah, and others. The winner in each category, to be announced at a ceremony on November 20, will receive $10,000; the finalists will each receive $1,000.

Amy Stuber writes for Electric Literature about loving short story collections and “the hive of situations and characters” they offer when the publishing world prefers novels. “I liked the quiet pockets I was able to build into short stories,” she writes, “but that felt harder to make work in a novel.”  

Ta-Nehisi Coates has returned to public discourse on social justice with a new book titled The Message (One World, 2024), the New York Times reports. His latest book is a letter to his writing students at Howard University; a meditation on storytelling; a travelogue of his trip to Senegal, where he visited a site of the slave trade; an account of book banning efforts; and, in large part, a reflection on a 2023 trip he took to Israel-Palestine. In The Message, Coates likens his books to his children: “My work is to set the table, craft the argument, render the world as I imagine it and then go,” he says.

Washington State University Press (WSUP), which had been slated for closure after university officials voted to eliminate its $300,000 annual funding, has been granted a second chance, Publishers Weekly reports. WSUP was founded in 1928 and has published more than 260 titles; it also serves as distributor for Spokane independent poetry publisher Lost Horse Press, which focuses on Ukrainian poetry.

Over thirty years, 40 percent of publishing jobs disappeared, Publishers Weekly reports. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people employed in book publishing in the United States fell to 54,822 in 2023, down from 91,000 in 1997. New technology, consolidation, and outsourced labor are all cited as possible reasons for downsizing in the industry.

Verso Books is holding a Kickstarter campaign to help get its books into the U.K. trade market, Publishers Weekly reports. In a thread posted on X, Verso explained that Marston Book Services, a subsidiary of United Independent Distributors, which went bankrupt over the summer, owes the press almost £1 million for book sales stretching back to January. 

Morgan Talty discusses his debut novel, Fire Exit (Tin House, 2024), the politics of indigeneity, blood quantum, colonization, and the manipulation of stories with Electric Literature.“Let’s say colonizers wipe out languages, stories, everything that makes a culture, a culture, yet still politically treat it as an entity,” Talty says. “It’s like, we die but we don’t die. We’re still here.” He asks, “How do we reclaim our identity then?” (Read Ten Questions for Morgan Talty.)

Jeanine Cummins, the author of the novel American Dirt, which faced intense criticism over cultural appropriation after its publication by Flatiron Books in 2020, is publishing a new novel about three women coping with the aftermath of a hurricane in Puerto Rico, the Washington Post reports. Speak to Me of Home is forthcoming from Henry Holt in May 2025.

Michelle Aielli has been named interim executive director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) following the retirement of executive director Cynthia Sherman in June. Aielli has over twenty-five years of experience in book publishing and most recently worked as the vice president and publishing director of Hachette Books at Hachette Book Group. Meanwhile, the AWP board of directors has launched a national search for a permanent executive director.

A panel discussion planned for Saturday as part of the Albany Book Festival, sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute, was canceled after two of the authors boycotted the event due to the planned participation of Elisa Albert, WAMC reports. In an e-mail, the organizers told Albert that two of the three authors who were scheduled to appear with Albert “don’t want to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist.’”

Arundhati Roy’s first memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, will be published in September 2025 by Scribner, the Associated Press reports. Roy, the author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The God of Small Things, said in a statement that she began working on the book after her mother’s death in September 2022. 

Banned Books Week, which was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in libraries, bookstores, and schools, will be observed starting September 22. The theme of this year’s week-long series of events is Freed Between the Lines, and Banned Books Week invites librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types to host events and participate.

Thomas Gebremedhin considers what is missing from the discourse on diversity in publishing in an essay for Literary Hub. “It has been uncomfortable to read stories about Black editors that hinge entirely on their subjects’ race, flattening individuals and cohorts, effacing their sensibilities. I feel abridged.” He adds, “It is essential that our conversations surrounding the dearth of people of color in publishing attempt to highlight our dimension as well as the full and complicated scope of the crisis in the industry.”

Helen Phillips discusses her new novel, Hum, which takes place in a near-future city with the urgent backdrop of climate change and ubiquitous artificial intelligence, at the Millions. Phillips says she is not intimidated by the current state of machine learning technology. “For me, some of the intrigue and fascination with artificial intelligence is very much in the realm of fantasy,” she says, “because it seems that, so far, algorithms tend to accelerate bias and emphasize the worst aspects of human behavior.” Her curiosity is different: “But if there was some way to have an artificial intelligence that was able to consolidate the wisdom, the knowledge, the ethical and philosophical understandings, and actually enact those principles, which, as humans, we find very hard to enact, what would that be like?” 

Deesha Philyaw discusses truth-telling, how a corporate job can help a writer creatively, and the importance of mentorship and community in a conversation with the Creative Independent. “I would not have a writing career if I did not have community and mentors,” Philyaw says.

In an essay for Poetry magazine, Johannes Göransson considers the merits of mimicry in translation. “Mimicry allows us to think about translation in terms beyond mastery, competence, and ‘naturalness,’” he writes. “We need a model of translation that does not seek to contain the noise and transformations caused by translation, but instead finds poetry in this transgressive circulation.”

Nicole Graev Lipson interviews Jerald Walker about his new essay collection, Magically Black and Other Essays, blending personal revelation and cultural critique to examine Black American life, in the Los Angeles Review of Books. “This book is about racial identity,” Walker explains, “how it’s formed and created, how you can learn to be a race, and how you can unlearn what race means through the course of a lifetime.”

Columbia College Chicago is considering cutting eighteen “underperforming” majors from curriculum, NBC Chicago reports. The list of programs under consideration includes the MFA in Fine Arts, BA in Creative Writing, and Cultural Studies. A final list of program changes, cuts and “consolidations” will be announced in early 2025.