An exhibition featuring the prolific yet often overlooked British poet, literary critic, translator, novelist, anthologist, and biographer Richard Aldington will open at the Grolier Club in New York City next month, Fine Books & Collections reports. Richard Aldington: Versatile Man of Letters will celebrate Aldington’s life and legacy through more than a hundred objects including first editions, typescripts, letters, photographs, and ephemera. The exhibition will run from September 11 through November 15.

A federal judge has sided with six publishers, the Authors Guild, and several authors and students in their lawsuit against Florida over a law that bans books that “describe sexual content” in school libraries, Publishers Lunch reports. The law banned books such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Erica Ackerberg writes for the New York Times about a recently published book that collects five hundred years of author portraits. Edited by Alexandra Ault and Catharine MacLeod, Writers Revealed: Treasures from the British Library and the National Portrait Gallery, London (National Portrait Gallery, 2025) includes portraits of John Donne, John Keats, and George Eliot, in addition to other renowned English authors.

The inaugural Story Feast festival will take place in London on September 13, with the goal of transforming market perceptions and creating more opportunities for East and Southeast Asian authors in the U.K. publishing industry, Publishers Weekly reports. This year’s Story Feast has obtained sponsorship from several publishers including Walker Books, Penguin Random House, Pan Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster, and will feature five panels with approximately twenty speakers across children’s and adult literature.

Ten authors nominated for this year’s Polari prizes, a set of U.K. awards that celebrate LGBTQ+ literature, have withdrawn their books from consideration over the longlisting of John Boyne, who has described himself as a TERF, the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, the Guardian reports. Two judges have also withdrawn from the jury, and more than eight hundred writers and publishing industry workers have signed a statement calling on Polari to formally remove Boyne from the longlist. The statement says that Boyne’s “public statements on trans rights and identity are incompatible with the LGBTQ+ community’s most basic standards of inclusion,” and points out “the context of rising anti-trans hatred and systematic exclusion of trans people from public life in the U.K. and across the world.” In a statement to the Guardian, the Polari prize said: “The hurt and anger caused has been a matter of deep concern to everyone associated with the prize, for which we sincerely apologize. We accept and respect the decisions of those writers and judges who have chosen to withdraw.” Though the prize is set to continue this year, the Polari prize added that it “will be undertaking a full review of the prize processes, consulting representatives from across the community ahead of next year’s awards, taking on board the learnings from this year.”

The Associated Press (AP) informed its freelance book reviewers that it will end its weekly reviews starting September 1, Publishers Lunch reports. The AP said it will “continue covering books as stories,” which will be written by journalists on staff. The AP added that the “difficult decision” was made after reviewing the AP’s story offerings and readership and determining that “the audience for book reviews is relatively low.”

The Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) has announced that board chair Tieshena Davis will step down after just over a year in the role, Publishers Weekly reports. IBPA vice chair Renita Bryant will lead the board until it elects Davis’s successor.

“The fundamental trait of the novels that I like is that people are always wrong,” André Aciman tells the New Yorker. “My own life has been one of always reading people and mistaking one thing for another, so it has been very useful for me to find that the great novelists I love also seem to have been in a state of perpetual error.” Among those novels he discusses is Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton and Emma by Jane Austen. 

Fearing legal action by the state, school districts in nine Florida counties have removed hundreds of books from libraries ahead of the new school year, PEN America reports. This latest wave of book bans follows a censorship campaign launched by the Florida Department of Education against Hillsborough County, which resulted in the removal of over six hundred titles from school library shelves in May, even though these titles had no challenges filed against them and did not violate state law.

The National Association of Black Bookstores (NAB2), a member-based nonprofit that aims to support and promote Black booksellers, has launched, Publishers Weekly reports. NAB2 was established by Kevin Johnson, the owner of Underground Books in Sacramento, California, who is also a former professional basketball player. Johnson says he was inspired to launch NAB2 to honor his mother, “Mother Rose” Peat West, who founded Underground Books in 2003 and died last year.

For the New York Times Magazine, Niela Orr writes about Jamaica Kincaid and her new essay collection, Putting Myself Together: Writing, 1974–, published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Orr describes how Kincaid has carried her childhood creativity through five decades of writing: “For the person with a lifelong interest in the way power works, her power is nurturing her access to that impressionable voice, being a student and devotee of it,” Orr writes. “[Kincaid] knows that maturity is not just about repressing the inner child or cradling her but learning how to rouse her from sleep. The secret is in recognizing how much of her she still has access to.”

Independent Publishers Group (IPG) has cut its publishing staff by a third and will reduce its title count by approximately 25 percent, Publishers Weekly reports. Joe Matthews, the CEO of IPG, has characterized the layoffs as part of “a year of transition.”

Kevin Breen writes for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses about how to identify generative AI in the publishing world. Breen suggests readers look out for writing that is more generalized, stories that have “perfect grammar but thin substance,” and prose that “favors summary and relies less on complex, multi-sentence exchanges of dialogue (for example).” He also encourages readers to trust their critical instincts and recommends some tools that can identify content that was generated by AI.

Yale Library has announced its fall exhibitions at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Fine Books & Collections reports. Open from September 2 through May 3, 2026, Textured Stories: The Chirimen Books of Modern Japan will focus on the history of illustrated Japanese crêpe-paper books, which typically feature handmade pages and stories drawn from Japanese fairy tales and folklore. Running concurrently until March 1, 2026, Unfolding Events: Exploring Past and Present in Artists’ Books will display more than thirty artists’ books by contemporary, mostly American artists.

Author J.B. MacKinnon, who is based in Vancouver, has filed four proposed class action lawsuits against technology companies for illegally using copyrighted works by Canadian writers to train their LLMs, Publishers Weekly reports. MacKinnon serves as the representative plaintiff in separate suits against Nvidia, Meta, Anthropic, and Databricks Inc. The lawsuits claim these companies took steps to explicitly conceal their copyright infringement, removing copyright information of books before feeding them into their AI systems, and instructing their LLMs to respond misleadingly when asked about the use of copyrighted text.

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.