Those who’ve longed to go on the road with Jack Kerouac will have a singular opportunity to get their hands on the next best thing this March, when the original typescript scroll of his iconic works goes up for auction at Christie’s, the Guardian reports. Clocking in at around 12 feet in length, the manuscript that would become On the Road was typed in April 1951 over the course of three weeks, its pages of tracing paper taped together to avoid transitions to a new page. Christie’s book specialist Heather Weintraub described the experience of encountering the typescript scroll: “When you roll it out it actually looks like a road. There are no paragraphs or chapters and it uses the real names of the characters before the publisher asked Kerouac to change the names.” Previous auctions of the scroll brought controversy about whether such an artifact belongs in a private collection. “I personally hope that a public institution will buy it so it can be seen by everyone,” Weintraub said.
Daily News
Every day the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine scan the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know.
For Book Riot, Kelly Jensen reports on “a few ways to support our Minneapolis neighbors through literary activism” as a federal immigration crackdown continues to target the city. Solidary efforts highlighted include the Publishing for Minnesota Auction, which is open for bids through tonight, and two book drives focused on Spanish-language titles for children staying home from school to avoid ICE raids. “Whether you live in the Twin Cities or not, you can help support those who are fighting back on the ground.”
Publishers Weekly reports a second round of layoffs at Simon & Schuster, following reductions earlier this week that affected staff at all levels of the company. Around fifteen employees have lost positions in total, including Eamon Dolan, vice president and executive editor of the publisher’s flagship imprint, as well as Scribner editorial director Colin Harrison and Atria executive editor Nick Ciana. A Simon & Schuster spokesperson cited market conditions as the reason for the reduction in force.
PEN America has shared the fifty finalists for its 2026 Literary Awards, “showcasing excellence from literary superstars and new voices alike and spanning genres including fiction, poetry, drama, essays, biography, translation, nonfiction, and more.” Additionally, Edwidge Danticat and Julia Cho have been named career achievement honorees for the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award, respectively. The award ceremony will be held on March 31.
The American Booksellers Association has announced that they are relaunching their Indies Choice Book Awards via the press release distribution platform EIN Presswire. For these awards, titles “are nominated and selected by booksellers from over 3,000 independent bookstores nationwide. They celebrate the best and brightest titles by authors and illustrators in the indie channel, showcasing the remarkable range of talent indie booksellers champion and share with readers every day.” Winners will receive $2,000 each in the categories of Adult Fiction, Adult Nonfiction, Picture Book, Middle Grade, Young Adult, Debut Adult, and Debut Children’s. The shortlist will be announced on March 11 and the winners will be revealed on April 8.
One year after the Eaton fire in Altadena, California, the Los Angeles Times speaks with five local writers on the archives and creative spaces they lost and how they’re reclaiming their literary practices. Storyteller Sakae Manning recently started writing again about how she views life differently after losing her home, while poet and educator Bonnie S. Kaplan turned to creating stand-up routines. Novelist Désirée Zamorano’s biggest takeaway from the fire: “[P]eople are better than you think they are. Really and truly. Of my writer’s group in Altadena, four of the five, their homes are gone…and the support everyone received was just beautiful…”
“A set of unredacted and less-redacted documents from the Anthropic case have been released, revealing more details on the tech company’s secret plan to copy every book in existence,” Publishers Lunch reports. The secret plan, Project Panama, aimed to acquire an undisclosed number books, cut off the spines, and scan them, allowing them to be used to “train AI to write well.” The documents describe intentions to target used bookstores, wholesalers, the Strand, New York Public Library, and underfunded libraries for the acquisition of these books at low rates. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” Anthropic said in the filings, as reported by the Washington Post. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
A Minnesota bookseller has gone viral for standing up to ICE agents in the aftermath of Alex Pretti’s murder, Publishers Weekly reports. The viral video and photographs show Greg Ketter, owner of DreamHaven Books and Comics, walking through clouds of tear gas and cursing at dozens of federal agents gathered half a block from the site of Pretti’s murder, just hours after his death. “Life for Ketter has not been the same since. The store landline has been ringing off the hook...and DreamHaven’s website has received so many hits that it went down for several days.”
After six years operating in partnership with Tin House, the acclaimed literary podcast Between the Covers is moving to Milkweed Editions, podcast creator and host David Naimon announced on social media. Known for “its generous and in-depth conversations with today’s most vital thinkers,” Between the Covers features Naimon’s interviews with contemporary luminaries of poetry and prose.
Days after Alex Pretti was killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis, a group of publishing professionals, including Mabel Hsu and Zoey Cole, are organizing a two-day online auction to raise money for Minnesotans and immigrants elsewhere, Publishers Weekly reports. The group, Publishing for Minnesota, is holding the auction (among the offerings are “signed books, author headshots, original art, critiques for novels and picture books, marketing feedback, portfolio reviews, and ‘art jam sessions’”) on January 29 and January 30. The proceeds “will support organizations providing legal aid, emergency assistance, food, and community resources to Minnesotans in urgent need due to ICE’s activities.”
The Academy of American Poets has announced the election of poets Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Cornelius Eady as chancellors. Established in 1946, the board of chancellors is “a group of fifteen distinguished poets who advise the Academy of American Poets on artistic matters, judge its largest legacy prizes, and serve as ambassadors of poetry.”
The National Book Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation recently announced the selected titles for the fifth annual Science + Literature program, which identifies three books annually that deepen readers’ understanding of science and technology across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Authors receive $10,000 and will be celebrated at a public ceremony in New York City in March. This year’s selected titles are Ancient Light (University of Arizona Press) by Kimberly Blaeser, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature (Spiegel & Grau) by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, and Bog Queen (Bloomsbury Publishing) by Anna North.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs has announced Laura Tohe as the new poet laureate for the state, according to Journalaz.com. Appointed on January 14, distinguished poet, librettist, and prose writer Tohe will serve as the second poet laureate of Arizona, following Alberto Álvaro Ríos. She was born in Fort Defiance, Arizona, and grew up speaking both English and Diné Bizaad (the Navajo language), having previously served as poet laureate of the Navajo Nation from 2015 to 2019. In response to this honor, Tohe wrote: “Poetry is alive; it celebrates our human experience with language, voice, and reflection. I especially look forward to sharing and supporting poetry in Arizona’s rural communities. This is an exciting opportunity.”
Vogue recently launched a book club, starting this month with the classic 1847 novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Participants can share their thoughts via virtual conversations which will culminate in a live event in the coming weeks. The fashion magazine plans to cover four books throughout the year and even offers a daily reading schedule for those wanting to wrap up before the February event.
Libro.fm, an “online platform that partners with independent bookstores to sell audiobooks,” has now launched an annual subscription plan to retain customers and compete with Amazon’s Audible, Publishers Weekly reports. Having built up the growth momentum and scale to add this annual Plus membership alongside their existing monthly subscription, the Seattle-based company can now pay their booksellers upfront. Libro.fm’s cofounder and CEO, Mark Pearson, “credits booksellers with helping create curated playlists to promote books, making customers aware of the service, and handselling subscriptions while customers are in store,” leading them to their current success.
“Hundreds of shops, restaurants, and cultural institutions” across Minneapolis have closed their doors today as part of a general strike to protest the federal deportation program targeting the city, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. Numerous local bookstores and publishers have announced their participation in the economic freeze, known as the Day of Truth and Freedom, including Birchbark Books, Graywolf Press, and Milkweed Editions, as reported by Literary Hub and shared on social media channels this past week. “Milkweed Editions could not exist without its beautiful and diverse community of authors and readers in Minnesota—our home, where so many are being threatened with cruelty and removal,” said Milkweed staff in a January 20 statement on Facebook about the strike.
Former Bantam Books editor Toni Burbank has died, Publishers Lunch reports. After beginning her career at Columbia University Press, Burbank joined the staff of Bantam where she would work for over forty years, rising to the position of vice president and executive editor. “Toni was a legend who championed books that inspired readers to better understand themselves and the world around them,” said the Bantam staff in a statement on the news of her passing.
Percival Everett was the best-selling Black author in 2025, Publishers Weekly reports. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tops the new list compiled by the African American Literature Book Club based on sales figures from Circana BookScan. Also leading the list are works by Kamala Harris, Octavia Bulter, Kimberly D. Moore, and Rachel Renee Russell.
The Bookseller has covered the death of a worker at the Hachette U.K. distribution warehouse in Oxfordshire this week. Though the circumstances of the death are still unknown, the staff member was much-loved by his colleagues, according to a representative for the publisher. A Thames Valley Police spokesperson added, “Sadly, a twenty-three-year-old man has died. His next of kin have been informed and offered support by officers. A twenty-one-year-old man from Wallingford was arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter and has since been bailed.”
To counteract the book bans that have been taking place in libraries and schools across the nation, the grassroots organization We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) has announced their Unbanned Book Network, reports the Associated Press. This network “will donate books by authors who have been banned and select Author Ambassadors for school districts facing bans.” WNDB is aiming to start with twenty schools in states where book banning is more widespread, including Texas and Florida. WNDB’s CEO, Dhonielle Clayton, remarks, “We’re not only facing an ongoing literacy crisis in the U.S., we’re also battling increased rates of censorship, which is infringing on our students’ right to read,” adding that the Unbanned Book Network will demonstrate “the power of diverse literature to transform young lives and our communities.”
California College of the Arts (CCA) will be closing their doors after the 2026-27 school year, reports KQED. In place of “northern California’s last nonprofit art school, which has served the region for 119 years” will be a new Vanderbilt University campus. The reason for CCA’s closing is related to financial hardship; in 2024 the school announced having a $20 million deficit and followed up with layoffs at that time, however running the school without a large endowment, and relying heavily on tuition, wasn’t sustainable in the long term. This signifies a major hit to the arts community in the Bay Area.
Celebrated science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor will venture into commercial fiction with a new imprint, Publishers Weekly reports. Set to launch in January 2027, Wildthorn Books will publish fifteen to twenty titles each year in genres including commercial and upmarket women’s fiction, suspense, paranormal mystery, magical realism, speculative nonfiction, and historical fantasy. Devi Pillai and Monique Patterson will lead the imprint. “‘Readers have changed—and so has the market,’ said Pillai in a statement, noting that as commercial fiction continues to blend with genre, it became apparent that Tor ‘was the perfect house to create Wildthorn.’”
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Debut Novel. From this longlist, three finalists will be announced in February, and the winning book will be announced in March. This year’s longlisted titles are Trip by Amie Barrodale (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown (Henry Holt), The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Crown), The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne (Little, Brown), Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Pantheon), North Sun by Ethan Rutherford (Deep Vellum), Blob by Maggie Su (Harper), and Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee (Summit Books). These titles were selected from from a pool of 146 novels published by debut novelists in 2025. Rachel Beanland, Dionne Irving, and Taymour Soomro judged.
Renowned agent Georges Borchardt, who had “an astute eye for literary talent” and introduced American readers to the daring and the avante-garde, died on Sunday at the age of ninety-seven, the New York Times reports. “At various times, he or the Manhattan agency that he and his wife, Anne Borchardt, founded in 1967, Georges Borchardt Inc., represented five Nobel laureates, eight Pulitzer Prize-winners and one statesman, the French president Charles de Gaulle.” Borchardt is also remembered for having “arranged for the publication in English of Elie Wiesel’s searing Holocaust memoir Night after it was rejected by fourteen American publishers” and for spotting the brilliance in “an enigmatic but tender and often darkly funny French play written by a lanky Irishman”—Waiting for Godot. In an interview with the Paris Review, Borchardt reflected on his legacy: “I really feel in many cases that I’ve made it possible for a book to succeed and also made it possible for a writer to go on writing.”
The National Book Critics Circle has announced the finalists for its annual awards in six categories—Autobiography, Biography, Criticism, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry—as well as the Barrios Book in Translation Prize and the John Leonard Prize. The winners will be named on March 26 at a public ceremony in New York City. The finalists in poetry are Yuki Tanaka for Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon), Rickey Laurentiis for Death of the First Idea (Knopf), Kevin Young for Night Watch (Knopf), Henri Cole for The Other Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Tolu Oloruntoba for Unravel (McClelland & Stewart). The finalists in fiction are Karen Russell for The Antidote (Knopf); Katie Kitamura for Audition (Riverhead); Solvej Balle for On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) (New Directions), translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell; Han King for We Do Not Part (Hogarth), translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris; and Angela Flournoy for The Wilderness (Mariner). The finalists for the John Leonard Prize are Nicholas Boggs for Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Evanthia Bromily for Crown (Grove); Saou Ichikawa for Hunchback (Hogarth), translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton; Liz Pelly for Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria/One Signal); Hedgie Choi for Salvage (University of Wisconsin Press); and Lucas Schaefer for The Slip (Simon & Schuster). The finalists for the Barrios Book in Translation Prize are Yoko Tawada for Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (New Directions), translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda; Banu Mushtaq for Heart Lamp (And Other Stories), translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi; Hanna Stoltenberg for Near Distance (Biblioasis), translated from the Norwegian by Wendy H. Gabrielsen; Neige Sinno for Sad Tiger (Seven Stories), translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer; Markus Werner for The Frog in the Throat (NYRB Classics), translated from the German by Michael Hofmann; and Olga Ravn for The Wax Child (New Directions), translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken.
According to Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch, a recent case management update filed with the court by the attorneys in the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement reveals that there are currently eight-six opt-outs ahead of the extended deadline of January 29. “As for claims received for the pool of nearly 500,000 registered, infringed works, ‘the Settlement Administrator has received a total of 56,798 claims for 161,691 works.” At this rate, taking into account attorneys’ fees, each claimed work would be awarded over $8,000.
Min Jin Lee’s forthcoming novel, American Hagwon, her first since Pachinko, which has sold over a million copies and was named among the best novels of the 21st century by the New York Times, will explore the Korean obsession with education, the Associated Press reports. “‘We’re obsessed with education, and it became my obsession over why Koreans care so much,’ says Lee, whose American Hagwon, scheduled for Sept. 29, will likely be one of the year’s most anticipated books.” The book’s publisher, Cardinal, is calling it a look into “what happens when the rules shift, the world order becomes suddenly unrecognizable and benchmarks of success are no longer a guarantee.”
Canadian poet Karen Solie is the winner of the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize for her collection Wellwater, the Guardian reports. Solie was announced as the winner at a ceremony in London on Monday; she will receive £25,000 (approximately $33,638.50) from the T. S. Eliot Foundation. The annual prize is awarded to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland. “Wellwater emerged from a shortlist that included Tom Paulin’s Namanlagh, Isabelle Baafi’s Chaotic Good, Nick Makoha’s The New Carthaginians and Sarah Howe’s Foretokens.” The judges were Michael Hofmann, Patience Agbabi and Niall Campbell.
A new organization known as McCormack Writing Center will house the programs formerly known as Tin House Workshop, the organization announced on its website today. Founded in 2003 as a summer writers workshop and operated alongside the literary magazine Tin House and Tin House Books, the workshop expanded its programming to craft intensives, online classes, and residencies in subsequent years. The transition to the McCormack Writing Center follows the acquisition of the organization’s book publishing arm by Zando in 2025. Tin House Workshop lead staff Lance Cleland and A.L. Major will stay on through the transition, serving as executive director and director of programs respectively.
Who’s afraid of terminal punctuation? Many of us denizens of the digital age, Nitsuh Abebe argues in an On Language essay for the New York Times Magazine, discussing anxieties about tone as we struggle to make ourselves known in social media, e-mail, and texts. Abebe unpacks the hahas, emojis, and dropped periods that stand in for familiarity as face-to-face interaction grows sparser: “The issue, in other words, isn’t the writing. It’s the lack of context—the fact that more and more of what we communicate is aimed at somebody we don’t know or rarely speak to, with little base line of what we’re normally like.”
A partnership between One World and Little Free Library will place book-sharing boxes in twelve communities across the United States, each box stocked with titles that “help readers understand and shape our changing world,” Publishers Weekly reports. Books from the One World Essentials line—including Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, and The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio—will be distributed in custom book-sharing boxes that honor a given title. Each will placed in a neighborhood with a connection to the author or the book. “The books in this series are not just about thinking, but rethinking, not just observing, but getting close, not just catharsis but movement to action,” says Chris Jackson, One World publisher and editor in chief. “Most of all, they’re meant to be freely read and shared—and we’re excited to get them to more readers through this exciting partnership with Little Free Library.”
The Nero Book Awards, given annually to “celebrate exceptional writing from authors based in the U.K. and Ireland,” has announced its 2025 winners. Benjamin Wood won in fiction for Seascraper (Viking); Claire Lynch won in debut fiction for A Family Matter (Chatto & Windus); Jamila Gavin won in children’s fiction for My Soul, A Shining Tree (Farshore); and Sarah Perry won in nonfiction for Death of an Ordinary Man (Jonathan Cape). Each winner receives £5,000 (approximately $6,690) and is in the running to win the Nero Gold Prize for the best overall book of the year, set to be announced in March and including a £30,000 cash prize (approximately $40,140).
Hachette Book Group (HBG) and Cengage are joining the copyright lawsuit against Google, reports Publishers Lunch. This class action suit was initiated by writers and illustrators in 2023, accusing the tech behemoth of copyright infringement in using their books to train Gemini, Google’s AI system. HBG and Cengage will represent the interests of publishers, a previously unrepresented class of rightsholders in the suit. The motion states, “They wish to stand alongside their authors in vindicating copyright owners’ rights” as “[p]ublishers are significant stakeholders in this case, with a parallel but distinct set of interests and arguments to make at a historic trial.”
According to six small press editors Emmeline Clein at Cultured recently spoke with, reissuing out-of-print and invigoratingly unique books is publishing’s hottest trend. “Longstanding institutions like New York Review Books, Semiotext(e), and New Directions are flourishing alongside younger upstarts like Hagfish and McNally Editions, while new presses continue to crop up—Doubleday just announced the debut of its own reissue imprint, Outsider Editions,” Clein writes. A new wave of unusual titles from long ago are offsetting more expected, mainstream books. Edwin Frank of New York Review Books adds, “It’s analogous to the way people began to collect vinyl. There became a historical dimension to people’s awareness and their cultural commitment. It all started up in the wake of the pandemic.”
Wiley has announced the appointment of its first chief of AI and data services officer, Publishers Weekly reports. In the new role, Armughan Rafat will focus on “developing and commercializing AI-ready content and data products for AI developers and corporate R&D teams.” The position has been created to “accelerate Wiley’s effort to license its content to AI developers as well as companies building out their AI applications.” Since January 2024, Wiley has generated nearly $100 million in revenue from AI licensing, including deals with Anthropic, the AI corporation sued in a class-action lawsuit brought by writers for copyright infringement.
For the New York Times, Colin Moynihan reports on a “previously undisclosed trove of correspondence” between Harper Lee and fellow Alabama writer Jo Beth McDaniel. The “dozens” of letters newly shared by McDaniel offer “a fuller view of [Lee’s] take on the Deep South’s transition from Depression-era segregation to the Civil Rights movement,” among other subjects, and help sketch out the beliefs of the intensely private writer, who had last given a formal interview in the 1960s. “This is a marvelous opportunity to take a more nuanced view of Harper Lee,” says Lee biographer Charles J. Shields. In one 1992 letter, Lee remarks on the response of white Southerners to pushes for Black equality: “Many Christians were challenged for the first time to be Christians. ...What was heart-breaking was to discover that people you loved—friends, relatives, neighbors—whom you assumed were civilized, harbored the most vicious feelings.”
Five writers are included in the 2026 class of USA Fellows, announced today by the Chicago-based arts funding organization United States Artists. Poets Sarah Aziza and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, nonfiction writer Mayuk Sen, sequential artist Lauren Rebecca Weinstein, and multigenre writer and artist Johanna Hedva will each receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards, “granting recipients the freedom to allocate funds to their unique needs.” Fifty artists from twenty-one states comprise this year’s class of fellows, with grants made in ten creative disciplines. Nominations for the fellowships come from an anonymous, rotating group of arts professionals, with finalists identified by panels of experts in each discipline. The 2026 class of fellows marks “two decades of unrestricted support that nurtures artists’ creative freedom and drives lasting impact” as the program hits its twentieth anniversary year.
Katie Couric has launched her own book club, KCBC (Katie Couric Book Club), and chosen Virginia Evans’s novel The Correspondent (Crown, 2025) as its inaugural title, the journalist and author announced via Katie Couric Media. “As some of you might have heard, my 2026 resolution can be summed up in four words: scroll less, read more. To that end, and in an effort to hold myself accountable, I’ve started a book club! I’m so excited. My goal is to read in community, as they say, one book a month.” Couric will host a conversation with Evans about the book on Monday, January 19, on Substack.
Bestselling author Colleen Hoover has revealed in an Instagram story that she recently received a cancer diagnosis, USA Today reports. The author of It Ends With Us (Atria Books, 2016) and Verity (Grand Central Publishing, 2021) noted her “second to last day of radiation” at a Texas Oncology location and added that the unspecified type of cancer had been “removed.”
At least eight college and university libraries across the country—in Massachusetts, Kentucky, Missouri, and Nebraska—received bomb threats this week, Book Riot reports. “Last October, at least fifteen colleges and universities received bomb threats to their libraries. Yesterday, January 12, 2025—the first day back on campus for many universities following winter break—at least eight college and university received similar library bomb threats.”
Adelaide Writers’ Week, one of Australia’s biggest cultural festivals, has been cancelled in the backlash following the removal of Australian Palestinian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the event’s lineup, the Guardian reports. The board of the festival said last week that Abdel-Fattah, “a vocal critic of Israel,” had been disinvited due to “insensitivities” following the mass shooting at a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach last month. After word of the author’s removal spread, 180 other writers scheduled to appear withdrew from the festival, including former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and British author Zadie Smith. All but one member of the board have now resigned, including the director who had invited Abdel-Fattah.
Hundreds of literary tourists are traveling to Prague to see artwork made of books, reports Literary Hub. Thanks to BookTok, visitors are heading to the capital of the Czech Republic to see “The Idiom,” a sculpture made by Slovak artist Matej Kren that consists of 8,000 books and forms a cylindrical tower “with a tear-shaped entrance and mirrors at each end,” creating an “endless” tunnel for visitors to enjoy. The piece was installed at Prague’s Municipal Library in 1998 and went viral on TikTok three years ago. As a result, the sculpture can draw up to a thousand tourists a day during peak seasons such as the holidays.
For the second year in a row, print book sales were up, reports Publishers Weekly. Based on data compiled by Circana BookScan, there was a .3 percent increase in print book sales from 2024 to 2025, with 762.4 million books being bought last year. Sales peaked in 2021 at 839.7 million copies, though they’re now at higher levels than they were before the pandemic. Postpandemic, adult fiction has taken the sales lead. Graphic novels and romance books had a 9.2 percent and 3.9 percent increase, respectively, while fantasy book sales fell by 8.7 percent. Publishers hoped for higher numbers for 2025.
The New York Times has reported on the passing of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s toddler on January 6. The famous novelist shared details regarding the death of her 21-month-old son, Nkanu, in a WhatsApp group chat with family and close friends, the content of which has been leaked to the public. Adichie stated that his passing was due to an overdose of a sedative while he was being treated for an infection at the private Euracare Hospital in Lagos. Euracare officials are investigating the matter, though the passing of Adichie’s son has prompted an outpouring of complaints about Nigeria’s health care system.
A press release from Folio Literary Management has announced the agency’s acquisition of the Greenhouse Literary Agency from Coolabi Group. Folio describes the move as “expanding Folio’s children’s division and reinforcing its commitment to representing exceptional children’s book authors and illustrators.” Greenhouse’s full backlist and client list will transfer to Folio, as will current Greenhouse staff. “We are thrilled to be moving from strength to strength and look forward with excitement to what the future holds for our clients’ careers at Folio Jr,.” says Chelsea Eberly, who will join Folio as vice president, transitioning from her role as director at Greenhouse.
At a moment when polls show 40 percent of American adults did not read a book in the last year, one book is nonetheless selling at record rates: the Bible. Publishers Weekly reports that Bible sales hit record highs in the United States and the U.K. in 2025, continuing an upward sales trend begun in 2021. Mark Schoenwald, CEO of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, notes that study Bibles are among the iterations of the text with sales that have soared: “What that tells me is people are not just buying Bibles, but they’re actually trying to read them and understand them and then apply them to their lives.”
A new deadline has been set for writers to opt-out or make objections in the lawsuit being brought against AI corporation Anthropic, Publishers Lunch reports. Judge Araceli Martinez-Oluguin has extended the deadline from January 7 to the revised deadline of January 29, allowing writers more time to exclude themselves from the class-action case and pursue different legal recourse. “This is the only option that allows you to bring your own separate lawsuit against Anthropic for the claims this Settlement resolves.”
Literary Hub has announced the forty fellows of the 2026 Periplus collective mentorship program for writers of color who live and work in the United States. Each fellow will be paired with an established writer who is a member of the collective and they will meet on a monthly basis “to foster community, support their writing practice, and advise on the nitty gritty of making a career as an artist.” This is the collective’s sixth year running these fellowships and they chose their newest mentees from over five hundred applicants.
The woman fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis yesterday has been identified as prize-winning poet Renee Nicole Good, the BBC reports. A mother of three, Good studied creative writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and won a prize from the Academy of American Poets for her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” in 2020. Old Dominion University’s president, Brian Hemphill, wrote, “May Renee’s life be a reminder of what unites us: freedom, love, and peace.”
Tor Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan known for its genre fiction and prose titles, has announced the retirements of two executives: Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor-at-large, and Linda Quinton, publisher and VP of Forge Books, Publishers Weekly reports. Separately, Hayden and Quinton spent almost forty years at the company before ending their time there on January 5. Hayden is a three-time Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning editor, and Quinton led Forge Books, an imprint of Tor that focuses on both fiction and nonfiction, for nine years.
With book distributor Baker & Taylor set for “imminent closure,” NPR considers the consequences for libraries nationwide. “For nearly two hundred years, Baker & Taylor has played a key role in getting books from manufacturers to warehouses to library patrons’ hands. Partnering with more than 5,000 U.S. libraries, the company has been a staple in the industry, selling books at wholesale prices and providing them with labels and lamination so libraries don’t have to.” Librarians report lags of weeks or months in receiving new titles as Baker & Taylor concludes its services and their libraries set up new accounts with other distributors.
OverDrive—a digital platform that furnishes e-books, audiobooks, and other digital media to public libraries—has responded to Washington, D.C.’s proposed Library E-book Pricing Fairness Amendment Act of 2025, Publishers Marketplace reports. If enacted, the legislation would aim “to prohibit libraries from paying more to license an item than the public would and avoid limiting the number of licenses and loans the library can engage in” at a time when e-book licensing prices have surged. OverDrive CEO Steve Potash challenged the measure by citing the district’s reduced spending per patron even as e-book circulation has increased.
On behalf of the Kurt Vonnegurt Estate and together with the ACLU, three authors and two anonymous high school students are challenging provisions of Utah House Bill 29, the 2024 law that prohibits materials deemed “pornographic or indecent” from public schools, Publishers Weekly reports. Jason M. Groth, legal director for ACLU of Utah, sees the ban as particularly insidious for the way it sets up a single ban to trigger a snowballing effect: “Just three school districts can trigger a statewide ban, ensuring more authors and more books are swept up. We are moving forward now with a strong case to protect the First Amendment rights of an impressive group of authors and students.”
Utah has added three new titles to its growing list of books prohibited in the state’s public schools, banning The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, and Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. “The additions bring Utah’s total number of banned books to twenty-two.”
Publishers Weekly reports on supply-chain disruptions that have marred what was otherwise a strong holiday sales season at independent bookstores across the country. Many booksellers expressed frustration over “unexpected shipping delays of two weeks and more on shipments from Ingram, the Big Five, and other major publishers throughout December.”
Kelly Jensen of Book Riot looks at a new YouGov poll released at the end of December 2025 that reveales American’s reading habits over the last year. The headline? Forty percent of Americans did not pick up a single book in 2025. “Perhaps that’s worth spinning in a more positive light. Most Americans, 60 percent, did read a book in 2025.” Other results of the survey show that those who identify as female read at higher rates, 63 percent, than male counterparts, and the age group that read the most books were those between 30 and 44.
Harlequin France, a division of HarperCollins, has started implementing AI translation tools, reports Literary Hub. According to a letter published on the French Literary Translators Association’s website in December, the publisher has contacted their translators to inform them that their contracts will be ending ASAP. Instead, Harlequin has employed Fluent Planet, a communications agency using machine translation software. A spokesperson from Fluent Planet stated that their hybrid model joins “in-house language assistance tools with systematic human translation carried out by professional literary translators,” such that “freelance proofreaders” will review the results of the machine translations.
Kelvin Watson, executive director of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District (LVCCLD), has been named Library Journal’s 2026 Librarian of the Year. Starting this new role at LVCCLD in the spring of 2021, after COVID-19 shutdowns, and serving as the first full-time African American library director in the state of Nevada, Watson and his leadership has led to LVCCLD receiving numerous awards, such as the American Library Association (ALA)/Information Today, Inc. Library of the Future Award (from 2022-2024); the 2023 ALA Medal of Excellence Award; and the 2023 Urban Libraries Council Innovation Award for Anti-Racism, Digital Equity, and Inclusion, among others. Watson remarked that his basic principles of access, discovery, and delivery have remained consistent for him throughout the years. “Those three words have been with me, probably, my entire library career.”
The American Library Association recently announced that a division of their organization, the Public Library Association (PLA), has launched the Transformative Technology Task Force “to advise...on the evolving role and impacts of transformative technology on library work and to identify and recommend priority training topics relevant to public library staff and users.” More specifically, the task force, which began work in November of last year, will be focusing on artificial intelligence for the first two years. PLA President Dr. Brandy McNeil remarks that the association “has assembled a powerhouse group to help shape how public libraries approach innovation, ethics, and the opportunities of an AI-powered world.” The task force consists of nine PLA members.