Jennifer Wilson writes for the New Yorker about the fairy tales written by the Brothers Grimm, and how their aim in collecting stories was “to create a cohesive national identity for German speakers.” Wilson explains: “The Grimms’ stories, with their promise of bodying forth an authentically Teutonic spirit, were so sought after during the Nazi years that Allied occupying forces temporarily banned them after the war.” Since then, scholars have emphasized that “their nationalism was rooted in a shared cultural and linguistic heritage, not blood and soil.” Still, as Ann Schmiesing explains in her new book, The Brothers Grimm: A Biography (Yale University Press, 2024), writing about the lives of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is difficult, and requires a balancing act: It “entails navigating between too naively or too judgmentally presenting the nineteenth-century constructions of Germany and Germanness to which they contributed.”
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.
Dorothy Allison, the lesbian feminist activist, poet, and author of novels like Bastard Out of Carolina (Dutton, 1992) and Cavedweller (Dutton, 1998) has died at seventy-five, Brittany Allen writes on Literary Hub. “Allison wrote about a queer, poor South with dynamism and ferocious love,” Allen writes. “Her books tangoed frankly with historically taboo subjects, like sexual abuse, and spotlit characters under-glimpsed on the shelves of hegemony.”
French Algerian author Kamel Daoud, who was awarded the Prix Goncourt earlier this week, and his French publisher Gallimard were not invited to the Algiers International Book Fair, the Associated Press reports. Daoud’s novels have been polarizing in France and Algeria, and center victims of Algeria’s civil war, which began in the nineties. The book fair was publicized as having a special focus on history, but Daoud’s most recent book, Houris, will not be among the three hundred thousand titles present. Several authors and publishers were censored for writing that challenges official narratives.
In the latest Bookselling This Week newsletter, Allison Hill, the CEO of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), wrote about how the results of the presidential election might effect some ABA initiatives, Publishers Weekly reports. Hill acknowledged the uncertainties surrounding ABA’s longstanding effort to get the federal government to regulate Amazon. Hill also noted the “hate and disinformation” that have marked political division in America would be “fertile ground for new unconstitutional legislation and book bans.”
Books about democracy, dystopia, dictatorship, feminism, and far-right politics have risen in best-seller charts since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, the Guardian reports. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which is set in a dystopian society where women are compelled to reproduce, moved up more than four hundred places and is currently in third place on the U.S. Amazon Best Sellers chart. Other books that have climbed the charts in the past day include Timothy Snyder’s 2017 history On Tyranny and George Orwell’s renowned 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Cozy, whimsical novels, belonging to a genre called “healing fiction” have been widely read in Japan and Korea for years, but are now gaining a global audience, the New York Times reports. Many of the feel-good books feature cats with magical healing powers, and several of the titles, including The Cat Who Saved Books (HarperVia, 2021) by Sosuke Natsukawa, have become “breakout hits in translation.” The novels offer readers escapism and heartwarming storylines during turbulent times of political division, climate crises, and war.
EveryLibrary, a nonpartisan library political action committee, said that the November 5 election of many politicians who have proposed defunding libraries and targeted library workers, could result in dire consequences for libraries, Publishers Weekly reports. In a statement, EveryLibrary said: “The library industry will need to do significant work over the next four years to mitigate potential cuts to library funding at the local, state, and federal levels,” adding, “This will include organizing communities, providing resources to citizens to push back locally, and raising and spending significant funding on national campaigns to combat misinformation about the role of libraries in American society.”
George Packer recalls reading, and recently rereading, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for the Atlantic, pointing out the century-old novel’s still-relevant lessons for contemporary readers. “The need for political reconstruction, in this country and around the world, is as obvious as it was in Thomas Mann’s time,” Packer writes.
Barnes & Noble has announced plans to open twelve new stores in November in California, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Utah, and Washington, D.C., Publishers Weekly reports. The additional locations are part of the company’s plan to open sixty bookstores this year.
Bookstores are setting up readers on “blind dates” with books, according to the New York Times. A contemporary trend in bookshops like the Strand Book Store in Manhattan features “a table of anonymous books with covers wrapped like Christmas presents and titles replaced by vague descriptions,” Hank Sanders writes. Spoiler Alert (HarperCollins, 2020) by Olivia Dade is pitched as a “You’ve Got Mail-esque Romance.” Readers are drawn to the element of surprise, and the practice helps sellers promote books that are not recently published, best-selling, or written by famous authors.
Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, which was published this month by Biblioasis in the U.S., explores how the notebook is an indispensable part of renowned writers’ biographies and classic works of literature, Wilson Wong reports for the New York Times. Allen discusses what can be discovered and gleaned from studying the notebooks of authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, and others. Wong writes that Allen’s book “is a revealing document of a relationship so intimate as to be sacred: that of the writer and the page.”
San Francisco Center for the Book is presenting an exhibition featuring the artist and graphic designer David King and his small press publications, zines, ephemera, and early design projects, Fine Books & Collections reports. The exhibition will include David King’s publications from 1977 to 2019 and will be on view until December 22.
In an interview with Electric Literature, Jenna Tang discusses translating Fang Si Chi’s First Love Paradise (HarperVia, 2024) by Lin Yi-Han, an influential novel that helped propel the #MeToo movement in Taiwan. The novel follows teenage Fang Si-Chi, who is groomed and assaulted by a neighbor. Lin Yi-Han explores how Si-Chi’s community repeatedly fails to protect her and illuminates the way harm flourishes when perpetrators act without consequence. Only two months after the book was published, Lin Yi-Han passed away due to suicide, and soon thereafter, her own suspected abuser was acquitted of charges. Tang discusses her translation choices, the importance of bringing the novel to an English-speaking audience, and what the book means to her. “This book has been by my side in very meaningful ways since I first moved to the U.S. It gave me just the right amount of courage and rage to move forward.”
In a recent study, only 34.6 percent of eight- to eighteen-year-olds surveyed in the U.K. by the National Literacy Trust said they enjoyed reading in their spare time, the Guardian reports. This is the lowest figure recorded by the charity since it began asking children about their reading routines nineteen years ago. Reading frequency is also at a historic low, with 20.5 percent of eight- to eighteen-year-olds reporting that they read daily in their spare time, compared with 28 percent last year.
Freedom to read activists in Alaska received good news in court when the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in Alaska agreed to pay $89,000 to settle claims that the district inappropriately pulled dozens of books from school libraries, Publishers Weekly reports. Titles that were removed included classic works of literature such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in addition to other books concerning LGBTQ people, sexual health, and racial issues.
Nicola Kenny writes for the BBC about how Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Penguin Books, 1960) by D. H. Lawrence was banned and became a bestseller in Britain. The trial that followed the publication, which was related to the Obscene Publications Act, brought significant publicity to the book. The novel ultimately sold out of all two hundred thousand copies on its first day of publication and went on to sell three million copies in three months.
Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK), the largest Dutch publishing house, has confirmed plans to use AI to translate a limited number of books into English, the Guardian reports. The press, which was acquired by Simon & Schuster earlier this year, will experiment with translating fewer than ten commercial fiction titles with AI. Vanessa van Hofwegen, the commercial director of VBK said, “No literary titles will nor shall be used,” and added, “we’re only including books where English rights have not been sold, and we don’t foresee the opportunity to sell English rights of these books in the future.” A spokesperson for VBK noted that authors have been asked to consent to this process. Ian Giles, co-chair of the Society of Authors’ Translators Association called the news “concerning” and pointed to a survey that found over a third of translators have lost work due to generative AI.
Electric Literature has compiled a list of books about the history of voting rights in the United States in advance of tomorrow’s election. The list includes The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Basic Books, 2009) by Alexander Keyssar, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (University of Illinois Press, 2000) by Chana Kai Lee, and The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) by Lisa Tetrault.
For Hard Feelings, a series of essays by poets who write about ugly emotions in Poetry, Randall Mann writes about being drawn to poetry that is filled with contempt. He includes examples from work by Emily Dickinson, Reginald Shepherd, and Frederick Seidel, among others. Mann writes, “I’ve always admired poems that dare me not to be there, as if my being there was of no consequence; poems that fail to notice me; poems that even actively deride me.”
A new John Keats sculpture has been unveiled close to his birthplace on Moorgate in London on what would have been his 229th birthday, Fine Books & Collections reports. This latest plaster cast is part of a series that includes a sculpture of poet John Donne, and extends the public commemoration of poets born within the Square Mile.
Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes (Atria, 2007), a national bestseller about a school shooting, has topped PEN America’s list of books most banned in schools, the Associated Press reports. Picoult added that objections to her book revolved around one page that mentions a date rape. She said, “There was nothing gratuitous about it…. I think that some people are unhappy because it makes you look at the world in a different way. That’s what’s behind a lot of the bans.”
Penguin Random House’s fifth annual demographics report demonstrated gradual but steady improvements in efforts to diversify, Publishers Weekly reports. The company was 68.9 percent white in 2024, down from 70.1 percent white in 2023. Emphasizing its longterm commitment to diversifying its workforce, Penguin Random House said, “This is a marathon, not a sprint…. [W]e remain committed to providing transparency and accountability along the way.”
PEN America has announced that Suzanne Nossel is stepping down as CEO. Summer Lopez and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf will serve as the organization’s interim co-CEOs while the organization begins a national search for its next leader. Lopez has worked in the fields of democracy, human rights, gender equality, and freedom of expression for twenty years and has most recently worked as the Chief Program Officer for free expression programs at PEN America. Rosaz Shariyf worked for over ten years at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and has led PEN America’s literary programming strategy since 2015. Nossel will assume the role of president and CEO of Freedom House.
Librarians in the United States are in the midst of a crisis of violence and abuse, as libraries have increasingly become gathering places for “people experiencing issues like homelessness, drug dependence, and mental illness,” the New York Times reports. One study surveyed 1,300 U.S. library workers, who reported that they had experienced more than eight thousand incidents that the researchers classified as “traumatic, such as threats, assault, or harassment.” Staffers have said that the job’s stressors, including the culture wars over book banning, are leading to burnout and require attention to protect workers’ mental health.
In a departure from its unlimited subscription model, Scribd has launched a credit-based system for its Everand reading platform, and is offering additional access to books from all five major trade publishers, Publishers Weekly reports. The new service was introduced yesterday and provides access to more than 1.5 million e-books and audiobooks. The pricing for Everand subscriptions are tiered: One premium title is $11.99 per month, and three premium titles cost $16.99 per month. Both subscriptions include “unlimited access to magazines, podcasts, sheet music, and a select catalog of e-books and audiobooks, including Everand Originals.”
A partnership of independent book publishers has launched a campaign to combat book banning called “We Are Stronger Than Censorship,” according to the Bay Area Reporter. The goal is to raise funds to purchase at least two thousand books that have been pulled from library shelves and distribute them to readers across the country. To date, the Independent Book Publishers Association has raised nearly $10,000, which will cover 1,244 books.
More than a thousand people from the publishing and entertainment industries have signed an open letter against “illiberal and dangerous” cultural boycotts, the Guardian reports. The letter, which includes signatures from authors Howard Jacobson, David Mamet, Herta Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, and others, was released by Creative Community for Peace, a nonprofit that campaigns against cultural boycotts of Israel. This letter follows another letter, signed by more than a thousand figures in the literary world, that pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.”
Literary publishers have been embracing the midnight release party, which results in eager readers arriving at bookstores at midnight “to get their copy of a buzzy new book,” Publishers Weekly reports. The origin of this trend in the book business can be traced to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which was first published in the U.S. in 1998. Stephanie Meyers’s Twilight series and the final book in the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins also followed this pattern. Some recent examples in literary fiction include Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) and Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls (Knopf, 2024), translated by Philip Gabriel.
On the occasion of the centennial of Franz Kafka’s death, the Morgan Library and Museum will present the author’s archive, which is usually held at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, for the first time in the United States, Fine Books & Collections reports. The exhibition will be open from November 22, 2024 to April 13, 2025 and feature Kafka’s manuscripts, letters, postcards, personal diaries, and drawings, among other items.
More than a thousand writers and publishing professionals have signed a letter pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians,” according to the Guardian. The signatories include authors Sally Rooney, Arundhati Roy, Rachel Kushner, and others. The campaign was organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature among other groups. UK Lawyers for Israel, a consortium of lawyers supporting Israel, has sent its own letter to the Society of Authors, the Publishers Association, and the Independent Publishers Guild that claims the boycott is “plainly discriminatory against Israelis.”
Lettie Y. Conrad writes about how accessible publishing standards are good for the literary community and the publishing business in Publishers Weekly. Conrad argues that accessible publishing is important for overall brand recognition, helps reach the largest group of potential readers, spurs new growth, avoids the risk of higher costs in the future, and increases inclusivity.
The Archer City Writers Workshop (ACWW) has announced the purchase and transformation of Booked Up, Larry McMurtry’s internationally recognized bookstore in Archer City, Texas. ACWW, a nonprofit inspired by and committed to “‘the minor regional writer’s’ clear-eyed vision and unvarnished realism about Texas and the American West” will turn Booked Up into a robust literary center that features McMurtry’s legacy as a cowboy, novelist, screenwriter, and rare book collector.
In McNeal, which opened on Broadway in September, the playwright Ayad Akhtar explores how artificial intelligence is causing chaos in the literary world and challenging the existence of originality in the age of information. Robert Downey Jr., who plays the title character, delivers a monologue revised by ChatGPT so that it sounds like a computer wrote it. Akhtar says he only ended up using two lines generated by AI, but imitating a computer as a human resulted in “an oddly circular process” and a speech that felt “both intimate and strangely disembodied,” according to the New York Times. Apparently, Akhtar was wary of feeding his whole play into ChatGPT. “Maybe I was scared that it would understand it better than I wanted it to,” he said.
Poets for Appalachia, a mutual aid relief effort among poets and publishers of poetry, is aiming to organize the wider literary community to help the people of Appalachia recover and rebuild after Hurricane Helene, according to Birds, LLC. If you make a donation of thirty dollars to a select organization, the fundraising team will send you a poetry book from one of their publishing partners, which include Fonograf Editions, Soft Skull, Ugly Ducking Presse, and Birds, LLC, among others.
In an interview with Electric Literature, Naomi Cohn discusses her new book, The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight (Rose Metal Press, 2024), and the way sensory reading and writing has expanded her imagination. “[W]hen I began learning braille,” Cohn says, “I reclaimed my love of reading and a way of writing that isn’t digital.” She adds, “What I’m getting at is that one of disability’s gifts is creativity; disability requires creativity just to get through the day.”
Sheila Heti writes for the Paris Review about Sam Shelstad’s third book, The Cobra and the Key (Touchwood Editions, 2023), which satirizes writing advice and the people who give it. Heti writes, “I think what confuses me so much about those who have prescriptions for how to write is that they assume all humans experience the world the same way.” She asks rhetorically, “Shouldn’t a writer be trained to pay attention to what they notice about life, what they think life is, and come up with ways of highlighting those things?”
Barnes and Noble has announced its 2024 Book of the Year finalists. The list includes Swift River (Simon & Schuster) by Essie Chambers, James (Doubleday) by Percival Everett, and Intermezzo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Sally Rooney, among other titles. The Book of the Year will be announced on November 15.
Nan Graham will step down from her role as publisher of Scribner in 2025, according to Jonathan Karp, the CEO of Simon & Schuster, Publishers Weekly reports. At Scribner, Graham has edited books by authors including Stephen King, Rachel Kushner, Steve Martin, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and others. The news comes just before the anniversary of the completion of S&S’s sale to private equity firm KKR. In a statement, Graham said, “I’m proud of making Scribner an imprint where editors, publicists, and marketers come of age and thrive, working on behalf of writers who have flourished here.”
Bernardine Evaristo, the president of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), will offer her Kent cottage to low-income writers and those without a dedicated space to work, the Guardian reports. The residency offering will be part of the new RSL Scriptorium awards, which will give ten writers the opportunity to stay in the cottage for up to a month. Evaristo said, “Literature receives the least public funding out of all the art forms and most writers earn very little, which is no reflection on the quality of their writing.” Interested writers living in the United Kingdom will be able to apply in the spring of next year.
A poem written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón is engraved on the interior panel of Europa Clipper, the largest interplanetary craft NASA has ever constructed, which was launched into space on October 14, the New York Times reports. The poem, titled “In Praise of Mystery,” will travel 1.8 billion miles to Europa, Jupiter’s second moon. The poem had to be submitted in three months, fall under two hundred words, contain water imagery, and be accessible to people on a fourth-grade reading level. Limón accepted the challenge, saying “I wanted to make sure it was a poem of praise and wonder. Yes, we’re going to this incredible place; and yes, we might find all of the ingredients for life and this could be an incredible moment in history.” “But,” she added, “we’re also on the most incredible planet, and it is full of life.”
Danny Caine, an activist for independent bookstores, has sold Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, to his co-owners, Publishers Weekly reports. Caine will move on from bookselling to assume the role of multimedia content creator for the Institute of Local Self-Reliance, “an advocacy organization that supports local retailers against big-box stores and other corporations.” The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association named Caine its Bookseller of the Year in 2019, and the Raven received the Bookstore of the Year award in 2022 from Publishers Weekly.
Small presses are banding together six months after the closure of Small Press Distribution (SPD), KQED reports. A group of presses formerly distributed by SPD, including Kelsey Street Press, Sixteen Rivers Press, and Pelekinesis, gathered and displayed their titles at the Litquake Book Fair at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco on Saturday.
The American Library Association has announced the longlist of forty-six books for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, Publishers Weekly reports. The list includes books by Morgan Talty, Hisham Matar, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and others. The shortlist will be announced on November 12 and two winners will be announced at a celebratory event on Sunday, January 26, in Philadelphia.
Denne Michele Norris interviews Danzy Senna about her new novel, Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024), for Electric Literature. Senna discusses the creative labor that is denied to marginalized writers when their work is presumed to be autobiographical. “Somewhere in there is the idea that you are not capable of the complexity of writing fiction, and if it has any resemblance to you, then surely, it’s confessional,” she says. “Unless the reader is in my body, they don’t know how much fictionalizing I did.”
A rare typescript of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (1943), which features original handwritten revisions by the author, is going up for sale, the Guardian reports. The artifact includes what is believed to be the first written version of the renowned lines, which, translated to English read: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” The typescript will be on display at Abu Dhabi Art, an annual art fair at the end of November, where it will be priced at $1.25 million.
Montgomery County in Texas has reversed its decision to put the children’s book Colonization and the Wampanoag Story, which details European colonization of Native American land, in the fiction section of local libraries, the Guardian reports. The initial decision sparked condemnation from many of the world’s largest publishers and anti-book banning activists. A new committee, composed of county staff members and advised by the county attorney, will review library rules, including policies around the citizen review committee, the group that originally advocated for the reclassification of the title as fiction.
An online statement denouncing the unlicensed use of creative works to train generative AI has reached 13,500 signatories, including the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, comedian and upcoming National Book Awards host Kate McKinnon, and a number of publishing organizations, Publishers Weekly reports. Representatives for the Association of American Publishers, which also signed the petition, said this is “a crucial time for AI policy development globally” and emphasized that “human authorship is the basis of Generative AI.”
The New Yorker’s Tad Friend shares the story of Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer who has sold the papers and possessions of authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, J. M. Coetzee, and Bob Dylan, and was indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney in 2022. The lawsuit surrounded five legal pads that he had sold a decade earlier with lyrics scrawled on them by the Eagles’ drummer and singer, Don Henley. When the pads went up for auction again, Henley became convinced that the pads were stolen from him, and he accused the collectors of possessing stolen property and Horowitz of forging the provenance of the pads. After interviewing Horowitz, Friend writes, “His mirthless laugh might have suggested Kafkaesque persecution, or Hardyesque inexorability of fate. Either way, he appeared determined to rewrite the ending.”
Brian Cleary, a clinical pharmacist in Dublin, discovered a new story by Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, at the archives of the National Library of Ireland, the New York Times reports. The story, titled “Gibbet Hill,” was published in a now-defunct Irish newspaper in 1890, but had not been mentioned in any bibliographies. Paul Murray, an expert on Stoker, noted that the story is “an important new addition to the canon.”
In an interview with Electric Literature, Kristopher Jansma discusses his latest book and first essay collection, Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers, which was published this month by Quirk Books. Jansma analyzes the drafts of works by authors such as Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Wright to demystify their reputations of literary brilliance. “I suddenly realized: It’s not just this one genius figure who creates a flawless book out of nothing,” he says. “There’s a process that you go through where it starts off bad, and then it gets better and better and better.”
The Guadalajara International Book Fair will run from November 30 to December 8 and feature 18,000 publishing professionals from fifty-four countries, Publishers Weekly reports. The event, which is widely known as “the most significant Spanish-language event on the global publishing calendar,” will also be expecting more than 850 authors writing in nineteen languages.
Marc Tracy writes for the New York Times about American descendants of Holocaust survivors who are using the creative arts to reckon with ancestral trauma. “The third-generation perspective on the Holocaust is carefully hedged, defiantly distanced, explicitly filtered, supremely self-aware,” Tracy writes, going on to mention the graphic novel Artificial: A Love Story (Catapult, 2023) by Amy Kurzweil, Joshua Harmon’s play Prayer for the French Republic, which had its Broadway run this year, and two television series, Transparent and Russian Doll, in addition to a number of other projects. He adds: “How the Holocaust will be remembered and its lessons applied—from Bosnia to Darfur to Ukraine to, many have argued, Israel and Gaza—is now up to this cadre, and going forward will be informed by its own ‘anxiety and humility,’ as Kurzweil put it.”
The Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, California, has announced Louisa Gloger as its new executive director, KQED reports. Gloger joins Headlands from the Bolinas Museum, where she served as executive director since 2022, and succeeds Maricelle (Mari) Robles, who will be leaving the role at Headlands after four years.
Anti-censorship activists have joined Penguin Random House in condemning Montgomery County in Texas after Linda Coombs’s book Colonization and the Wampanoag Story (2023), which details European colonization of Native American land, was reclassified as fiction, the Guardian reports. According to PEN America, Texas is the state with the second highest number of book bans in the country with 1,567 titles removed from July 2021 to December 2023.
Agent Elena Giovinazzo and author Jason Reynolds are partnering to establish Heirloom Literary and Media, a new literary agency, Publishers Weekly reports. Reynolds will serve in a mentorship role, offering his insight as an author with vast experience in publishing, and Giovinazzo will assume the role of agent, managing the everyday tasks of working with authors.
The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) announced on Friday a new funding opportunity for small presses impacted by the sudden closure of Small Press Distribution (SPD) in March 2024. Presses distributed by SPD can apply to the Small Press Future Fund for one-year grants of $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 to support them as they secure new warehousing, recover inventory, and improve their operations. The funding is available through a partnership between CLMP and the Mellon Foundation.
Maya Hawke will narrate a new audiobook edition of Joan Didion’s classic Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968) People reports. “It’s an honor to have the opportunity to narrate her brilliant work and introduce her iconic prose to a new generation,” Hawke said in a statement.
The winners of this year’s Kirkus Prizes were announced at a ceremony on October 16, Book Riot reports. The recipients of the prize each receive $50,000, and this year’s winners included Percival Everett for his novel James (Doubleday Books) and Adam Higginbotham for his nonfiction book Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space (Avid Reader Press).
The University of Cincinnati has announced the closure of the University of Cincinnati Press, which will cease operations on June 30, 2025, because it “is not in a self-sustaining financial position.” As of July 1, 2025, scholarly titles in print and e-book formats will be distributed by University of Minnesota Press.
Academic publisher Wiley has launched a new program called Wiley AI Partnerships, which “aims to develop new AI applications, assistants, and agents in partnership with innovative companies, to empower researchers and practitioners and help drive the pace, efficiency, and accuracy of scientific discovery,” Publishers Weekly reports. The program seeks to support researchers with AI tools and resources to improve their work. In the past year, Wiley has signed two content-licensing agreements with technology companies worth a total of $44 million.
Kate McKinnon will host the 75th National Book Awards and Jon Batiste will perform at the ceremony on November 20 in New York City, the Associated Press reports. “I’ve been an invested reader my whole life and am so honored to be part of this event that celebrates the life-changing power of books while recognizing some of today’s most brilliant storytellers,” McKinnon said in a statement.
Luis Jaramillo discusses his novel The Witches of El Paso, which was published earlier this month by Primero Sueño Press, and writing about motherhood, magic, and malleable borders in an interview with Electric Literature. Jaramillo describes magic as “a metaphor for creativity, the force that exists in all of us.” He adds: “Anyone who writes knows that you have to be careful what you write about. Writing makes things happen.”
Han Kang declined a press conference for her Nobel Prize in Literature amid global wars, the Korea Herald reports. Upon hearing the news, Kang told the Swedish Academy in a phone interview, “I’m so surprised and I’m absolutely honored,” but Kang’s father relayed to local reporters at his home in Jangheung County, South Jeolla Province, “with the wars raging between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, with deaths being reported every day, she could not hold a celebratory press conference.”
The 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair, which began yesterday and runs until October 20, began with rousing remarks from Karin Schmidt-Frederichs, chairwoman of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, who said, “There are no bots at the book fair,” Publishers Weekly reports. Schmidt-Frederichs added that the fair aspires to be a forum for democracy, diversity, and dialogue—sentiments that were echoed by other speakers. For instance, British Turkish novelist Elif Shafak gave a keynote address in which she addressed the tragedy of global tribalism and proposed literature as a remedy for the discord of the digital age. “The literary mind cannot be isolationist,” she said, “Literature brings the periphery to the center.”
Book critic Michael Dirda writes for the Washington Post about his trip to Norway and his exploration of the country’s literature. Dirda shares his impressions of Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen and Hunger by Knut Hamsun, writing of the latter: “In general, Hamsun presents privation as a kind of drug, instilling a heightened awareness of the self and the external world.”
ByteDance, the Chinese technology company that owns TikTok, began publishing digital books last year and is now planning to publish physical books through its imprint, 8th Note Press, the New York Times reports. 8th Note Press is partnering with Zando, an independent publishing company, and the companies together will release ten to fifteen books per year. The target readership will be millennial and Gen Z readers, and the venture will focus on romance, romantasy, and young adult fiction, with the first editions arriving in early 2025.
Unite Against Book Bans is holding a Freedom to Read Community Day of Action this Saturday, October 19, 2024. Libraries, bookstores, and other partners nationwide are organizing events, rallies, and readings to unite against book bans. Readers can find events near them, sign the freedom to read pledge, and report censorship online.
Nadxieli Nieto will be the next editorial director of Algonquin Books, Publishers Weekly reports. She previously worked at Flatiron Books, where she served as executive editor, and PEN America, where she served as the director of Literary Awards.
The New York Times has compiled a list of audiobooks to help readers and voters make sense of our political moment and the upcoming presidential election. The list includes Why We’re Polarized, written and read by Ezra Klein; Unbought and Unbossed, written by Shirley Chisholm and read by Marcella Cox; and Election, written by Tom Perrotta and read by a full cast.
Xochitl Gonzalez celebrates the landmark publication of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street in the Atlantic. In her bio note for that novel, which was published forty years ago by Arte Público Press, Cisneros stated she was “nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife.” Gonzalez considers Cisneros’s literary legacy and its particular resonance for contemporary Latina writers who explore pleasure and longing in their books. “After all,” Gonzalez writes, “she was a mother, in a sense, to many—all of the Latinas striving to add to the literary landscape full-throated, complicated women rendered beautiful and bitchy and real.”
The dissolution process of Small Press Distribution (SPD) is moving forward in California, Publishers Weekly reports. The Superior Court of Alameda County partially granted a motion filed by SPD to consolidate all claims and leave them with the court. However, “a source familiar with the proceedings said some presses are having trouble substantiating their claims, in part because of a lack of information from the distributor,” according to Publishers Weekly. Court documents reveal that SPD, which closed in March, owes a total of more than $316,000 to publishers.