Daily News

The Washington Post’s Sophia Nguyen writes about author Zadie Smith’s ability to get rid of physical copies of books after she has read them. Notable exceptions include certain philosophy titles, Italian dictionaries, and books gifted to her by family. “I feel like the record of your books are in the books you write, if you’re a writer,” she says.

Author and writing teacher Tom Spanbauer has died at age seventy-eight, Willamette Week reports. Spanbauer was known for mentoring many local Portland authors, including Monica Drake, Suzy Vitello, and Chuck Palahniuk, through his “Dangerous Writing” workshops. More than fifty of his former students went on to publish novels or memoirs.

Aspen Words, the literary arm of the Aspen Institute, is partnering with Book of the Month to launch the Aspen Literary Festival, Publishers Weekly reports. The inaugural festival is scheduled to take place September 26 to September 28 in Aspen, Colorado. More than forty authors will participate in conversations, book signings, and other activities inspired by books.

Esquire reports on the ten most banned books in America in 2023, including The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, and This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson.

Data from the American Library Association (ALA) shows that attempts to censor books and materials in libraries have slowed in 2024, Publishers Weekly reports. Between January 1 and August 31, 2024, ALA tracked 414 challenges to censor library materials and services that amounted to 1,128 unique titles challenged. That figure is down from 695 cases and 1,915 unique titles challenged during the same period last year. The report noted that censorship efforts remain far above levels tracked prior to 2020 and new data from PEN America found censorship in schools is still surging. 

Li-Young Lee, whose first poetry collection in a decade, The Invention of the Darling, was published by W. W. Norton in May, discusses the spiritual practice of poetry in an interview with Electric Literature. “Poetry is the logic of all logic,” he says. “And it’s a logic beyond reason. It’s the logic of God. It’s the logic of my mother.”

New state laws are fueling a surge in book bans, the New York Times reports. State and local governments are banning books at rates far higher than before the pandemic, according to two advocacy groups. PEN America reported that over 10,000 books were removed from schools and libraries, at least temporarily, last year. About 80 percent of those bans came just from Florida and Iowa.

Penguin Random House has appointed Rosalie (Rosie) Stewart as its senior manager for public policy, a role created to help battle book bans, Publishers Weekly reports. Stewart was most recently the manager of grassroots communications for the American Library Association’s Public Policy and Advocacy Office, and previously cofounded MOVE Texas (Mobilize, Organize, Vote, Empower), an organization focused on empowering underrepresented youth communities through civic engagement, issue advocacy, and leadership development. 

The Bay Area Book Festival (BABF) announced the appointment of J. K. Fowler as its new executive director. Fowler previously served as the founder and executive director of Nomadic Press, an Oakland-based nonprofit publisher committed to platforming marginalized voices. The BABF will celebrate its eleventh anniversary this spring.

Henry Hoke, the author of five books, including the novel Open Throat, published in 2023 by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and the memoir Sticker (Bloomsbury, 2022), discusses finding representation, balancing the work of publishing with creative life, and being honest about privilege in an interview with the Creative Independent. “I didn’t set out to even work with a big five publisher,” Hoke says. “I didn’t think that was my world because of what I do and how I do it and who I looked up to.” He adds: “Connecting with people through art is creative success to me.”

Academic publishers Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley, Sage Publications, Taylor & Francis, and Springer Nature are being sued over the peer review process, which does not compensate scholars for services, Publishers Weekly reports. The academics and researchers who filed the antitrust suit claim the major publishers are exploiting the peer review process for their own financial gain.

Andrea Lawlor writes about rereading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in an essay for Electric Literature. “I felt one way at first, I feel differently now, I will likely feel a new way in the future,” Lawlor writes. “Like Woolf, I will resist explanation and merely say that reading, like life, is subject to revision.”

The shortlist for the Booker Prize 2024 has been announced, Publishers Weekly reports. The list includes Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch writer to be shortlisted for the prize; Charlotte Wood, the first Australian to make the shortlist in ten years; as well as British, Canadian, and American authors. The winner will be announced at an award ceremony on November 12 in London.

An early version of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies that opens with the boys being evacuated in the midst of a nuclear war, and their plane shot down in an aerial battle, will be part of an exhibition marking seventy years since the novel’s publication, the Guardian reports. Golding’s manuscripts, notebooks and letters will be on display at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter in England later this month.

A school district in northeast Florida must return three dozen titles to libraries as part of a settlement with students and parents who sued over what they said was an unlawful decision to limit access to dozens of books containing LGBTQ+ content, the Associated Press reports.

The National Book Foundation announced the longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. The list includes works by Hisham Matar, Percival Everett, Kaveh Akbar, and others. Winners will be announced at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday, November 20.

The National Book Foundation has announced the longlist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Among the authors on the list are Hanif Abdurraqib for There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, Salman Rushdie for Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, and Deborah Jackson Taffa for Whiskey Tender. Winners will be announced at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday, November 20.

The National Book Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry. The list includes poets at all stages of their publishing careers, and nine of the ten poets are first-time National Book Award honorees, including Fady Joudah and Diane Seuss. Winners will be announced at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday, November 20.

A major Canadian literary award has dropped the reference to its sponsor, Scotiabank, from its name following months of protests over the bank’s investments in Elbit Systems, which supplies military equipment to Israel’s military, the Guardian reports. The Giller Prize, formerly known as the Scotiabank Giller Prize, will keep the bank as its main sponsor despite the rebrand. The change comes after more than thirty authors whose books would have been eligible for the 2024 Giller Prize withdrew their work from consideration in a collective statement published in July. In mid-2023, Scotiabank’s 1832 Asset Management was the third largest shareholder in Elbit Systems, and as of mid-August, the asset manager is the seventh largest shareholder, though they deny the protests influenced the reduction of their stake.

Former Doubleday executive editor Gerald Howard writes for the New York Times about Wilfrid Sheed's 1966 novel, Office Politics, and how it prepared Howard for his life in books. “The core insight I gained from my second reading of Office Politics was that if I thought I could stand at a remove from my place of employment and regard it as a kind of diorama or spectacle, I was deluding myself,” Howard writes. “As Rilke wrote, in a very different context: All this seems to require us. I was going to have to work with the materials at hand, pedestrian and unpromising as they might seem, to make of my life and career something meaningful. This was no small gift of self-knowledge to receive from a novel.”

Maggie Doherty writes for the New Yorker about Seamus Heaney and how he struggled to reconcile his vision of poetry with the brutality of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Heaney wanted to honor the “secret and natural” elements of poetry while acknowledging the violent realities of the world around him. “The public poet concerned himself with the polis and its problems,” Doherty writes. 

In an interview with Electric Literature, Vietnamese German author Khuê Phạm discusses her debut novel, Brothers and Ghosts (Scribe, 2024), translated by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey. The book explores how a Vietnamese diaspora family remains ensconced in historical trauma. “The dark experiences of being a refugee, of being in a country at war, they’re covered in silence,” Phạm says, “but somehow that silence is passed on from one generation to the next.”

Katy Waldman writes about the “literary bratdom” trend in contemporary fiction for the New Yorker. Focusing on books by the Zoomer and young millennial writers Gabriel Smith, Frankie Barnet, and Honor Levy, Waldman analyzes protagonists who identify as “brats” are “exuberantly ‘unlikable’” and jaded about the status quo.

A new exhibition at New York City’s Morgan Library & Museum will focus on the life and career of its inaugural director, Belle da Costa Greene, honoring the centennial of her appointment, Fine Books & Collections reports. The exhibition, which will run from October 25 to May 4, 2025, will trace her roots in a predominantly Black community in Washington D.C., to her career at the helm of the library, where she was an authority on illuminated manuscripts.

Little Free Library has produced an interactive map in collaboration with the American Library Association and PEN America in response to the nationwide surge in efforts to ban books from public and school libraries, Publishers Weekly reports. The map includes two main features: highlights, indicating where book bans are in effect at the state and county levels, and pinpoints, indicating the locations of Little Free Library’s book-sharing containers. The purpose of the initiative is to raise awareness about book banning and to leverage little free libraries to help distribute restricted books.

Brendan Chambers puts Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso Books, 2024) in conversation with Daniel Wright’s The Grounds of the Novel (Stanford University Press, 2024) in an essay for Public Books on the value of literary theory. “To them,” Chambers writes, “literary theory can be either avant-garde or lyric, a tool for stepping back from the world or for more fully inhabiting it. Even as crises multiply, they assert that theory remains valuable.”

NaNoWriMo, an annual challenge in which participants write a novel of at least 50,000 words in one month, has refused to “explicitly support” or “explicitly condemn” the use of AI assistance, the Atlantic reports. Many participants were angry at the organization’s decision but Gal Beckerman, a staff writer at the Atlantic, does not mind: “The world needs fewer novels, certainly fewer novels that have been written in a month,” he writes. “And artificial intelligence is itchy for distractions; we need to give the robots something to do before they start messing with nuclear codes or Social Security numbers.”

The Black List, an annual survey of Hollywood’s best unproduced screenplays, founded in 2005 by Franklin Leonard, is expanding into publishing, the New York Times reports. Leonard hired Randy Winston, the former director of writing programs at the Center for Fiction, to oversee the Black List’s development of a team to read and evaluate manuscripts. Like screenwriters who use the site, fiction writers can create a public profile on the Black List for free. They can post a novel-length unpublished or self-published manuscript on the site for a monthly fee of $30, and receive professional feedback on the first one hundred pages of their manuscript for $150.

The National Book Foundation announced it will present the 2024 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community to W. Paul Coates at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on November 20. Founder of Black Classic Press and BCP Digital Printing, Coates has published original works by authors such as Amiri Baraka, Bobby Seale, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

On September 7 the Harlem Book Fair will celebrate 26 years under the theme of “literary revolution,” according to Publishers Weekly. Founder and publisher Max Rodriguez says the event is intended as a “rebirth” of the historically Black neighborhood’s literary lineage. Rodriguez planned to shutter the event after last year’s event, but with additional support from publishing veteran Yona Deshommes, the fair is back with a global focus, fourteen panels, and roughly one hundred exhibitors. It has also partnered with Harlem’s own Caribbean Cultural Center Diaspora Institute (CCCDI), and authors of Haitian backgrounds will be prominently featured in the programming.

Fewer books are published during the fall of a presidental election, the Washington Post reports. It is harder for authors to book promotional media appearances or garner attention from social media influencers and book bloggers with the news cycle around an election. Christina Ward, vice president and editor at the publisher Feral House, described publishing at the peak of an election cycle as “an unforced error.”

Julian Lucas writes for the New Yorker about the novelist Danzy Senna’s humorous approach to the way biracial people are presented, questioned, overlooked, and exoticized in America. “The worst version of me would be writing about biracials in a respectful way,” Senna told Lucas. “I get to make fun of us incessantly.”