Publishers Weekly has announced its 2026 Bookstore of the Year: Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, New Jersey. The beloved bookstore has been in business since 1991 and is praised for the community it engenders; its unique spirit inspired former Watchung staffer Lily Braun-Arnold to pen her YA novel The Last Bookstore on Earth informed by the magic of her “home away from home.” In her letter nominating the store for the award, journalist Candy J. Cooper described it as “a cozy reading space for toddlers, a launchpad for local and regional authors, a recommender of great reads, a partner and promoter of the local literary festival, a beacon of sanity during the pandemic shutdown. The presence of Watchung Booksellers in the neighborhood persuaded me to move to Montclair thirty years ago and makes it difficult to imagine ever leaving now. It has meant more in my life, for my overall sense of happiness and well-being, than any other local business.”
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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.
Publishers Lunch reports on a new “interactive storytelling experience” from controversial chatbot company Character.ai that tells its users: “Don’t read books. Play them.” The offering, simply called “Books,” takes plotlines from canonical novels and other public domain works and allows its users to play out the novels’ plotlines or deviate from them as they choose; one demo models “a user changing the world of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz so that ‘Toto the dog was the one pulling the strings all along.”’ Character.ai, which promises users the experience of “[a]ll the classics. Even the ones you never finished,” has been the subject of considerable scrutiny: “It has come under fire for the platform’s chatbots of teenagers who were murdered and criminals including school shooters and Jeffrey Epstein. Character.ai is also engaged in lawsuits after teen users died by suicide after communicating with bots on the platform.”
Philadelphia author Emma Copley Eisenberg is bringing a message of fat-positivity to her community using $3,000 from an Anthropic settlement and a billboard, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. Earlier this week, the billboard was unveiled at Front Street and Fairmount Avenue, depicting a large, naked female body and the message “Your gut is a terrible thing to lose.” The URL fatswim.com in the bottom corner directs audiences to a website that shares its name with Eisenberg’s forthcoming short story collection centering fat, queer Philadelphians. “‘We just so rarely see images of fat people in public,’ said Eisenberg, whose fiction and nonfiction pieces aggressively challenge the notion that big people are unhappy in their skin and view their girth as temporary.” (Eisenberg prefers the language “fat” to words like “curvy,” which she sees as euphemisms that perpetuate the idea that “big people are unhappy in their skin.”) The billboard was financed with the $3,000 she received from a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic, which trained its AI model on another one of her books. “Essentially, algorithms are controlled by multinational corporations that are profiting off our data,” Eisenberg said to the Inquirer. “I want to interrupt that and, as a human, put important ideas in front of other humans who might not otherwise find them.”
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced its 2026 fellows across poetry, fiction, general nonfiction, biography, literary criticism, translation, and more. This 101st cohort of fellows represents 223 artists, scientists, and scholars, including writers Raymond Antrobus, Amitav Ghosh, Edgar Kunz, Rickey Laurentiis, Megha Majumdar, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and Namwali Serpell.
Noemi Press will be the new home for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, as announced via Instagram yesterday. The biannual award, named after the late Chicano poet, was established in 2004 by Letras Latinas to support the publication of debut poetry collections by Latinx poets residing in the United States. Montoya’s brother, the author and artist Maceo Montoya, stated, “Andrés lived and breathed poetry. He believed in its power to change the world. Noemi Press is the perfect home for the prize because it embodies this ethos and is deeply committed to every book it publishes.”
The 2026 Whiting Award winners were announced during a ceremony last night. The ten recipients are poets Hajar Hussaini, Brittany Rogers, and Alison C. Rollins; fiction writers Elaine Castillo, Hilary Leichter, and Lara Mimosa Montes; nonfiction writers Negar Azimi, Karen Hao, and Carvell Wallace; and dramatist and filmmaker Celine Song. All writers will receive a $50,000 cash prize. The annual awards are given “to identify exceptional new writers who are just making their mark in the literary culture.”
In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Colson Whitehead offers his unvarnished thoughts on the place of AI in art: “Studies show that overreliance on these digital tools causes cognitive decline, but if current events are any indication, nobody’s making much of a contribution anyway. Go ahead and use AI however you like. Except art. If you use it for your art, you’re a freakin’ hack.”
A new partnership with Bookshop.org will allow Spotify users to order books through the streaming service’s app, reports Book Riot. The partnership extends Spotify’s efforts to cater to book fans; since launching its audiobook services in 2022, Spotify has nearly quintupled the number of titles available on the platform, expanding from 150,000 to 700,000. The collaboration with Bookshop.org dovetails with its Page Match feature, a tool launched in February that allows readers to switch between a physical book and an audiobook without losing their place.
Citing concerns about “job security, wages, and a need for greater transparency from company leadership,” employees at Catapult Book Group have unionized, reports Publishers Weekly. Catapult unionizes as part of UAW Local 2011, which also represents workers at HarperCollins, Abrams, and the New Press. “I’m eager to form a union at Catapult to create a healthier workplace so that I, my colleagues, and future employees can sustain a meaningful career in publishing,” said Skye Tarshis in a comment to Publishers Weekly. “With the current job market, it’s paramount that people have a say in their working conditions through a fair contract. I hope to set an example in the industry, so we can all protect our jobs and continue to pursue the literary work we’re passionate about.” Senior production editor Laura Berry echoed the sentiment: “It’s not sustainable to depend on good intentions when it comes to our livelihood, and a union can protect the conditions of our employment during a time of political hostility against books.”
PEN America has joined with one hundred organizations including the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, and the Children’s Book Council, to bring a letter to Congress urging the rejection of House Resolution 7661 (H.R. 7661), a bill that would “in effect mandate book censorship in the nation’s public schools.” The bill would invoke the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to restrict funding to programming supporting books deemed to contain “sexually-oriented material” and material related to trans identity. “H.R. 7661 threatens to suppress access to important books for students—a clear attempt to further erode the freedom to read in this country. That Congress would task itself with deciding what books belong in schools is absurd and yet another example of government overreach tormenting public schools and libraries,” said Kasey Meehan, the director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read initiative. “The bill’s focus on a limited number of ‘classic works’ and explicit anti-trans language also signals the continued desire to censor identities and stories of people of color and LGBTQ+ people and books that reflect the lived experiences of young people today.”
According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in October 2025, more Americans still read books in print than in digital formats. The survey shows that 75 percent of U.S. adults say they “have read all or part of at least one book in the past twelve months” and that roughly two-thirds say they have read a physical book during that same time period. “While book reading is widespread, the survey also shows that participation in book clubs is much less common.”
PEN America recently announced a partnership with Big Five publishers Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, and Penguin Random House as well as author David Baldacci to establish a U.S. Author Safety Program “to help protect writers facing harassment and threats driven by a pernicious wave of censorship that is eroding free expression and disrupting authors’ professional lives.” As part of the new program, PEN America plans to offer safety training, consultations, resources, and peer support for U.S. authors who are facing harassment and security risks connected to their work.
For the Atlantic, Rebecca Ackerman considers the merits of ghostwriting in light of artificial intelligence. “What seems clear to me is that experts should hire experts, and everyone should get paid. When would-be writers use AI, tech companies and their investors profit. Ghostwriting, however, offers experienced writers a real living in an industry where a sustainable career often looks like a long-lost dream.”
Paramount, a leading media and entertainment conglomerate, is forming a book publishing imprint, Paramount Global Publishing (PGP), reports Publishers Weekly. Previously a longtime owner of Simon & Schuster, before selling the publishing company to a private investment firm, Paramount is back in the literary game with a new team that sees books as a way to expand how audiences engage with their content. Via an announcement, the company shared that PGP “will develop complementary publishing content inspired by its iconic portfolio of brands and franchises as well as generate new IP [intellectual property] through the creation of original stories.”
Esther Cohen’s poet laureate appointment for Greene County, New York, has been revoked due to social media posts, the Overlook reports. Cohen would have been the first poet laureate for the county, but lawmakers have cited two Facebook posts of hers that promoted violence against President Trump. Patrick Linger, chairman of the Republican-majority Legislature, wrote that the county must take “a zero-tolerance stand against the promotion of violence of any kind, made by anyone.” Cohen, a writer and award-winning poetry teacher, has since removed the posts and apologized after learning of the objections, though she said the legislature declined her offer to speak with them. Of one of her recent books, All of Us (Saddle Road Press, 2023), Cohen stated, “My whole book is an inclusive portrait of all of us, dedicated to everyone in Upstate New York. We have to learn to talk to each other and listen to each other and figure out how to coexist rather than polarizing each other for our politics and our beliefs.”
PEN America is working with publishers and literary agencies to launch a new initiative for authors in the United States who are facing harassment, reports the Associated Press. The U.S. Safety Program will “provide safety training and other resources for authors amid a wave of censorship efforts across the country.” Given the rise in harassment against journalists when Trump was first elected president and the threats and abuse being aimed at writers and educators in recent years, co-chief executive officer of PEN America, Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, says, “Through this new program, the literary and publishing community is stepping up together because writers should not be forced to choose between their safety and their voice.”
A settlement has been reached in ALA et al. v. Keith Sonderling et al., an action brought to protect the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) from dismantlement by the Trump administration, reports Publishers Weekly. The agreement to drop the case comes as “welcome news for library supporters” and follows another key victory this week, when Attorneys General from twenty-one states were granted a permament injunction in a separate lawsuit surrounding the dissolution of the IMLS. In a statement, American Library Association president Sam Helmick celebrated today’s news: “This settlement protects life-changing library services for communities across the country. ALA will continue to defend every American’s freedom to read and learn.”
Novelist Helen DeWitt has spoken about her decision to decline the Windham-Campbell Prize—and the $175,000 purse that comes with it—the Guardian reports. To accept the award, DeWitt was asked to consent to a promotional tour, the filming of a video, and participation in a podcast on the heels of “five very bad years” personally and professionally. “If you’re trying not to crack up, there are some things you can’t do; it’s hard to get people to accept that,” wrote DeWitt of finally declining the award after several exchanges with the award sponsors. “If the superstructure of the prize excludes people who are not able to do all the extra things you want, that hardly seems in the spirit of what was intended by its generous founders,” said DeWitt in an e-mail to prize director Michael Kelleher.
For the New York Times, Alexandra Alter talks with authors about faltering trust as AI seeps into traditional publishing: “A growing number of writers face unfounded suspicions of AI use. Others use AI without disclosing it. Many readers feel confused and wary, not knowing whether the books they’re reading were written by a human or a machine.” Few publishing houses have clear guidelines around what use of AI, if any, is considered permissible for their authors. Meanwhile, authors who have not used AI tools can be incorrectly flagged by AI-detection software. Thriller writer Andrea Bartz reports running a text she’d written through such software and being told she’d likely used AI. The software then offered an uncanny solution: “Would you like to humanize your text?”
The inaugural Poetry Society of America (PSA) Summer Fellowship program has announced its cohort. The fellows are S. Erin Batiste, Adriana Beltrano, Mitchell Bradford III, Cynthia Clifford, Isabella DeSendi, Cicely Grace, Eve Kenneally, Miguel Martin Perez, Kimberly Ramos, Timothy Ree, Lina Stoyanovich, and Dujie Tahat. These twelve early-career poets will participate in a weeklong writing intensive free of charge at PSA’s offices in New York City, which will include daily workshops led by Lynn Melnick, field trips, and visits from industry professionals.
As of this morning, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), Mitzi Angel, informed staff that the publisher will be closing their MCD imprint, Publishers Weekly reports. MCD began in 2016 with the goal to publish experimental work that existed at the edges of FSG’s traditional roster. MCD’s publisher and SVP, Sean McDonald, will be leaving on April 15. All the imprint’s spring titles will remain under MCD’s name, but starting this fall all forthcoming books will be published under FSG more broadly. Despite the closure of this imprint, Angel wrote, “FSG remains deeply committed to adventure; to publishing a wide variety of unexpected, exhilarating and thought-provoking books across a range of categories and genres.”
The Windham-Campbell Prizes at Yale University, given for literary achievement and to “provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns,” announced the 2026 winners. They are poets Joyelle McSweeney (United States) and Karen Solie (Canada), fiction writers Gwendoline Riley (United Kingdom) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs (United States), nonfiction writers Kei Miller (Jamaica) and Lucy Sante (United States/Belgium), and playwrights Christina Anderson (United States) and S. Shakthidharan (Australia/Sri Lanka). Each writer will receive $175,000 in support of their work.
Audiobook fans can look forward to a uniquely immersive listening experience this May, when Audible runs a “pop up listening lounge” in New York City, Publishers Lunch reports. The three-story Audible Story House will feature a browsable library of “story tiles” with headphones for listening, and will play host to events including panels and book clubs. Entry is free. “Story House arrives at a cultural inflection point where audio storytelling is one of the fastest-growing formats in entertainment, and passionate fan culture around books and audiobooks has never been more alive,” stated a press release quoted by Publishers Lunch. “Story House taps into the nostalgia and community feel of book culture while bringing it fully into the present—reimagining the bookstore as an innovative destination for the next frontier of storytelling.”
The National Book Foundation has announced its 2026 5 Under 35 honorees: Megan Kamalei Kakimoto for Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury, 2023), Anika Jade Levy for Flat Earth (Catapult, 2025), Carrie R. Moore for Make Your Way Home (Tin House, 2025), Maggie Su for Blob: A Love Story (Harper, 2025), and Stephanie Wambugu for Lonely Crowds (Little, Brown, 2025). Conferred annually to recognize “outstanding debut fiction writers under the age of 35,” the honor has previously been bestowed on luminaries including Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Angela Flournoy, Valeria Luiselli, Karen Russell, Bryan Washington, Claire Vaye Watkins, Tiphanie Yanique, and Charles Yu. Writers who published a debut novel or story collection within the previous five years were eligible for consideration; this year’s recipients were selected by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sigrid Nunez, Danielle Evans, Charles Yu, and Kaveh Akbar. Each honoree will receive $1,250 and be honored at a ceremony in New York City this June.
The Trump administration has dropped an attempt to appeal a 2025 federal court ruling that protected the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) from dismantlement, Publishers Weekly reports. “Last spring, Trump issued an executive order demanding that IMLS and other federal agencies be reduced to their minimum statutory functions. To enforce the executive order, the executive branch appointed an IMLS acting director, put 85 percent of IMLS staff members on paid administrative leave, dissolved the agency’s board of directors, and curtailed the administration of grants.” However, Attorneys General from twenty-one states filed a lawsuit to stop the dismantlement of IMLS, and a Rhode Island district court judge ruled in their favor. As the Trump adminstration withdraws its appeal, the action “finally lays to rest President Trump’s executive order that threatened countless library services available to anyone who walks into one of our nation’s 115,000 public, school, academic and other libraries,” said American Library Aassociation president Sam Helmick in a statement.
Six bookstores in Tehran have been damaged or destroyed following military attacks by the United States and Israel, according to the CEO of Book City, the largest chain of bookstores in Iran, Publishing Perspective reports. Despite the ongoing war, Ali Jafarabadi says Book City’s shops have been busy. “We are doing daily activities but sometimes it is really hard when you have no perspective of your next seconds and you might be surprised by a bomb, which was the experience that we had in our stores several times,” he said.
Mahreen Sohail’s Small Scale Sinners (A Public Space) has been named winner of the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Sohail will receive $15,000. The other finalists—Addie E. Citchens for Dominion (FSG), Quiara Alegría Hudes for The White Hot (One World), Jonas Hassen Khemiri for The Sisters (FSG), and Lily King for Heart the Lover (Grove Press)—will receive $5,000. Judges Samantha Hunt, Tania James, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow considered 387 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the U.S. during the 2025 calendar year. Submissions came from 155 publishing houses, including independent and academic presses.
The Correspondent (Crown, 2025) by Virginia Evans has been selected as the inaugural winner of the $15,000 James Patterson + Bookshop.org Prize. The $10,000 runner-up prize goes to The Lilac People (Counterpoint, 2025) by Milo Todd. Every nomination and selection was made by booksellers at qualifying independent bookstores, “a direct expression of Bookshop.org’s mission to amplify the expertise of indie booksellers and the voices of local readers.”
Today is National Black Bookstore Day, a national observance established by the National Association of Black Bookstores “to recognize, elevate, and drive support to Black-owned bookstores across the United States.” The day also honors the legacy of Georgia “Mother Rose” West, founder of Underground Books and a central figure in Black literary culture and community.
Wes Enzinna, deputy editor of The Baffler, details the financial realities of being a writer, for a symposium titled “The Profession That Does Not Exist: Writing Won’t Make You a Living,” featuring Philip Connors, Bertrand Cooper, Sara Nović, Chris Rose, Bud Smith, Timmy Straw, and May Syeda. Citing the Authors Guild’s latest income survey, which showed that the median book-related income for “traditionally published trade authors” in 2023 was $15,000-$18,000, Enzinna introduces the personal essays that follow by writing: “The accounts here describe the financial compromises, the emotional costs, the physical exhaustion, the moral injury, and the drain on the imaginative reserves that are the costs of a side gig. They describe the way that writing itself can serve as a form of spiritual recovery from the labor that funded it.”
Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel, The Corrections, is set to stream with Netflix, featuring Meryl Streep as a lead actor and Cord Jefferson as the director of the limited series drama, reports IndieWire. Originally adapted for HBO in 2012, with Noah Baumbach as the director, and starring actors Dianne Wiest, Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Greta Gerwig, the would-be series was passed on by the cable network. This time around Franzen is writing the adaptation of his book, with Streep and Jefferson set to be executive producers.
The latest data from Circana BookScan reveals that unit sales of print books fell 3.1% compared to the first quarter of 2025, reports Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly. “Though the young adult category had the steepest percentage decline, adult nonfiction, the industry’s biggest category, lost the most sales, selling some 5.5 million fewer copies in the most recent quarter than a year ago.” Only the children’s category had a sales increase over last year’s first quarter, with sales most likely benefitting from an earlier Easter this year.
“Visitors to Norway during Easter might find the streets emptier than usual, thanks to the nation’s cherished Eastertime obsession: retreating to isolated cabins to binge crime fiction,” reports the BBC. The Påskekrim (“Easter crime”) tradition dates to the days preceding Easter in 1923 when, thanks to savvy marketing, the title for the Norweigan crime novel Bergenstoget plyndret i nat (The Bergen Train Was Looted Last Night) appeared at the top of the national newspaper, confusing readers about what was fact and what was best-selling fiction. “Ever since, the Easter period has become associated with crime fiction, and eventually Norwegians began celebrating by reading suspenseful stories, from murder mysteries and heists to detective tales and true crime.”
Ursula K. Le Guin’s personal blog is finding new life as a podcast, Reactor reports. From 2010 to 2017, the iconic writer used her posts to weigh matters of politics, discuss publishing developments, consider imagined floor plans for fictional spaces from her work, and even share cat photos. Now, each and every blog entry—including the cat tributes—will get its own episode in In Your Spare Time: From the Blog of Ursula K. Le Guin. Every episode will be narrated by a different writer, reader, editor, librarian, or other literary friend from Le Guin’s circles, with installments slated from David Mitchell, Emily Wilson, Rick Riordan, Darcie Little Badger, Molly Gloss, and Karen Joy Fowler, among many others. The first episode will be released on April 8. “Over the years, many readers have told me they wish they could hear Ursula’s blog posts read by her. I do too, but for me, this is the next best thing—to hear so many fascinating people, connected to my mother in many different ways, bringing the blog into current conversation,” Theo Downes-Le Guin, Le Guin’s son and the podcast’s coproducer, said in a statement quoted by Reactor.
After two decades cultivating a now-thriving book culture in the city, the “Literary King of Tulsa” is bound for Seattle, the New York Times reports. In 2016, Jeff Martin launched the nonprofit bookstore Magic City Books in his Nebraska hometown, modeling its business structure on that of art museums and drawing on connections in the industry to draw literary luminaries to a destination that hadn’t previously been on many book tour maps. “I knew all the publishers, I knew all the publicists,” Martin said to the Times. “But once I was detached from the machine, I had to figure out, How am I going to get people here?” The answer involved galvanizing local businesses to help, sometimes “ponying up gas money” to authors, and pouring countless unpaid personal hours into the project. Martin will continue as president of Magic City Books even as he begins his new role as chief of creative strategy and storytelling at the Seattle Art Museum, Tulsa never far from mind. “The place felt like a black hole when I was a teenager, and at some point, it became a blank canvas,” Martin told the Times. “Tulsa will survive without me just fine. But it feels nice knowing I made a difference.”
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, one of the remaining LGBTQ+ bookstores in Manhattan, may be acquired by Hive Mind, a queer indie bookstore in Brooklyn, to prevent the Bureau from closing, reports Publishers Weekly. To aid with the transfer of ownership, Hive Mind’s owner, Jules Wernersbach, has started a GoFundMe to raise the funds needed for the acquisition process. In a release, Wernersbach stated: “We’re in a moment when queer literature is under extreme censorship nationwide and trans people are being targeted by legislation that threatens their human rights. Just this month, HR 7661, a bill that would censor books in schools nationwide, was sent to the House. We must keep this invaluable resource of trans and queer literature open in our city. We need it.”
This fall World Editions will launch Read the World A to Z, a translation series featuring novels by authors from countries representing every letter of the alphabet. In October the press will publish the first three titles in the series, highlighting authors from Argentina (All That Dies in April by Mariana Travacio), Belgium (The Woman Who Fed the Dogs by Kristien Hemmerechts), and China (Cocoon by Zhang Yueran). The rollout for this series will include “special information packages about the literary landscape of the featured country” as well as events with the authors and translators.
The bestselling novel Go as a River has led literary tourists to Gunnison Valley, Colorado, looking for the lost town written about in the book, reports Nancy Lofholm of the Colorado Sun. Penned by author Shelley Read, the novel is set in a historic location called Iola that existed six decades ago and is now a “barren stretch of lake bottom” in Western Colorado. Tourists began flooding the area looking for remnants of Iola, as written by Read, in the summer of 2023, with the hopes of running into the author as well. “I have learned much of the rest of the world is enthralled by Colorado,” says Read. “I can still say that I am so honored by it.”
Nearly $350,000 was awarded to writers, editors, and translators at last night’s annual PEN America Literary Awards held in New York City, Publishers Weekly reports. Those honored included Jamaica Kincaid, who received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974– (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Nicholas Boggs, who received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Edwidge Danticat received the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, honoring the Haitian American novelist, short story writer, and memoirist for her extraordinary body of work. The evening “marked a return to form for the free speech organization’s flagship literary prizes, which had been diminished in recent years by a boycott, led by Writers Against the War in Gaza, which was lifted on December 31, 2025. Due to numerous authors withdrawing their books from consideration, the ceremony and a number of awards were canceled in 2024. Last year, the ceremony returned but one of its top prizes, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was not conferred due to author withdrawals.”
As audiobooks and romantasy novels converge in popularity, Vanessa Romo of NPR talks to Antony Palmini, the audiobook rising star who has voiced the “book boyfriends” of some of the romantasy genre’s biggest titles. Palmini has offered his resonant baritone to leading characters in series including A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fae & Alchemy, participating in the recordings of more than fifty audiobooks last year. Early hints of Palmini’s path to “admittedly niche celebrity” came while working at a Blockbuster video store as a teenager, when a coworker admired his voice on the phone to customers: “‘There’s like a voice that’s coming out that sounds kind of, dare I say, sexy,’ he said, recalling his friend’s words.”
JD Vance has announced the publication of his second memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, with HarperCollins this June, the Guardian reports. Vance’s earlier memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper, 2016), became a best-seller, “spending more than two hundred weeks on the New York Times list and selling more than five million copies worldwide, and was later adapted into a film by Ron Howard starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.” The new book is seen as a calculated move as Vance contends for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination.
A freelance writer is in hot water after the New York Times discovered he used artificial intelligence “to help write a book review that inadvertently incorporated elements of a Guardian review on the same title,” the Wrap reports. The Times has cut ties with the freelancer, Alex Preston, who used AI to write his January 6 review of the novel Watching Over Her (Simon & Schuster, 2026) by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, translated from French by written Frank Wynne, after a reader wrote in to alert the newspaper to the similarities with the Guardian review. “The Times then launched a review and spoke to Preston, who admitted he used an AI tool to help draft the piece and that he failed to catch the Guardian material before the paper published the review.”
The New York Times recently announced updates to its best-seller lists. “With audiobooks making up a larger share of how people consume books, we are broadening our audio offerings by adding two new lists: Audio Children’s (top 15) and Audio Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous (top 10). These additions round out our coverage of the audiobook segment, which currently includes Audio Fiction and Audio Nonfiction, and reflect [the newspaper’s] goal to publish lists that cover different formats through which readers—and increasingly listeners—purchase books.” The newspaper also announced that it would cease publication of the monthly Mass Market list; the weekly Paperback Nonfiction list will shift to monthly. The changes will go into effect online on April 1 and in print on April 12.
The judging panel of the 2026 International Booker Prize today announced the shortlist of six books that are competing for this years’ prize for fiction translated into English. They are The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin; She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel; The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin; On Earth as It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan; The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump; and Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. The winner of the International Booker Prize, which will be announced on May 19, will receive £50,000 (approximately $66,226), with the money divided equally between the winning author and translator. Each shortlisted title will be awarded a prize of £5,000 (approximately $6,622), split between the author and the translator.
New legislation may aid prison libraries in delivering materials and preparing incarcerated individuals to transition home, reports Publishers Weekly. As the majority of the U.S.’s nine-hundred-plus prison libraries are often under-resourced and understaffed, the introduction of the Prison Libraries Act into the U.S. House of Representatives aims to offer one-year grants to “advance reintegration efforts, reduce recidivism, and increase educational opportunities,” per the bill. This would require $10 million in federal spending each year through 2031 and would allow “for more free resources to be made available, for people who are incarcerated to be viewed as members of the public, and for the public to think about how this is for the good of all of us,” says Jeanie Austin, a librarian at the San Francisco Public Library, which has a Jail and Reentry Services department.
Harlequin, a division of HarperCollins known for its romance books, is partnering with the AI entertainment company Dashverse to create microdramas inspired by the imprint’s titles, reports Publishers Lunch. These illustrated short-form videos will be available in English with the goal of offering readers a new way of experiencing beloved books such as Catherine Mann’s A Fairy-Tail Ending and JC Harroway’s Forbidden Fiji Nights With Her Rival. “This partnership with Dashverse represents an exciting opportunity to reimagine these cherished stories for a new audience, leveraging cutting-edge technology to bring them to life in an innovative and engaging medium,” says Harlequin EVP and publisher Brent Lewis.
April 7th is National Black Bookstore Day, established by the National Association of Black Bookstores (NAB2) “to increase visibility, drive engagement, and strengthen the long-term sustainability of Black-owned bookstores.” This nationwide movement is also meant to honor Georgia “Mother Rose” West, founder of Underground Books in Oak Park, California, and a notable figure in the Black literary community who passed in December 2024 at the age of 75. Among the resources the NAB2 provides in association with this special day are a bookstore directory to enable readers to find Black-owned bookstores throughout the U.S. and a report on the current state of Black bookstores, including the fact that Black-owned bookstores represent only eight percent of independent bookstores nationwide.
Ahead of the 30th annual celebration of National Poetry Month this April, the Academy of American Poets has announced its lineup of festivities: “free programs, resources, and events designed to make poetry accessible to everyone.” Offerings include curation of the Academy’s free Poem-A-Day e-mail series by chancellor emerita Dorianne Laux; free National Poetry Month posters featuring artwork by Alfredo Richner and words from U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze; and the annual Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day, celebrated on April 30. A virtual benefit for the Academy will take place on April 28, with benefits going to the organization’s K-12 poetry education programs.
The European and International Booksellers Federation has issued a statement condemning the arrest of four employees of a Hong Kong bookstore. The founder of the bookshop Book Punch, Pong Yat-ming, has been taken into police custody along with three booksellers from the shop; they stand accused of selling a biography of the imprisoned pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai. “The arrest of booksellers for distributing literature is an attack on the core mission of booksellers to provide access to diverse ideas and on the fundamental principle of intellectual freedom,” reads a statement from the EIBF. “EIBF calls for the immediate release of the arrested booksellers and urges the international community to join us in condemning these actions and to stand in solidarity with booksellers and publishers worldwide who face repression for their work.”
Winners of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) book awards for publishing year 2025 were announced last night at a ceremony in New York City. In a statement to the press, the NBCC spoke to the breadth and impact of this year’s honorees: “This year’s NBCC winners include books on timely and timeless topics: the present and future impact of new technologies, the power of storytelling in shaping a life, the importance of shining a light on forgotten or ignored histories, the lasting repercussions of sexual abuse, the complexity of geopolitics, the beauty of transformative narratives.” Kevin Young (Night Watch, Knopf), Han Kang (We Do Not Part, Hogarth, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris), Karen Hao (Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Penguin Press), Alex Green (A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled, Bellevue Literary Press) and Arundhati Roy (Mother Mary Comes to Me, Scribner) took home awards in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, biography, and autobiography, respectively. Critic Rhoda Feng received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, given to an NBCC member for exceptional work in the field. Other honors bestowed included the Toni Morrison Achievement Award, which recognizes “institutions that have made significant contributions to book culture,” and which was was jointly awarded to NPR and PBS. “At a time when some question the value of public, service-minded media, we salute PBS and NPR for all you have done for both book culture and American democracy,” said board member Jacob M. Appel of the award.
Bertelsmann, the parent company of Penguin Random House, is stepping up legal efforts to combat book bans, CEO Thomas Rabe told Reuters. “In January 2025, the Trump administration dismissed 11 complaints related to books banned by local school districts. ‘These are indeed factual book bans,’ Rabe said. Bertelsmann and its publishing arm are contesting the measures in court, and the group has so far won every legal case that has been decided, he added.”
“The Gathering,” a poem about the “relentlessness of the news cycle” by Partridge Boswell, has won the National Poetry Competition sponsored by the British arts organization Poetry Society, the Guardian reports. The poem was picked from more than 21,000 entries by poets in 113 countries. Boswell received £5,000 (approximately $6,680). “The speaker reflects on the tensions of personal grief against the backdrop of state violence in Gaza and elsewhere,” the judges said of the winning poem. “How do we maintain language’s potency amid the anaesthetising relentlessness of the news cycle? How do we resist false narratives, eclipsed histories?”
Marianthe Dresios and Omer Korkmaz, both first-year students at Johns Hopkins University, have penned a love letter to the semicolon, the disrespected and little-used punctuation mark that Kurt Vonnegut advised writers to avoid (“All they do is show you’ve been to college,” according to Vonnegut) for the school’s News-Letter. “The semicolon does not draw a sentence to a close. It holds its breath, waiting for the next clause to continue the message of the first. In the same way, the semicolon is not dead; it merely waits for us to love it again.”
The Associated Press reports that Tracy Kidder, the author of a dozen acclaimed nonfiction books, including The Soul of a New Machine (Little, Brown, 1981), which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, has died of lung cancer. He was 80.
Random House has announced its publication this September of Gloria Steinem’s memoir, An Unexpected Life, Publishers Marketplace reports. “Moving between memory and the present, Steinem examines the progress and setbacks of more than sixty years of activism and offers a message to new generations about what the ongoing fight will require—and the imagination it will demand,” said the publisher in a press release. The book was acquired by Random House vice president and executive editor Jamia Wilson; read a conversation between Wilson and Vivian Lee about Wilson’s beginnings at Feminist Press and the work of building a list in the September/October 2023 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Mystery surrounds a library book conscientiously returned by its reader before its due date—but over 10,500 miles away from where it was checked out, the Express & Star reports. Australian librarian Jessica Berry was baffled to discover a book in her return queue that had come from Gornal Library, a community library in the West Midlands of England. The book, a copy of Gill Hornby’s 2013 best-seller The Hive, has since been returned to Gornal, where it has been withdrawn from circulation. Although the book’s wandering days are over, tales of its exploits live on: “We’ve been entertaining some of our regulars with the story of this novel’s incredible journey,” said library assistant James Windsor.
Six books have been announced as the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction: The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet (Hutchinson Heinemann), Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health by Daisy Fancourt (Cornerstone Press), Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell (Picador), Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane Rogoyska (Allen Lane), Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton), and Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century by Ece Temelkuran (Canongate). “We awarded the first Women’s Prize for Nonfiction in 2024 because women’s voices were systemically underrepresented in most narrative nonfiction disciplines, as well as being overlooked in review coverage, award recognition and receiving lower advances,” said Claire Shanahan, executive director of the Women’s Prize Trust. “This exceptional shortlist... shines a light on the brilliant women writing such bold and accomplished nonfiction, for the pleasure of all booklovers, everywhere.” This year’s winner will be announced on June 11 at an event in London and will receive £30,000 (approximately $40,140).
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been named a Global Icon for Bvlgari’s 2026 Carrying Culture campaign, “becoming one of five women chosen by the Italian luxury house to front its Icons Minaudière collection,” according to Brittle Paper. The author of eight books, the most recent of which is the novel Dream Count, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2025, joins Canadian supermodel Linda Evangelista, Italian American actress Isabella Rossellini, South Korean actress Kim Ji-won, and South African architect Sumayya Vally in a campaign photographed by Ethan James Green and designed by Greek fashion designer Mary Katrantzou. (Read the profile of Adichie by Renée H. Shea from the July/August 2009 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)
Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly reports on statistics compiled by Bowker that show the total number of books published in the U.S. in 2025 jumped 32.5 percent over 2024, to more than four million books. “The increase was led by self-published works, for which the number of print and e-books...soared 38.7 percent to more than 3.5 million from 2.5 million in 2024.”
In an essay for the New York Times, David Streitfeld looks at the power of book reviews and how, back in 1993 at the Washington Post Book World, before the Jeff Bezos era, a review by Michael Dirda of a misunderstood novel by Annie Proulx had career-changing results for both Proulx and Larry McMurtry, who had been fired from Book World fifteen years earlier. “Here is a tale, in the dark for 30 years, about how book reviews are an engine that helps keep the culture running. It is about what can happen when you’re not ruled by data.”
Henry Grabar of the Atlantic covers the recent revival of Barnes & Noble (B&N). After becoming a private company in 2019, B&N acquired a new CEO, James Daunt, who subsequently changed the trajectory of the company, which was going down in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. Having previously founded an independent bookstore, Daunt changed what he calls B&N’s “retailer’s mindset” by giving authority to the local store managers, so they could choose what books to stock and promote, creating diversification across all stores. As a result, Barnes & Noble opened sixty new stores last year with the goal of doing the same this year as well. Grabar writes: “Daunt believes that Barnes & Noble makes room for a type of book buyer who might not feel at ease in independent bookstores, in which customers, he says, are met with a ‘sort of scrutiny, and also a sense of intellectual expectation.’” B&N is also “a popular stage set for TikToks,” appealing to teenagers with its laid-back atmosphere and wide aisles.
Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James is developing two new TV projects with Motive Pictures, an independent British production company, Deadline reports. Previously, James collaborated with Motive on his first show, Get Millie Black, which aired in both the U.S. and the U.K. in 2024 and 2025, respectively. The duo is back and working on two dramas, one of which “is being billed as a blood-soaked odyssey into the lawless Caribbean, set during the Golden Age of piracy,” and the other of which is “a revenge epic and geopolitical thriller that plays out across the Americas.”
The HarperCollins Union has secured the highest starting salary in the publishing industry with a new contract, reports Publishers Lunch. This three-year contract mandates a beginning salary of $52,500, for a 35-hour week, which will increase annually to reach up to $55,200 in 2028. Additionally, all covered employees will receive annual pay increases, one floating holiday was included to a total of eighteen throughout the calendar year, and entry-level employees must be considered for a promotion after two years. “We were able to achieve provisions that will provide life changing support to current members, and a more sustainable future for new employees,” says Caitlin Stamper, the union chair and a Harper Children’s designer.