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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.
Ahead of the Valentine’s Day weekend, the New York Times Book Review has shared a glossary of romance novel terms and tropes, from amnesia and apron tugger to yearning and zombies. The guide parses the evolving (and sometimes cultish) culture surrounding the booming genre—Publishers Weekly estimates nearly 44 million copies of romance novels sold in 2026—and invites new readers to understand its niches, so as “to achieve maximum swoon.”
In a statement to the Wire, author Arundhati Roy has announced her withdrawal from the 2026 Berlinale film festival, where she had been set to make an appearance at a screening of her film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. Roy’s withdrawal comes in response to controversy surrounding comments from the film festival’s jury president about the place of politics at the festival, and particularly discussion of Palestine. “This morning, like millions of people across the world, I heard the unconscionable statements made by members of the jury of the Berlin film festival when they were asked to comment about the genocide in Gaza. To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping,” said Roy. “It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time—when artists, writers, and filmmakers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.”
Does every writer need a room of one’s own? In the latest installment of his Open Questions column, Joshua Rothman mulls this truism for the New Yorker. Writers’ spaces hold a particular mystique for their literary acolytes, and a peek inside a beloved writer’s space can promise to reveal the “route of creativity,” as Katie da Cunha Lewin, author of The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love, describes it. Nevertheless, Rothman and da Cunha Lewin argue, we “might do better to imagine a writer as someone conversing, exercising, socializing, and interacting, instead of merely observing—someone who is out in the world instead of shut away in a room.” (Journalist Alissa Greenberg considered the experience of writers retreats in the homes of literary heroes in the March/April 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)
For the Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper reports on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the virtual monopoly it has on American arts and letters. There is no single entity, the federal government included, that has “a more profound influence on the fiscal health and cultural output of the humanities than the Mellon Foundation.” Some of the questions that Harper grapples with are: “What are the consequences when eye-watering sums of money are put behind the idea that the purpose of American arts and letters is not wisdom but advocacy? What happens when the humanities are seen not as having intrinsic worth, but as valuable only insofar as they can be of service to a cause?”
Senators Adam Schiff (California) and John Curtis (Utah) have introduced the bipartisan CLEAR Act (Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting Act), Publishers Lunch reports. This bill “would require tech companies to submit a list of the copyrighted works used to create AI products to the register of copyrights” at least thirty days before a generative AI tool is released. Should a company violate the act, they would pay a penalty of at least $5,000 for each instance, and creators could take legal action against them.
Federal judges have dismissed three lawsuits accusing author Neil Gaiman of sexual assault in New Zealand four years ago, reports the Associated Press. The former nanny of his children, Scarlett Pavlovich, filed the suits against Gaiman and his wife in February of last year, “accusing Gaiman of multiple sexual assaults while she worked as the family’s nanny in 2022.” Pavlovich was demanding at least $7 million in damages.
Claire Kirch of Publishers Weekly looks at the ways in which Minnesota’s literary community “is coming together to support immigrants and others under attack by ICE agents, who have been an unwelcome presence in the state for the past six weeks.” Among the activities is the forthcoming publication by two affiliated publishers based in Minneapolis of an anthology, ICE Out: Minnesota Writers Rising Up, edited by Ian Leask and featuring more than fifty writers responding to ICE’s presence through poetry and prose. “In yet another show of solidarity, mystery authors Jess Lourey and Kristi Belcamino have organized Authors for Minnesota Day, slated for February 28, in which more than 50 Minnesota-based authors—including Allen Eskens, William Kent Krueger, Bao Phi, Margi Preus, and Curtis Sittenfeld—will stop by more than two dozen indie bookstores around the state to sign copies of their latest releases and give them out, along with swag kits in some cases, to anyone who donates to either the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota or the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota Immigration Rapid Response Fund.”
The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) has announced that Host Publications is the winner of the 2026 Constellation Award. The press, based in Austin, Texas, will receive $10,000. CavanKerry Press, located in Fort Lee, New Jersey, was selected as a finalist. Given to honor an independent literary press that champions the writing of people of color, including Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American Pacific Islander individuals, the Constellation Award was launched in 2021 by CLMP with the support of Penguin Random House. “With a current focus on poetry, Host publishes radical writing by emerging LGBTQ+, BIPOC, intersectional feminist, and immigrant voices, championing experimental writing that queers language and meaning-making, and engages with a poetics of liberation. Host works to empower its community of writers whose work inspires social transformation and creates a new sense of what is possible in writing.”
The New York Times reveals the quick responses and careful considerations that are triggered inside a publishing house when a forthcoming book, in this case the novel Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack, hews a little too close to the news cycle for comfort. Avid Reader Press, the publisher of Novack’s novel about a sex worker who assassinates a right-wing politician, had already sent out hundreds of prepublication copies of the book, emblazoned with the words “Somebody had to do it” and the image of a bleeding American flag, when Charlie Kirk was killed in September, prompting Novack’s team to reconsider the publishing plan. In the end, they decided to remove certain biographical information about the author from the finished book and the publisher’s website. “The circumstances surrounding Murder Bimbo were particularly extreme. But any publisher putting out a book in the current news environment faces significant marketing and publicity challenges.”
Literary Arts has announced the finalists for this year’s Oregon Book Awards. Thirty-five titles by Oregon authors across seven genre categories were chosen as finalists by panels of out-of-state judges, from a total of two hundred submitted titles. The winners will be revealed at an awards ceremony on April 20. The finalists for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction are Olufunke Grace Bankole for The Edge of Water (Tin House), Ling Ling Huang for Immaculate Conception (Dutton), Kevin Maloney for Horse Girl Fever (Clash Books), Madeline McDonnell for Lonesome Ballroom (Rescue Press), and Karen Thompson Walker for The Strange Case of Jane O. (Random House). The finalists for the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry are H. G. Dierdorff for Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter (University of Nevada Press), Garrett Hongo for Ocean of Clouds (Knopf), Jennifer Perrine for Beautiful Outlaw (Kelsey Street Press), Lisa Wells for The Fire Passage (Four Way Books), and Joe Wilkins for Pastoral, 1994 (River River Books). The finalists for the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction are Judith Barrington for Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs (Oregon State University Press), Karleigh Frisbie Brogan for Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts (Steerforth), Justin Hocking for A Field Guide to the Subterranean: Reclaiming the Deep Earth and Our Deepest Selves (Counterpoint Press/Catapult), Wayne Scott for The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined (Black Lawrence Press), and Lidia Yuknavitch for Reading the Waves (Riverhead Books).
The estate of Maya Angelou has joined Kurt Vonnegut’s estate in its case against Utah’s Sensitive Materials Law, Erin Somers of Publishers Lunch reports. Under the law, which was passed in 2022 and amended in 2024 to require public schools and their libraries “to remove certain ‘inappropriate’ books or books with any reference to sex,” Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings were banned by two school districts in Utah. Other banned books include Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.
The longlist for the inaugural James Patterson and Bookshop.org Prize has been revealed. The award honors outstanding full-length debut books published in the United States within the past twelve months. All nominations and selections are made by booksellers working in qualifying independent bookstores. The winner will be announced on April 6 and will receive $15,000; the runner-up will receive $10,000. The longlisted books are The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders (Catapult) by Sarah Aziza, The Correspondent (Crown) by Virginia Evans, When the Tides Held the Moon (Erewhon Books) by Vanessa Vida Kelley, Aftertaste (Simon & Schuster) by Daria Lavelle, It’s Different This Time (Dell) by Joss Richard, My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women (Curbstone Press) by Christina Rivera, The Slip (Simon & Schuster) by Lucas Schaefer, My Mother’s Boyfriends (7.13 Books) by Samantha Schoech, The Nature of Pain: Roots, Recovery, and Redemption Amid the Opioid Crisis (University Press of Kentucky) by Mandi Fugate Sheffel, and The Lilac People (Counterpoint) by Milo Todd.
Becca Rothfeld, a former nonfiction critic for the Washington Post’s Book World, laments last week’s shuttering of the stand-alone books section in a Page-Turner essay for the New Yorker, pointing out that the New York Times Book Review is the last discrete newspaper books section standing. “There are still plenty of places to read about literature, many of them excellent,” Rothfeld writes. “There are older and more established outlets, like the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books; cult favorites, like Bookforum; and irreverent newcomers, like the Drift and the Point, the latter of which I edit. These magazines are delightful and, in their own way, consistently surprising; I love reading them, and I have loved writing for them. But they are produced for an audience that already knows it cares about literature. The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits.”
The romance genre, known for its prolific authors and voracious readers, is at the vanguard of implementing A.I. tools, reports the New York Times. As the publishing industry’s best-selling genre, romance “relies on familiar narrative formulas” and is “built around popular tropes,” making the community particularly vulnerable to A.I.-generated work, especially since most authors don’t reveal when they have used chatbots, so as not to alienate readers. A contentious topic for writers and readers alike, one book-club leader, Zoë Mahler, noted, “Romance is about human connection, and there’s nothing more human than being vulnerable and falling in love. Why would I want to read a story written by a machine trying to emulate that?”
Publishers Lunch has announced that the Tuesday Agency, an Iowa City-based speakers agency for authors, has closed its doors. Agency president Trinity Ray said, “We have suffered the economy and politics of the day and we’re doing our best to take care of all those who put their trust in us,” as changes to rules around government loan repayments, NEA grants, and other such financial factors have made it impossible for the company to keep running. Ray is working to pay the six authors the agency still owes money to and is launching a smaller company, Goliath Jones, to continue platforming important voices.
Cengage and Hachette have responded to Google’s recent opposition to their motion to join the class action infringement suit against the tech company, reports the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The authors who started this suit welcome the participation of publishers, saying, “Proposed Interventors . . . [would] ensure the publishing industry’s discrete interests are fairly treated in class litigation where both authors and publishers’ rights are at stake.” AAP added that, per the publishers’ response, “Google’s opposition misrepresents the clear legal interests of publishers in this matter and misstates the law on timeliness of the motion to intervene.”
On the heels of the Washington Post’s elimination of its Book World supplement, Adam Kirsch of the Atlantic considers the decline of book reviews and the implications that has on the literary ecosystem as a whole. “A book critic, or a newspaper book section, is a convener, bringing people together around a new book or writer, a literary trend or controversy,” he writes. Though the disappearance of the book review does not mean the end of literary criticism overall, readers, publishers, and authors suffer in different ways. Relatedly, NPR has shared that the Post’s CEO and publisher, Will Lewis, has stepped down.
Amazon’s latest earnings reports boast record-setting numbers, Publishers Weekly reports, attributed to “explosive” sales at company’s cloud computing business, AWS. Demand for AWS led to a 14 percent increase in fourth quarter sales as the company hit $213.4 billion in revenue. The news comes on the heels of the layoff of three hundred reporters at the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and the dissolution of the newspaper’s books section.
Sales of Wuthering Heights are “skyrocketing” ahead of the release of director Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of the Emily Brontë classic, the Guardian reports. Penguin Classics UK notes a 459 percent increase in sales of the title in the United Kingdom; 10,670 copies of the book flew off British shelves in January 2026, as opposed to 1,875 in January 2025. Jess Harrison of Penguin Classics reflected on the surge in interest: “There seems to be a real yearning among readers for intense, maximalist, tragic love stories. We’ve seen huge demand for similarly angsty classics like Dostoevsky’s White Nights and Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat. But Wuthering Heights stands apart in being so wild and unhinged—an extreme book for extreme times.”
For the New York Times, Elizabeth A. Harris considers the fate of the mass market paperback, the inexpensively-bound editions that have found their readers in train stations and airports, supermarket aisles and drug stores since the 1930s. In spite of its appeal, the form is endangered: “Sales have dropped for years, peeled away by e-books, digital audiobooks and even more expensive formats like hardcovers and trade paperbacks, the mass market’s larger and pricier cousin.” With only “about a 30 cent difference” in cost between printing a mass market edition versus a trade paperback—but a much higher potential retail price—publishers are shifting gears. Still, the form has enduring fans. Paula Rabinowitz, author of a cultural history of the mass market paperback, sees inspiration in its design: “It was one of the most brilliant technologies in the history of the world, precisely because you could shove it in your purse or your pocket.”
The Whiting Foundation has appointed two inaugural resident directors to provide creative direction for the Whiting Award for Emerging Writers and the Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress, reports Publishers Weekly. Adam Kirsch, a senior editor at the Atlantic, and Peter Godwin, a former president of PEN America, will serve the emerging writers and nonfiction programs, respectively. The foundation believes this new model “encourages new voices and perspectives, while strengthening Whiting’s commitment to writers at pivotal points in their careers.”
Spotify announced a partnership with Bookshop.org, which will allow users of the audio streaming service to buy physical books from independent bookstores. Set to launch later this spring, Spotify users in the United States and the United Kingdom will be able to access titles on Bookshop.org directly from Spotify’s app. Additionally, the streaming company introduced a new Page Match feature that will allow “readers [to] seamlessly switch between the printed (or e-book) and audiobook versions of a title.”
Amidst the ongoing resistance to ICE operations in the Twin Cities, the Public Library Association (PLA) is prepared to move forward with their biennial conference at the Minneapolis Convention and Visitors Bureau from April 1-3. The association shared that they are “heartbroken by recent events and [have] been coordinating closely with city and venue partners to support them and to foster a safe and welcoming conference environment” as they “look forward to gathering in strength and solidarity with Minnesota colleagues” and everyone around the country. Offering a virtual option as well, PLA urges attendees to download the conference app for full updates and include a list of suggestions to support safe travel to and around the city for those joining in person.
The 57th annual Cairo International Book Fair closed yesterday after setting new records for attendance, the Arab Weekly reports. More than 6.2 million visitors are believed to have attended the fair, which ran from January 21 to February 3. Over 1,450 publishing houses from 83 countries were represented at the fair, which has evolved to be “more than a marketplace” for publishing in Africa and the Middle East; this year’s gathering offered “a sprawling forum for debate, performance, and encounter, with dedicated programs for children and young people, subsidized book schemes, and initiatives designed to widen access to reading.”
A press release from Bookshop.org has announced a new partnership with Draft2Digital which will allow hundreds of thousands of self-published e-books to be sold through the Amazon alternative’s website. Bookshop.org began selling e-books in 2025, generating over $9.5 million in revenue for its independent bookstore partners, with over 200,000 e-book sales transacted through the Bookshop.org app; the new collaboration will add “a new, sustainable revenue stream” as the catalogue of Draft2Digital titles become available through Bookshop.org. Bookshop.org founder and CEO Andy Hunter celebrated the collaboration: “Partnering with Draft2Digital means self-published authors, an essential and rapidly growing part of the publishing landscape, can now work with indie bookstores, and they can support each other."
“After weeks of rumors about impending layoffs, employees at the Washington Post were informed Wednesday morning that the Jeff Bezos–owned newspaper would be eliminating its books section, Book World, along with an array of other sections,” reports Publishers Weekly. Book World had relaunched in 2022 under the leadership of John Williams, previously of the New York Times Book Review, and was staffed by acclaimed critics including Ron Charles, Michael Dirda, and Becca Rothschild. Book World editor John Brogan noted that traffic to the section had been “quite good on the whole,” even as other major news outlets have made the decision to end their books coverage. In total, around one-third of the Washington Post’s staff will be eliminated by job cuts, including three hundred journalists out of the eight hundred who comprise the newsroom, reported the New York Times. “I know that every one of us believes deeply in this place and we all want to save it,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of the Post. (Critic Ron Charles was interviewed about his work at the Post by Michael Taeckens in the May/June 2015 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the longlist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: Ghostroots (Norton) by ’Pemi Aguda, Behind You Is the Sea (Harpervia) by Susan Muaddi Darraj, The Mighty Red (Harper) by Louise Erdrich, James (Doubleday) by Percival Everett, Small Rain (FSG) by Garth Greenwell, Creation Lake (Scribner) by Rachel Kushner, There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven (Mariner) by Ruben Reyes Jr., Colored Television (Riverhead) by Danzy Senna, The History of Sound Viking) by Ben Shattuck, and Devil Is Fine (Celadon) by John Vercher. “In selecting the longlist, this year’s judges—Bruce Holsinger, Deesha Philyaw, and Luis Alberto Urrea—considered 414 eligible novels and short story collections by American authors published in the U.S. during the 2024 calendar year. Submissions came from 166 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. From this longlist, the judges will select five finalists for the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Those finalists will be announced in early March.” The winner will be announced in April.
The Association of American Literary Agents (AALA) has appointed Daniel O’Brien as its first-ever executive director, Publishers Weekly reports. O’Brien also serves as executive director of the Independent Publishers Caucus and director of Books Across Borders. (AALA president Regina Brooks spoke with Katie Arnold-Ratliff in the November/December 2024 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)
More than twenty years after the release of her best-selling novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger has completed the sequel, according to the Associated Press. The novel, Life Out of Order, will be published by Hanover Square Press on October 27. “The protagonist this time is violinist Alba DeTamble, the daughter of time traveler Henry DeTamble. She shares his Chrono-Displacement Disorder, which involuntarily propels her out of the present.” The Time Traveler’s Wife, published in 2003, was Niffenegger’s first novel and sold millions of copies. It was adapted into a film starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana and an HBO series starring Rose Leslie and Theo James.
Author Neil Gaiman released a statement on Monday in which he denied sexual misconduct allegations first brought forth against him a year and a half ago, the Los Angeles Times reports. Five women came forward to accuse the 65-year-old British author of sexual misconduct in the summer of 2024, appearing on a podcast, Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman. “Eight women then accused the author of assault, abuse and coercion in an article published by New York magazine just over a year ago.” In his statement, Gaiman wrote: “These allegations, especially the really salacious ones, have been spread and amplified by people who seemed a lot more interested in outrage and getting clicks on headlines rather than whether things had actually happened or not.”
In the latest on the literary community’s copyright lawsuit against Google, the tech giant is claiming that Hachette and Cengage’s motion to join the widely reported suit of writers opposing them is an untimely hijacking of the case, Publishers Lunch reports. “If book publishers Cengage and Hachette…want to present ‘their own evidence and arguments’ about how Google supposedly infringed their copyrights, …they can file their own case,” their new filing states. Should the publishers be allowed to join the lawsuit, Google believes it would disrupt the proceedings and prejudice them.
The Cornell Chronicle recently reported on a new study from their university showing that readers are interested in good stories, regardless of the main character’s gender. More specifically, researchers found that men were as willing to continue reading a story with a female main character as they were one with a leading man. This data “is contrary to the limited existing literature and contrary to widespread industry assumptions,” says Matthew Wilkens, associate professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Women showed a slight preference for reading stories about other women.
The new president and CEO of the Frankfurt Book Fair will be Joachim Kaufmann, effective September 1, reports Publishers Weekly. The longtime CEO of German publisher Carlsen Verlag is succeeding Juergen Boos. In a statement endorsing Kaufmann, Boos said, “Few leaders in our world of books are as capable as he is of inspiring people with his ideas and convictions.”
Those who’ve longed to go on the road with Jack Kerouac will have a singular opportunity to get their hands on the next best thing this March, when the original typescript scroll of his iconic works goes up for auction at Christie’s, the Guardian reports. Clocking in at around 12 feet in length, the manuscript that would become On the Road was typed in April 1951 over the course of three weeks, its pages of tracing paper taped together to avoid transitions to a new page. Christie’s book specialist Heather Weintraub described the experience of encountering the typescript scroll: “When you roll it out it actually looks like a road. There are no paragraphs or chapters and it uses the real names of the characters before the publisher asked Kerouac to change the names.” Previous auctions of the scroll brought controversy about whether such an artifact belongs in a private collection. “I personally hope that a public institution will buy it so it can be seen by everyone,” Weintraub said.
For Book Riot, Kelly Jensen reports on “a few ways to support our Minneapolis neighbors through literary activism” as a federal immigration crackdown continues to target the city. Solidary efforts highlighted include the Publishing for Minnesota Auction, which is open for bids through tonight, and two book drives focused on Spanish-language titles for children staying home from school to avoid ICE raids. “Whether you live in the Twin Cities or not, you can help support those who are fighting back on the ground.”
Publishers Weekly reports a second round of layoffs at Simon & Schuster, following reductions earlier this week that affected staff at all levels of the company. Around fifteen employees have lost positions in total, including Eamon Dolan, vice president and executive editor of the publisher’s flagship imprint, as well as Scribner editorial director Colin Harrison and Atria executive editor Nick Ciana. A Simon & Schuster spokesperson cited market conditions as the reason for the reduction in force.
PEN America has shared the fifty finalists for its 2026 Literary Awards, “showcasing excellence from literary superstars and new voices alike and spanning genres including fiction, poetry, drama, essays, biography, translation, nonfiction, and more.” Additionally, Edwidge Danticat and Julia Cho have been named career achievement honorees for the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award, respectively. The award ceremony will be held on March 31.
The American Booksellers Association has announced that they are relaunching their Indies Choice Book Awards via the press release distribution platform EIN Presswire. For these awards, titles “are nominated and selected by booksellers from over 3,000 independent bookstores nationwide. They celebrate the best and brightest titles by authors and illustrators in the indie channel, showcasing the remarkable range of talent indie booksellers champion and share with readers every day.” Winners will receive $2,000 each in the categories of Adult Fiction, Adult Nonfiction, Picture Book, Middle Grade, Young Adult, Debut Adult, and Debut Children’s. The shortlist will be announced on March 11 and the winners will be revealed on April 8.
One year after the Eaton fire in Altadena, California, the Los Angeles Times speaks with five local writers on the archives and creative spaces they lost and how they’re reclaiming their literary practices. Storyteller Sakae Manning recently started writing again about how she views life differently after losing her home, while poet and educator Bonnie S. Kaplan turned to creating stand-up routines. Novelist Désirée Zamorano’s biggest takeaway from the fire: “[P]eople are better than you think they are. Really and truly. Of my writer’s group in Altadena, four of the five, their homes are gone…and the support everyone received was just beautiful…”
“A set of unredacted and less-redacted documents from the Anthropic case have been released, revealing more details on the tech company’s secret plan to copy every book in existence,” Publishers Lunch reports. The secret plan, Project Panama, aimed to acquire an undisclosed number books, cut off the spines, and scan them, allowing them to be used to “train AI to write well.” The documents describe intentions to target used bookstores, wholesalers, the Strand, New York Public Library, and underfunded libraries for the acquisition of these books at low rates. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” Anthropic said in the filings, as reported by the Washington Post. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
A Minnesota bookseller has gone viral for standing up to ICE agents in the aftermath of Alex Pretti’s murder, Publishers Weekly reports. The viral video and photographs show Greg Ketter, owner of DreamHaven Books and Comics, walking through clouds of tear gas and cursing at dozens of federal agents gathered half a block from the site of Pretti’s murder, just hours after his death. “Life for Ketter has not been the same since. The store landline has been ringing off the hook...and DreamHaven’s website has received so many hits that it went down for several days.”
After six years operating in partnership with Tin House, the acclaimed literary podcast Between the Covers is moving to Milkweed Editions, podcast creator and host David Naimon announced on social media. Known for “its generous and in-depth conversations with today’s most vital thinkers,” Between the Covers features Naimon’s interviews with contemporary luminaries of poetry and prose.
Days after Alex Pretti was killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis, a group of publishing professionals, including Mabel Hsu and Zoey Cole, are organizing a two-day online auction to raise money for Minnesotans and immigrants elsewhere, Publishers Weekly reports. The group, Publishing for Minnesota, is holding the auction (among the offerings are “signed books, author headshots, original art, critiques for novels and picture books, marketing feedback, portfolio reviews, and ‘art jam sessions’”) on January 29 and January 30. The proceeds “will support organizations providing legal aid, emergency assistance, food, and community resources to Minnesotans in urgent need due to ICE’s activities.”
The Academy of American Poets has announced the election of poets Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Cornelius Eady as chancellors. Established in 1946, the board of chancellors is “a group of fifteen distinguished poets who advise the Academy of American Poets on artistic matters, judge its largest legacy prizes, and serve as ambassadors of poetry.”
The National Book Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation recently announced the selected titles for the fifth annual Science + Literature program, which identifies three books annually that deepen readers’ understanding of science and technology across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Authors receive $10,000 and will be celebrated at a public ceremony in New York City in March. This year’s selected titles are Ancient Light (University of Arizona Press) by Kimberly Blaeser, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature (Spiegel & Grau) by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, and Bog Queen (Bloomsbury Publishing) by Anna North.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs has announced Laura Tohe as the new poet laureate for the state, according to Journalaz.com. Appointed on January 14, distinguished poet, librettist, and prose writer Tohe will serve as the second poet laureate of Arizona, following Alberto Álvaro Ríos. She was born in Fort Defiance, Arizona, and grew up speaking both English and Diné Bizaad (the Navajo language), having previously served as poet laureate of the Navajo Nation from 2015 to 2019. In response to this honor, Tohe wrote: “Poetry is alive; it celebrates our human experience with language, voice, and reflection. I especially look forward to sharing and supporting poetry in Arizona’s rural communities. This is an exciting opportunity.”
Vogue recently launched a book club, starting this month with the classic 1847 novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Participants can share their thoughts via virtual conversations which will culminate in a live event in the coming weeks. The fashion magazine plans to cover four books throughout the year and even offers a daily reading schedule for those wanting to wrap up before the February event.
Libro.fm, an “online platform that partners with independent bookstores to sell audiobooks,” has now launched an annual subscription plan to retain customers and compete with Amazon’s Audible, Publishers Weekly reports. Having built up the growth momentum and scale to add this annual Plus membership alongside their existing monthly subscription, the Seattle-based company can now pay their booksellers upfront. Libro.fm’s cofounder and CEO, Mark Pearson, “credits booksellers with helping create curated playlists to promote books, making customers aware of the service, and handselling subscriptions while customers are in store,” leading them to their current success.
“Hundreds of shops, restaurants, and cultural institutions” across Minneapolis have closed their doors today as part of a general strike to protest the federal deportation program targeting the city, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. Numerous local bookstores and publishers have announced their participation in the economic freeze, known as the Day of Truth and Freedom, including Birchbark Books, Graywolf Press, and Milkweed Editions, as reported by Literary Hub and shared on social media channels this past week. “Milkweed Editions could not exist without its beautiful and diverse community of authors and readers in Minnesota—our home, where so many are being threatened with cruelty and removal,” said Milkweed staff in a January 20 statement on Facebook about the strike.
Former Bantam Books editor Toni Burbank has died, Publishers Lunch reports. After beginning her career at Columbia University Press, Burbank joined the staff of Bantam where she would work for over forty years, rising to the position of vice president and executive editor. “Toni was a legend who championed books that inspired readers to better understand themselves and the world around them,” said the Bantam staff in a statement on the news of her passing.
Percival Everett was the best-selling Black author in 2025, Publishers Weekly reports. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tops the new list compiled by the African American Literature Book Club based on sales figures from Circana BookScan. Also leading the list are works by Kamala Harris, Octavia Bulter, Kimberly D. Moore, and Rachel Renee Russell.
The Bookseller has covered the death of a worker at the Hachette U.K. distribution warehouse in Oxfordshire this week. Though the circumstances of the death are still unknown, the staff member was much-loved by his colleagues, according to a representative for the publisher. A Thames Valley Police spokesperson added, “Sadly, a twenty-three-year-old man has died. His next of kin have been informed and offered support by officers. A twenty-one-year-old man from Wallingford was arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter and has since been bailed.”
To counteract the book bans that have been taking place in libraries and schools across the nation, the grassroots organization We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) has announced their Unbanned Book Network, reports the Associated Press. This network “will donate books by authors who have been banned and select Author Ambassadors for school districts facing bans.” WNDB is aiming to start with twenty schools in states where book banning is more widespread, including Texas and Florida. WNDB’s CEO, Dhonielle Clayton, remarks, “We’re not only facing an ongoing literacy crisis in the U.S., we’re also battling increased rates of censorship, which is infringing on our students’ right to read,” adding that the Unbanned Book Network will demonstrate “the power of diverse literature to transform young lives and our communities.”
California College of the Arts (CCA) will be closing their doors after the 2026-27 school year, reports KQED. In place of “northern California’s last nonprofit art school, which has served the region for 119 years” will be a new Vanderbilt University campus. The reason for CCA’s closing is related to financial hardship; in 2024 the school announced having a $20 million deficit and followed up with layoffs at that time, however running the school without a large endowment, and relying heavily on tuition, wasn’t sustainable in the long term. This signifies a major hit to the arts community in the Bay Area.
Celebrated science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor will venture into commercial fiction with a new imprint, Publishers Weekly reports. Set to launch in January 2027, Wildthorn Books will publish fifteen to twenty titles each year in genres including commercial and upmarket women’s fiction, suspense, paranormal mystery, magical realism, speculative nonfiction, and historical fantasy. Devi Pillai and Monique Patterson will lead the imprint. “‘Readers have changed—and so has the market,’ said Pillai in a statement, noting that as commercial fiction continues to blend with genre, it became apparent that Tor ‘was the perfect house to create Wildthorn.’”
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Debut Novel. From this longlist, three finalists will be announced in February, and the winning book will be announced in March. This year’s longlisted titles are Trip by Amie Barrodale (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown (Henry Holt), The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Crown), The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne (Little, Brown), Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Pantheon), North Sun by Ethan Rutherford (Deep Vellum), Blob by Maggie Su (Harper), and Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee (Summit Books). These titles were selected from from a pool of 146 novels published by debut novelists in 2025. Rachel Beanland, Dionne Irving, and Taymour Soomro judged.
Renowned agent Georges Borchardt, who had “an astute eye for literary talent” and introduced American readers to the daring and the avante-garde, died on Sunday at the age of ninety-seven, the New York Times reports. “At various times, he or the Manhattan agency that he and his wife, Anne Borchardt, founded in 1967, Georges Borchardt Inc., represented five Nobel laureates, eight Pulitzer Prize-winners and one statesman, the French president Charles de Gaulle.” Borchardt is also remembered for having “arranged for the publication in English of Elie Wiesel’s searing Holocaust memoir Night after it was rejected by fourteen American publishers” and for spotting the brilliance in “an enigmatic but tender and often darkly funny French play written by a lanky Irishman”—Waiting for Godot. In an interview with the Paris Review, Borchardt reflected on his legacy: “I really feel in many cases that I’ve made it possible for a book to succeed and also made it possible for a writer to go on writing.”
The National Book Critics Circle has announced the finalists for its annual awards in six categories—Autobiography, Biography, Criticism, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry—as well as the Barrios Book in Translation Prize and the John Leonard Prize. The winners will be named on March 26 at a public ceremony in New York City. The finalists in poetry are Yuki Tanaka for Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon), Rickey Laurentiis for Death of the First Idea (Knopf), Kevin Young for Night Watch (Knopf), Henri Cole for The Other Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Tolu Oloruntoba for Unravel (McClelland & Stewart). The finalists in fiction are Karen Russell for The Antidote (Knopf); Katie Kitamura for Audition (Riverhead); Solvej Balle for On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) (New Directions), translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell; Han King for We Do Not Part (Hogarth), translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris; and Angela Flournoy for The Wilderness (Mariner). The finalists for the John Leonard Prize are Nicholas Boggs for Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Evanthia Bromily for Crown (Grove); Saou Ichikawa for Hunchback (Hogarth), translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton; Liz Pelly for Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria/One Signal); Hedgie Choi for Salvage (University of Wisconsin Press); and Lucas Schaefer for The Slip (Simon & Schuster). The finalists for the Barrios Book in Translation Prize are Yoko Tawada for Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (New Directions), translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda; Banu Mushtaq for Heart Lamp (And Other Stories), translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi; Hanna Stoltenberg for Near Distance (Biblioasis), translated from the Norwegian by Wendy H. Gabrielsen; Neige Sinno for Sad Tiger (Seven Stories), translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer; Markus Werner for The Frog in the Throat (NYRB Classics), translated from the German by Michael Hofmann; and Olga Ravn for The Wax Child (New Directions), translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken.
According to Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch, a recent case management update filed with the court by the attorneys in the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement reveals that there are currently eight-six opt-outs ahead of the extended deadline of January 29. “As for claims received for the pool of nearly 500,000 registered, infringed works, ‘the Settlement Administrator has received a total of 56,798 claims for 161,691 works.” At this rate, taking into account attorneys’ fees, each claimed work would be awarded over $8,000.
Min Jin Lee’s forthcoming novel, American Hagwon, her first since Pachinko, which has sold over a million copies and was named among the best novels of the 21st century by the New York Times, will explore the Korean obsession with education, the Associated Press reports. “‘We’re obsessed with education, and it became my obsession over why Koreans care so much,’ says Lee, whose American Hagwon, scheduled for Sept. 29, will likely be one of the year’s most anticipated books.” The book’s publisher, Cardinal, is calling it a look into “what happens when the rules shift, the world order becomes suddenly unrecognizable and benchmarks of success are no longer a guarantee.”
Canadian poet Karen Solie is the winner of the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize for her collection Wellwater, the Guardian reports. Solie was announced as the winner at a ceremony in London on Monday; she will receive £25,000 (approximately $33,638.50) from the T. S. Eliot Foundation. The annual prize is awarded to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland. “Wellwater emerged from a shortlist that included Tom Paulin’s Namanlagh, Isabelle Baafi’s Chaotic Good, Nick Makoha’s The New Carthaginians and Sarah Howe’s Foretokens.” The judges were Michael Hofmann, Patience Agbabi and Niall Campbell.
