Daily News

The Association of American Publishers will present its annual International Freedom to Publish Award to Freedom Letters, a Russian publishing house “that operates out of Ukraine, Latvia, Georgia, and other locations, and has released hundreds of works in Russian and Ukrainian by anti-war writers and other opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin,” the Associated Press reports. The award will also honor its founder, Georgy Urushadze, “a onetime literary prize official in Moscow who fled in 2022 after opposing the Russian invasion of Ukraine and being designated a ‘foreign agent’ by the Russian government.”

In the New York Times, Elisa Gabbert looks back at four decades of the annual book series Best American Poetry, the final installment of which was recently published by Scribner, and ponders the act of curation and the implications of the adjective Best. “In any given volume, the ratio of poems I find appealing to not is about the same as it would be in a good journal.... Reading through my stack of ‘BAP’s, I was struck by the randomness of it all,” Gabbert writes.

At least fifteen libraries at U.S. colleges and universities have been the targets of bomb threats in the past week, according to Book Riot. “Officials have linked these bomb threats, as well as less location-specific threats received this week, as part of a swatting effort. Swatting is criminal harassment that purposefully deceives law enforcement into believing there is an emergency at a particular address, encouraging a significant response. It can be considered an act of stochastic terrorism.”

Bookshop.org has launched an e-book platform in the U.K. that allows independent bookstores to sell digital books, the Guardian reports. Stores will keep 100 percent of the profits. 

Patrizia Zelano, an Italian photographer, captured images of century-old books she salvaged from historic flooding in Venice in November 2019, when the combination of strong winds, a tidal peak, and a fast-moving cyclone resulted in 85 percent of the city being underwater, the BBC reports. “On her two-day adventure, Zelano salvaged 40 books. Though most are now unreadable, her photographs of the ruined books tell the story of the fragility of the lagoon and its cultural heritage—as well as a push towards possible solutions.”

CNN looks at Africa’s book publishing industry in light of a report by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that estimates Africa’s publishing industry generated only $7 billion in 2023, accounting for just 5.4 percent of the global book market, which is valued at $129 billion. “Today, you see that most of the names of authors of literature in Africa are more known outside the continent than inside the continent. They’re known in their country, but they’re not circulating between the other countries, and that’s an issue,” says Ernesto Ottone Ramírez, assistant director-general for culture at UNESCO. The report blames “weak polices, an absence of tax incentives, and a reliance on imported books for the lack of industry growth within Africa.”

The supermarket chain Publix is facing calls for a boycott after withdrawing as the sponsor of the Black Book Bash in Jacksonville, Florida, just days before the event, Atlanta Black Star reports. “The three-day festival, set for Oct. 3–5 at the Hyatt Regency, is a celebration of Black literature and culture where readers can meet authors, shop from Black-owned businesses, and visit vendors and bookstores. Publix had been positioned as the title sponsor, but organizers say the company abruptly pulled out, citing the ‘political climate.’” Organizers insist the festival will go on. “This is bigger than books. This is about Black stories. Black joy. Black freedom,” they wrote in a statement on Instagram.

ReaderLink’s deal to acquire book distributor Baker & Taylor that was in place and scheduled to close last week has been terminated, Publishers Lunch reports. Baker & Taylor is the largest supplier of library content, software, and services to public and academic libraries in the United States. “Baker & Taylor’s open invoices with publishers were to remain with the current owners, and publishers were expressing concern about getting paid,” Michael Cader writes. There has been no formal statement about why the deal was terminated.

Trinity University Press will cease operations at the end of 2026 due to rising costs and in response to, as provost and vice president for academic affairs at the university in San Antonio is quoted as stating, “strategic needs of the university,” Publishers Weekly reports. The report comes less than a month after Bucknell University Press in Lewisberg, Pennsylvania, announced that it, too, would close next year. 

The Stanford Daily takes stock of Stanford University’s creative writing program a year after the school announced it was phasing out all twenty-three of the creative writing lecturers over the course of the next two years. “Many students and lecturers have expressed their disappointment in the decision in the last year. According to lecturer Sarah Frisch, last year was the first time she was able to receive a livable wage due to the lecturers’ previous year of advocating for a pay raise. This was her last year.”

The American Booksellers Association has named LeVar Burton as its Indie Bookstore Ambassador for 2025-2026, Publishers Weekly reports. “As ambassador, Burton will champion indie bookstores, especially on Small Business Saturday (Nov. 29, 2025) and Independent Bookstore Day (Apr. 25, 2026).” Burton is the latest in a line of ambassadors that includes Celeste Ng, Amanda Gorman, and Trevor Noah.

The New York Times raises questions about billionaire author Amy Griffin’s best-selling memoir The Tell, published by the Dial Press in March and lauded by celebrity influencers from Oprah Winfrey to Reese Witherspoon, in which Griffin writes about engaging in “illegal psychedelic-drug therapy,” during which she “recovered memories of being raped on many occasions by a middle-school teacher in Amarillo, Texas, starting when she was 12.” Online reviews as well as the Times reporters themselves, Katherine Rosman and Elisabeth Egan, question the legitimacy of memories retrieved under the influence of MDMA and point to a lack of fact-checking for most memoirs. “Book publishers are not investigators,” Whitney Frick, the author’s editor at the Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, is quoted as saying. “This is Amy’s story. We trust her, and all of our authors, that they are recounting their memories truthfully.” 

The Los Angeles Times looks at the booming audiobook business in which actors are vying for audiobook roles “at a time when the talent pool is expanding and casting is becoming a growing topic of debate.” Some narrators, including well-known actors for the screen, enjoy consistent bookings, while most others face lower wages, increased competition, and “the looming specter of AI-generated narration.”

Jed Kudrick and Sean DiLeonardi study decades of the New York Times best-seller list for Public Books to provide an overview of three eras “in which the popularity of translated works suddenly rises” in the United States. “Each wave leads to a blossoming of linguistic and generic trends within the market before dissipating rapidly. Between these waves, in the trenches, bestsellers in translation fall to nearly zero.” According to their analysis, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest spent nearly eighty weeks among the top 10 books on the list, which means the 2008 novel spent the longest time on the best-seller list “of any translated novel—from any language—ever.”

The Hilary Mantel Prize for Fiction, open to unpublished writers without an agent living in the UK or Ireland, is being launched on the third anniversary of the author’s death, the BBC reports. The winner would of the biennial prize will receive “a cash prize, mentoring from an agent and a place on an Arvon Foundation residential writing course.” Mantel, best known for Wolf Hall, published seventeen books over four decades before her death from complications of a stroke in 2022.

A new requirement that applicants for grants offered by the National Endowment for the Arts comply with President Trump’s executive order not to promote “gender ideology” violates the Constitution and cannot be implemented, a federal court in Rhode Island ruled on Friday, the New York Times reports. “In the ruling, Judge William E. Smith, a senior district judge who was appointed by President George W. Bush, noted that the 1965 law creating the endowment had included provisions ensuring that all grants be awarded, as the court put it, ‘on talent alone, irrespective of the artists’ viewpoints or the messages conveyed in their works.’ The new regulations, he said, ran afoul of that goal.” Several arts organizations, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, had filed the lawsuit in March, saying the new requirement for grants violated their rights under the First Amendment.

A week after he fired a lecturer and two administrators at Texas A&M University in response to a video of a student “who filmed herself arguing with the instructor that a children’s literature course broke the law because the coursework recognized more than two genders,” the president of the university is stepping down, the New York Times reports. President Mark Welsh, whose last day is today, had said his decision to fire the instructor, Melissa McCoul, was not “about academic freedom; it’s about academic responsibility.” After the video was shared by a state lawmaker, Republican politicians in Texas, including the governor, criticized the university and accused the lecturer of “blatantly indoctrinating students in gender ideology.” The president’s decision to fire McCoul was met with criticism from some students and faculty, however, who said “her termination was indeed a threat to academic freedom.”

Sally Rooney, author of Normal People, Conversations With Friends, Intermezzo, and other novels, was unable to attend the UK’s Sky Arts Awards ceremony on Tuesday because, the author says, she can “no longer safely enter the UK” without potentially facing arrest for her support of Palestine Action, a pro-Palestinian network based in the UK that was formally banned as a terrorist organization by the UK government in July, the Guardian reports.

The ongoing online conversation about the difference between writing produced by humans versus AI chatbots has reached an inevitable subject—the em-dash, according to Nitsuh Abebe of the New York Times. 

Barnes & Noble has announced the finalists for the 2025 Discover Prize for debut novels. They are Kaplan’s Plot (Flatiron Books) by Jason Diamond, Great Black Hope (Summit Books) by Rob Franklin, Tilt (Marysue Rucci Books) by Emma Pattee, The Artist and the Feast (Union Square) by Lucy Steeds, Lonely Crowds (Little, Brown) by Stephanie Wambugu, and Maggie: Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar (Summit Books) by Katie Yee. The winner will be announced on October 9.

“I think these are dangerous times,” says former U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón in a video produced by the Associated Press. “I think that as artists we really have to hold true to what we believe in; we have to maintain our moral center even as funding resources dry up and even as we are asked to toe the line.... I think it’s really important to remember who we are.” Limón, the twenty-fourth poet laureate, will be succeeded by Arthur Sze, whose term starts October 9. 

The third annual Banned Wagon Tour, a program sponsored by Penguin Random House in parternship with EveryLibrary and First Book, will visit libraries and bookstores in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia beginning October 5. The annual tour is organized “to celebrate the freedom to read and express ideas, highlight the value of free and open access to information, and confront the harms of censorship.” Among the banned books the wagon will give away are The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Beloved by Toni Morrison, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez, and Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.

The Poetry Foundation has announced the recipients of its annual Pegasus Awards. Rigoberto González, the author of seventeeen books and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, will receive the 2025 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which recognizes a U.S. poet for outstanding lifetime achievement with an award of $100,000. Amy Stolls, who recently completed twenty-six years at the National Endowment for the Arts, wiil receive the $25,000 Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry, which is given “in recognition of commitment and extraordinary work in poetry and the literary arts through administration, advocacy, education, publishing, or service.” And Kazim Ali will receive the 2025 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism a $10,000 prize that “commends an outstanding book-length work of criticism published in the United States in the prior calendar year.”

Kelly Jenson of Book Riot unpacks the Institute of Museum and Library Services’s new project, Freedom Trucks: “six mobile exhibits intended to crisscross the country and ‘share the story of our nation’s founding’ to celebrate America’s 250th birthday in 2026.”

Capping off a week of announcements by the National Book Foundation, the New Yorker shares the longlist for the National Book Award in fiction: Rabih Alameddine for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove), Susan Choi for Flashlight (FSG), Angela Flournoy for The Wilderness (Mariner), Jonas Hassen Khemiri for The Sisters (FSG), Megha Majumdar for A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf), Kevin Moffett for Only Son (McSweeney’s), Karen Russell for The Antidote (Knopf), Ethan Rutherford for North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther (A Strange Object), Bryan Washington for Palaver (FSG), and Joy Williams for The Pelican Child (Knopf).

Richard Smith, the man who impersonated Henry David Thoreau at the Walden Pond State Reservation in Concord, Massachusetts, for the past twenty-six years, has retired, the New York Times reports. His last day on the job was September 6, which was 178 years to the day after the 19th-century transcendentalist writer left Walden Pond.

Readerlink Distribution Services plans to acquire Baker & Taylor, a distributor of books to public and academic libraries and schools, and expects to close the deal on or around September 26, according to Publishers Lunch. Readerlink had already acquired the distributor’s marketing and publishing imprints  in 2015. “In a statement, Readerlink noted that they will retain ‘most of the current Baker & Taylor management team and employees,’ and that B&T CEO Aman Kochar will continue to lead the division, reporting to Readerlink president and CEO Dennis Abboud.”

Shira Permutter, the copyright office director who was removed by the Trump administration in May, will be allowed to return to work while her lawsuit over her firing moves forward, Publishers Lunch reports. “In a 2-1 decision, Judges Pan and Childs of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals called her case ‘unusual’ and ‘extraordinary,’ noting that ‘the President’s removal of Perlmutter was likely unlawful.’”

The New Yorker has revealed the longlist for the National Book Award for poetry, which includes Gabrielle Calvocoressi for The New Economy (Copper Canyon), Cathy Linh Che for Becoming Ghost (Washington Square), Rickey Laurentiis for Death of the First Idea (Knopf), Richard Siken for I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon), Patricia Smith for The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner), and five others. The longlist for translated literature was also announced, with multiple books published by New Directions (Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, Book III, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell; and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s We Are Green and Trembling, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers) and Two Lines (Jazmina Barrera’s The Queen of Swords, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, and Mohamed Kheir’s Sleep Phase, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger) making the list. The finalists will be announced on October 7; the winners will be revealed at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 19.

Citing financial issues, the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences announced the closure of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and Iowa Youth Writing Project, the Daily Iowan reports. “Iowa City literary community members are critical of the decision to discontinue the programs, as the [University of Iowa] is recognized as a top school for literature in the nation,” news reporter Ansley Tonkovic writes. “The festival offered eighteen online and seventy in-person workshops, varying from short story and essay sections to travel writing and flash fiction.”

The New Yorker has announced the longlist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Among the ten authors named to the longlist is Mahogany L. Browne, author of A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe (Crown) and a contributor to Poets & Writers Magazine (“Name a Song: A Conversation With Reginald Dwayne Betts,” November/December 2019).

Publishers Weekly looks at how the presence of National Guard troops and federal law enforcement agents in Washington, D.C. has disrupted the city’s economy, specifically the independent bookstores in the area. While Politics & Prose “has reported no discernible impact at any of its three locations,” for example, Loyalty bookstore, which specializes in diverse and intersectional literature, reports that sales are down 65 percent since August 11, the day President Trump ordered troops into D.C.