Salman Rushdie said he has moved on from the knife attack that threatened his life in 2022, the BBC reports. At this year’s Hay Festival in Wales, Rushdie said, “It will be nice to talk about fiction again because ever since the attack, really the only thing anybody’s wanted to talk about is the attack, but I’m over it.” When asked about AI’s impact on authors, Rushdie said, “I don’t have Chat GPT,” adding, “I try very hard to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

Librarians, teachers, bookstore owners, and other activists have planned a day of action on June 7 to fight book bans and preserve history, USA Today reports. Teach Truth Day of Action will include around a hundred events across the country, such as film screenings, protest marches, and community readings.

Due to soft sales and diminished funding, the New Press has reduced its number of employees by about nine—from a staff of under thirty members to one of under twenty, Publishers Weekly reports. Cofounder and executive director Diane Wachtell said she attributed the decline in sales to the increased banning of mostly progressive books under Trump’s administration, and a lack of a sales uptick for books that explain what is happening in the United States today. “It looks like, at least for now, readers are turning to escapist books rather than to books that try to explain what is happening,” she said.

Book of the Month Club (BOMC), which chose James Frey’s novel Next to Heaven (Authors Equity, 2025) as an upcoming selection, has responded to criticism about Frey’s prior comments on AI, Publishers Lunch reports. In a 2023 interview, Frey said that he was using generative AI in the writing of his work. BOMC has addressed the controversy, writing, “it is our belief that in today’s technology environment, there is always a chance that sentences or grammar were edited or revised with the use of AI tools somewhere in the creation process,” and added that the “use of AI is a complex and evolving topic in the publishing industry, and we’re monitoring it closely.” BOMC decided not to revoke the selection and instead encouraged members to make their own decisions about whether to read Frey’s novel.

Cal Newport writes for the New Yorker about what Isaac Asimov’s science fiction reveals about living with AI today. In I, Robot (Gnome Press, 1950), Asimov articulates three laws of robotics designed to protect human beings from harm. “But” Newport writes, “we can more deeply appreciate the difficulties in taming AI” by remembering that “Asimov himself portrayed his laws as imperfect; as the book continues, they create numerous unexpected corner cases and messy ambiguities, which lead to unnerving scenarios.”

At the fifth annual U.S. Book Show on June 3, experts from nearly all sections of the publishing business discussed the changes AI is bringing to the industry, Publishers Weekly reports. Panel topics included helping authors with commercial potential build networks and achieve greater success, supporting human narrators while AI voiceovers are on the rise, and the importance of fostering human-translated literature.

Writers and artists remember the author Edmund White in the New York Times. The colleagues, friends, and admirers who contributed reflections include Andrew Sean Greer, Yiyun Li, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Alexander Chee, among others.

Jason Wilson writes for the Guardian about how the far right is trying to spread its ideology through the publishing world. The dissemination of far-right material is being led by publishers including Passage Press and Ark Press, and illustrates the Trump administration’s larger attack on what it sees as liberal culture.

Edmund White, an author who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays, and novels, has died at age eighty-five, the Associated Press reports. White is known for famous works such as A Boy’s Own Story (Dutton, 1982) and The Beautiful Room Is Empty (Knopf, 1988). An activist and professor, White was among the founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an organization that advocated for AIDS prevention and awareness. In 2019, White received a National Book Award for lifetime achievement.

Bernardine Evaristo has received an outstanding contribution award to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the BBC reports. Evaristo will receive £100,000 (approximately $135,738) at an awards ceremony in London on June 12. Evaristo said she was “astonished” to receive the award and that she would donate the prize money to support other women writers.

Penguin Random House has acquired Wonderbly, one of the U.K.’s fastest-growing independent publishers and an international leader in personalized gift books, the Bookseller reports.

Audiobook sales rose 13 percent in 2024, to $2.2 billion, according to a sales survey released by the Audio Publishers Association (APA), Publishers Weekly reports. The APA’s consumer survey found that of 1,700 Americans aged eighteen or older, 51 percent have listened to an audiobook. The number of non-listeners who said they are interested in listening to an audiobook rose from 32 percent in 2023 to 38 percent in 2025. While the production of AI-narrated audiobooks has increased, consumer willingness to try AI-narrated audiobooks dropped year over year, from 77 percent in 2023, to 70 percent in 2025.

One of the scheduled exhibitions for 2026 at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City features drawings by the poet John Ashbery, Fine Books & Collections reports. The show also includes drawings that were gifts to the poet from his friends—artists such as James Bishop, Joe Brainard, Jane Freilicher, Jean Hélion, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers. The selection features eight portraits of Ashbery and one of the first collages Ashbery ever created. The exhibition will also display books that show Ashbery’s collaboration with artists.

The Center for Fiction has recognized its workers’ union after a supermajority of eligible employees filed for election with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, Publishers Lunch reports. The union will cover approximately twenty-five roles, including booksellers, baristas, administrators, event coordinators, and development and grants assistants. The union will now begin negotiations with management over contract terms.

Adelle Waldman writes for the New Yorker about Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and argues that the novel is Austen’s most underappreciated work. Austen wrote the novel in her early twenties between 1798 and 1799. She sold the manuscript in 1803, but it ultimately wasn’t published until after she died. Northanger Abbey is “a novel about novels,” Waldman writes, “deriving much of its energy and humor from mocking the tropes of the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century—particularly the convention of endowing protagonists with extraordinary personal qualities and heartrending histories.”

The 2026 federal budget proposal shutters the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Book Riot reports. Despite court rulings that the White House cannot do further damage to the IMLS, these legal decisions will be moot if the agency is simply defunded. According to Trump’s budget, the IMLS, which is under .005 percent of the overall federal budget, would find its funding reduced from $313 million to $6 million beginning on October 1. Congress also needs to reauthorize the Museum and Library Services Act of 2018 by September 30, or the IMLS will no longer be active.

After the NEA terminated dozens of grants last month amounting to a total of $1.2 million, fifty-one independent presses and literary organizations have been left to cover immediate deficits and wonder about the future of the literary arts, Publishers Weekly reports. Beyond the material losses of the NEA grants, many publishers said that the NEA offers prestige that leads to other funding. The NEA is the only organization that funds the literary arts in all fifty states. In its absence, nonprofit publishers are looking to cities, philanthropic organizations, and crowdfunding campaigns as they reassess their budgets and operations.

Alexandra Alter writes for the New York Times about Molly Jong-Fast’s new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir (Viking), about life with her famous mother, Erica Jong, and her mother’s decline. Erica Jong, who is now eighty-three and diagnosed with dementia, often repurposed details and stories from her daughter’s life into memoirs and novels. Jong-Fast naturally sometimes resented the use of her experiences as literary fodder. Alter writes that Jong-Fast’s memoir “reads like a score-settling marathon at times, but also like a loving elegy.”

The history of unconventional publishing is being traced in a new exhibition at the Senate House Library in London called Spineless Wonders: The Power of Print Unbound, Fine Books & Collections reports. The show, which is curated by Tansy Barton, Christos Fotelis, and Leila Kassir, will run from June 17 until November 15 and span five centuries of printed materials. The exhibition includes English Civil War pamphlets, insights into fortune tellers’ tricks, and queer and feminist explorations, among other items.

Shira Perlmutter, the former register of copyrights, lost her first lawsuit to convince a federal judge that “her dismissal by the White House on May 10 was illegal and that the executive branch overstepped in ordering it,” Publishers Weekly reports. On May 29, Perlmutter’s attorneys filed new documents with the court and petitioned for expedited judgment—continuing their argument that her dismissal violates both constitutional and statutory rights.