Forty European and international organizations, including the Federation of European Publishers, have written a joint statement criticizing the provisions for the European Union AI Act, Publishers Weekly reports. The coalition, which represents millions of authors, performers, publishers, producers, and other creatives across Europe, maintains that the implementation package for the act does not deliver meaningful protection of intellectual property rights in the context of AI.

The finalists for the thirty-seventh annual Lambda Literary Awards, celebrating outstanding LGBTQ+ voices in literature, have been announced. This year’s shortlist includes Anyone’s Ghost (Penguin Press) by August Thompson, Good Dress (Tin House) by Brittany Rogers, Cinema Love (Dutton) by Jiaming Tang, Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press) by Saretta Morgan, and Pretty (Knopf) by KB Brookins, among other titles.

Book publishing sales fell across all major categories in May, Publishers Weekly reports. Adult book sales declined 9.6 percent, fiction sales dropped by 8.3 percent, and nonfiction fell by 11.3 percent.

Bookshop.org, the online bookselling platform, reported 65 percent year-over-year growth for the first half of 2025, Publishers Weekly reports. The platform has already sold $1 million in e-books, after introducing the format in January. Bookshop.org works with 2,471 bookstores and with around 90 percent of the American Booksellers Association members, according to Andy Hunter, the CEO of Bookshop.org. To counter Amazon’s Prime Day event earlier this month, Bookshop.org conducted an “Anti-Prime sale,” offered free shipping, and ultimately earned $1.5 million in sales.

Rachel Kurzius writes for the Washington Post about how fan fiction, which was once relegated to the internet, is transforming traditional publishing. Kurzius writes that the “interest of many readers…has caught up with what fic writers, often women and queer people, have been up to all along: Joyful same-sex romances and stories told with the immediacy of first-person present tense, for example, now fill bookstore shelves.” Fan fiction is unfettered “by the constraints of the market (or even of good taste) and often buoyed by anonymity,” Kurzius adds.

The Booker Prize longlist has been announced, and it features authors from nine different countries, making it the most global list of books the award has seen in a decade, the Guardian reports. The list includes The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hamish Hamilton) by Kiran Desai, The South (4th Estate) by Tash Aw, and Flashlight (Jonathan Cape) by Susan Choi, among others. The shortlist will be announced at a ceremony in London on September 23, and the winner will be announced on November 10.

A new literary hub will open in Sydney with initial funding of $1.5 million AUD (approximately $978,300) from the New South Wales state government, the Guardian reports. The new hub will rival Melbourne’s Wheeler Center and allow Sydney to host seventy-five literary events over the next twelve months.

A preliminary injunction has found that the mass cancellation of previously awarded National Endowment for the Humanities grants violated the constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act, Publishers Lunch reports.

Dan Pelzer, who died this month at ninety-two years old, read 3,599 books in his lifetime, and his children have posted his reading list online with the goal of inspiring readers everywhere, the New York Times reports. Pelzer’s reading list was varied, including books on the mental health of adolescents, bildungsromans, autofiction, and works by John Grisham and Charles Dickens.

The second novel by George Saunders will be published in January 2026 by Random House, Kirkus Reviews reports. The novel, which is titled Vigil, follows K.J. Boone, an oil company CEO on his deathbed who is guided into the afterlife by Jill “Doll” Blaine, a woman who died young in 1976. “I found myself wondering about that generation of climate change deniers who, through obfuscation and spin, put progress on hold for twenty or thirty years, and are now old and passing away,” Saunders said in a statement. “I wondered whether such a person might, at the end of his life, feel inclined to repentance. If he had a chance to explain himself, would he try?”

An exhibition at the Holburne Museum in Bath will showcase the illustrations featured in Jane Austen novels over the last 150 years, Fine Books & Collections reports. The exhibition, which will run from September 11 through January 11, 2026, will include drawings, illustrated editions, original sketchbooks, printing blocks, and more.

The same day the White House released an AI strategy document that emphasized rapid AI integration within government operations and the importance of eliminating obstacles to AI development, Trump said adhering to copyright was “not doable,” Publishers Weekly reports. Trump also compared training AI models on copyrighted material to human beings reading a book or article.

New Directions has announced Tynan Kogane, who previously served as senior editor of the press, as its new editor in chief, Publishers Weekly reports. New Directions has made several other promotions due to the retirement of executive vice president Laurie Callahan. Mieke Chew has been promoted to senior editor and executive director of publicity and Declan Spring has been promoted to executive vice president. Christopher Wait has been promoted to vice president and director of sub-rights and permissions; Maya Solovej has been promoted to publicity manager and associate editor; and Oliver Preston has been promoted to production associate.

For Electric Literature, the staff of the Brooklyn Public Library recommends books that changed the shape of politics and reading in the United States. The list includes Parable of the Sower (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993) by Octavia E. Butler, A People’s History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980) by Howard Zinn, and Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) by Rachel Carson, among other titles.

Siang Lu has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for his novel Ghost Cities (University of Queensland Press, 2024), the Guardian reports. Considered Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the award comes with $60,000 AUD (approximately $39,634). Lu said the novel had been rejected more than two hundred times in Australia and abroad before being published.

Bookstagram entrepreneurs, independent bookstores, and Libro.fm are encouraging audiobook listeners to gather for walks outside, Publishers Weekly reports. Readers meet at a predetermined location, listen to their book of choice, or discuss it with others, all while following an easy walking route at a conversational pace. The walks let readers turn a solitary activity into a social, outdoor experience.

After the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa lost almost $1 million in funding in February, the local independent bookstore Prairie Lights launched an initiative that will raise thousands of dollars for the program, the Daily Iowan reports. Former Iowa Public Radio host Dennis Reese donated his collection of 450 Library of America slipcase books to Prairie Lights in May; each book is worth $40, and 20 percent of the proceeds will go to the IWP.

Elisabeth Egan writes for the New York Times about the trend of independent bookstores showcasing their pets. Egan writes that these dogs, cats, birds, fish, lizards, and bunnies “serve as quiet mascots—steadfast and loyal, deigning to have their heads patted or ears scratched while humans tend to the business of words.” Social media has also put some bookstores on the map thanks to their nonhuman residents. “Books and animals both provide joy, companionship, and windows into other worlds,” Egan writes. “The former are, admittedly, a lot tidier.”

History of Humanities (HOH) has published its tenth volume, marking a decade of the annual publication. HOH, which is published by the University of Chicago Press, was founded in 2015 by editors Rens Bod, Julia Kursell, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn as a new forum for research on the history of humanistic knowledge. Articles in HOH have addressed topics such as the emergence of comparative musicology, the history of libraries, and the problem of scholarly forgetting. In their introduction to the anniversary issue, the editors write: “We firmly believe that the humanities play an indispensable role in addressing humanity’s challenges, from expanding artificial intelligence and climate migration to autocratic intellectual clampdown. Understanding their past will prepare us better for our future.”

In the Poets on Translation series in Poetry, Layla Benitez-James writes about her anxiety around titles, names, and naming. But in recalling T. S. Eliot’s phrase, “good writers borrow, great writers steal,” Benitez-James finds solace. “If I can begin to think of the writer as the original thief, some of my own preciousness around translation lessens,” she writes, “and the weight of this question of translating titles in particular begins to fall away.”