Shira Perlmutter, the former register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office who is suing the federal government after the Trump administration fired her in May, has once more asked the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., to grant “an injunction pending appeal and to end Defendants’ lawless attempt to take over the Library of Congress,” Publishers Weekly reports. Perlmutter’s legal team is urging the court to see the connection between the Office of Copyright’s report on AI, which revealed “the copyright implications for training generative artificial intelligence models,” and Perlmutter’s subsequent dismissal.

A new effort at Riverhead Books will bring more Chinese language literature in translation to American readers, NPR reports. Led by editor Han Zhang, the initiative aims to circumvent systemics obstacles, “both real and imagined,” to “doing business with a country with a pretty intensive censorship structure in place” and offer translations that convey the richness and range of contemporary Chinese literature. The first book in Zhang’s program, Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang, was released last week. “I think, for a long time, the perception of Chinese literature among Western readers has been quite fixed,” says Yeuran. “It’s often seen as either heavily influenced by Chinese culture, or focused on people living rural, impoverished lives. Which has nothing to do with our lives today.” Other books in Zhang’s lineup include titles from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Ana Hein writes for Electric Literature about how friendship and collaboration are part of her creative process. Hein explains, “writing need not be inherently isolating…. Writing can be collaborative: reading each other’s notebooks and making margin comments, swapping laptops back and forth to edit at the coffee shop, sending emails and texts and voice notes, asking for ideas and jotting them down to use later, even just talking through a story plot with a trusted ear.” For Hein, writing through friendship transforms the “failures” of “writing—the distractions, the procrastination, the frustrations at [her] limitations and circumstances—and turns them into opportunities for connection.”

The technology studio Hidden Door has opened early access to its literary role-playing platform, Publishers Weekly reports. Hidden Door promises fans of titles such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz an “immersive entertainment” experience through choose-your-own-adventure storytelling within the worlds of their favorite books. The studio uses a mix of machine learning technology and partnerships with publishers to give readers the power to “explore, expand, and remix” fictional narratives. Hidden Door is primarily using titles in the public domain but is working on licensing agreements for select titles that will involve a revenue-sharing component.

The next manuscript by Amitav Ghosh will not be read for eighty-nine years, as he becomes the twelfth author to participate in the Future Library project, the Guardian reports. Ghosh joins Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong, and other renowned authors who have written manuscripts, which will be locked in a public library in Oslo until 2114. The full anthology of texts will be printed using paper made from the Future Library’s forest of spruce trees, which were planted in 2014. (Read “A Library Grows in Norway” from the January/February 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine).

An exhibition featuring the prolific yet often overlooked British poet, literary critic, translator, novelist, anthologist, and biographer Richard Aldington will open at the Grolier Club in New York City next month, Fine Books & Collections reports. Richard Aldington: Versatile Man of Letters will celebrate Aldington’s life and legacy through more than a hundred objects including first editions, typescripts, letters, photographs, and ephemera. The exhibition will run from September 11 through November 15.

Waterstones, a U.K. bookselling chain, which, like Barnes & Noble, is owned by Elliott Management and led by James Daunt, has secured £125 million (approximately $169,180,685) in new financing to support its expansion plans, Publishers Weekly reports.

A federal judge has sided with six publishers, the Authors Guild, and several authors and students in their lawsuit against Florida over a law that bans books that “describe sexual content” in school libraries, Publishers Lunch reports. The law banned books such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

The inaugural Westchester Book Festival, conceived by W. W. Norton vice president John Glusman last spring, will launch on November 8 in Katonah, New York, Publishers Weekly reports. The one-day event will feature sessions run by industry professionals, and authors such as Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Emma Straub. All proceeds from ticket sales will benefit local libraries.

Erica Ackerberg writes for the New York Times about a recently published book that collects five hundred years of author portraits. Edited by Alexandra Ault and Catharine MacLeod, Writers Revealed: Treasures from the British Library and the National Portrait Gallery, London (National Portrait Gallery, 2025) includes portraits of John Donne, John Keats, and George Eliot, in addition to other renowned English authors.

Will Atkinson, the former head of Atlantic Books and sales executive at Faber, has launched Wilton Square, a new U.K.-based publisher that intends to acquire titles from the now-defunct publishers Unbound and Boundless, Publishers Weekly reports. Atkinson will serve as joint CEO with Dan Hiscocks of Eye Books. With this new venture Atkinson seeks to both rescue stranded Unbound titles and build an enduring publishing company.

The inaugural Story Feast festival will take place in London on September 13, with the goal of transforming market perceptions and creating more opportunities for East and Southeast Asian authors in the U.K. publishing industry, Publishers Weekly reports. This year’s Story Feast has obtained sponsorship from several publishers including Walker Books, Penguin Random House, Pan Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster, and will feature five panels with approximately twenty speakers across children’s and adult literature.

Additional law firms have joined a lawsuit filed against Anthropic for infringing the copyright of up to seven million books, Publishers Lunch reports. Class action law firm Edelson and the anti-piracy firm Oppenheim + Zebrak have joined the original plaintiffs’ attorneys to support publishers and authors.

Ten authors nominated for this year’s Polari prizes, a set of U.K. awards that celebrate LGBTQ+ literature, have withdrawn their books from consideration over the longlisting of John Boyne, who has described himself as a TERF, the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, the Guardian reports. Two judges have also withdrawn from the jury, and more than eight hundred writers and publishing industry workers have signed a statement calling on Polari to formally remove Boyne from the longlist. The statement says that Boyne’s “public statements on trans rights and identity are incompatible with the LGBTQ+ community’s most basic standards of inclusion,” and points out “the context of rising anti-trans hatred and systematic exclusion of trans people from public life in the U.K. and across the world.” In a statement to the Guardian, the Polari prize said: “The hurt and anger caused has been a matter of deep concern to everyone associated with the prize, for which we sincerely apologize. We accept and respect the decisions of those writers and judges who have chosen to withdraw.” Though the prize is set to continue this year, the Polari prize added that it “will be undertaking a full review of the prize processes, consulting representatives from across the community ahead of next year’s awards, taking on board the learnings from this year.”

Boston Public Library is launching a project this summer with OpenAI and Harvard Law School to make its archive of historically significant government documents more accessible to the public, NPR reports. The documents date back to the early-nineteenth century and include oral histories, congressional reports, and industry surveys. Currently, people who want to access these documents must visit in person. The project will enhance the metadata of each document and allow users to search and cross-reference texts from around the world. AI companies help fund library efforts through the Harvard Law School Library’s Institutional Data Initiative, and in exchange, get to train their large language models on high-quality materials that are out of copyright and thus less likely to lead to lawsuits.

The Associated Press (AP) informed its freelance book reviewers that it will end its weekly reviews starting September 1, Publishers Lunch reports. The AP said it will “continue covering books as stories,” which will be written by journalists on staff. The AP added that the “difficult decision” was made after reviewing the AP’s story offerings and readership and determining that “the audience for book reviews is relatively low.”

Karen Fischer writes for Publishers Weekly about how federal cuts to library budgets will harm publishers as well. If libraries are compelled to decrease acquisitions to their collections due to insufficient funding, publishing companies will inevitably be impacted. Fischer notes that for Dzanc Books, libraries account for 8 to 12 percent of their annual sales. Vida Engstrand, the director of communications at Kensington Publishing, says, “Not being able to put books into libraries will hurt discoverability for newer authors and marginalized authors.” Engstrand adds: “Without libraries, the ecosystem falls apart.”

The Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) has announced that board chair Tieshena Davis will step down after just over a year in the role, Publishers Weekly reports. IBPA vice chair Renita Bryant will lead the board until it elects Davis’s successor.

When Oprah Winfrey called Richard Russo to let him know that his 2007 book Bridge of Sighs was the August Selection for Oprah’s Book Club, the author didn’t recognize the celebrity’s famous voice until the end of the conversation, according to Entertainment Weekly. “At the end of the conversation, Russo thanked the person he was speaking with and said, ‘And I missed your name.’ ‘It’s Oprah,’ the Emmy winner answered. ‘Oprah Winfrey.’ He understood then. ‘Oprah?’ Russo said before chuckling. ‘I’m so embarrassed.’”

“The fundamental trait of the novels that I like is that people are always wrong,” André Aciman tells the New Yorker. “My own life has been one of always reading people and mistaking one thing for another, so it has been very useful for me to find that the great novelists I love also seem to have been in a state of perpetual error.” Among those novels he discusses is Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton and Emma by Jane Austen.