“Visitors to Norway during Easter might find the streets emptier than usual, thanks to the nation’s cherished Eastertime obsession: retreating to isolated cabins to binge crime fiction,” reports the BBC. The Påskekrim (“Easter crime”) tradition dates to the days preceding Easter in 1923 when, thanks to savvy marketing, the title for the Norweigan crime novel Bergenstoget plyndret i nat (The Bergen Train Was Looted Last Night) appeared at the top of the national newspaper, confusing readers about what was fact and what was best-selling fiction. “Ever since, the Easter period has become associated with crime fiction, and eventually Norwegians began celebrating by reading suspenseful stories, from murder mysteries and heists to detective tales and true crime.”
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s personal blog is finding new life as a podcast, Reactor reports. From 2010 to 2017, the iconic writer used her posts to weigh matters of politics, discuss publishing developments, consider imagined floor plans for fictional spaces from her work, and even share cat photos. Now, each and every blog entry—including the cat tributes—will get its own episode in In Your Spare Time: From the Blog of Ursula K. Le Guin. Every episode will be narrated by a different writer, reader, editor, librarian, or other literary friend from Le Guin’s circles, with installments slated from David Mitchell, Emily Wilson, Rick Riordan, Darcie Little Badger, Molly Gloss, and Karen Joy Fowler, among many others. The first episode will be released on April 8. “Over the years, many readers have told me they wish they could hear Ursula’s blog posts read by her. I do too, but for me, this is the next best thing—to hear so many fascinating people, connected to my mother in many different ways, bringing the blog into current conversation,” Theo Downes-Le Guin, Le Guin’s son and the podcast’s coproducer, said in a statement quoted by Reactor.
After two decades cultivating a now-thriving book culture in the city, the “Literary King of Tulsa” is bound for Seattle, the New York Times reports. In 2016, Jeff Martin launched the nonprofit bookstore Magic City Books in his Nebraska hometown, modeling its business structure on that of art museums and drawing on connections in the industry to draw literary luminaries to a destination that hadn’t previously been on many book tour maps. “I knew all the publishers, I knew all the publicists,” Martin said to the Times. “But once I was detached from the machine, I had to figure out, How am I going to get people here?” The answer involved galvanizing local businesses to help, sometimes “ponying up gas money” to authors, and pouring countless unpaid personal hours into the project. Martin will continue as president of Magic City Books even as he begins his new role as chief of creative strategy and storytelling at the Seattle Art Museum, Tulsa never far from mind. “The place felt like a black hole when I was a teenager, and at some point, it became a blank canvas,” Martin told the Times. “Tulsa will survive without me just fine. But it feels nice knowing I made a difference.”
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, one of the remaining LGBTQ+ bookstores in Manhattan, may be acquired by Hive Mind, a queer indie bookstore in Brooklyn, to prevent the Bureau from closing, reports Publishers Weekly. To aid with the transfer of ownership, Hive Mind’s owner, Jules Wernersbach, has started a GoFundMe to raise the funds needed for the acquisition process. In a release, Wernersbach stated: “We’re in a moment when queer literature is under extreme censorship nationwide and trans people are being targeted by legislation that threatens their human rights. Just this month, HR 7661, a bill that would censor books in schools nationwide, was sent to the House. We must keep this invaluable resource of trans and queer literature open in our city. We need it.”
This fall World Editions will launch Read the World A to Z, a translation series featuring novels by authors from countries representing every letter of the alphabet. In October the press will publish the first three titles in the series, highlighting authors from Argentina (All That Dies in April by Mariana Travacio), Belgium (The Woman Who Fed the Dogs by Kristien Hemmerechts), and China (Cocoon by Zhang Yueran). The rollout for this series will include “special information packages about the literary landscape of the featured country” as well as events with the authors and translators.
The bestselling novel Go as a River has led literary tourists to Gunnison Valley, Colorado, looking for the lost town written about in the book, reports Nancy Lofholm of the Colorado Sun. Penned by author Shelley Read, the novel is set in a historic location called Iola that existed six decades ago and is now a “barren stretch of lake bottom” in Western Colorado. Tourists began flooding the area looking for remnants of Iola, as written by Read, in the summer of 2023, with the hopes of running into the author as well. “I have learned much of the rest of the world is enthralled by Colorado,” says Read. “I can still say that I am so honored by it.”
Nearly $350,000 was awarded to writers, editors, and translators at last night’s annual PEN America Literary Awards held in New York City, Publishers Weekly reports. Those honored included Jamaica Kincaid, who received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974– (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Nicholas Boggs, who received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Edwidge Danticat received the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, honoring the Haitian American novelist, short story writer, and memoirist for her extraordinary body of work. The evening “marked a return to form for the free speech organization’s flagship literary prizes, which had been diminished in recent years by a boycott, led by Writers Against the War in Gaza, which was lifted on December 31, 2025. Due to numerous authors withdrawing their books from consideration, the ceremony and a number of awards were canceled in 2024. Last year, the ceremony returned but one of its top prizes, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was not conferred due to author withdrawals.”
As audiobooks and romantasy novels converge in popularity, Vanessa Romo of NPR talks to Antony Palmini, the audiobook rising star who has voiced the “book boyfriends” of some of the romantasy genre’s biggest titles. Palmini has offered his resonant baritone to leading characters in series including A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fae & Alchemy, participating in the recordings of more than fifty audiobooks last year. Early hints of Palmini’s path to “admittedly niche celebrity” came while working at a Blockbuster video store as a teenager, when a coworker admired his voice on the phone to customers: “‘There’s like a voice that’s coming out that sounds kind of, dare I say, sexy,’ he said, recalling his friend’s words.”
JD Vance has announced the publication of his second memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, with HarperCollins this June, the Guardian reports. Vance’s earlier memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper, 2016), became a best-seller, “spending more than two hundred weeks on the New York Times list and selling more than five million copies worldwide, and was later adapted into a film by Ron Howard starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.” The new book is seen as a calculated move as Vance contends for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination.
A freelance writer is in hot water after the New York Times discovered he used artificial intelligence “to help write a book review that inadvertently incorporated elements of a Guardian review on the same title,” the Wrap reports. The Times has cut ties with the freelancer, Alex Preston, who used AI to write his January 6 review of the novel Watching Over Her (Simon & Schuster, 2026) by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, translated from French by written Frank Wynne, after a reader wrote in to alert the newspaper to the similarities with the Guardian review. “The Times then launched a review and spoke to Preston, who admitted he used an AI tool to help draft the piece and that he failed to catch the Guardian material before the paper published the review.”
The New York Times recently announced updates to its best-seller lists. “With audiobooks making up a larger share of how people consume books, we are broadening our audio offerings by adding two new lists: Audio Children’s (top 15) and Audio Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous (top 10). These additions round out our coverage of the audiobook segment, which currently includes Audio Fiction and Audio Nonfiction, and reflect [the newspaper’s] goal to publish lists that cover different formats through which readers—and increasingly listeners—purchase books.” The newspaper also announced that it would cease publication of the monthly Mass Market list; the weekly Paperback Nonfiction list will shift to monthly. The changes will go into effect online on April 1 and in print on April 12.
The judging panel of the 2026 International Booker Prize today announced the shortlist of six books that are competing for this years’ prize for fiction translated into English. They are The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin; She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel; The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin; On Earth as It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan; The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump; and Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. The winner of the International Booker Prize, which will be announced on May 19, will receive £50,000 (approximately $66,226), with the money divided equally between the winning author and translator. Each shortlisted title will be awarded a prize of £5,000 (approximately $6,622), split between the author and the translator.
New legislation may aid prison libraries in delivering materials and preparing incarcerated individuals to transition home, reports Publishers Weekly. As the majority of the U.S.’s nine-hundred-plus prison libraries are often under-resourced and understaffed, the introduction of the Prison Libraries Act into the U.S. House of Representatives aims to offer one-year grants to “advance reintegration efforts, reduce recidivism, and increase educational opportunities,” per the bill. This would require $10 million in federal spending each year through 2031 and would allow “for more free resources to be made available, for people who are incarcerated to be viewed as members of the public, and for the public to think about how this is for the good of all of us,” says Jeanie Austin, a librarian at the San Francisco Public Library, which has a Jail and Reentry Services department.
Harlequin, a division of HarperCollins known for its romance books, is partnering with the AI entertainment company Dashverse to create microdramas inspired by the imprint’s titles, reports Publishers Lunch. These illustrated short-form videos will be available in English with the goal of offering readers a new way of experiencing beloved books such as Catherine Mann’s A Fairy-Tail Ending and JC Harroway’s Forbidden Fiji Nights With Her Rival. “This partnership with Dashverse represents an exciting opportunity to reimagine these cherished stories for a new audience, leveraging cutting-edge technology to bring them to life in an innovative and engaging medium,” says Harlequin EVP and publisher Brent Lewis.
April 7th is National Black Bookstore Day, established by the National Association of Black Bookstores (NAB2) “to increase visibility, drive engagement, and strengthen the long-term sustainability of Black-owned bookstores.” This nationwide movement is also meant to honor Georgia “Mother Rose” West, founder of Underground Books in Oak Park, California, and a notable figure in the Black literary community who passed in December 2024 at the age of 75. Among the resources the NAB2 provides in association with this special day are a bookstore directory to enable readers to find Black-owned bookstores throughout the U.S. and a report on the current state of Black bookstores, including the fact that Black-owned bookstores represent only eight percent of independent bookstores nationwide.
Ahead of the 30th annual celebration of National Poetry Month this April, the Academy of American Poets has announced its lineup of festivities: “free programs, resources, and events designed to make poetry accessible to everyone.” Offerings include curation of the Academy’s free Poem-A-Day e-mail series by chancellor emerita Dorianne Laux; free National Poetry Month posters featuring artwork by Alfredo Richner and words from U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze; and the annual Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day, celebrated on April 30. A virtual benefit for the Academy will take place on April 28, with benefits going to the organization’s K-12 poetry education programs.
The European and International Booksellers Federation has issued a statement condemning the arrest of four employees of a Hong Kong bookstore. The founder of the bookshop Book Punch, Pong Yat-ming, has been taken into police custody along with three booksellers from the shop; they stand accused of selling a biography of the imprisoned pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai. “The arrest of booksellers for distributing literature is an attack on the core mission of booksellers to provide access to diverse ideas and on the fundamental principle of intellectual freedom,” reads a statement from the EIBF. “EIBF calls for the immediate release of the arrested booksellers and urges the international community to join us in condemning these actions and to stand in solidarity with booksellers and publishers worldwide who face repression for their work.”
Winners of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) book awards for publishing year 2025 were announced last night at a ceremony in New York City. In a statement to the press, the NBCC spoke to the breadth and impact of this year’s honorees: “This year’s NBCC winners include books on timely and timeless topics: the present and future impact of new technologies, the power of storytelling in shaping a life, the importance of shining a light on forgotten or ignored histories, the lasting repercussions of sexual abuse, the complexity of geopolitics, the beauty of transformative narratives.” Kevin Young (Night Watch, Knopf), Han Kang (We Do Not Part, Hogarth, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris), Karen Hao (Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Penguin Press), Alex Green (A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled, Bellevue Literary Press) and Arundhati Roy (Mother Mary Comes to Me, Scribner) took home awards in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, biography, and autobiography, respectively. Critic Rhoda Feng received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, given to an NBCC member for exceptional work in the field. Other honors bestowed included the Toni Morrison Achievement Award, which recognizes “institutions that have made significant contributions to book culture,” and which was was jointly awarded to NPR and PBS. “At a time when some question the value of public, service-minded media, we salute PBS and NPR for all you have done for both book culture and American democracy,” said board member Jacob M. Appel of the award.
Bertelsmann, the parent company of Penguin Random House, is stepping up legal efforts to combat book bans, CEO Thomas Rabe told Reuters. “In January 2025, the Trump administration dismissed 11 complaints related to books banned by local school districts. ‘These are indeed factual book bans,’ Rabe said. Bertelsmann and its publishing arm are contesting the measures in court, and the group has so far won every legal case that has been decided, he added.”
“The Gathering,” a poem about the “relentlessness of the news cycle” by Partridge Boswell, has won the National Poetry Competition sponsored by the British arts organization Poetry Society, the Guardian reports. The poem was picked from more than 21,000 entries by poets in 113 countries. Boswell received £5,000 (approximately $6,680). “The speaker reflects on the tensions of personal grief against the backdrop of state violence in Gaza and elsewhere,” the judges said of the winning poem. “How do we maintain language’s potency amid the anaesthetising relentlessness of the news cycle? How do we resist false narratives, eclipsed histories?”
Marianthe Dresios and Omer Korkmaz, both first-year students at Johns Hopkins University, have penned a love letter to the semicolon, the disrespected and little-used punctuation mark that Kurt Vonnegut advised writers to avoid (“All they do is show you’ve been to college,” according to Vonnegut) for the school’s News-Letter. “The semicolon does not draw a sentence to a close. It holds its breath, waiting for the next clause to continue the message of the first. In the same way, the semicolon is not dead; it merely waits for us to love it again.”
The Associated Press reports that Tracy Kidder, the author of a dozen acclaimed nonfiction books, including The Soul of a New Machine (Little, Brown, 1981), which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, has died of lung cancer. He was 80.
Random House has announced its publication this September of Gloria Steinem’s memoir, An Unexpected Life, Publishers Marketplace reports. “Moving between memory and the present, Steinem examines the progress and setbacks of more than sixty years of activism and offers a message to new generations about what the ongoing fight will require—and the imagination it will demand,” said the publisher in a press release. The book was acquired by Random House vice president and executive editor Jamia Wilson; read a conversation between Wilson and Vivian Lee about Wilson’s beginnings at Feminist Press and the work of building a list in the September/October 2023 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Mystery surrounds a library book conscientiously returned by its reader before its due date—but over 10,500 miles away from where it was checked out, the Express & Star reports. Australian librarian Jessica Berry was baffled to discover a book in her return queue that had come from Gornal Library, a community library in the West Midlands of England. The book, a copy of Gill Hornby’s 2013 best-seller The Hive, has since been returned to Gornal, where it has been withdrawn from circulation. Although the book’s wandering days are over, tales of its exploits live on: “We’ve been entertaining some of our regulars with the story of this novel’s incredible journey,” said library assistant James Windsor.
Six books have been announced as the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction: The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet (Hutchinson Heinemann), Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health by Daisy Fancourt (Cornerstone Press), Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell (Picador), Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane Rogoyska (Allen Lane), Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton), and Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century by Ece Temelkuran (Canongate). “We awarded the first Women’s Prize for Nonfiction in 2024 because women’s voices were systemically underrepresented in most narrative nonfiction disciplines, as well as being overlooked in review coverage, award recognition and receiving lower advances,” said Claire Shanahan, executive director of the Women’s Prize Trust. “This exceptional shortlist... shines a light on the brilliant women writing such bold and accomplished nonfiction, for the pleasure of all booklovers, everywhere.” This year’s winner will be announced on June 11 at an event in London and will receive £30,000 (approximately $40,140).
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been named a Global Icon for Bvlgari’s 2026 Carrying Culture campaign, “becoming one of five women chosen by the Italian luxury house to front its Icons Minaudière collection,” according to Brittle Paper. The author of eight books, the most recent of which is the novel Dream Count, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2025, joins Canadian supermodel Linda Evangelista, Italian American actress Isabella Rossellini, South Korean actress Kim Ji-won, and South African architect Sumayya Vally in a campaign photographed by Ethan James Green and designed by Greek fashion designer Mary Katrantzou. (Read the profile of Adichie by Renée H. Shea from the July/August 2009 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)
Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly reports on statistics compiled by Bowker that show the total number of books published in the U.S. in 2025 jumped 32.5 percent over 2024, to more than four million books. “The increase was led by self-published works, for which the number of print and e-books...soared 38.7 percent to more than 3.5 million from 2.5 million in 2024.”
In an essay for the New York Times, David Streitfeld looks at the power of book reviews and how, back in 1993 at the Washington Post Book World, before the Jeff Bezos era, a review by Michael Dirda of a misunderstood novel by Annie Proulx had career-changing results for both Proulx and Larry McMurtry, who had been fired from Book World fifteen years earlier. “Here is a tale, in the dark for 30 years, about how book reviews are an engine that helps keep the culture running. It is about what can happen when you’re not ruled by data.”
Henry Grabar of the Atlantic covers the recent revival of Barnes & Noble (B&N). After becoming a private company in 2019, B&N acquired a new CEO, James Daunt, who subsequently changed the trajectory of the company, which was going down in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. Having previously founded an independent bookstore, Daunt changed what he calls B&N’s “retailer’s mindset” by giving authority to the local store managers, so they could choose what books to stock and promote, creating diversification across all stores. As a result, Barnes & Noble opened sixty new stores last year with the goal of doing the same this year as well. Grabar writes: “Daunt believes that Barnes & Noble makes room for a type of book buyer who might not feel at ease in independent bookstores, in which customers, he says, are met with a ‘sort of scrutiny, and also a sense of intellectual expectation.’” B&N is also “a popular stage set for TikToks,” appealing to teenagers with its laid-back atmosphere and wide aisles.
Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James is developing two new TV projects with Motive Pictures, an independent British production company, Deadline reports. Previously, James collaborated with Motive on his first show, Get Millie Black, which aired in both the U.S. and the U.K. in 2024 and 2025, respectively. The duo is back and working on two dramas, one of which “is being billed as a blood-soaked odyssey into the lawless Caribbean, set during the Golden Age of piracy,” and the other of which is “a revenge epic and geopolitical thriller that plays out across the Americas.”
The HarperCollins Union has secured the highest starting salary in the publishing industry with a new contract, reports Publishers Lunch. This three-year contract mandates a beginning salary of $52,500, for a 35-hour week, which will increase annually to reach up to $55,200 in 2028. Additionally, all covered employees will receive annual pay increases, one floating holiday was included to a total of eighteen throughout the calendar year, and entry-level employees must be considered for a promotion after two years. “We were able to achieve provisions that will provide life changing support to current members, and a more sustainable future for new employees,” says Caitlin Stamper, the union chair and a Harper Children’s designer.
Jeff Shotts has been announced as the winner of the 2026 A.P. Anderson Award, bestowed by the Anderson Center at Tower View to honor an individual for “significant contributions to the cultural and artistic life of Minnesota.” An editor at Graywolf Press for nearly thirty years and the press’s current executive editor, Shotts has acquired and edited works that have received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and awards from the National Book Critics Circle, among other accolades. “Editors... work in the shadows and rarely get the acclaim they deserve,” wrote Dobby Gibson, one of Shotts’s nominators, in a statement shared by the Anderson Center. “Jeff’s work at Graywolf has strengthened Minnesota’s stature as a center of literary arts. By nurturing world-class talent from Minnesota and beyond, he ensures the Twin Cities are not just a regional hub but a national and international presence in literature. And most important of all, Jeff has ensured Graywolf—and by extension Minnesota—fosters a culture of literary risk, innovation, and excellence.”
For the New York Times, Alexandra Alter considers the curious case of Shy Girl, the buzzy self-published horror novel picked up by Hachette—and then pulled from publication after evidence of AI use in its authorship. After online speculation about the book’s voice and the telltale tics of AI, Max Spero, the founder and chief executive of the AI-detection company Pangram, ran the book through its software, finding that an estimated 78 percent of the book was AI-generated. Hachette subsequently cancelled the book’s planned publication in the United States and ceased printing the title in the U.K. While AI has roiled the online book marketplace for time, Shy Girl may be the “first commercial novel from a major publishing house to be pulled over evidence of AI use. Its cancellation is a sign that AI writing is not only appearing in cheap self-published e-books that are flooding Amazon but is seeping into even traditionally published fiction.”
Amazon Literary Partnership has opened applications for its 2026 grants cycle, offering funding to “literary nonprofits with the aim of empowering writers, helping them create, publish, learn, teach, experiment, and thrive.” Grants are awarded in amounts ranging from $5,000 to $20,000; in 2025, ninety-nine Amazon Literary Partnership grants offered a total of $1 million in funding to organizations across the United States. Recent recipients of grants include the National Book Foundation, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), Girls Write Now, and Cave Canem. Applications for this year’s grants are due May 1. Recepients will be announced in July.
Utah has added another book to its list of banned titles, reports The Salt Lake Tribune. Looking for Alaska (Dutton Books for Young Readers, 2005) by John Green is now the twenty-eighth title to be banned from Utah public schools. This young adult fiction book was also among the top fifty-two books banned from U.S. schools in 2025, according to PEN America. Utah law requires that a title be banned from public schools if at least three school districts determine there to be indecent content found within. On Green’s website, he states that a sex scene from the book is frequently the most cited reason for why it has been banned.
Smithsonian Magazine covers a new exhibition at Yale Library that explores the history of typos across five hundred years. Entitled “‘Beauties of My Style’: Errata and the Printed Mistake” and opening on March 30 at the university’s Sterling Memorial Library, this exhibition shows errors found in Ulysses, the Bible, and many more well-known titles. According to the library, “errors committed” lists—acknowledging typos and including apologies and additions—first appeared in the fifteenth century, with authors placing these slips in the back of their books. The exhibition looks at errata lists alongside their respective texts, exploring themes such as “censorship, misrepresentation, intervention, and instability,” per the library’s statement.
The executive director of the Modern Language Association (MLA), Paula M. Krebs, will be stepping down from her position in 2027. Having been with the MLA for close to a decade, Krebs has led the association “through a period of significant evolution, guiding the organization as it strategized to respond to the impact of new technologies, the COVID-19 pandemic, and legislative challenges to higher education.” Of her time spent with the MLA, Krebs notes, “As a first-generation college student, I’ve always had a bit of an outsider perspective, and this organization welcomed that, allowing me to take some risks and try some new things.” The executive council plans to start searching for Krebs’s replacement in the coming weeks.
Publishers Weekly reports on the surprise Chapter 11 filing of Baker & Taylor, which reveals debts to thousands of creditors that are estimated to total between $100 million and $500 million; the company’s estimated remaining assets are valued at $1 million to $10 million. Those owed money include Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins, which are due $23.4 million, $16.4 million, and $15.6 million respectively; Ingram, Wiley, Norton, and multiple public libraries are also on the list of those to whom Baker & Taylor is in debt. “Given the huge gap between Baker & Taylor’s assets and what they owe their creditors, one observer told Publishers Weekly that companies will be lucky to receive pennies on the dollar.”
Six novels have been announced as the shortlist for the second annual Climate Fiction Prize: Dusk by Robbie Arnott (Chatto & Windus), The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha (John Murray Press), Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Simon & Schuster) Hum by Helen Phillips (Atlantic Books), Endling by Maria Reva (Virago), and The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (Granta Books). Sponsored by the British nonprofit Climate Spring, the prize “celebrates the most inspiring novels tackling the climate crisis” as part of the organization’s broader mission to leverage the power of storytelling to address climate change. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced May 27 and will receive £10,000 (approximately $13,300).
Publishers Lunch reports that book distributor Baker & Taylor is set to close in January 2027. The news comes on the heels of the failed acquisition of the company’s assets by distributor ReaderLink last month. Local news reports that 253 of the 318 of the employees at the company’s warehouse in Momence, Illinois, learned yesterday that they had lost their positions; the remaining employees will assist in winding down operations through the end of the year. One of the oldest companies in the book industry, Baker & Taylor “was the largest supplier of materials to libraries, and B&T Publisher Services distributes books from more than 250 small presses. Small publishers are particularly in need of distribution services after the closure of Small Press Distribution.”
The Los Angeles Times uncovers a trend in book jacket design marked by childlike sketches, doodles, and crayon marks. “The more childish and unrefined, the better,” Maddie Connors writes. The “naive design” trend reportedly appeals to millennials and Gen Z readers. “The book cover trend, imbued with nostalgia for childhood, promises fiction that grapples with the pangs of adulthood in an age of precarity.” Examples of the design can be found on the covers of books by Madeline Cash and Cazzie David.
Virginia Evans is the winner of the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel for The Correspondent (Crown), the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced. Judges Rachel Beanland, Dionne Irving, and Taymour Soomro considered 146 eligible novels by American authors published in the United States during the 2025 calendar year. Submissions came from 59 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. Evans will receive $10,000. The other finalists were Susanna Kwan for Awake in the Floating City (Pantheon) and Maggie Su for Blob: A Love Story (Harper).
Jaime Leifer has been named publishing director of Bloomsbury US’s adult trade division, according to Publishers Weekly. “Leifer will oversee the adult literary fiction list alongside the division’s nonfiction list, which the publisher hopes to expand.”
An author in Utah has been convicted of “aggravated murder after poisoning her husband with fentanyl and then self-publishing a children’s book about coping with grief,” the Guardian reports. Prosecutors say Kouri Richins gave her husband five times the lethal dose of the synthetic opioid by mixing it in a cocktail that he drank in March 2022. The couple were $4.5 million in debt; Richins reportedly believed she would inherit her husband’s estate, valued at more than $4 million, after his death.
Comic book retailers are adopting BookTok-style videos to help increase store sales, reports Publishers Weekly. Creating content for a younger, online demographic, these booksellers are employing a variety of social-media-savvy techniques, including posting reels and creating videos in which they speak with comics creators, utilize puppets to share reviews of recent releases, drink wine while discussing new books, and more. One such comic store owner, Jen King of Space Cadets in Shenandoah, Texas, says, “When they see what people are like in the community, and how we talk to each other, they realize, Oh wait, they’re just like my friends. I’m not any different in person. The person they see on the screen is really me.”
Jack Kerouac’s original typescript scroll of the first draft of On The Road has sold for upwards of $12 million, making it the most expensive literary manuscript to sell at an auction, reports Fine Books & Collections. Typed with no paragraphs or chapter breaks, and measuring 119 feet long by 9 inches wide, the famous scroll “features occasional cross-outs by repeated ‘x’s, and numerous penciled deletions and word changes, in some cases substituting fictional names for the real names of himself and his companions, plus marginal notes in pencil by Kerouac.” Singer-songwriter Zach Bryan bought the literary work of art, having previously purchased a church in the author’s hometown that he plans to turn into a Kerouac museum.
Four years following his survival of an assassination attempt, Salman Rushdie says he’s tired of being everyone’s “free speech Barbie,” reports the Guardian. During this year’s New Orleans Book Festival, Rushdie spoke with the Atlantic’s George Packer, saying, “it’s a little frustrating to be not known for a book—but for something that happened to a book,” referring to the attacker that stabbed him onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York in 2022 due to his having written The Satanic Verses (Viking, 1989). Wanting to focus more on his writing than the incident, Rushdie mentioned his return to fiction, and his most recent short story collection, The Eleventh Hour, published by Random House last November.