Daily News

A survey finds most Americans are unengaged with book banning efforts in public schools, Publishers Weekly reports. The survey found that most adults feel informed about the issue, but only 3 percent of respondents said that they have personally engaged—with 2 percent working to maintain access to books and 1 percent seeking to restrict access. 

J Wortham writes for the New York Times Magazine about Audre Lorde’s enduring legacy, focusing on a new biography by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. The biography underscores Lorde’s prescient and passionate engagement with environmental justice.

The Guardian reports on how Ireland became a global literary powerhouse. The country has had four Nobel literature laureates and six Booker prize winners; its capital was the fourth Unesco City of Literature in 2010, and it has a thriving network of magazines, publishers, bookshops, festivals, and libraries. The article attributes some of this success to “an arts council that cares about literature and a culture of intergenerational benevolence.”

The novelist Nella Larsen wrote books that “were influenced by her training in the New York Public Library system,” writes H.M.A. Leow for JSTOR Daily. Larsen was the first woman with Black heritage admitted to the New York Public Library’s training school, where she studied in the early 1920s. The library had rigid ideas about the racial classification of knowledge, and Larsen wrote novels that rejected “systemized forms of knowledge production.”

The New York Times writes about how the push to diversify publishing fell short. Lisa Lucas, who became publisher of Pantheon and Schocken (imprints of Penguin Random House), in 2020, was abruptly let go in May. Her experience is representative of a larger trend. A demographic survey of the publishing industry showed that between 2019 and 2023, the percentage of Black employees in the book business remained at around 5 percent, and the percentage of Black executives hovered around 4 percent.

Louis Menand writes for the New Yorker about how bookstores have been forced to redefine themselves in the digital age. “[C]uration is probably still the way for bookstores to go. It no longer makes business sense for a small shop to stock a bit of everything.”

Though much of our consumption has turned digital, NPR revisits a conversation about vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, and paper books—the physical media many of us still cherish.

Brandon Shimoda discusses his book The Afterlife Is Letting Go (City Lights, December 2024) with Publishers Weekly and reflects on his efforts to memorialize the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.

Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux reflects on her experience navigating cancer and desire in the New Yorker. The essay is excerpted from The Use of Photography, translated by Alison L. Strayer, forthcoming from Seven Stories Press in October.

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation has announced the finalists for the 2024 book award, including A History of Burning by Janika Oza and Prophet Song by Paul Lynch in the fiction category and Built From Fire by Victor Luckerson and Red Memory by Tania Branigan in nonfiction. The winners will receive $10,000 each, and the first runners-up will receive $5,000 each, at an awards ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, the weekend of November 9-10, 2024.

The Poetry Foundation announced the 2024 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows: Rob Macaisa Colgate, Marissa Davis, Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras, Chandanie Somwaru, and marion eames white. The $27,000 prize includes a subscription and an invitation to publish in Poetry magazine. Additionally, the Poetry Foundation will sponsor the fellows’ attendance at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey, where they'll participate in a public reading on October 19, 2024. 

Barnes & Noble is eliminating certain books of erotica as well as public domain works and “summary” titles that bill themselves as guides to other popular books, reports Katy Hershberger of Publishers Lunch. 

The Bookseller reports on the “dismal or even disastrous” effects that the Paris Olympic Games had on the French capital’s bookstores, as traffic restrictions, “the massive exodus of Parisians,” and tourists more interested in sports than browsing books, deflated sales considerably.

Algeria’s first women’s boxing Olympic gold medalist has filed a criminal complaint in France against X (formerly Twitter) over alleged “cyber-harassment.” Among the figures named in Imane Khelif’s complaint is JK Rowling, the Guardian reports. 

Tommy Orange, the author of There There and Wandering Stars, has been selected as the eleventh writer to contribute to the Future Library project, which each year invites an author to write a manuscript that will not be read until 2114, the Guardian reports. 

Following a ruling by federal appeals court judges on Friday, a law banning any book that describes sexual acts from K-12 schools, which was signed by Iowa’s Governor Kim Reynolds last May, can take effect. The ruling overturned a preliminary injunction issued in December by a federal judge, according to the New York Times. After the law was passed last year, thousands of books, including The Color Purple by Alice Walker and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, were banned from schools around the state. The case will now go back to District Court.

The Life of Herod the Great, a final novel by Zora Neale Hurston, will be published for the first time by HarperCollins imprint Amistad in January 2025. The Guardian reports that the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God was working on the sequel to her 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, when she died in 1960.

The Atlantic recommends six books, including the novels Personal Days by Ed Park and Temporary by Hilary Leichter, for readers wrestling with questions of modern employment, such as whether it’s time to quit.

Audible.com has launched an AI-powered feature that allows users to search for audiobooks using “natural language queries,” according to Publishers Weekly.

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses has awarded $350,000 in capacity-building grants to forty-six literary publishers, including Deep Vellum Publishing, the Feminist Press, Nightboat Books, and Ugly Duckling Presse. Recipients will receive grants of $5,000 or $10,000 to support projects that build organizational capacity and ensure greater sustainability. Through a similar program, the National Book Foundation has awarded $350,000 in capacity-building grants to forty-nine nonprofit literary organizations, including 826DC, Girls Write Now, and Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

The Utah State Board of Education has ordered schools to remove thirteen books from classrooms and libraries, including books by Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake) and Judy Blume (Forever), “because they have content considered pornographic or indecent under a new state law,” the New York Times reports. “It is a dark day for the freedom to read in Utah,” says Kasey Meehan, Freedom to Read program director at PEN America. “The state’s No-Read List will impose a dystopian censorship regime across public schools and, in many cases, will directly contravene local preferences.”

George Saunders reflects on his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which landed at number 18 in the New York Times list of “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” (His story collections Pastoralia and Tenth of December also made the list, at numbers 85 and 54, respectively.) 

Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward remembers learning to read and, eventually, discovering novels by Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison, in the Washington Post.

Belt Publishing has announced that it will publish the final issue of Creative Nonfiction, the literary magazine founded thirty years ago by Lee Gutkind. 

The Southwest Review, the literary magazine founded in 1915 at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, is launching a book-publishing arm called New Pony Press that aims to publish a single title a year, with an emphasis on literary works. Greg Brownderville, the Southwest Review’s editor in chief, told Publishers Weekly that the press “aims to spotlight ‘cult authors’ and ‘maverick writers’ who have devoted followings but may not have achieved widespread recognition.” The first title, an art book by Barry Gifford titled Disappearances, will be published on October 8.

Barnes & Noble is set to purchase Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore for $1.83 million, Denverite reports. 

Alexandra Schwartz of the New Yorker explores two new books that attempt to identify what it takes to live a life of sustained creativity: Stacey D’Erasmo’s The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry and Adam Moss’s The Work of Art.

East Bay Booksellers, a popular bookstore in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, California, was destroyed in a fire early Tuesday morning, the Oaklandside reports. 

The Atlantic examines a new documentary, How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer (A Cautionary Tale), directed by Jeff Zimbalist, that “offers a model for reassessing the lives of monstrous men.” In addition to writing dozens of books, including two winners of the Pulitzer Prize (The Executioner’s Song and The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel / The Novel as History) during a career that spanned six decades, in 1960 Mailer stabbed his second wife (of six), nearly killing her.

Jim Hicks is stepping down as executive editor of the Massachusetts Review after fifteen years on the job. The Daily Hampshire Gazette looks back at his tenure. 

The Guardian remembers Edna O’Brien, the Irish author whose early novels, including The Country Girls, won international acclaim but were banned in Ireland. O’Brien died on Saturday at the age of 93.

NPR tells the story of Baldwin & Co., a Black-owned bookstore in New Orleans, that is counting down the days to what would have been the 100th birthday of its namesake, James Baldwin.