“Books-A-Million … is in the process of opening 15 new outlets this year, which will keep the total number of outlets at over 220 spread across 32 states.” Both new and existing locations are getting redesigned interiors and a wider selection of titles; new stores average about 15,000 square feet. - Publishers Weekly
College professors of English Johanna Winant and Dan Sinykin thought they had written a book to help other undergrad-level instructors to teach close reading. It’s turned out that their work is helping high school teachers learn how to get their students to read and understand whole books. - Slate (MSN)
“Citing a chronic shortage of financial backing for independent publishers and nonprofits dedicated to writing and reading, a coalition of seven charitable foundations has established a Literary Arts Fund that will distribute a minimum of $50 million over the next five years.” - AP
What I am about to say on this matter may seem perverse, but I think a look back at the instances where great works of literature almost disappeared upon publication or came close to not being published can offer a useful perspective, and even a modicum of hope, that the game is far from over. - The New York...
“Everything must be seen and experienced before it can be recycled, shredded or, as a last resort, binned. We must honour and mourn. We must absorb the past out of each object, so it can turn into empty rubbish. This alchemy is deeply exhausting.” - The Guardian (UK)
Mychal Threets “recalls the joy he felt as a young boy watching Burton on the show, taking viewers anywhere from an underwater world to the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Now he’s the host, trying to create joy for other kids. - San Francisco Chronicle
“A history of an “unruly appendage”, a look at the sadly neglected post-war Montreal erotic art scene and a scientific tome tackling whether fish can recognise themselves in a mirror are among the six shortlistees in The Bookseller’s Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year 2025.” - The Bookseller (UK)
“The Children’s Booker Prize, offering £50,000 (roughly $67,000) for the best fiction written for readers aged eight to 12, … will launch in 2026, with the first winner announced in early 2027. It will be decided by a mixed panel of adult and child judges, a first for a Booker award.” - The Guardian
“Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems, 1936–1995, to be published on 6 November, brings together decades of work that Murdoch largely kept private, stored for years in a chest in her Oxford home.” - The Guardian
“It would be hard to find another nation as serious about its language. In Lithuania, one misspelled word can turn a politician into a clown; a misplaced comma can be enough to cancel a date. … Yet people often say, ‘If only that book/song/movie were in English, it would be a hit.’” - Literary Hub
The most common qualms, BISG reports involve “inadequate controls around the use of copyrighted material (86 percent), hallucinations (84 percent), AI-generated books flooding platforms (81 percent), and in accurate, false, or biased training data (79 percent). -Publishing Perspectives
“Drafted in the decade before To Kill a Mockingbird, after Lee had first moved to New York City in 1949, the stories feature some of the characters and settings she would soon make famous and reveal some of the contradictions and conflicts she would spend her life trying to resolve.” - The Guardian
The founder: “I had friends who wrote award-winning books and couldn't get their books into D.C. bookstores because they were smaller presses, or they didn't have a mass appeal. … And that always seemed wrong to me.” - NPR
Most observers knew that Saul Bellow was no saint, especially after reading his greatest novel, the quasi-autobiographical Herzog. Bellow’s portrait of his protagonist’s wife, a stand-in for his soon-to-be-ex, is very unflattering, but evidence now shows that Bellow himself was far more cruel and violent toward her in real life. - Slate (Yahoo!)
