The Authors Guild has issued a statement that opposes the sale of Simon & Schuster to Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House. The sale, which was announced last week, would create a publishing giant that, the Guild notes, “would account for approximately 50% of all trade books published, creating a huge imbalance in the U.S. publishing industry.” The letter goes on to point out: “Less competition would make it even more difficult for agents and authors to negotiate for better deals, or for the Authors Guild to help secure changes to standard publishing contracts—because authors, even

The founder of Dalkey Archive Press, John O’Brien, has died at the age of seventy-five. The press’s backlist will be kept in print by Deep Vellum Publishing. Dalkey, which was started in 1984, was committed to keeping important international and experimental literature available, and published more than one thousand works over the course of its history, including books by Flann O’Brien, Danilo Kiš, Ishmael Reed, David Markson, Anne Carson, and many more. John O’Brien won a lifetime achievement award from the NBCC in 2011, and was appointed a Chevalier in the order of Arts and Letters by the

The New York Times reports on tensions at Facebook over the “nicer news feed” resulting from temporary changes in the company’s algorithm that Mark Zuckerberg agreed to implement in the days before the national election. “There has never been a plan to make these permanent,” said executive Guy Rosen of the changes that led the platform to favor mainstream news sources like CNN, the Times, and NPR over hyperpartisan sites.

At The Guardian, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett wonders why so many books avoid using Donald Trump’s name. As Patricia Lockwood explains: “Refusal to name Trump is seen among my more

At 9:30 AM EST this morning, in a live event, the New York Times will reveal its list of the top ten books of the year, as Pamela Paul and other editors name their favorites.

Publishers Weekly reports on Penguin Random House’s new Spanish-language division, Penguin Random House Español, which will be based in Miami, and will bring together two previously discrete divisions: Vintage Español and Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial. “Vintage Español has been focusing on fiction, both literary and commercial, and narrative nonfiction,” said Silvia Matute, who will serve as president. “The Miami

Douglas Stuart, one of four debut novelists shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, has won the award for Shuggie Bain, which was rejected by thirty editors before finding a publisher. Stuart thanked his mother—“I’ve been clear without her I wouldn’t be here, my work wouldn’t be here”—and “joked that his winnings would be spent on settling his bet with his husband that he wouldn’t win.”

For The Nation, Audrey Wollen discusses “afterwardness” and collective, political memory in Annie Ernaux’s memoirs: “Ernaux has done repeatedly what many believe to be impossible in memoir writing: articulate

Former staff of Poets House have responded to the center’s closure and layoffs earlier this week, “out of concern not just for ourselves, but for the integrity of Poets House and its mission.”

The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, which supports work on short- and long-form projects, has announced this year’s twenty-two grantees. Recipients include, among others, Jeannine Tang, Ratik Asokan, and Lauren O’Neill-Butler.

Novelist Akwaeke Emezi has spoken out against Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s support of J. K. Rowling’s anti-trans essay, and shared their own experiences with Adichie:

Reader-supported press organization Shadowproof has announced the launch of its Marvel Cooke Fellowship, which will support writers of color covering the movement toward prison abolition.

Here are the odds for the six novels up for this year’s Booker Prize, as aggregated by NicerOdds. The winner will be announced Thursday at 2 PM EST.

At Vulture, Sarah Jones wonders who the Netflix adaptation of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is for. Reviewing the book when it came out, Jones called Vance’s volume “poverty porn wrapped in a right-wing message”; in Jones’s estimation, the movie may be even

In Columbia Journalism Review’s winter issue, Clio Chang profiles Substack, the newsletter platform that has “begun to look like it’s reverse engineering a media company.” The most successful writers on Substack like Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, and now Glenn Greenwald tend to be white, male, and already “well-served” by careers in existing media. “In general,” Chang asks, “will Substack replicate the patterns of marginalization found across the media industry, or will it help people locked out of the dominant media sphere to flourish? To a large extent, the answer depends on whether or not

In June, Knopf will publish Wayward, the new novel by Dana Spiotta, author of Eat the Document and Innocents and Others. According to the publisher, Wayward is “about aging, about the female body, and about female difficulty—female complexity—in the age of Trump. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird, off-kilter America, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins. Tremendous new work from one of the most gifted writers of her generation.”

Americanah author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks with The Guardian about Trump (“If you

Alex Shephard looks at the question of whether book publishers should put out the inevitable Trump memoir. Though it would likely be lucrative, the potential consequences could dissuade the big five publishing houses from touching the book. As Shephard writes: “Increased labor activism and demands that publishers live up to their stated values have been two of the biggest stories in publishing during the Trump era—a larger publisher putting out a Trump memoir would lead to a surge in both.”

Maggie Haberman has secured a deal with Penguin Press to write “a definitive and fascinating account of

At the New York Review of Books, David Treuer looks at a recent history of the Lakota people. Pekka Hämäläinen’s Lakota America “emphasizes that to understand American history it is vital to understand Lakota—and, by extension, Native American—history; that rather than existing in a state of constant first contact marked by incomprehension and surprise, Native nations and the American nation knew each other, grew up and around and through each other; that contact between the Lakota and European powers wasn’t one-sided and didn’t necessarily spell doom for Indians.”

PEN America has announced

Goodreads has announced their 2020 Choice Awards.

Timothy D. Snyder, author of On Tyranny, has written a twenty-tweet thread on the post-election situation: “The mechanism to undo democracy is usually a fake emergency, a claim that internal enemies have done something outrageous.”

The Los Angeles Times and Tribune Publishing have settled a class-action lawsuit, agreeing to pay three million dollars to address allegations of pay disparities between persons of color and white employees.

The first pick for the online book club hosted by T: The New York Times Style Magazine is James Baldwin’s