Beth Brower's self-published Emma M. Lion historical series, which has sold over a million U.S. print and ebook copies, has been acquired by Viking Press. New editions of volumes one through eight are scheduled for November 24, 2026, with the ninth book expected February 23, 2027.
Tracing serial fiction from Dickens's 19-installment Pickwick Papers through magazine-era serials to today's Substack newsletters, the essay argues that market incentives and fragmented modern attention explain the form's revival. Lauren Oyler's six-part story "The Hater" in New York magazine's Dinner Party newsletter serves as the current example.
A roundup of ten favorite October book covers, with notes on each design's color, texture, lettering and concept. Titles include Barbara Kingsolver's Partita and Frank Huyler's The Red Dress, with designers and publishers credited throughout.
Ukraine's Ministry of Culture, with the KSE Foundation, the Ukrainian Book Institute and the Book Arsenal Festival, is building a grant program for small publishers hit by the war, after strikes destroyed about 13 million books. The fund targets presses releasing up to 20 books a year and aims for a $500,000 cap.
Maris Kreizman looks at the publishing "make book," a title an editor champions to build into a hit, arguing that corporate consolidation has made this harder. Small presses like Catapult, now closing, increasingly nurture debut writers.
Novelist Jung Yun recounts leaving a secure New York career, shaped by her immigrant parents' creed of being smart, to pursue writing. She reflects on the randomness of publishing, citing Markus Dohle's 2022 remark, and on why the risk is worth it.
— via Literary Hub, Jung Yun
A roundup of twenty new releases out today, led by Chad Harbach's long-awaited follow-up to The Art of Fielding, Jane Schoenbrun's debut novel, and Jonathan Van Meter's authorized Kim Kardashian biography. Each title is listed with its publisher and a blurb or review quote.
— via Literary Hub, Julia Hass
Victor Gollancz's Left Book Club grew from 20,000 members in its first year to 39,000 by March 1937, and it did so without fighting booksellers. He paid them a fee to receive members' books and put no obligation on them to stock his radical titles, which might have shocked conservative customers.
— via Literary Hub, Andrew Pettegree
On the Graf Zeppelin's first flight in 1928, Captain Ernst Lehmann found two passengers already bored with the view and playing chess. His complaint about how fast people shrug off the miracle of flight was shared by Charles Lindbergh, and it came up again on the Hindenburg's first 1937 crossing.
— via Literary Hub, Catherine Grace Katz
Book Riot turns 15, and its staff is marking it with a trip through the chaos: a failed food vertical, a Reddit-style news board, and a 2015 rebellion against Harold Bloom's all-white "greatest authors" list. Annual memberships are 15% off for a limited time.
— via Book Riot, S. Zainab Williams
Publishers once made authors pay thousands just to quote a song lyric. Now they're letting AI companies swallow whole books under "fair use" while quietly using the same technology for marketing copy, Maris Kreizman writes.
— via Literary Hub, Maris Kreizman
A raccoon cub spent two and a half days trying to revive his dead brother, using paw compressions and mouth-to-mouth water. What followed was a bond with the humans who watched, and a cracker-loving orphan named Baby Graham.
— via Literary Hub, Paul Bochner
BookTok can't reliably surface diverse titles, but it moves units: Circana sales data confirm the platform's biggest YA picks actually top bestseller lists. Romantasy dominates this year's roundup, from royal curses to a Shatter Me spinoff, with one graphic novel breaking the pattern.
— via Book Riot, Arvyn Cerezo
In 1942 the Army's chief librarian toured Pacific war zones and found GIs craved pulp westerns, pin-ups and Sears catalogs over anything literary. The catch: soldiers wanted pocket-sized paperbacks, a format major publishers still refused to touch.
— via Literary Hub, Molly Guptill Manning
A writer paid to join a professional writing group, asked upfront if she'd fit in, and got reassured she would. One meeting later, the facilitator called her writing "raw," booted her, and refunded the fee like it was a tryout.
— via Literary Hub, Kristen Arnett
A hotel bathroom, the Doobie Brothers on TV, and a man saying he just had the most beautiful experience of his life: this poem tracks what happens when a soft-rock harmony hits somewhere between nostalgia and ecstasy. An eleven-year-old superfan screams at Michael McDonald in the bleachers. He says thank you.
— via Literary Hub, Patricia Lockwood
Before a single bomb fell on Iraq, Colin Powell's "mobile weapons labs" and Netanyahu's WMD warnings to Congress went largely unchallenged by the press. No weapons were ever found; roughly 4,500 U.S. troops, 179 British soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died anyway.
— via Literary Hub, Assal Rad
Long before the marches of the 1960s, a network of Southern women quietly dismantled Jim Crow's legal and social scaffolding. One campaign against lynching, led by a white Texas businesswoman, grew to four million members by the early 1940s using church groups already in place.
— via Literary Hub, Keri Leigh Merritt
Assigned to cover the 1963 March on Washington as a fashion item, "the hats," her editor said, one reporter found herself jammed six inches deep in a crowd twice its expected size, and decided the real story was the women themselves.
— via Literary Hub, Marcia Chatelain
Robert Kolker once taped a note to his desk reading "What if this were fun?": until his kids called it bleak and made him take it down. He answers Lit Hub's questionnaire on writer's block, a cliffhanger-filled start at a community newspaper, and why "The World According to Garp" made him angry, then made him cry.
— via Literary Hub, Literary Hub
