A new organization known as McCormack Writing Center will house the programs formerly known as Tin House Workshop, the organization announced on its website today. Founded in 2003 as a summer writers workshop and operated alongside the literary magazine Tin House and Tin House Books, the workshop expanded its programming to craft intensives, online classes, and residencies in subsequent years. The transition to the McCormack Writing Center follows the acquisition of the organization’s book publishing arm by Zando in 2025. Tin House Workshop lead staff Lance Cleland and A.L. Major will stay on through the transition, serving as executive director and director of programs respectively.

Who’s afraid of terminal punctuation? Many of us denizens of the digital age, Nitsuh Abebe argues in an On Language essay for the New York Times Magazine, discussing anxieties about tone as we struggle to make ourselves known in social media, e-mail, and texts. Abebe unpacks the hahas, emojis, and dropped periods that stand in for familiarity as face-to-face interaction grows sparser: “The issue, in other words, isn’t the writing. It’s the lack of context—the fact that more and more of what we communicate is aimed at somebody we don’t know or rarely speak to, with little base line of what we’re normally like.”

A partnership between One World and Little Free Library will place book-sharing boxes in twelve communities across the United States, each box stocked with titles that “help readers understand and shape our changing world,” Publishers Weekly reports. Books from the One World Essentials line—including Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, and The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio—will be distributed in custom book-sharing boxes that honor a given title. Each will placed in a neighborhood with a connection to the author or the book. “The books in this series are not just about thinking, but rethinking, not just observing, but getting close, not just catharsis but movement to action,” says Chris Jackson, One World publisher and editor in chief. “Most of all, they’re meant to be freely read and shared—and we’re excited to get them to more readers through this exciting partnership with Little Free Library.”

The Nero Book Awards, given annually to “celebrate exceptional writing from authors based in the U.K. and Ireland,” has announced its 2025 winners. Benjamin Wood won in fiction for Seascraper (Viking); Claire Lynch won in debut fiction for A Family Matter (Chatto & Windus); Jamila Gavin won in children’s fiction for My Soul, A Shining Tree (Farshore); and Sarah Perry won in nonfiction for Death of an Ordinary Man (Jonathan Cape). Each winner receives £5,000 (approximately $6,690) and is in the running to win the Nero Gold Prize for the best overall book of the year, set to be announced in March and including a £30,000 cash prize (approximately $40,140). 

Hachette Book Group (HBG) and Cengage are joining the copyright lawsuit against Google, reports Publishers Lunch. This class action suit was initiated by writers and illustrators in 2023, accusing the tech behemoth of copyright infringement in using their books to train Gemini, Google’s AI system. HBG and Cengage will represent the interests of publishers, a previously unrepresented class of rightsholders in the suit. The motion states, “They wish to stand alongside their authors in vindicating copyright owners’ rights” as “[p]ublishers are significant stakeholders in this case, with a parallel but distinct set of interests and arguments to make at a historic trial.”

According to six small press editors Emmeline Clein at Cultured recently spoke with, reissuing out-of-print and invigoratingly unique books is publishing’s hottest trend. “Longstanding institutions like New York Review Books, Semiotext(e), and New Directions are flourishing alongside younger upstarts like Hagfish and McNally Editions, while new presses continue to crop up—Doubleday just announced the debut of its own reissue imprint, Outsider Editions,” Clein writes. A new wave of unusual titles from long ago are offsetting more expected, mainstream books. Edwin Frank of New York Review Books adds, “It’s analogous to the way people began to collect vinyl. There became a historical dimension to people’s awareness and their cultural commitment. It all started up in the wake of the pandemic.” 

Wiley has announced the appointment of its first chief of AI and data services officer, Publishers Weekly reports. In the new role, Armughan Rafat will focus on “developing and commercializing AI-ready content and data products for AI developers and corporate R&D teams.” The position has been created to “accelerate Wiley’s effort to license its content to AI developers as well as companies building out their AI applications.” Since January 2024, Wiley has generated nearly $100 million in revenue from AI licensing, including deals with Anthropic, the AI corporation sued in a class-action lawsuit brought by writers for copyright infringement.

For the New York Times, Colin Moynihan reports on a “previously undisclosed trove of correspondence” between Harper Lee and fellow Alabama writer Jo Beth McDaniel. The “dozens” of letters newly shared by McDaniel offer “a fuller view of [Lee’s] take on the Deep South’s transition from Depression-era segregation to the Civil Rights movement,” among other subjects, and help sketch out the beliefs of the intensely private writer, who had last given a formal interview in the 1960s. “This is a marvelous opportunity to take a more nuanced view of Harper Lee,” says Lee biographer Charles J. Shields. In one 1992 letter, Lee remarks on the response of white Southerners to pushes for Black equality: “Many Christians were challenged for the first time to be Christians. ...What was heart-breaking was to discover that people you loved—friends, relatives, neighbors—whom you assumed were civilized, harbored the most vicious feelings.”

Five writers are included in the 2026 class of USA Fellows, announced today by the Chicago-based arts funding organization United States Artists. Poets Sarah Aziza and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, nonfiction writer Mayuk Sen, sequential artist Lauren Rebecca Weinstein, and multigenre writer and artist Johanna Hedva will each receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards, “granting recipients the freedom to allocate funds to their unique needs.” Fifty artists from twenty-one states comprise this year’s class of fellows, with grants made in ten creative disciplines. Nominations for the fellowships come from an anonymous, rotating group of arts professionals, with finalists identified by panels of experts in each discipline. The 2026 class of fellows marks “two decades of unrestricted support that nurtures artists’ creative freedom and drives lasting impact” as the program hits its twentieth anniversary year.

Katie Couric has launched her own book club, KCBC (Katie Couric Book Club), and chosen Virginia Evans’s novel The Correspondent (Crown, 2025) as its inaugural title, the journalist and author announced via Katie Couric Media. “As some of you might have heard, my 2026 resolution can be summed up in four words: scroll less, read more. To that end, and in an effort to hold myself accountable, I’ve started a book club! I’m so excited. My goal is to read in community, as they say, one book a month.” Couric will host a conversation with Evans about the book on Monday, January 19, on Substack.

Bestselling author Colleen Hoover has revealed in an Instagram story that she recently received a cancer diagnosis, USA Today reports. The author of It Ends With Us (Atria Books, 2016) and Verity (Grand Central Publishing, 2021) noted her “second to last day of radiation” at a Texas Oncology location and added that the unspecified type of cancer had been “removed.”

At least eight college and university libraries across the country—in Massachusetts, Kentucky, Missouri, and Nebraska—received bomb threats this week, Book Riot reports. “Last October, at least fifteen colleges and universities received bomb threats to their libraries. Yesterday, January 12, 2025—the first day back on campus for many universities following winter break—at least eight college and university received similar library bomb threats.”

Adelaide Writers’ Week, one of Australia’s biggest cultural festivals, has been cancelled in the backlash following the removal of Australian Palestinian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the event’s lineup, the Guardian reports. The board of the festival said last week that Abdel-Fattah, “a vocal critic of Israel,” had been disinvited due to “insensitivities” following the mass shooting at a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach last month. After word of the author’s removal spread, 180 other writers scheduled to appear withdrew from the festival, including former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and British author Zadie Smith. All but one member of the board have now resigned, including the director who had invited Abdel-Fattah. 

Hundreds of literary tourists are traveling to Prague to see artwork made of books, reports Literary Hub. Thanks to BookTok, visitors are heading to the capital of the Czech Republic to see “The Idiom,” a sculpture made by Slovak artist Matej Kren that consists of 8,000 books and forms a cylindrical tower “with a tear-shaped entrance and mirrors at each end,” creating an “endless” tunnel for visitors to enjoy. The piece was installed at Prague’s Municipal Library in 1998 and went viral on TikTok three years ago. As a result, the sculpture can draw up to a thousand tourists a day during peak seasons such as the holidays.

For the second year in a row, print book sales were up, reports Publishers Weekly. Based on data compiled by Circana BookScan, there was a .3 percent increase in print book sales from 2024 to 2025, with 762.4 million books being bought last year. Sales peaked in 2021 at 839.7 million copies, though they’re now at higher levels than they were before the pandemic. Postpandemic, adult fiction has taken the sales lead. Graphic novels and romance books had a 9.2 percent and 3.9 percent increase, respectively, while fantasy book sales fell by 8.7 percent. Publishers hoped for higher numbers for 2025. 

The New York Times has reported on the passing of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s toddler on January 6. The famous novelist shared details regarding the death of her 21-month-old son, Nkanu, in a WhatsApp group chat with family and close friends, the content of which has been leaked to the public. Adichie stated that his passing was due to an overdose of a sedative while he was being treated for an infection at the private Euracare Hospital in Lagos. Euracare officials are investigating the matter, though the passing of Adichie’s son has prompted an outpouring of complaints about Nigeria’s health care system. 

A press release from Folio Literary Management has announced the agency’s acquisition of the Greenhouse Literary Agency from Coolabi Group. Folio describes the move as “expanding Folio’s children’s division and reinforcing its commitment to representing exceptional children’s book authors and illustrators.” Greenhouse’s full backlist and client list will transfer to Folio, as will current Greenhouse staff. “We are thrilled to be moving from strength to strength and look forward with excitement to what the future holds for our clients’ careers at Folio Jr,.” says Chelsea Eberly, who will join Folio as vice president, transitioning from her role as director at Greenhouse.

At a moment when polls show 40 percent of American adults did not read a book in the last year, one book is nonetheless selling at record rates: the Bible. Publishers Weekly reports that Bible sales hit record highs in the United States and the U.K. in 2025, continuing an upward sales trend begun in 2021. Mark Schoenwald, CEO of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, notes that study Bibles are among the iterations of the text with sales that have soared: “What that tells me is people are not just buying Bibles, but they’re actually trying to read them and understand them and then apply them to their lives.”

A new deadline has been set for writers to opt-out or make objections in the lawsuit being brought against AI corporation Anthropic, Publishers Lunch reports. Judge Araceli Martinez-Oluguin has extended the deadline from January 7 to the revised deadline of January 29, allowing writers more time to exclude themselves from the class-action case and pursue different legal recourse. “This is the only option that allows you to bring your own separate lawsuit against Anthropic for the claims this Settlement resolves.”

Literary Hub has announced the forty fellows of the 2026 Periplus collective mentorship program for writers of color who live and work in the United States. Each fellow will be paired with an established writer who is a member of the collective and they will meet on a monthly basis “to foster community, support their writing practice, and advise on the nitty gritty of making a career as an artist.” This is the collective’s sixth year running these fellowships and they chose their newest mentees from over five hundred applicants.