Book Smarts

In this week’s magazine, we checked in with Bookshop.org’s Andy Hunter about the online book retailer’s path to becoming one of Amazon’s biggest competitors for book sales since launching in 2019. We also spoke with Alvina Ling, formerly editor-in-chief of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers for more than a decade, about the upcoming debut of her own imprint this fall. A number of publishers say that Netflix has helped boost their book sales this year as the streaming giant churns out hit page-to-screen adaptations. Lost Kite, a new nonprofit press in Minneapolis, hopes to empower incarcerated individuals to acquire, edit, and write books. In other news, Haruki Murakami’s first novel in three years—and his first to feature a female protagonist—will be published in Japan this July, per the AP. At last week’s Whiting Awards, Library of America president and publisher Max Rudin reflected on the imprint’s influence on the American literary canon, via Lit Hub. Meta has laid off 10% of its staff and slashed another 6,000 open positions as it doubles down on AI development, the New York Times reports. The New York Times Book Review has launched a column on fantasy books led by editor Jennifer Harlan. And the New Yorker’s Jessica Winter looks at how parents and teachers are responding to the encroachment of AI on classrooms.