Slow and Steady

Adult fiction buoyed book sales for the first nine months of 2026, which were on par with 2025 sales thanks to blockbusters like Theo of Golden and Project Hail Mary, while nonfiction has continued to flounder. The U.K.-based parent company of Taylor & Francis plans to offload the academic publisher as part of a larger pivot. Two months after the departure of NEIBA executive Eileen Dengler, SIBA executive director Linda-Marie Barrett has announced she will also step down at the end of the year. And the fall trade show season has officially wrapped, capped by MIBA and GLIBA’s joint conference in Minneapolis and MPIBA’s gathering in Denver. In other news, Wired reports that HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette are encouraging the use of AI to generate publicity copy, cover art, emails, and more, according to employees. The prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing is investigating whether a winning short story by Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza was AI-generated, after the Atlantic flagged it as suspicious. A24 is reportedly in talks to adapt Emma Cline’s The Guest, with Lorene Scafaria directing and Sadie Sink attached to star, per Deadline, while Netflix is adapting Gary Paulsen’s 1987 YA novel Hatchet, via Variety. And author and longtime New York literary fixture Sidney Offit has died at 97.