News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff.
NOTE on paywalls: Publisher’s Weekly and The Guardian may require you to sign up for a free account in order to read their content. Both The New York Times and the Washington Post have paywalls, but allow a small number of free articles per month.
Literary Losses
John Crowley (12/01/1942–8/08/2026), award-winning author of a number of science fiction and fantasy novels as well as nonfiction works including several documentary films, has died at the age of 83. His first three novels were science fiction. Then came the work for which he is perhaps best known: the 1981 novel Little, Big, which won both the World Fantasy and Mythopoeic Awards and was a finalist for a number of other awards. It is considered by some to be a foundational novel in the contemporary/urban fantasy subgenre, and Ursula K. LeGuin said of Little, Big that it is “a book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” This was followed by the four-book Aegypt Cycle. More recently, his novel Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (2017) was also nominated for several awards, winning both the Mythopeoic Award and Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.
Obituaries and tributes: Black Gate; Boston Review substack; Locus Magazine. Bibliography and Biography: author website; Goodreads; Wikipedia
Bookish News
- Dark Horse Comics voluntarily recognizes DHC Workers United union (Dark Horse Comics press release)
- EJ Swift wins the 2026 Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction for her eco-SF novel When There Are Wolves Again (The Guardian)
- McGraw Hill Touts AI in Improving First Quarter Results (Publishers Weekly)
- Indian Publishers Fight Book Pirates (Publishers Weekly)
- Barack Obama launches podcast about books that ‘shaped his worldview’ (The Guardian)
Worth Reading/Viewing
- ‘I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young’: Katherine Rundell on the view from the classroom, and on the importance of reading and the humanities (The Guardian)
- Authors Weigh In on Wilder’s ‘Little House’—Then and Now (Publishers Weekly)
- Why Is TikTok in This Book from 2006? (New York Times)
- Why It Takes So Long to Write The Winds of Winter and The Doors of Stone (The Portalist)
- The Creepy Caller Problem: Protecting library workers from inappropriate (but not explicitly obscene) calls (American Libraries magazine)
- Your Fancam Is Their Marketing Plan: “Hollywood spent years ignoring, ridiculing, and even persecuting fandom. Now, it’s speaking the language, reposting the art, and recruiting directly from its ranks.” (34th Street)
Free Fiction Online
For Writers & Bloggers
- You Will Be Accused of Using AI. Here Is How to Prove You Wrote It. (The Slow AI substack)
Books, Movies, and TV
More on AI
- How to Prevent Meta From Using Your Instagram Images in A.I. (New York Times). And on the same topic, in case you can’t get past the NYT paywall, there’s this article from WIRED: Meta Now Lets Anyone Use Your Instagram Photos in AI Images—Unless You Opt Out
- ChatGPT [is] not letting you emulate specific authors anymore, complains a Redditor who has been using ChatGPT advanced models to “write” “their” books in the style of established authors. Most of the replies are… not sympathetic, to say the least. (Mine wouldn’t be, either.)
Cool, Fun, and Awesome
- let’s do a ‘couch to 5k’ for reading. Naomi Alderman, creator of the “couch to 5k” running app Zombies, Run!, now aims to do something similar for reading. Only instead of training your body to run 5K, she’s working on a program (not yet an app) to help you read more and/or harder. It targets three types of people: people who used to love reading but have gotten sucked into spending time on their smartphones instead, people who genuinely have little time for reading, and people who want to challenge themselves to read more difficult material. Just as in a couch-to-5k program, you build toward your goal over time. Sounds interesting!
Bookish Quote
Nicole @ BookWyrmKnits
Ooh, a couch-to-5k reading edition sounds interesting!
What did you think of the John Wiswell short story? The Three O’Clock Dragon is a favorite.
Nicole @ BookWyrmKnits recently posted…Top Ten Tuesday ~ Books I Was Reading On This Day Over the Last Ten Years