The Denver Post reports that this year’s Readers Take Denver, an annual festival for fans of romance literature held earlier this month, is being denounced by attendees as “disorganized and chaotic,” on par with the 2017 Fyre Festival that led to prison time for its organizer, Billy McFarland. Next year’s festival has been cancelled as a result.

ABC News reports on how a recent wave of book-banning efforts has specifically targeted the Asian American community.

Publishers Weekly offers a dispatch from the Independent Book Publishers Association’s Publishing University event held in Denver last week, including ideas from a “roundtable [that] addressed alternatives—or creative tweaks—to traditional publishing models.”  

In light of the current unprecedented wave of book-banning efforts in the United States, the New York Times looks back at efforts that began fifty years ago to ban Robert Cormier’s 1974 novel, The Chocolate War.

The New York Times investigates the theft of 170 rare books by Russian classic authors worth more than $2.6 million from European libraries. “How Russian rare books came to be at the center of a possible multinational criminal conspiracy is a story of money and geopolitics as much as of crafty forgers and lackluster library security.”

A group of academics, including many poets and writers, have announced “an academic and cultural boycott of Columbia University and Barnard College” due to the university and college’s response to protestors demanding a divestment “from Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.” The list of signatories includes authors Jamel Brinkley, Alexandra Kleeman, Kiese Laymon, Claire Luchette, Solmaz Sharif, and others. The letter notes that “80% of educational facilities in Gaza have been partially or wholly destroyed, including every university, the Gaza Municipal Archive and hundreds of libraries, bookstores, and publishing houses.” 

Liese Mayer has been appointed as executive editor of Little, Brown. “Mayer was most recently editorial director of fiction at Bloomsbury US, where she acquired and edited such titles as Women Talking by Miriam Toews, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy, Girlhood by Melissa Febos, and Zorrie by Laird Hunt,” writes Publishers Weekly.

Paul Auster, the critically acclaimed novelist and writer in nearly every genre, has died at age seventy-seven.

The New Yorker investigates the “Order of the Third Bird,” which is “an underground international fellowship, made up of artists, authors, booksellers, professors, and avant-gardists who try to understand what attention is, how to channel it, what it can do.”

Maryland has passed a Freedom to Read Act, joining a growing list of states supporting such legislation in response to an unprecedented wave of book-banning efforts. The law, signed by Maryland’s governor late last week, offers “a series of comprehensive protections for school and public library workers, as well as the materials acquired and housed in these institutions,” reports Book Riot.

Publishers Weekly reports on festivities held across the nation on Independent Bookstore Day, which was April 27. “Many stores partnered on organized crawls for book lovers, who received passports and stamps to mark their progress. Some booksellers in areas with large concentrations of stores—such as Chicagoland, which had 45 participating stores—went so far as to commission shuttle buses to more efficiently transport customers to different locations. (One bookseller reported that she took the opportunity to handsell a favorite read to customers during the bus ride.)”

Amid criticism that AI infringes on authors’ copyrights and otherwise poses a threat to the writing trade, some authors are using it to feed their creative process, reports NPR.

The Tampa Bay Times speaks with novelist Lauren Groff about her new bookstore in Florida, The Lynx, which opened on Sunday. “‘We did this because of book bans,’ Groff says. ‘We want to fight back against the chill of authoritarianism that is creeping across Florida.’”

PEN America has cancelled its annual World Voices Festival after many writers declined to participate in protest of its response to the war in Gaza. PEN America’s CEO Suzanne Nossel has responded on MSNBC. The Atlantic offers some analysis about the future of the free speech organization after a series of controversies have rocked its operations this year: “Can an organization that sees itself as above politics, that sees itself straightforwardly as a support system for an open society, be allowed to exist anymore?”

On NPR Maureen Corrigan reviews a new collection of epistles by one of American poetry’s foundational voices: “The Letters of Emily Dickinson reads like the closest thing we'll probably ever have to an intimate autobiography of the poet.”

Electric Literature lists its favorite indie bookshops, from Minnesota to Tennessee.

The Hudson Valley Book Trail in New York State has grown from a “doodle on the back of a bookmark” to a major tourist attraction leading literary pilgrims across eight counties and nearly forty bookstores that not only sell books but offer readings, trivia, live music, food, beer, and more, writes the Middletown Times Herald-Record.

Indiana Public Media speaks with a local library director about whether lending physical books will be a priority for public libraries in the future: “[P]ublic library services are increasingly about access to digital resources, whether through computers at the library itself, or online services. It also means the library space is about far more than reading. It’s not just teens who can do more there. It’s a space for public meetings, performances, book clubs, cooking demonstrations, and more.”

Was Shakespeare a writer of fan fiction? “Many of his major works draw their narrative core from classical or popular source material, ranging from Ovid to the Bible to the Decameron,” writes Betsy Golden Kellem at JSTOR Daily.

Two literary organizations are offering financial assistance to small presses affected by the closure of Small Press Distribution (SPD). The Poetry Foundation today announced a bridge fund through which nonprofit poetry presses can apply for grants to help cover costs incurred due to SPD’s closure. The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) announced a separate grant opportunity for nonprofit publishers based in New York that were affected by SPD’s shutdown.