News of note for readers: January 22, 2024

Catch up quick with the bookish news of the past few days ... or take a deeper dive into each story. Your choice!

• Colorado has become the latest state to introduce anti-book-ban legislation; Book Riot applauded many aspects of the bill, but noted in particular that it keeps challenged material available during the evaluation process, unlike procedures in other states.

• Charles O. Jones, an American political scientist who wrote or edited some eighteen books, has died at the age of ninety-two (The New York Times).

• Lev Rubinstein, a Russian poet, essayist, and political dissident who criticized both Soviet leaders and Vladimir Putin, has died at the age of seventy-six (The New York Times).

• Rie Kudan has won Japan's biannual Akutagawa Prize, considered the country's most prestigious literary award, for a novel that AI helped her write; she said she "made active use of generative AI" in writing Tokyo-to Dojo-to and that about five percent of the book used AI-generated lines, verbatim (The New Publishing Standard).

• Read an excerpt from Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, a day before it hits shelves; the novel follows newly sober Cyrus Shams, the orphaned son of Iranian immigrants to the US, on a search for a family secret (Electric Literature).