News of note for readers: October 19, 2026

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

• The British Library has acquired sixty-eight boxes of notebooks, manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and documents from the late author A.S. Byatt, including handwritten drafts of her Booker Prize-winning novel Possession (The Guardian).

• Doyle D. Calhoun points out that five significant AI scandals in the publishing world this year have all been focused on authors of color — and that in some cases, the accusers aren't literary purists, but rather groups with political agendas (The New York Times). 

• Author Isabel Allende entered a literary contest with pseudonyms for both herself and her book, but the submission — the sequel to The House of the Spirits — still won (The Guardian).

• Dungeon Crawler Carl author Matt Dinniman described the scarier parts of his life as a bestselling author at New York Comic Con, saying that some people have tried to contact him through his kids and that fans' arrival at his house prompted his family to move (People).

• A bear paid an after-hours visit to a California library, security footage shows; it left before the building opened (KTLA).

• Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James is making her young adult debut; Land of Ghosts comes out tomorrow and, yes, is far less explicit than the novels that made James famous (People).