News of note for readers: January 8, 2025

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

• The DAG Foundation for the Arts is launching a new annual award called the DAG Prize for Literature, which will give $20,000 to a writer working on their second book, one that, specifically, "offers significant innovation" (Literary Hub).

• Jenna Bush Hager is launching a partnership with Random House Publishing Group, in which Hager will publish four to six books across Random House's imprints per year, beginning with Conform by Ariel Sullivan; the books she publishes will not, however, become part of her book club (The New York Times).

• Both the director and the chair of the UK's Royal Society of Literature are leaving their roles, the latter as his term expires and the former as the organization has faced allegations of censorship, complaints about its expansion speed, and criticism over its response to the attack on Salman Rushdie (The Guardian).

• Erica Ezeifedi highlights the ways in which book clubs seem to be trending nationwide, including within the walls of schools — and prisons (Book Riot).

• To celebrate the launch of Zora Neale Hurston's final novel, The Life of Herod the Great, scholar Deborah G. Plant discusses how Hurston became fascinated by the historical figure and how Plant herself fell in love with Hurston and her work (NPR).

• Constance Grady researched what she calls the "zombie statistic" of how few men read fiction — fueling many a lamentation of what this means for society as a whole or how it reflects other trends — and discovered that there's no evidence to back this extreme statement up (Vox).