Posted on May 20, 2026 at 8:00 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
Catch up quick with the bookish news of the past few days ... or take a deeper dive into each story. Your choice!
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Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk issued a statement clarifying that she has only used artificial intelligence for "faster documenting and checking of facts," not to write her novels, in response to reports that she discussed using AI to write her upcoming novel (Literary Hub).
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Taiwan Travelogue, written by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated by Lin Kang, has become the first work translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the International Booker Prize; the author and translator are also the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners, respectively, of the prize (NPR).
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Meet some of the students and groups who are fighting book-ban efforts in public schools in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, itself the topic of a new documentary called An American Pastoral (Book Riot).
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Read Laurie Lathem's short story "The Flamingo Café," which was chosen as the winner of the 2026 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize (Electric Literature).
Categories: Today in Books