News of note for readers: May 21, 2026

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

• Chuck Palahniuk has revealed the cover for his next novel; Galleria is a sci-fi tale that comes out early next year (People).

• Starting next month, Kobo's ereaders and app will automatically sync with a user's StoryGraph account, showing their book progress in real time versus needing to add it manually (Yahoo!).

• The latest TikTok trend? "Immersive reading," in which a person listens to the audio version of a book while looking at the text version, to help them focus or process a difficult work (NPR).

• Another trend, unfortunately, is legislative attempts to restrict reading materials on a mass scale; Kelly Jensen reports on the various consequences, including book censorship, of the national "Don't Say Trans" bill that just passed the House of Representatives (Book Riot).

• Read a (heartbreaking) passage from Hugh Ryan's My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond (Electric Literature).