Posted on August 19, 2026 at 9:42 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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Bestselling true-crime writer Christopher Berry-Dee has been dropped by his publisher and his books have been pulled from Waterstones bookstores, following an investigation into allegations of violence and sexual abuse against him; Berry-Dee denies the allegations (The Guardian).
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We have more details about how Anthropic's "watermark" on AI-generated text will work, and it's not going to be discernible at all to the average reader (404 Media).
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Danika Ellis unpacks the results of her reader survey on what particular actions would qualify a work as AI-written and how readers would respond to such works (Book Riot).
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On this day in 1866, Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness, was granted British citizenship (Literary Hub).
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Also on this day, but in 1946, Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King’s Men, was published (Literary Hub).
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Author Alex Aster's YA novel Barbie: Dreamscape — the first such work that Mattel has authorized — came out yesterday (People).
Categories: Today in Books