Posted on September 1, 2026 at 12:00 PM 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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Congratulations to the winners of the 2026 Hugo Awards, which honor the best of science fiction and fantasy (Book Riot).
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Wendell Berry, who wrote poetry, novels, and essays dedicated to smaller, environmentally conscious, and more traditional farming, died Monday at age ninety-two; some of his best-known works include The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture and The Memory of Old Jack (The New York Times).
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Aaron Blumberg's final installment in his series about book censorship in prisons opens Kelly Jensen's weekly roundup of ban and challenge news outside the carceral system (Book Riot).
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Hong Kong's independent bookstores are facing increased scrutiny, pressure, and harassment from Chinese authorities who cite the prohibitions against "seditious intent" in printed material (Associated Press).
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Emily Wilson is retranslating The Odyssey from scratch, a project that she expects to take a few years; the next version will contain "somewhat more lines than the original, enabling more varied word-length and pacing," in the style of her Iliad translation (The New York Times).
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A poem by E.B. White has, nearly one hundred years after its publication, become a children's picture book; The Duck Can't Sleep includes a foreword by White's granddaughter Martha White and comes out September 8 (People).
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Also coming out September 8: Queenie Is Working on It, the sequel to Candice Carty-Williams's debut novel, Queenie; you can read and hear an excerpt from this second book (People).
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Carley Fortune is also returning to a previous novel's universe; Only in Summer, the third installment in her Barry's Bay book series, comes out May 18 (People).
Categories: Today in Books