News of note for readers: September 18, 2026

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

• If you love the fall poem "To Autumn" by John Keats, tomorrow is a special day for you (Literary Hub). 

• In other, albeit much more recent, milestone news: R.L. Stine is releasing a Slappy-themed gift set to mark the upcoming thirty-fifth anniversary of his classic Goosebumps books (People).

• Here's an excerpt from We Chase Shadows, the just-released next installment of Richard Osman's We Solve Murders series (People).

• The winners of the Wainwright Prize, which celebrates the best nature and conservation writing published in the UK, have been announced; the overall winner for adults is The Book of Birds by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, which you may have seen on many bestseller lists (The Guardian).

• Instead of a link roundup this week, Kelly Jensen and four other literary advocates have written a reflection on five years of surging book-ban efforts (Book Riot).

• One story that might make the next link roundup, though, is how communities in Florida are fighting back — and winning races — against extreme right-wing school board candidates (The Guardian).

• National Book Award-winning author Phil Klay has been appointed as the new president of PEN America (The New York Times).

• More than 180 writers, including such notable names as Olga Tokarczuk, JM Coetzee, Colm Tóibín, Elif Shafak, Isabel Allende, Ben Okri, Yann Martel, Kamila Shamsie, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, have signed a letter to Eritrea's president, asking for proof of life for twelve writers arrested over twenty years ago (The Guardian).

• Author Salman Rushdie and his wife, Eliza Griffiths, discuss the graphic and real-time footage of the 2022 knife attack on Rushdie, which you can see in the recently released — or soon to be, for UK readers — documentary Knife (The Guardian).