Heirs of Mystery

The 80th annual Edgar Awards, hosted last week by the Mystery Writers of America in Manhattan, saw big wins for authors Libba Bray and Robert Crais, as well as posthumous honors for some of the genre’s forebears. Workers at the University of Chicago Press have joined the Chicago News Guild and are requesting voluntary recognition from management, less than a week after employees at Hachette Book Group went public with their own union bid. In honor of Children’s Book Week, which kicks off today, Chronicle is accepting unagented manuscript submissions through May 10. And with the Devil Wears Prada sequel in theaters, we look back on the chick lit boom of the early 2000s, and how it laid the groundwork for the “women’s fiction” of today. In other news, Netflix has set a release date for Greta Gerwig’s much anticipated adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew. NPR’s Planet Money explores the “outlandish” strategies that publishers use to achieve bestseller status in the latest episode of its series on the inner workings of the book biz. San Diego’s KPBS examines one local bookstore’s struggle to cope with rent hikes as a microcosm of the challenges facing indie booksellers today. Technology historian W. Patrick McCray argues in the MIT Press Reader that generative AI is the latest, but not the first, machine to disrupt the meaning of authorship. And Sylvia cartoonist Nicole Hollander has died at 86.