Critical Maas

Bloomsbury reported a 7% increase in profits in fiscal year 2026, though consumer sales fell due to a lack of frontlist titles by Sarah J. Maas—who, luckily, has a new novel out in October. Little, Brown is updating its colophon for the first time in nine years, with the new logo set to debut in August. And National Book Award winner Taiwan Travelogue, written by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, has also won this year’s International Booker Prize. In other news, three of the five winners of this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize are now facing allegations that their work is AI-generated—which, Wired argues, could soon become the “new normal” for literary contests. Meanwhile, Olga Tokarczuk maintains that she did not use AI to write her forthcoming novel after earlier comments by the author aroused suspicion online, per Lit Hub. The family of Roots author Alex Haley is protesting a ban on his 1976 novel in Knox County, Tenn., public schools, the Tennessean reports. Sylvester Stallone and the Walking Dead’s Channing Powell are teaming on a series adaptation of J.D. Barker’s 4MK thriller books, per Deadline. James Murdoch has acquired roughly half of Vox Media, including New York magazine and its verticals, according to the New York Times. And the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore examines the century-long history of attempts to automate authorship.