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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Announcing The 2025 PEN America Literary Awards Finalists
What an amazingly odd line-up of awards and finalists PEN offers up every year. In terms of adding things to my persona reading list, I think the PEN/E.O. Wilson finalists for literary science writing have the highest matriculation rate. But with dedicated categories for essays, debut fiction, and even poetry in translation, it has a wider range of literary-minded prizes than anything after. The PEN/Stein Award is probably the most prestigious (and certainly the most lucrative), but does not have nearly the same cache as Pulitzers and NBCCs and so on (at least to me). Part of that may be the confusing X/X branding, but some of it has to be the description: “To a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact, which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence.” It’s not a straight-ahead “for oustanding achievement in X” but rather a mishmash of originality and “strong potential for lasting influence). This line-up of finalists, pretty much from top to bottom, eschews the titles that have been making regular award season appearances. This, I think, it one reason the PEN honorees are always interesting, but then somehow forgotten (when was the last time you saw a PEN award sticker on a book?).
The Most Challenged Books of 2024
The ALA released their “State of America’s Libraries” Report, and there’s a lot going on. In past years, the list of the most challenged books would have been the headline, and maybe it still is, but the table of contents exemplify the wider truth: libraries are under siege:
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Introduction: Libraries Face
Challenges But Continue to Serve
Don’t Believe the Hype!
Libraries of All Kinds Remain
Essential to Their Communities
Freedom to Read Continues
to Come Under Fire
Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2024
10 Censorship By the Numbers
And if you make it through that, the next piece is about AI. Grim.
‘Book Boyfriends’ and ‘Shadow Daddies’: the men cashing in on Romantasy
I called Peak Adaptation way too many times. I have done the same with Booktok writ large. I am not making the same mistake with Romantasy. That said, elaborate costume balls that pay dark-haired dudes thousands of dollars to cosplay as fantasy book characters is really testing my resolve. Question: does the market for these events dry up if/when there is a big-time adaptation of one of the major series? Or does it heighten it? And what is the IP/copyright situation here? Does the Renaissance fair community know about this? Is there someone with a turkey leg and a flimsy set of armor sweltering in a fairground somewhere, not realizing they missed the boat on these?
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