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Here are the stories Today in Books readers were most interested in this week. Settle into your Sunday and catch up!
The 2025 Pulitzer Prize Winners
The winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday. You can watch the livestream on YouTube, but if you just want to know which books were awarded, I gotchu. In the History category, we had a tie! Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal and Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War by Edda L. Fields-Black both won the award. In Biography, Jason Roberts scored the win for Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life. A graphic memoir won in the Memoir category–Tessa Hulls’ Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, which “traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in her family” sounds like something I need to add to my TBR. In Poetry, the win went to New and Selected Poems by former New York poet laureate Marie Howe. General Nonfiction went to To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans. And in my most anticipated category, Fiction, the win went to James by Percival Everett and anything else would not have made sense to me. Congratulations to all of this year’s winners, and check out the full list here.
Trump Abruptly Fires First African American Librarian of Congress
With seemingly no warning, the first woman and the first African American to be Librarian of Congress received an email from the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office notifying Carla Hayden that she was fired. AP News reported that Hayden had recently come under fire from conservative advocacy group American Accountability Foundation for “promoting children’s books with ‘radical’ content and literary material authored by Trump opponents.” AAF took to X to celebrate the termination hours before the news was made public. Democratic leaders have condemned the move and praised Hayden’s leadership, with New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich saying Donald Trump was “taking his assault on America’s libraries to a new level.” It is exhausting to be this horrified by the callous takeouts of good people doing good work, and I cannot begin to imagine how Hayden felt receiving such a blithe and dismissive email ending her historic career at the Library of Congress, “effective immediately.”
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About That Romantasy “Fyre Fest of Book Festivals”
That quote is from author Kait Disney-Leugers, one of the A Million Lives attendees who took to TikTok to unpack the event advertised as gathering featuring “a vendor hall, panels, a content creation room, fandom cosplay meet ups, a cosplay competition and a ball.” If you guessed from the subject line that the tea wasn’t about how grand the event was, you guessed right. Numerous authors who showed up reported scant attendance, contradicting the turnout they were allegedly promised. Attendance is of course important to the quality of any event, but especially to authors who applied to sign at tables in hopes of selling books. You really have to see the TikToks (many of which have gone viral) to understand the bleakness described: the sad conference table, the mostly empty hall, the wash of corporate gray. The many legal marketing conferences I attended in my previous career seem glamorous by comparison. Attendees paid $50 to $250 per ticket, and author Perci Jay said she flew to Maryland from Texas to attend and planned a whole lot of big life events around participating. Whoof. What a mess. You can read about it and find some of the videos at The Cut.
Amazon’s Clash With Independent Bookstore Day Might Repeat
The we-could-care-less vibes were strong in Amazon’s response to Retail Brew when asked whether they would avoid scheduling their big book sale week around Independent Bookstore Day. This year, Amazon’s second annual Book Sale ran from April 23–28 and Independent Bookstore Day, which has not shifted its schedule for the past 12 years, was held on April 26. This did not go unnoticed and while Amazon, when asked by various media outlets who picked up the story, has maintained that the overlap was unintentional, they did not offer Retail Brew an answer about whether they’d do it again, even when asked explicitly. Indie bookstores are a beloved institution and the optics are bad for Amazon, but I’d guess Amazon is counting on a lack of awareness or perhaps even apathy from its cost-conscious, convenience-seeking user base–if they deigned to think about this at all while planning their book sale. While the question of whether Amazon inadvertently helped Independent Bookstore Day since those sales were up 77% over the previous year came up, the chief communications officer of the American Booksellers Association wasn’t having it. “Amazon doesn’t help independent bookstores. Period,” said Ray T. Daniels.
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