Come Together

For more than 200 far-flung members of the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association, this year’s FallCon in Denver has proven to be a much-needed celebration of the region’s bookselling community—and, of course, books. Bloomsbury’s new SFF imprint Archer is set to make its official debut in 2027 with an inaugural lineup including the first installment of an epic fantasy series and a speculative romance. In a new partnership, Matt Kindt’s Flux House imprint at Dark Horse will move over to Oni Press, which has also acquired rights to more than 20 Flux House properties. On the heels of CEO Charlie Redmayne’s abrupt departure, HarperCollins UK has retracted “unverified” claims about Melania Trump published in a recent book and issued an apology, Newsweek reports. After public outcry, an Austin public school district has returned nearly all of the books it had preemptively removed from classrooms, including To Kill a Mockingbird and Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, according to the Texas Freedom to Read Project. ​​ The fight against censorship continues in South Carolina, where a coalition of public school librarians and students is taking the state superintendent to court to challenge a rule banning books that depict “sexual conduct” from K–12 classrooms, per the ACLU. On CBC’s Commotion podcast, Jen Sookfong Lee and Tajja Isen discuss how publishing’s obsession with sales numbers can harm debut authors. For the Paris Review, Chinese writer Yan Lianke reflects on his books being blocked from publication in his own country. And editor Chuck Adams, who acquired dozens of bestsellers at Algonquin and Simon & Schuster, has died at 82.