Budding Readers

For our spring children’s preview, we rounded up hundreds of can’t-miss titles for young readers, surveyed the trends in full bloom, and talked with a Newbery Honoree. A strong frontlist—and Heated Rivalry—buoyed HarperCollins’s sales in Q2, but not enough to overcome a $16 million operations expense, which pushed profits down 2%. The Association of American Publishers doubled down on its petition for Hachette Book Group and Cengage to be allowed to join in a class action lawsuit against Google and its generative AI product Gemini. ProPublica draws attention to “unusually specific” new criteria for the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences’ 2026 grant cycle, which appear to favor funding projects that are politically aligned with the Trump administration. Jeremy Strong will star in a Netflix adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, reports Variety, and Heated Rivalry star Hudson Williams is at work on a novel, per CBC. In the wake of the Washington Post axing its books section, the Atlantic’s Adam Kirsch argues that the decline of book reviews reflects a sea change in news media consumption. For the Telegraph, critic Claire Alfree wonders whether romantasy is diluting popular culture—and dulling readers’ minds. And Lit Hub’s Maris Kreizman reflects on book publishing’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking network.