Writers cleared of AI use win Commonwealth Prize after investigation

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July 7, 2026 View Online | Join All Access | Listen

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THE HEADLINE

ICYMI: The biggest recent publishing news

Photo by Jaredd Craig on Unsplash

Publishing took a little breather over the holiday weekend here in the U.S., which is a perfect opportunity for you to catch up on the latest headlines.

Writers accused of using AI to write their Commonwealth Prize-shortlisted stories were cleared after an investigation, and one went on to win the whole thing .

Barnes & Noble named the best debut novel of the year—yes, the whole year—months earlier than they typically announced the Discover Prize.

Austenites are hypted for the new adaptation of Sense & Sensibility now that the trailer is out.

Publishers Weekly dropped a great big fall book preview .

#BookTok stars picked the best books to read this summer .

Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s next book is a World War II spy novel coming in early 2027.

Netflix launched a book-to-screen hub for your adaptation viewing pleasure

Dua Lipa created a stunning library of banned books under the most beautiful bookstore in the world.

NEW RELEASES

People be peopling

Would you rather move across the country to a small town populated with colorful, kooky characters, some of whom believe the Earth is hollow, or live with your soon-to-be-ex mother-in-law while she recovers from surgery?

Those are the scenarios in Country People by Daniel Mason and Some People by Parini Shroff, two of our most-anticipated books of the season, out today.

Also hitting shelves:

🏳️‍🌈 The final installment in a beloved LGBTQ+ graphic novel series .

⚠️ Things turn dangerous when college sweethearts reunite at a professor’s funeral a shocking thriller from a bestselling author.

💞 A diehard Jane Austen fan accidentally summons Mr. Darcy in a charming and hilarious romance inspired by Pride and Prejudice .

🍃 A teen girl turns over a new leaf after being labeled as a bad kid in a touching coming-of-age story .

See more of July’s new releases .

TOGETHER WITH TRAVIS DEVERELL AND AETHON: VAULT

A magic-fueled LitRPG for fans of Dungeon Crawler Carl

Take it from Dungeon Crawler Carl author Matt Dinniman: He Who Fights With Monsters is “exciting, hilarious, irreverent, and action-packed.”

Waking up in a mysterious world of magic and monsters isn’t easy. For Jason, making the career jump from office-supplies-store middle manager to heroic interdimensional adventurer is surreal. Good is hard when your powers are evil. As a stranger in a strange land, he’ll need courage, wit, and his own magic powers. But first, he’s going to need pants.

Book 1 of this witty fantasy action adventure is now available in a deluxe hardcover edition with an exclusive bonus short story. Order yours today!

ZERO TO WELL-READ

The foundations of Western literature

Hot Greek Summer has arrived! Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey hits theaters next week, and we are here to help you with the homework.

If you’ve never read Homer’s epic poem—or if it’s been a while—you might be surprised by how accessible it is. And the themes are relatable, too.

At its heart , this is a story about a man trying to get back to his family, a boy trying to become grow up, and a woman holding the whole place together in her husband’s absence.

Most surprising , perhaps, is that all of the big set pieces you think of when you think of The Odyssey —the sirens, the Cyclops, Circe turning the men into pigs—appear in just two of the poem’s 24 books.

The rest is the stuff the Western canon is built on: big questions about identity, family, hospitality, free will vs. destiny, and what we owe our neighbors.

🎧 Hear our conversation about this foundational text on Zero to Well-Read , and dive in for the adventure.

WRITERS ON WRITING

Cats as writing supervisors

photo credit: Mindy Tucker

Alison Leiby is the author of I’m a Lot: Surviving Myself and All the People I’ve Been , out today from The Dial Press. Below, she discusses how this book was written alongside her cat, Rizz.

Most people find writing a book, especially a memoir, to be a solitary exercise done in isolation and solitude. With the exception of an editor, most writers have no help when they are writing. Not me, I’m different. I had most of my writing overseen by my cat, Rizz.

Rizz is what I like to call an “arm rest cat.” I hadn’t had him long when I started writing the book, and while he is a snuggly buddy, he only turned into a lap cat now that the book is completed.

It’s honestly a relief. It is impossible to type on your laptop when most of your lap is occupied by a 17-pound tuxedo cat (I claim in my book that I’m a lot, and he’s even more).

But when I began writing, Rizz had a very specific position he occupied, physically. Existentially, his position is really the manager of the apartment, but physically, I would sit on the couch with my computer on my lap and my feet up on my coffee table in the early days of writing.

Rizz would hop up on the couch, stare into my eyes for 10 seconds, and then flop over and lie flush with my leg, maximum physical contact without ever being on top of me. While I surfed around Word documents or labored over a sentence, my left arm could rest on his big, fuzzy belly as it rose and fell with his sleepy breathing.

After a few weeks, I had to actually go and get a workspace because the distractions of my apartment are numerous, and Rizz is only one of them.

I completed my 13 essays at a giant desk near a man eating pistachios too loudly, but always came home and kept tinkering away with my living arm rest, Rizz.

TOGETHER WITH THE CAMEO PRESS

A sweeping, morally complex love story that will stay with you.

New from the bestselling author of Beyond the Moon , The Many Seas of Guernsey is a story of forbidden love, a crisis of faith, and a choice that costs everything.

In the last golden years before Europe erupts into WWII a young English writer and a German Roman Catholic priest-in-training meet by chance on the small British island of Guernsey – and are drawn into a forbidden, all-consuming love. Then history and duty intrude, forcing them to choose between complicity and courage in a fight for truth, freedom – and each other.

Now available on Kindle Unlimited and wherever books are sold.

ESSAYS

“I Love You, Madame Librarian” by Kurt Vonnegut

image source: The LIbrary of Congress

Last week, I was looking around for a literary quotation that might be good to share on Book Riot’s socials. Something affirming, but also not uncritically jingoistic. Sounds like a job for one Kurt Vonnegut.

It’s a nice quote, isn’t it?: “ The America I love still exists at the front desk of public libraries.” Lots of other people think so too, but when I went looking for the source, I found it’s quite a bit darker than I (and presumably the others sharing it all over the internet) thought.

It comes from one of his late essays, the 2004 “I Love You, Madame Librarian.” It’s a short piece, though long on political dread:

“What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?”

And this is coming from someone who made his bones writing about the fire-bombing of Dresden. The paragraph from which the pull quote comes is no less, dare I say, despondent:

“So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”

If there is a bright side to this little story, it might be that Vonnegut would be heartened to see that people who care about books and libraries are still fighting, still showing up. And maybe even reading the source material for one-line quotes we find on the internet.

RETELLINGS

Why Darcy is still the #1 book boyfriend

photo credit: David Levenson

Freya Sampson is the author of Most Ardently Yours , out today from Sourcebooks Landmark. Below, she discusses why Darcy still has so much appeal for readers today.

Mr Darcy has been making readers swoon for more than 200 years, which is pretty impressive for a man who spends much of Pride and Prejudice looking grumpy in the corner of a room. On paper, he really shouldn’t work as well as he does—he’s proud, socially awkward, and his first proposal is an absolute disaster—yet generation after generation of readers list him as their number one book boyfriend. Why?

This is a question I asked myself many times while writing my latest novel, Most Ardently Yours , which sees Mr Darcy come to life in twenty-first-century London. I came to the conclusion that a large part of his appeal is that he isn’t charming in the conventional sense. He doesn’t flirt effortlessly, flash a dazzling smile, or deliver perfect lines. Instead, readers get the satisfying experience of discovering that first impressions can be wildly wrong. Beneath the aloof exterior is someone loyal, thoughtful, and capable of genuine self-reflection.

Darcy also embodies a romantic fantasy that never quite goes out of style. He’s the person whose feelings run far deeper than anyone realises. For all his awkwardness, when he loves, he loves wholeheartedly. What’s more, because of that love, he’s willing to change. When Elizabeth Bennet calls him out on his arrogance, rather than sulking, Darcy listens and does the difficult work of examining his own flaws and becoming a better person.

More than two centuries after Jane Austen wrote him, you can strip away the cravats and country estates and find a man trying, often imperfectly, to connect with other people and prove himself worthy of the woman he loves. In a world of slick dating apps and carefully curated online personas, that feels refreshingly timeless.

TOGETHER WITH DEL REY

An uplifting cozy fantasy about a geeky academic finding love and self-worth.

In Chiara Bullen’s The Inn at the Foot of Mount Vengenance , a young aspiring scholar is sent to research the mysteries of an adventurer’s inn—only to uncover a centuries-old secret. What he doesn’t expect to find is true friendship and a new home among a diverse cast of not-quite-human heroes and heroines.

Perfect for Dungeons & Dragons readers and fans of fantasy pop culture with mouth-watering food, this is “a heartfelt and heartwarming story about finding your own peace . . . charming and lovely” (Sarah Beth Durst, author of The Spellsho p).

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

V.E. Schwab (July 2)

Did you know? V.E. Schwab pursued a masters degree in what might be the coolest sounding degree program of all time: depictions of monsters in medieval art (University of Edinburgh). You might be interested in this interview we did with her a few years ago about creativit y.

CRITICAL LINKING

You are now free to roam about the internet

🧠 Rewire your attention and learn to read again .

🌈 Add these must-read new LGBTQ books to your July TBR.

📓 Expand your reading horizons with the best new poetry collections .

⏪ Be kind, rewind with a ’90s-inspired reading list.

🔍 Spot the clues to a literary email scam .

📚 Keep up to date with all things library by signing up for the Check Your Shelf newsletter.

END NOTES

Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Jeff O’Neal, and Danika Ellis. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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