The Good Fight

As 2026 gets underway, legal teams are fanning out across the country to defend the freedom to read in Utah, Iowa, Idaho, and other hotspots of censorship in public schools and libraries. Percival Everett and Kamala Harris topped the African American Literature Book Club’s inaugural year-end BLK Bestseller list, which uses Circana BookScan data to track the top-selling Black authors of 2025. Publishing veteran Derek Stordahl is set to acquire Behrman House after the owners of the Jewish educational publisher retire this year. Plus, we talked with two entrepreneurs who are applying their business acumen to hybrid publishing. The joint venture acquiring TikTok’s stateside assets has closed its deal with the platform’s Chinese parent company, just before the app was set to be banned in the U.S., per CNN. Publishers Milkweed and Coffee House and booksellers Magers & Quinn and Next Chapter are among the Minnesota businesses participating in today’s general strike in protest of ICE’s violent crackdowns on the state, the New York Times reports. Amazon MGM has landed film rights to Elise Kova’s YA fantasy Dragon Cursed, per Deadline. A volunteer-created guide to spotting AI-generated writing inadvertently provided training data for a new open source plugin aimed at making AI sound more human, Ars Technica reports. And NPR’s Fresh Air talks with poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths about her new memoir, The Flower Bearers.