Needle in a Haystack

Salt Lake City–based nonprofit press Torrey House has scored its biggest hit ever with Eli McCann’s breakout novel Stitched, which debuted at #3 on PW’s trade paperback bestseller list. Lonely Planet is revamping its guidebooks with new formats and content as more travelers turn to influencers and AI to shape their itineraries. And the Book Industry Study Group celebrated its semicentennial on Wednesday with a forum tackling various challenges facing publishing, from supply chain issues to declining reading rates. In other news, recently unsealed court documents reveal concern among Microsoft and OpenAI staffers over the use of millions of news articles to train AI models, which they called the “largest theft of labor in human history,” per the New York Times. Knopf will publish Crying in H Mart author Michelle Zauner’s new memoir, Thank You For Your Suffering, next April, via Elle. The Guardian looks into the story behind director Alex Gibney’s new documentary Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, which tracks the author’s recovery after a near-fatal attack in 2022. Across the pond, HarperCollins UK has dropped the backlist of children’s author David Walliams following allegations of “inappropriate conduct,” the Bookseller reports. The latest edition of Merriam Webster’s dictionary has added some 1,400 new words, per NBC News. And the Los Angeles Times maps the “creepy-cute” aesthetic movement spurred by Mona Awad’s 2019 novel Bunny.