The biggest news in the book of the week
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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily overview of literary titles at the intersection of politics, culture, media, etc. Here are the biggest stories of last week that you may have missed, wanted to forget or try to remember.
Chicago Sun-Totes prints the summer reading list generated by AI with books that do not exist
The LLM make mistakes that no human would make. And they are not errors even in a traditional sense, but incorrect calculations on the probability of words in order. SO Whoever ran one for chatgpt or other to “write” an article for the Sun-Totes Chicago called “the best summer reading list for 2025” made at least two errors. First of all, do not do llms doing your job for you. Search yes. Orthographic and grammar verification, of course. But trust to find out which books are real and which are just in a way thought as being very likely to exist even when they do not? No. It is embarrassing for the writer and a real blow to the credibility of the newspaper. Which does not mean that it probably does not happen (certainly really) everywhere. But if you are not going to do human work, you should not be read by other humans.
What are the best -selling books of black authors?
Book sales data is difficult to get (unless you pay a lot). The proxy data that we obtain in the form of best-sellers lists are generally leading to 10-20 titles per. And as we have noted in our weekly follow -up of what the books make these lists, they are incredibly, regularly and intractable very, very unciterate. So what books beyond the vertices of the graphics are sold? And where do you start to see different voices map? I said, I think that at the same time here and on various Podcasts BR, that publishing has made great progress towards inclusiveness. There is still a lot to do. But publishing cannot control the books that readers finally buy (believe me, they would do it if they could). The purchase side of the sales purchase equation is not the maintenance. Tools like this could help us see where a certain movement could occur And give books that get a little traction a little additional juice.
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Five judges from the Supreme Court are rejected from the publication case
The case itself looks like the quixotic flight of a real crank, but the secondary event is quite fascinating. Five judges of the Supreme Court have recused themselves to hear the affair of plagiarism Because they are all signed with the accused, Penguin Random House. This means that with only four remaining jurors, the run had no quorum, and therefore the conclusion of the lower court held, essentially saying that it is indeed the trace of the crank of a real crank. I had not considered this consequence of the superior order of the domination of the PRH: you will not obtain a file against them judged before the Supreme Court. Not ideal.
The Pen / Faulkner price for fiction goes to …
A book that I learned today. No shadow, but I had not met two books on the finalist list of five titles and the winner, Rain By Garth Greenwell, was one of them. That said, thinking about the list of winners of this prize, which honors the fiction of American permanent residents in a calendar year with a winner selected by three judges of writers, it seems to me as one of the least predictable awards with a mixture of large books / large publishers and less known authors (or at least less buzzing). The finalists in the running for this year’s price alongside the winning title were Ghostroot by PEMI AGUDA, Behind you is the sea By Susan Muaddi Darraj (the other book I had not heard of), Jacques by Percival Everett, and Colorful television by Danzy Senna.
