Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal Winners
The American Library Association announced the winners of this year’s Carnegie Medals for fiction and nonfiction, and if you guessed that Percival Everett came out on top for the bojillionth time in the fiction category–ding ding ding!–you guessed right. Everett’s achievements with James, a rewriting of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of Twain’s fictional Jim, an enslaved man who journeys down the Mississippi with Huck, are well deserved. James was my favorite read of 2024 and struck me as an instant classic I’d love to see on the shelves of every school library and in curriculums the way Twain’s work has been and likely still is. I have not forgotten about the Medal for nonfiction, which was awarded to Kevin Fedarko for A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon. I hadn’t heard a whole lot about this book about Fedarko’s long and adventuresome relationship with the Grand Canyon. Admittedly, the only nonfiction 2024 release I read was By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land by Rebecca Nagle (a must-read if you haven’t gotten to it yet), but I’m hoping to check out more nonfic this year. James beat out fellow finalists Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang and Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, while A Walk in the Park beat out Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham and Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum.
Dark Horse Comics Drops Neil Gaiman
If you read the excellent and truly disturbing reporting on the sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman, it might come as no surprise that Dark Horse Comics has announced they will no longer publish Gaiman’s works. Or maybe it won’t come as a surprise since the silence around the allegations from publishers who work with Gaiman and publishing media was deafening. Dark Horse made the announcement after the author posted a statement to his blog denying the allegations. In addition to stating that they take the allegations seriously, in their post on X Dark Horse confirmed that they cancelled a planned Anansi Boys comic series and collected volume. In an era where entities and individuals are emboldened by a post-MeToo sentiment and a majority of Americans decided they could stomach a president found liable of sexual abuse, I’m sad to say the low bar of standing on principal here is wild and heartening.
Recreating Anne Frank’s Secret Annex
In the Center for Jewish History an 800-square-foot room with scant furnishings and photos of bygone celebrities offers visitors a glimpse of the space where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. The exhibition, opening today on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, was created by the Anne Frank House, which has a museum in Amsterdam with a starkly different version of the space–one “pillaged by the Nazis and left bare.” In addition to the replica, the Manhattan exhibition displays 79 editions of Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl in different languages. As Fast Company‘s Elissaveta M. Brandon points out, the show feels all too timely. I was just reading about how Elon Musk, speaking on video at a far-right event in Germany, said, “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” To that I say, there is no better time than now to reflect on our ability to be complicit in acts as great and horrifying as holocaust, genocide, enslavement and all manner of inhumanities, and to learn from and act against them.
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