What the Literary World Learned This Week (or What We're Still Trying to Process)

By Andy — 2026-07-22 — Literary News

Some weeks the news just lands wrong. Today is one of those weeks, and it's a Tuesday in late July.

The literary internet is processing several things at once, which is to say: things are bad in different ways. Let me start with the worst one.

A Free Speech Crisis That Looks Like a Criminal Case

A Texas artist named Daniel "Des" Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of zines, or political pamphlets. That's not a typo. Not 3 years. Not probation. Thirty.

The zines didn't contain instructions for anything. They discussed philosophy. Anti-government sentiment, yes, but the kind you find in print since forever—anarchist theory, critique, the sort of material that's supposed to be protected.

The prosecution claimed Sanchez moved the zines so they wouldn't incriminate his wife, who attended a protest outside a detention center near Dallas. The zines at issue may have discussed controversial political views, but they said nothing about the shooting or the protest itself, and prosecutors did not allege that his wife, Maricela Rueda (who was sentenced to 70 years), fired any shots or had anything to do with the shooting.

Actually, that's not quite right. Let me be more direct: he wasn't accused of attempted murder or material support of terrorism. He was merely convicted of obstructing the investigation by moving a box full of zines. His wife attended a protest. A police officer was shot. Neither of them did it. But 100 years combined prison time landed on them anyway.

And yes, that's a thing we're supposed to accept now.

The case has attracted extreme skepticism from civil rights organizations including the Freedom of the Press Foundation and National Lawyers Guild, and is part of a growing number of cases in which federal prosecutors are pointing to the possession of First Amendment–protected materials as evidence of criminal support for terrorism. You can read more about this at The New Republic, which is why Ramses Books exists—to remind people that books are worth protecting, even when they make you uncomfortable.

AI Companies Need Old Books Because the Internet Is Full of AI Now

Meanwhile, in the same news cycle, companies are offering old, printed books as an ideal source for AI training data because they are guaranteed to be free of AI slop. ISBNdb, a company that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site that "the world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf."

The problem is obvious. Printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don't include AI generated text. Which means: old books, real books, physical books with dust on them—they've become valuable specifically because humans wrote them. Not machines. Humans. And now machines want to learn from that humanity, to copy it, to sell it as their own insight.

Anthropic set out to compile a central library of "all the books in the world." The company first knowingly downloaded pirated copies of books, and later purchased print copies, digitized them. They ripped them apart. Physically destroyed them to scan every page.

The courts ruled it fair use, more or less, as long as the books were lawfully acquired. But that's the thing, isn't it—the precedent matters more than the outcome.

Fanny Howe Left Us a Miracle, and She Did It at the End

The weight lightens a bit here. Fanny Howe was the author of many books. She died in 2025. Her final project arrived this month: This Poor Book, completed just before the end.

She was working on it right up to the end of her life, retracing poems from several collections over the last 30 years and reconfiguring them into one long, continuous epic. It reads like something assembled from scraps—from scraps, actually—but somehow it becomes whole. A singular poem made of dozens.

That's the kind of book a used bookshop carries. A book that's been through something.

Other Things That Happened

Hella Wuolijoki was born on 22 July 1886 in Valga, Estonia. Not today, but her birthday is today, which is why she's in the round-up. She wrote under a male pseudonym. She collaborated with Bertolt Brecht. She survived imprisonment. She mattered.

Writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston used their writing to recount their experiences of racist medical abuse during the Harlem Renaissance, which was steeped in a Black disability culture that rejected eugenics and medical segregation. The full essay is worth an afternoon if you have one.

Medieval Italian traveling booksellers. Poems about Chapman's Homer. Alt text as literary translation. All of it real. All of it in the same news cycle as the Sanchez Estrada sentencing.

That's how it works now. Beauty and monstrosity side by side, sharing the same column inches.

If you're looking for a reason to buy used books instead of new ones, or to support independent bookshops in a place like Bangkok where Ramses exists because physical books still matter—here's your answer.