In this week’s edition: TikTok users are encouraging each other to read and return books under Amazon’s seven-day e-book return policy; writing advice from 10 Asian American authors; the winners of the NYPL’s Young Lions Award and the UK’s Women’s Prize; UTA buys famed literary agency Curtis Brown; and more.

TikTok Users Are Showing Readers How to Game Amazon’s Ebook Return Policy
VICE’s Motherboard
A #readandreturn challenge on TikTok that encourages viewers to purchase, read, and return Amazon e-books within the company’s return window is harming independent authors, who claim to have seen dramatic spikes in their e-book return rates since the trend went viral.

10 Asian American Writers Share the Best (and Worst) Advice They’ve Received
Lit Hub
Ahead of the Asian American Writers Workshop’s Page Turner conference, ten authors shared the best and worst writing advice they received from publishers, editors, agents, professors, or other writers.

The Book That Tore Publishing Apart: ‘Harm Has Been Done, and Now Everyone’s Afraid
The Guardian
In 2020, an award-winning memoir about a white poet’s experiences working with students of color set off a frenzy on Twitter when the author was accused of writing questionable physical descriptions of some of the students. This look at the book’s aftermath also rehashes similar controversies, including W.W. Norton’s decision to pull Blake Bailey’s biography of Phillip Roth after Bailey was accused of sexual assault.

UTA Buys London’s Curtis Brown: ‘A Culture of Collaboration’
Publishing Perspectives
California’s United Talent Agency has bought the UK’s Curtis Brown Literary Agency for an undisclosed sum. The merger will help support Curtis Brown’s new television and film production companies, while UTA gains the cachet of Curtis Brown’s talent list, which includes top draws like Margaret Atwood, Bono, Adele Parks, David Mitchell, and Elif Shafak, as well as the estates of John le Carré, John Steinbeck, Daphne du Maurier, and Ian Fleming.

Ruth Ozeki Wins U.K. Women’s Prize for Fiction
Publishers Weekly
Canadian-American author Ruth Ozeki has won the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel The Book of Form and Emptiness. The prize, which includes a cash award of £30,000, is given for “outstanding, ambitious, original fiction written in English by women from anywhere in the world.”

Kalani Pickhart Wins NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award
Lit Hub
The winner of this year’s Young Lions Fiction Award is Kalani Pickhart for her novel I Will Die in a Foreign Land. The $10,000 prize is given by the New York Public Library every year to a writer under 35 for a novel or short story collection published in the United States.