2021 in Books: `Everything feels magnified’

NEW YORK (AP) — In 2021, few in the publishing industry worried that no one cared about books anymore. Sometimes, people seemed to care too much. A 22-year-old poet became a literary star. And the enthusiasms of young people on TikTok helped revive Madeline Miller’s “The Song of Achilles” and other novels released years earlier. Conservatives pushed to restrict the books permitted in classrooms at a time when activists were working to expand them. And the government decided that the merger of two of the country’s biggest publishers might damage an invaluable cultural resource: authors.