After 12 years as co-owner, Lynn Mooney will retire from Women & Children First bookstore, Chicago, Ill., at the end of September; she will succeeded by Raven Stubbs, who has worked at the store in various roles since 2020. Stubbs will join Sarah Hollenbeck as co-owner. Hollenbeck and Mooney bought the store in 2014 from founders Ann Christophersen and Linda Bubon.

Lynn Mooney, Raven Stubbs, and Sarah Hollenbeck (photo: Jake Wittich/Windy City Times)

Mooney was a bookseller and manager of Women & Children First, one of the largest and oldest feminist bookstores in the U.S., before becoming a co-owner in 2014. She was a founder of the Chicagoland Independent Booksellers Association (ChIBA), which launched the annual Chicagoland Independent Bookstore Day crawl. She has also facilitated book groups, leading as many as three of them--Classics Book Group, Women Aging with Wisdom & Grace, and Banned Book Group--at one time. Frontlist buying was her other passion project, the store said, and she formed strong friendships with many of the publisher reps she worked with. She served on the board and was an officer of the Andersonville Chamber of Commerce for many years and is a former president of the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association.

GLIBA executive director Larry Law said in part, "Lynn Mooney has shaped the independent bookselling community in ways that are impossible to overstate. A former GLIBA board president, bookseller, mentor and advocate, Lynn has spent decades generously sharing her knowledge, leadership and time with fellow bookstores while helping move our industry toward being more inclusive, sustainable and representative of the communities we serve." The store also won the inaugural Great Lakes Bookstore of the Year Award.

Mooney is looking forward to devoting more time to her passion for the outdoors, and "finally, finally, finally getting to read only the books she wants to read!" the store wrote.

"When you are in the thick of running a small business, all you see is the mess, the to-do list," Hollenbeck said. "But then I walk into the store on a Saturday afternoon and see it packed with young folks having passionate conversations about queer theory and I am awed that Lynn and I did what we promised to do in that business proposal we wrote 12 years ago. With our incredible team of booksellers, we've built a space that is a home to the next generation of feminists. I'm so excited to keep on building with Raven." 

An artist, educator, and consultant, Stubbs joined Women & Children First in 2020 as the online sales lead and was the store's first manager of people & culture and created the store's first comprehensive employee manual. She holds a BA in Ethnodramatic Theatre Studies from Illinois Wesleyan University, an Ed.M. in Education, Management, and Public Policy from Harvard University, and a certificate in Applied DEI Strategies for Business & Management from Brown University. She uses, the store said, ethnography, sociological dramaturgy, and Theater of the Oppressed to address the intersection of historical disenfranchisement and contemporary systemic oppression, and to interrogate racism, gender, and class.

The new ownership team of Sarah Hollenbeck and Raven Stubbs plan to expand community programming as well as relaunch the Feminist Bookstore Network, which included Feminist Bookstore News, an important publication from 1976 to 2000. In addition, they aim to continue toward "a more feminist workplace that values the wholeness of each of their booksellers."

Better Days Books & Beers held its soft opening recently at 515 Main St. in Cairo, N.Y. WTEN reported that the store "has been a lifelong dream for owners Maya Prohovnik and Erik Price. The couple, who has lived in Cairo for more than six years, purchased the historic building in October 2025 and have since lined its walls with bookshelves, bookish merchandise, and beverage coolers."

"My husband and I have been crying all weekend," Prohovnik said. "It's so surreal for us."

Better Days Books offers a broad but curated selection of hardcover and paperback books. There is also a dedicated children's section.

"I've always had this dream of being able to help people--both adults and kids--find great books and fall in love with books, and it was really cool getting to do that all weekend," Prohovnik said.

In addition to books, the store also sells a wide selection of canned and bottled beers, wine and cider, including popular upstate brands. Fresh salads, cheese plates, veggie plates and other snacks, all sourced from the Corner Counter in Red Hook, are also available for purchase.

"A lot of people came in and wanted non-alcoholic beers, which was on our list but we just haven't had them in stock yet," Prohovnik noted. "I'm excited to fill out that part of the section as well."

The inaugural Midwest Black Book Fair will take place this coming Saturday, August 22, in Minneapolis, Minn., MPR News reported. The book fair, which will honor stories of resistance and "uplift the modern-day intersectional narratives of Blackness, Black history, and Black futurity," will take place from noon to 5 p.m. at the University of Minnesota Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center. 

The schedule includes panels about contemporary Black storytelling, the history of Black literature in Minnesota, Black poetry, and more. There will be author signings, food options, and several Black-owned bookstores selling books. Attendance is free but tickets require pre-registration; so far about 800 have been reserved.

Event director Terresa Hardaway, who is also the owner of Black Garnet Books in St. Paul, Minn., said she was attending a Black Bookstore Coalition meeting when it occurred to her that Minnesota didn't have a book festival focused on Black authors and booksellers. She chose to hold the book fair this month in order to coincide with Black August, a month-long commemoration of Black abolitionists, freedom fighters, and political prisoners. 

"I was just looking around at all these like really amazing Black women who are doing this really important work in the literary space, and I'm like, we need to," Hardaway told MPR News. "It's just been on my heart. We need to do something."

Chapters on Chestnut, a bookstore and cafe, will open later this year in Needham, Mass., the Needham Observer reported. Located at 7 Chestnut St., Chapters on Chestnut will sell general-interest titles for all ages and include a substantial children's section spanning roughly 1,000 square feet. Owner Nicole Connolly told the Needham Observer she took over additional space to provide more room for children's, middle grade, and YA titles.

"I feel like [those years] are a time when the kids are getting phones and they can get on screens more, and that's when we see reading starts to fall off," Connolly said. 

Connolly, who spent 25 years at Fidelity Investments before deciding to open a bookstore, said having a cafe was also an extremely important part of the project. "The idea of creating a space where people could come and linger and browse and connect was really appealing to me. I felt like Needham needed more places for people to connect and hang out."

Much remains to be done, including construction, renovation, and permitting, but Connolly is hoping to open before the end of the year.

Today, August 19, Barnes & Noble will host the official opening of its new bookstore at 150 N. State St. in downtown Chicago, Ill. Located at "the heart of The Loop," the store occupies the historic building that was once a flagship Borders Bookstore. It is the fourth new bookstore to be opened by B&N in the Chicagoland area this year, joining others in Skokie, Hyde Park, and Oak Park.

The 20,000-square-foot bookstore's opening celebration will feature author Jasmine Warga cutting the ribbon and signing copies of her book The Unlikely Tale of Chase and Finnegan (Balzer + Bray).

"We are delighted to restore this wonderful building as a home to a major bookstore," B&N said. "Returning to the Loop reinforces a significant commitment to Chicago where we have now opened four new bookstores in the last year."

Dave Nee, bookseller and science fiction/fantasy fan, died August 6. He was 73. Locus reported that he attended high school in the San Francisco Bay Area and studied at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1974, he co-founded the Portable Bookstore, with Debbie Notkin and Tom Whitmore, "as a service running books to local organizations. It would be renamed the Other Change of Hobbit and became a physical store in Berkeley at the suggestion of Sherry Gottlieb, founder of the eponymous bookstore A Change of Hobbit. The physical store relocated multiple times over the decades, finding homes in downtown Berkeley and El Cerrito, before closing in 2014."

In addition to being a bookseller, Nee wrote bibliographies for Thomas M. Disch and Michael Bishop in 1982 and 1983. He also had a long-time involvement with San Francisco Pride, being chair of the SF Pride Safety Committee.

In a tribute, Whitmore wrote in File 770: "It's next to impossible for me to summarize Dave Nee. We were friends for almost 60 years. We went to different Bay Area high schools, but I ended up hanging out with his school's drama class. We both attended UC Berkeley and were friends, then partners (with Debbie Notkin) in a small bookselling enterprise, The Portable Bookstore, which sold new books at Little Men's meetings and rare books at conventions. In 1977 that morphed into The Other Change of Hobbit bookstore.... 

"He and I had similar depths of knowledge in SF and fantasy, both in the history of the books and the history of the field. If I couldn't remember a story, he could, and vice versa. He had far more knowledge than I did in other fields: we'd interrupt the Monday night restocking at Other Change so he could call in to (and frequently win) a local classical musical station's weekly trivia contest. He liked (and knew deeply) a broader range of music than anyone else I know. He was excellent at training people. He loved the cats we had in the store. He excelled at devising tactical solutions to problems. And he inspired loyalty in a wide range of people.... If you knew any one part of Dave, you knew someone amazing."

Winnie & Mo's Bookshop, Idaho Falls, Idaho, shared a music video featuring staff members, noting: "Shake it off. Come hang with us (and the books). You don't even have to have hella good hair."

While dealing with some downtown construction disruptions, the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, Vt., turned to its sidewalk chalkboard ("Read Books") for some gentle, creative venting, while noting: "Another awesome sign from our resident artist/bookseller Vanessa."

Lonely Planet has entered a new distribution agreement with Macmillan Publishers in the U.S. Effective March 1, 2027, Macmillan will take exclusive responsibility for U.S. sales and distribution across Lonely Planet's publishing portfolio, which includes their travel guides, travel inspiration and gift books, as well as their line of children's nonfiction titles.

The move is designed to further strengthen Lonely Planet's position in the U.S., while expanding the reach of its publishing program across booksellers, retailers, and other key channels nationwide, the company noted.

In the U.K., Lonely Planet will continue its distribution relationship with Hachette UK, as well as maintaining distribution with Penguin Random House Distribution in Australia.

Morgan Amer has joined the Stable Book Group as sales director. She was previously a sales director at Hachette Book Group.

Chasing Goodfellas: Lufthansa, Henry Hill, Point Shaving, and Making Movies by Edward McDonald (Post Hill Press).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Michael Grynbaum, author of Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America (Simon & Schuster, $29.99, 9781668003916).

Jennifer Hudson Show repeat: Laura Dave, author of The First Time I Saw Him (Scribner, $29, 9781668002964).

A new trailer has been released for the sixth season of the Apple TV spy series Slow Horses, adapted from the novels by Mick Herron. Deadline reported that the trailer "shows Jackson Lamb's (Gary Oldman) team embroiled in Diana Taverner's (Kristin Scott Thomas) fatal high-stakes game of retaliation and revenge.... The trailer also provides one more big surprise: The return of Olivia Cooke as disappeared MI5 agent Sid Baker, who was last seen at the end of Season 1." The season launches on September 16.

The cast also includes Christopher Chung, Saskia Reeves, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Rosalind Eleazar, Joanna Scanlan, Samuel West, Ruth Bradley, Tom Brooke, Jonathan Pryce, Hugo Weaving, and newcomer Lenny Rush.

Helen Ennis won the A$25,000 (US$23,300) National Biography Award in Australia for Max Dupain: A Portrait, Books+Publishing reported. The book explores "the complexities and contradictions of the man who produced Australia's most well-known image, the Sunbaker, and examines the sources of his creativity," according to State Library of New South Wales.

Chair of judges Sylvia Martin said the winning title was chosen as "an exceptional example of the biographer's craft. Elegantly structured and written, it weaves Max Dupain's life and work into a complex whole. Interspersed microchapters accompanying carefully curated images illuminate not only the range and originality of his photography but also aspects of his character. This biography of a major 20th-century Australian photographer will be read long into the 21st century."

Micaela Sahhar won the A$5,000 (about US$3,545) Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work for Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family. Judges praised the memoir's "exceptional synthesis of scholarship, imagination and literary craft, and profound contribution to contemporary life writing."

photo: John Michael Bond

Elizabeth Little is the author of Dear Daughter, Pretty as a Picture, and two works of nonfiction. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, McSweeney's, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles with her family. Good Girls Die Bored (Bantam, August 4, 2026) is a gripping, emotionally charged thriller featuring a woman hired to join a security detail team for an investigative journalist, but the job and the people involved might be hiding more than they appear.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

You ever wish your action heroes were women with complex inner lives and emotionally rich female friendships? Me too! So here's Die Hard meets Fleabag.

On your nightstand now:

I'm a strange little goblin who likes to read in the dark, so at night I'm usually on an e-reader, but I do have two physical books on my dresser at the moment. First, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton. I picked this gem up on a bookseller's recommendation--it's a chronicle of a couple's relationship as told through an auction catalog, and I'm enjoying it so much I ration myself to only a few pages a night. Then there's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, which I'll freely admit I've been reading for months. (And I'll probably never finish it because I keep setting it aside to rant to my husband about whatever it is I've just learned.) Meanwhile, the next novel in my e-book queue is Bromantasy by Máire Roche, which had me at the tagline: "Two heroes. One brain cell."

Favorite book when you were a child:

I was a Little Golden Book devotee, and the first book I remember thinking of as "my favorite" was The Pink Panther in the Haunted House by Kennon Graham, illustrated by Darrell Baker. (I was a genre-fiction girl from the start.) Later on, I probably told people that my favorite book was Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and maybe that's true in an aesthetic sense, but if I were to calculate the number of rereads, I'm pretty sure Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey would come out on top.

Your top five authors:

These definitely change according to mood, but at the moment I'll go with Shirley Jackson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Book you've faked reading:

With apologies to my 11th grade English teacher: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I'm so sorry, but that essay I handed in was in fact a five-paragraph educated guess. I was just too busy reading very important books about dragons and vampires.

Book you're an evangelist for:

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. Perhaps my favorite mystery novel of all time--a Scotland Yard inspector laid up in the hospital becomes fixated on the disappearance of Richard III's nephews, the so-called Princes in the Tower. Just impeccably crafted. (But while I'm here, can I also put a good word in for Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head?)

Book you've bought for the cover:

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy.

Book you hid from your parents:

I never went so far as to actually hide a book, but let's just say I wasn't exactly volunteering information about Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear sequels.

Book that changed your life:

Either Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy or Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game--whichever I read first. For better or for worse (and when I'm under deadline, I'd definitely say worse), those are the books that made me fall in love with mysteries.

Five books you'll never part with:

A first edition of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire that was given to me as a wedding present. A collection of 17th-century British poetry that belonged to a dear friend who is no longer with us. My father's much-loved childhood copy of A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh (illustrated by E.H. Shepard). A slim volume of Italian verb conjugations that's just the most perfectly well-constructed language reference work I've ever come across. And The Age of Surveillance Capitalism--because, like I said, I'm never going to finish the damn thing.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Murder on the Orient Express. I've been reading mystery novels for many years now, and while I'm not going to pretend I'm never surprised by a twist, it's pretty rare. These days, I probably read crime fiction more for the journey than the destination--which isn't without its pleasures, of course! But it's a special treat to be expertly hoodwinked, and no one did it better than Agatha Christie. So wipe my memory, please, and give me the chance to be fooled all over again.

A young explorer and his friends search for a long-lost treasure in the boisterous and bouncy middle-grade graphic novel The Moonlit Spiral by Mike Maihack (Cleopatra in Space series).

In the land of Helix, "treasure hunting was once a way of life." Explorers "unearthed the artifacts of past civilizations," and magical creatures known as guardians protected "treasure and sacred places." Then the guardians disappeared. Years later, Orion Flynn, the most famous treasure hunter in Helix, also vanished after venturing out to find a "final, mysterious discovery." And thus, the "great era of exploration" came to an end.

Punky blond-haired, brown-skinned Orion "Rion" Corsair grew up hearing stories about his namesake from his treasure-hunter parents. Rion lost interest in exploration and the possibility of magic after his parents died searching for Flynn's treasure. He prefers to spend time playing video games with his friend, the redheaded, pale-skinned Zyla, and working in caregiver Henry's bookstore. One dark and stormy night, Rion awakens to the sound of his window unlatching. Rion's "parent's old journal" gets soaked, revealing clues hidden on previously empty pages about Flynn's lost treasure. Before Rion can read the mysterious text, he encounters a "fox-like girl" named Quill in his room as she bounds past him and tries to eat several of his possessions. Rion, now burdened with new information and understanding about his parents' quest, decides to honor his parents' memories by finding the treasure, and he sets out with Zyla and Quill. The trio travels "in the same footsteps of Orion Flynn and [Rion's] parents," solving puzzles, fighting beasts, and rediscovering magic.

The Moonlit Spiral is a zany, earnest story of adventure and friendship set in an elaborate and whimsical fantasy world filled with creatively imagined fauna. Cautious, cynical Rion's push-pull with daring Zyla and perky Quill is an entertaining throughline. His insistence that "there's no such thing as magic" is challenged by Quill's strange powers and the bizarre species they meet on their journey, such as a reptilian orange blob that "tastes like mango." Maihack's eye-popping illustrations brim with color and detail as Rion and his companions trek through mountainous cities, verdant jungles, and spiny caverns. Simple yet distinct character designs make Rion, Zyla, and Quill stand out against the graphic novel's intricate settings.

Although some of the novel's plotlines become muddled, the focus on the trio's evolving friendships shines bright. Fans of detailed world-building and offbeat humor should enjoy this inventive romp. --Alanna Felton, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: This adventurous, eccentric middle-grade graphic novel follows a group of young treasure hunters on a quest through an elaborate and whimsical fantasy realm.