"Fifty years, blink of an eye. I'm here looking out to all of you wondering what's next. I saw the arrival of the fax machine, remember those? E-mail, personal computers, the internet, smartphones, OMG, social media. All of these transitions in novel, new modes of communication. After all of this, now comes the arrival of AI. OMG, well it's part of editorial and marketing already. However, just like the advent of all of these other technologies, AI is causing an uproar in the human psyche and all sorts of machination in the world of events. However, I have good news for all of you, with the advent of AI comes the advent of AS, Artificial Stupidity. This is where highly intelligent people say really stupid things.

Ehud Sperling (photo: Ben DeFlorio)

"For example, this notion of AGI, Artificial General Intelligence: it's the idea that machines will soon outperform humans. For one artifice or another, whether it is for greed, jealousy or competition, this idea of machines surpassing humans is a really stupid idea. Just on the basis of the science. For example, each one of you in this room has billions of cells in your body, each individual cell has more computing capacity than all the large language models put together. Further, this biological computing power uses very little energy, where large language models require greater and greater processors and more and more electricity.

"Right now large language models have absorbed about as much data as a child absorbs in their first four years of life. Unlike a child, they can only transact based on data that has already been structured and is available in digital format. But no worries, the triad is finished. You've got AI, AS, now you've got RI--Real Intelligence. That is what exists in this tent, that is what makes the publishing endeavor so exciting and that's what makes it so rewarding for me. Even after 50 years of diligently pursuing this vocation, it remains fresh, original and continually challenging and exciting. For this great gift, I wish to thank you all because you are what makes it possible."

"I'm sometimes very frustrated at our industry, probably more than ever now, but there are no days when I don't think that what we do is important. There are no days that I don't think about what life would look like if we didn't have bookstores like mine.

"Human connection is so important for us. We are meant for connection. And that's what bookselling is, that's what books are. They are connection. And I think that's what a bookstore is. The connection you get from a bookstore, even if you don't know anyone there, is so important. And that's why we do it. Bookselling is a labor of love."

Tyler and Stefani Miller are the new owners of Riverwalk Books in Chelan, Wash., "ushering in a new era while honoring the bookstore's deep local roots," the Lake Chelan Mirror reported. The bookstore was founded in the 1990s by Libby Manthe, who died several years ago. Her husband, Bob Manthe, continued running the store, with Stefani Miller managing day-to-day operations.

"My wife, Stefani, has actually been managing the store for almost four years," said Tyler Miller. "And I had worked here as a teenager, years and years ago. We're book people--book lovers, big readers, of course. I've always been interested in owning a bookstore and being able to put it together and do it the way you'd like to."

The Millers took ownership just days before Fourth of July weekend, but "the store is well-established. It has a long history and a good reputation," Tyler said. "People come here every year while on vacation, so we haven't had to worry about finding customers. That's been really encouraging."

Bob Manthe said it felt like the right moment to pass the torch: "Stefani worked for me for a while and she knows the store. She has a passion for books.... Our family's been doing this for a long time, and we thought it was the right time with the right person to take it over and follow the tradition of what my wife, Libby, had started."

Noting that they have no plans to drastically change the store, Tyler Miller said, "We're not going to renovate or refashion it into something totally new. It's a bookstore--we're going to have all kinds of books in here, just like before. We are moving some things around to make space for more inventory, but the core of what makes it special isn't changing."

He added: "We want families to feel like this is a fun, welcoming place--a spot where kids of all ages can hang out, read, or just explore.... I hope people feel a lot of excitement when they come in--enthusiasm to see a lot of books on the shelves again. We really hope that families feel like this is a really fun and cozy environment where kids of all ages can come and hang out."

Lovestruck in Seattle in progress.

Lovestruck in Seattle, a romance-focused bookstore in Seattle, Wash., will host a grand-opening celebration this Sunday, July 13, Secret Seattle reported.

The store will carry a variety of romance titles, along with gifts, apparel, and other nonbook items from sister shop Palm Creative. The bookstore's first home, at 12315 Lake City Way N.E. in Seattle's Lake City neighborhood, will be a temporary one, with Lovestruck in Seattle hoping to move into a permanent space after October.

The opening celebration will run from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. on Sunday, and will feature snacks, refreshments, and free bookmarks and stickers with each purchase. The first 25 people will receive a free tote bag, and any customers who shop at Lovestruck in Seattle through the rest of July can enter to win a giveaway.

Liberation Station Bookstore, a Black-owned children's bookstore that closed in 2024 due to racist harassment and threats, will reopen next year in Raleigh, N.C., WRAL News reported.

Victoria Scott-Miller in the space that will be the new Liberation Station.

Owner Victoria Scott-Miller and her husband have found a space within Montague Plaza, a 15,000-square-foot building dedicated to housing Black-owned businesses, and they are aiming for a Juneteenth 2026 reopening. They have launched a GoFundMe campaign to help with the reopening and have already raised more than a third of the $60,000 goal.

"I'm grateful that we had an opportunity to step back," Scott-Miller told WRAL. "And that we had a community that loved us so much they allowed us to rest. They allowed us to pause and reimagine what it could look like, not only the bookstore but our own personal safety. Coming back has been that of a revival, honestly." 

Scott-Miller founded Liberation station as an online and pop-up store in 2019 after having difficulty finding children's books for her sons that featured Black characters. She opened a bricks-and-mortar store in 2023, but less than a year later announced that persistent harassment and threats made the store's continued operation untenable.

At the time, Scott-Miller wrote that the closure "certainly won't mark the end of Liberation Station Bookstore. There is so much more work to be done."

Following a dispute with the store's landlord related to a broken air conditioning system, the Best Bookstore in Palm Springs is moving to a new location in Palm Springs, Calif., the Palm Springs Post reported.

Store owners Paul Bradley Carr and Sarah Lacy have found a new space with the help of other business owners and community members. While they have not officially announced the new location's address, they did note that it is only about a block away from the current space and has affordable rent and working AC.

The bookstore has until August 10 to leave its current space. In the meantime, Lacy and Carr are running a "buy two, get one free" sale on all inventory and are raising funds to help with the move. Donors who contribute more than $100 will get a limited-edition T-shirt as well as a 10% discount while wearing said shirt, and donors who contribute $1,000 or more will be included on a mural the owners are designing for the new space, along with a lifetime 10% off discount.

The bookstore's air conditioning failed over Fourth of July weekend, and when store owners Carr and Lacy reached out to their landlord about getting the unit repaired, the landlord refused. The bookstore was left without AC in an area that routinely sees triple-digit heat in the summer. Although the landlord has since offered to pay 50% of the repair costs, Carr and Lacy are instead taking them up on a different offer--to leave their lease early. 

After sharing their story about the broken AC, Carr told the Palm Springs Post, "people flooded in. People posting online--can we contact the landlords on your behalf? We've had people come in and say, 'I want to buy a $500 gift card just to help you guys.' "

The Best Bookstore in Palm Springs opened in late 2022.

Literally Books will have its grand opening July 25 in New Paltz, N.Y. The bookstore will be a "curated book nook" inside of New Paltz's Water Street Market and will sell "new titles, cult classics, children's books and activity books, and the occasional rare books," said co-owners Robin Minkoff and Jane Liddle.

Liddle and Minkoff will carry bestsellers and popular nonfiction, along with small-press titles and "an erudite backlist." In addition to books, shoppers will be able to find a variety of journals and gifts. 

Minkoff has a background in environmental and retail consulting, while Liddle has been in the book industry for 20 years, selling used and rare books online and at antique malls.

The store's grand opening celebration will run from 6 to 8 p.m. on July 25 and coincide with the Water St. Market's Fourth Friday event.

Oliver Books, a new and used bookstore, opened earlier this spring at 365 NE Court St. in Prineville, Ore. KTVZ reported that for owner Hannah Oliver, it has always been her passion to own and operate a bookstore, and that "shows in the inventory of the store. It has the staples of classic literature, trending BookTok books and obscure, hidden gems.... There is even a room dedicated to valuable vintage and antique books."

As important as the books are, the owner has gone out of her way to create areas in the store for people to sit and read together.

"They give the community a place to go and spend time with other people," Oliver said. "To develop community with other people. I believe that a bookstore is a perfect place for that. And these spaces are not very plentiful in Prineville. And so it was something that was important to me, to provide that space that people could go and spend time and know that they don't have to pay."

The store has also become a meeting place for local craft clubs and parents who read to their children after school, KTVZ noted. 

The Northshire Bookstore, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., has been closed temporarily since July 4 due to sustained, significant water damage from a leak originating in one of the apartments above the store.  

"We are working expeditiously to reopen as soon as possible and thank our incredible customers for their patience and support," COO Scott Austin told the Albany Times Union at the time. 

In a recent e-mail newsletter update, the Northshire wrote: "The store remains closed as we undertake remediation and repairs. Unfortunately, we do not yet have any additional info on the timeline for reopening, but we are hard at work and will continue to keep you updated." 

Scheduled author events will take place outside of the Saratoga Springs store throughout July. The Northshire's Manchester Center, Vt., location and the company's website remain open.

"Almost immediately after we announced the closure, there was a wildly generous community response, with many customers, other businesses, and organizations reaching out to with offers of help," the Northshire noted in its e-mail. "We are overwhelmed with gratitude for the kindness and support of our community.... We cannot wait to welcome you back to our Saratoga store. We appreciate your kind words and your continued support."

Owner Ryan Billingsley

Dad Suggests Books children's bookstore made its debut last month at 2526 E. Mission Blvd., Suite 110, in Fayetteville, Ark. Owner Ryan Billingsley posted on Instagram at the time: "We quietly and secretly opened the doors to our new bookstore today! Thanks to everyone who stopped by to make the day very special. There were a few squeals of joy from kids--and one even said this is my new happy place. So really what more could you ask for?"

Billingsley, a father who has been operating an online site recommending books for kids for seven years, told the Fayetteville Observer, "We have two kids and we've always had a ton of books and games in the home. Before becoming a bookseller, I was a middle school teacher in Lincoln. In 2018 I started a website called DadSuggests.com to write about the books and board games that our family enjoyed."

Billingsley added that he started the project because he was having a hard time finding the books he and his family enjoyed, noting: "After writing about books and games for many years, we opened up a very small store in 2022 to kind of test the waters with a children's bookshop curated with the stuff we enjoy. Many people that discovered our small shop would offer us very encouraging and kind feedback about the type of book selection we were curating--and this year we decided to jump in head first by building an exciting flagship location in East Fayetteville."

In addition to books and games, the new shop also includes a reading room and other little nooks for kids to enjoy books on site, including "a special door" for kids to explore, the Observer wrote.

"From the very beginning I knew that we needed to have a special door," Billingsley said. "Maybe a wardrobe like in the Chronicles of Narnia, maybe a special wall like platform 9 and three quarters, maybe even just a secret bookshelf. I knew a children's bookshop needed a special door to take kids from one place to another--a place that gets their imaginations fired up. And what ended up being a perfect fit for us was a round, green door inspired by The Shire. I consider The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to be some of the very best examples of human imagination, and the perfect amount of geeky for a store called Dad Suggests Books.

"The Shire also perfectly exudes the type of cozy atmosphere we wanted for a quiet reading room--complete with nooks to discover and plenty of books to read with your kids. The reading room is full of books that aren't even for sale, because we want to encourage families to find a comfortable place to sit and read together."

Page & Pine in Puyallup, Wash., debuted last month with a soft opening, the News Tribune reported.

The all-ages, general-interest bookstore is located at 207 W. Stewart Ave. and opened on June 27. Owner Emily Foster noted that although the shop is not yet fully furnished and she and her team are still working out some kinks, the soft opening was met with a strong response. Customers and community members expressed their excitement and gratitude for the bookstore, and sales were brisk.

"We sold close to 850 books on the first day we opened--which far surpassed what we thought we would do the first couple of weeks," Foster told the News Tribune. "There was a portion of time where our romance section was cleared out--there were less than 20 books on the shelf and there were a few hundred prior. That's really exciting."

Foster, who has lived in Puyallup for nearly 20 years, plans to host a grand opening celebration later in the summer, potentially in August.

Spellbound Books, a mobile bookstore selling new and used titles, debuted earlier this month in Eagle Mountain, Utah, the Daily Herald reported.

The bookstore, which is built from a 7×16 foot trailer, can be found six days per week at its regular location at 3726 E. Campus Dr.; it also makes pop-up appearances at other spots in the Eagle Mountain area. Owner Liz Moore sells general-interest titles, particularly in the romance, fantasy, and thriller genres, along with a variety of bookish gifts and merchandise.

Moore described herself as a lifelong reader and told the Daily Herald she decided to open a bookstore after taking a break from a job that she no longer found fulfilling. She chose to go with a mobile bookstore because there would be less overhead and the ability to travel to readers was appealing.  

Moore noted that her husband "is the one who pretty much built the whole trailer out, along with some friends and some family that have helped. So I've had a good support system in getting us started."

The shop's first day in business was July 5, and Moore recalled there was an "hour-long wait in the line on the grand opening day, which was really exciting."

Shelf Love DSM, a romance-focused bookstore in Des Moines, Iowa, will have its grand opening on Saturday, July 26, Axios reported. 

Sarah Gardner-Bergan

The bookstore, located at 2326 University Ave. in the city's Dogtown neighborhood, will carry a wide variety of romance titles from both traditionally published and independent authors. Owner Sarah Gardner-Bergan plans to host author readings along with events like book bedazzling and bookmark decorating.

Gardner-Bergan began her bookselling career by selling book box subscriptions. From there, she started hosting romance-focused conventions and, seeing the success of other romance bookstores, decided to launch one of her own. 

Earlier this spring, Gardner-Bergan launched a Kickstarter campaign to help open the store. It raised $7,441, well above its goal of $2,500.

The opening festivities will begin on July 26 with a ribbon cutting, followed by an afternoon of author signings, with more signings to follow on Sunday. All attendees will receive a ticket for a prize raffle, and additional tickets will be given for every $10 spent. All purchases will come with a Shelf Love sticker and bookmark swag pack.

The Book Loft will open next month in Oak Park, Ill., in a storefront that previously housed the Book Table, the Wednesday Journal reported.

Co-owners Heather Nelson and Sophie Schauer Eldred have an opening date set for August 16. The 3,000-square-foot bookstore, at 1047 Lake St., will sell general-interest titles for all ages. It will have a special children's section called "the roost," related to the bookstore's owl mascot. The owners plan to do outreach with local teachers and librarians, and they've been talking to other local businesses about possible collaborations.

Schauer Eldred and Nelson have lived in Oak Park and been close friends for 20 years. The closure of the Book Table at the end of 2024, after more than two decades in business, inspired them to open a business and begin giving back to the community. 

"It was a little bit based on a dream of both of ours," Nelson, whose family owns a bookstore in Florida, told the Wednesday Journal. "When we started to really think about it, it was fulfilling something for both of us, and we both are really committed to the community." 

The owners noted that the Oak Park community has been very welcoming and helpful throughout the opening process.

"It's made us even more giddy and just thrilled to enter this community," Schauer Eldred added.

Verb Bookstore & Cafe in Jonesboro, Ark., is for sale. Owner Sari Harlow, who founded the bookstore as an online and pop-up store about five years ago, is looking to sell the store's inventory, fixtures, and some additional business assets. The store's lease at 316 S. Main St. runs until the end of the year, and the space could be sub-leased to a buyer if they want to remain in the same spot. She noted, however, that she is not selling the Verb Bookstore brand, as she hopes "to continue it on in future iterations." 

Among other qualities, Harlow is looking for a buyer who "has a passion for books and building community! Indie bookstores can't compete on price or shelf space, but we can offer the best service, coolest events, and the most genuine connection with fellow book lovers."

"The past five years of building an independent bookstore from scratch have been an absolute dream come true," Harlow wrote. "I've met and made lasting connections with so many amazing customers, writers, business owners, and community leaders. I'm so proud of what we've built together, and I'm hopeful that our foundation will be someone else's launching pad!"

Interested parties can reach Harlow at sari@verbbookstore.com.

After more than a decade as a pop-up and online store, the Scribbled Hollow has opened a bricks-and-mortar store in Glendale, Ariz., 12News reported. 

Scribbled Hollow sells books for all ages, with an emphasis on science fiction, fantasy, and fandom. Alongside books, customers can find T-shirts, mugs, and other merchandise, and the store will host author signings, poetry slams, and more. 

Owner Amber Murray held grand opening festivities for the store throughout the weekend, with a ribbon cutting Friday afternoon followed by author visits and an open mic night. Saturday saw more author visits and a cosplay night, and Sunday included more author appearances and a gaming session.

Murray launched the Scribbled Hollow in 2012 and initially sold only children's titles. As the Scribbled Hollow built an audience and expanded its offerings throughout the years, Murray always dreamed of opening a bricks-and-mortar space. She was able to finally do so with the help of the community.

"Our sponsors actually paid our first and last months' rent," Murray told 12News. "They made it happen. We didn't even find that money, they came through for us." 

Prior to the grand opening on Friday, the Scribbled Hollow was open for a few days on a limited basis; there were already a few repeat customers. "Everybody is super excited about there being a West Valley bookstore," said Murray.

An integral part of New York University's Summer Publishing Institute is visiting independent bookstores in New York City. This year, four students wrote about their impressions of bookstores they visited, which they kindly have shared with Shelf Awareness. On Wednesday, we published Mallory Stock's report on The Ripped Bodice. Yesterday featured Alison Keiser's report on Greenlight Bookstore. Today we have Brianna Angeliz's report on The Strand. On Monday, we'll run another bookstore report.

Kat Pongrace (l.) and Walker Iversen speak with NYU Summer Publishing Institute students. (photos: Brianna Angeliz)

On a blazing hot day, my peers and I from the 2025 cohort of NYU's Summer Publishing Institute walked over to The Strand Book Store and were given a tour by Walker Iversen, events director, and Kat Pongrace, marketing director.

Even before we set foot inside, we had the opportunity to browse through carts of marked-down books. Once inside, we were met with tables of BookTok and staff picks. Everywhere you looked, reading recommendations were coming to life. My personal favorite was the "Blind Book Date" table, where titles were wrapped in white paper with a few handwritten clues--a fun way to read for book enthusiasts and new readers alike.

Kat began by telling us about the store's legacy: "The Strand first opened in 1927 on Fourth Avenue's Book Row, which had 48 used bookstores," she said. "We're the only one that survived, and we moved to this current location in the 1950s." Kat added that they've hosted "about 500 events in just under two years," from small gatherings to large public signings and readings and not including off-site events.

We went upstairs for the rare book collection tour. On our way upstairs, we passed author signatures--including unexpected gems like Julia Fox and Sofia Coppola. The Strand is a magnet for cultural figures: Olivia Rodrigo, Bella Hadid, and Harry Styles, among many, many others, have stopped by.

The rare book room attracts a range of customers. "Rare book dealers come here from all over the world," Walker told us. The most impressive offering: a $45,000 edition of Ulysses by James Joyce that was illustrated and signed by Henri Matisse. (The most expensive book the store has ever sold was a Shakespeare Folio for $120,000.) The rare book room is popular in other ways: some couples host weddings in it.

Our tour extended through the Strand's internal workings: the offices, production department, web team, and meeting room. They ship six days a week from a warehouse stocked with books a decade, a century, and even more than 100 years old.

The Strand is one of the epicenters of pop culture in media and film. The bookstore has been rented for shows like Saturday Night Live and The Good Wife. The store itself has appeared in various productions, including Six Degrees of Separation, Tick, Tick... Boom!, and Netflix's Dash & Lily. "Any time you see a New York set with books, odds are those books came from us," Kat shared, explaining that they supply props to shows like Saturday Night Live, sometimes with just 24 hours' notice.

After our q&a session, our cohort was left to shop. I caught up with some of my peers to hear what they think about the Strand. Josie: "Despite my impulse to avoid what people like, I see why people like the Strand." Leo: "Coming from a family business, seeing another one thrive like this is super amazing. The owner had a vision, and the team here has kept it alive." Zoe: "Moments like these--when indie bookstores hold onto and seal who they are as a brand--it's really powerful. It's about building an inclusive brand, not just selling books."

I also asked a few Strand members what their favorite books are and what they love about working at the Strand. William: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Honor and Guadalupe both emphasized what makes the Strand such a special place to work: "It's the people we work with. We all get along and share a love of books, film, and music." This sense of connection and brand building is what makes the Strand what it is today. And the store keeps expanding, recently opening a location at Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side (in a former Shakespeare & Co. store). The Strand also continues to operate a store on Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side, as well as the Central Park kiosks (weather permitting), which date back to the 1960s. The Strand is more than a bookstore. It's a culture icon, a creative hub, and a thriving community/archive of stories, from the people who walk through the doors to the books on the shelves.

Brianna Angeliz enjoys Muay Thai and watching dramedies. With faith and a whole lot of love, she wants to continue to uplift those in the digital media industry, specifically regarding holistic wellness. Brianna lives in Woodbridge, N.J., with her family.

Books & Mortar Bookstore, Grand Rapids, Mich., is "expanding to the lakeshore" with the addition of a store at 447 Washington Ave. in Holland, Mich., Crain's Grand Rapids Business reported. Jenny Kinne and her partner, Josh Johnson, plan to open Antidote Books & Records by the end of August. The new store, about 30 miles from the current one, will offer books for adults and adolescents along with gifts and a selection of new and used records.

Books and Mortar

Calling Books & Mortar "the biggest passion project that I've had in my life," Kinne said, "I love the community that has come around that spot.... Books & Mortar has just been my home for such a long time." She took ownership of the bookstore in 2018 from co-founders Jonathan Shotwell and Christopher Roe, and relocated to its current, larger space at 966 Cherry St. SE in 2021.  

Kinne and Johnson moved to Holland two years ago, which led to the idea for Antidote Books & Records. "We've slowly built up this really vibrant, great life in Holland, and we're just ready to make it home and build something akin to Books & Mortar in our new backyard," Kinne said. "I obviously have a huge passion for books and wanted to see another independent bookshop in the Holland (Washington Square) neighborhood that didn't have a bookshop yet." 

Johnson, a musician, will operate Antidote, which will allow him to realize his dream of opening a record shop. Crain's Grand Rapids Business noted that Kinne has signed a three-year lease for the former restaurant space, and over the coming weeks will give it " a fresh coat of paint and new furniture."

"We want to make sure that we're honoring the history and the beauty that's already there," she said. "With it being a record shop, of course, we want to bring some of that retro spirit into it, a colorful, fun space."

She hopes that Antidote can bring a new "third space" to Holland's Washington Square neighborhood. "Everything that I've tried to do through a bookshop, and everything that my partner hopes to do through a record shop, will be bringing people together, offering sanctuary, offering healing through art, which, for me, historically, has been books, and for him, it's music," Kinne said. "We think that books and record shops are an antidote to so much of the pain that we feel in the world right now."

On July 23, Barnes & Noble will open its new bookstore in the Shops at Abilene at 3417 Catclaw Dr., Abilene, Tex. Author Monica Garner is cutting the ribbon and signing copies of her book, Summer on Cape May (Kensington). The 20,000-square-foot store also features a B&N Café.

"We are very pleased to open this beautiful new Barnes & Noble in Abilene," B&N said. "Texas hosts more Barnes & Noble bookstores than any other state--and yet the nearest to Abilene is over 150 miles away. We are proud to add Abilene to the new fleet of Barnes & Noble bookstores we are opening across the country."

At Arcadia Publishing, Matthew Gildea is retiring as chief operating officer, and Melody Beacher is the new COO.

Beacher was formerly CEO of DataSpring, an IT consulting company Arcadia has used in various capacities for more than a decade. Before that, she was IT director at the College of Charleston and v-p of information systems at C&S Wholesale Grocers.

Matthew Gildea

Gildea joined Arcadia in 2019 as business development manager. In 2021, he became COO. Before that, he was book team business director at Joseph-Beth Booksellers and earlier held executive positions at Hastings Entertainment, Borders Group, and several independent bookstores, including Chapter Two.

Gildea was also a board member of the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc) from 2013 to 2023 and was president from 2020 to 2022.

Arcadia CEO Brittain Phillips said that Gildea's six years at Arcadia "have been filled with notable achievements and consequential moments, and Matthew has played a pivotal role throughout. Under Matthew's leadership, we've seen significant strides in every major operational area, and he's partnered with employees spanning imprints and departments to make Arcadia a better publisher and a stronger business, far beyond his remit...

"He cares deeply about his employees, and although he expects the best, he always puts them in a position to succeed. And not just for the short term; Matthew's always looking ahead, thinking about the long-term development of his people, coming up with opportunities to challenge, motivate, and elevate them. He's relentless about it, and thank goodness."

Phillips called Beacher "a strategic thinker, an adept manager, and a dedicated colleague. Those characteristics--along with her deep experience and her familiarity with Arcadia's business--will serve Melody well in the COO position."

Today, Barnes & Noble's new bookstore in Rushmore Crossing at 1617 Eglin St., Rapid City, S.Dak., is hosting its grand opening. Children's author Sean Covel will be cutting the ribbon and signing copies of his books. The location also features a B&N Café.

"We are very pleased to open this beautiful new bookstore in Rapid City," B&N said. "It is a direct result of some of our booksellers and many residents of Rapid City e-mailing with a vigorous campaign to ask us to open here. We thank them for their persistence!"

Dream Palace Books & Coffee, which opened in 2023, will close at the end of July. The Indianapolis Star reported that the store, which offers both used books and new titles from small presses, "sells a curated selection of books it calls radical, absurd and experimental. Its niche collection includes books on fine art, poetry, theory and more." The store did not give a specific reason for closing in its social media announcement. 

Owner Taylor Lewandowski posted: "While this was a difficult choice, we have decided to close our doors effective July 26. We are grateful for the opportunity to serve the community of Indianapolis and foster numerous events over the years, like readings, latte throw downs, countless open mics, a literary festival, and much more. To the regulars, the strangers, the organizers, the impeccable staff, and anyone who was a part of Dream Palace, thank you and hope the moments at Dream were memorable and special. While this was not the ideal outcome, we are honored we had the chance to create an alternative space in Indianapolis."

The Barnes & Noble University District Bookstore--the partnership between B&N and University Book Store through which B&N will operate the store's general books department--will officially open in Seattle, Wash., this week. Author Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl) will be on hand for a ribbon cutting and book signing. 

Under B&N's management, the trade book department will span 17,000 square feet, about double the size of the previous trade book department. UBS, meanwhile, will remain independent and focus on providing textbooks, student supplies, and apparel to the University of Washington community.

Earlier this spring, UW student newspaper the Daily reported that the agreement is set to run for 10 years, with the possibility of a reevaluation after four years. B&N will pay rent and a percentage of sales, and per the agreement, all UBS staff who worked in the trade book department have been retained

University Book Store was founded in 1900 by UW students. It is independent from the university and operates as a corporate trust for the benefit of UW students, faculty, and staff. At one time it had nine locations in the greater Seattle area.

The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance posted an update yesterday on how some of the North Carolina bookstores in the path of tropical storm Chantal had fared:

"The Regulator in Durham, Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, and Bookmarks in Winston-Salem were among the stores who reported back that their stores and their staff were not harmed, though at Quail Ridge Books, one bookseller who lived closer to Chapel Hill and the Eno River was affected by bridge closures caused by flooding.

"Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill was without power, internet, or phones the following day. They opened despite these challenges and guided customers to books with flashlights. At McIntyre's Books in Fearrington, a funnel cloud sighting in the area set off phone alerts to seek shelter. The staff shuttled customers into the basement until they received an official 'all clear.' In one of the worst hit areas, Southern Pines, The Country Bookshop dealt with some leaks and road closures but considered themselves lucky that it was not worse."

Valerie Pierce has been promoted to v-p, independent sales and retail marketing, at Sourcbooks and will lead the company's in-house sales team dedicated to serving independent bookstores, which launched at the beginning of the year.

Valerie Pierce

Pierce was most recently executive director, retail marketing and creative services. During her 14 years at Sourcebooks, she has led the development of marketing strategies tailored to independent retail, crafting campaigns that celebrate each bookstore's unique identity while driving measurable growth. Her work paved the way for Sourcebooks' independent retail marketing program and was a driving force behind the launch of the in-house indie sales force.

Sourcebooks publisher and CEO Dominique Raccah said, "At Sourcebooks, we know that independent bookstores are essential cultural institutions and creative partners. Valerie has long understood the value of those relationships and helped us show up with intention, care, and impact. Her promotion is a powerful reflection of where we're going: a future grounded in deeper connection with booksellers and greater opportunity for our authors."

Paula Amendolara, senior v-p of sales at Sourcebooks, said, "Valerie laid the groundwork for how Sourcebooks partners with independent bookstores. She understands the individuality of each store, builds strong relationships with owners and frontline booksellers, and turns that knowledge into meaningful action. With Valerie in this role, we're better positioned than ever to support the work of indie booksellers and the readers they serve."

Pierce said, "We're at a defining moment for independent retail. Booksellers are expanding their reach, opening new stores, connecting more deeply with readers, and shaping what success looks like in our industry. I'm honored to lead this team and build on the powerful partnerships that have brought us here. I can't wait to see what we're going to accomplish together!"

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs has named Michelle Aielli as its executive director, effective July 1. Aielli has been serving as interim executive director since September 2024.

Michelle Aielli

The AWP board of directors voted unanimously to approve the appointment. Chair January Gill O'Neil said, "Michelle has shown outstanding leadership, skill, and commitment throughout her time as interim director and her service on the board of directors. I'm excited for the new path forward under her guidance."

Aielli has more than 25 years of experience in the book industry, most recently as v-p and publishing director of Hachette Books at Hachette Book Group. Previously, she served as director of publicity for Little, Brown, among other roles within Hachette Book Group and other publishing houses. 

Aielli commented: "It has been an honor to work as interim director alongside AWP's staff and board of directors, a small but mighty team committed to advancing the literary arts. As we navigate a rapidly shifting cultural, political, and technological landscape, I am dedicated to ensuring AWP remains a source of support and connection for writers, writing programs, and the broader literary community."

HarperCollins is acquiring the manga publishing operations in France and Germany of global anime company Crunchyroll. The transaction should close this year, subject to regulatory approval.

The publishing operations team will be led by Hideki Iyama-Desseigne, who will report to Chantal Restivo-Alessi, CEO of international foreign language publishing at HarperCollins, and day-to-day operations will be supported by HarperCollins France and Germany.

HarperCollins president and CEO Brian Murray said, "We are thrilled to expand our manga portfolio in Europe, building on our already successful Japanese business. As the only major western publisher operating in Japan, this acquisition strengthens our expertise and capabilities in this fast-growing category. This is a significant step toward broadening the HarperCollins manga program around the world, not only in Europe, but the English language markets as well."

Restivo-Alessi added, "We look forward to welcoming and investing in the French and German publishing teams and their business, and to enhancing our relationships with Japanese manga publishers."

Despite a challenging economy, the German book industry recorded positive results overall last year, with sales up 1.8% compared to 2023, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (the German book trade association) reported. Total sales in 2024 were €9.88 billion (about $11.5 billion). 

Compared to 2023, revenue from physical stores rose 0.6%, to €4.08 billion (about $4.8 billion), giving the retail book trade (excluding e-commerce) a 41.3% share of total industry sales. The online book trade, around half of which is attributable to the online efforts of bricks-and-mortar bookshops, rose 4.4%, to €2.51 billion (about $2.9 billion). The online book trade accounted for 25.4% of sales in the overall market in 2024.

Among other 2024 highlights:

• 57% of books sold were backlist titles, a share has grown in recent years (in 2014 it was 48%).
• E-book sales were unchanged at 6.1% in the consumer market.
• Audiobook sales rose 2.2% over 2023, but were up 49.6% compared to 2019.
• The number of people buying books declined in 2024 by 2%, except for consumers in the 16-19 age group (up 9.6%) and the 20-29 age bracket (up 7.7%).

For the first six months of 2025, sales remain "subdued," according to the Börsenverein, which noted that turnover in the central sales channels is down by 3.3%, with the exception of fiction, "which continues to perform strongly" with a 0.9% increase thus far.

The Börsenverein also noted that the book trade remains concerned about the precarious situation regarding reading literacy, inadequate attempts at regulation in the field of generative AI, and needed measures to reduce bureaucracy. 

Börsenverein chairwoman Karin Schmidt-Friderichs said the book market "is holding its own in tough times. From novels and nonfiction to books for children and teens or textbooks, the book industry provides reliable content and compelling narratives that offer orientation, context and perspective in an increasingly challenging and complex world."

Peter Kraus vom Cleff, managing director of the Börsenverein, observed that "the economic impact of global turmoil, from wars to crises, is also being felt in the book industry. Consumer confidence remains low and the tendency to save money is high. This is also reflected in the subdued half-year results for 2025. However, the traditionally strong second half of the year is still ahead of us."

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Applications are now open for the RISE Booksellers Exchange Program, through which selected participants spend three days in a bookshop abroad, gaining first-hand insight into the daily realities of bookselling in another country. Interested booksellers should check the Frequently Asked Questions on the RISE website for details about the eligibility criteria, financial support and selection process. The deadline for applications is August 20. Apply here. 

The RISE Booksellers Exchange Program also offers the opportunity to welcome a visiting bookseller into your store for a few days, "helping to foster international collaboration, exchange valuable know-how, and strengthen the European bookselling community. Hosts offer their time, insight, and everyday expertise--while gaining fresh perspectives and building lasting connections in return." 

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Banned Books Week U.K., which ran for a couple of years prior to the Covid pandemic before going on hiatus, is returning this fall (October 5-11). The Bookseller reported that the project, coordinated by Index on Censorship in partnership with the International Publishers Association, encourages bookshops, libraries, writers and readers to plan activities "in celebration of our right to read freely."

Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO of Index on Censorship, said, "Book bans are not just on the rise in the U.S., which has been well-documented. We have research showing they're on the rise here too, and that librarians and booksellers in the U.K. are increasingly under pressure.... For Banned Books Week 2025 we will therefore be looking at what is happening in the U.K. But we will place conversations in a broader context. What can we learn from the experiences of authors who have had their books challenged or banned around the world? What other threats do writers and readers face? What can we do to support a vibrant publishing industry?" --Robert Gray

Agate Publishing is partnering with Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications to publish nonfiction books by journalists. Under the imprint Medill Books, the partnership will launch with a pilot title that should appear in late 2026.

Agate founder and president Doug Seibold said, "I've published dozens of journalists during my career in book publishing, and before that I spent a decade working as a magazine editor and freelance writer myself. My hope is that this new imprint might become another sustainable channel for journalists to publish longform work of all kinds."

Medill dean Charles Whitaker said, "We are excited that our partnership with Agate will provide us with another important avenue to support journalism and journalists by seeking out and publishing ambitious nonfiction work in book form."

Agate has published book-length work by multiple Pulitzer Prize winners, including Nick Chiles (Justice While Black) and Leonard Pitts, Jr. (Forward from This Moment and Becoming Dad). A partnership with the Chicago Tribune has led to nearly 20 print titles and 80 brief e-books that feature many Tribune-related works as well as work by journalists at other newspapers and magazines in Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.

Journalists may submit proposals of reported nonfiction work of roughly 10,000-30,000 words to submissions@agatepublishing.com, with the subject line "Medill Books proposal."

An integral part of New York University's Summer Publishing Institute is visiting independent bookstores in New York City. This year, four students wrote about their impressions of bookstores they visited, which they kindly have shared with Shelf Awareness. On Wednesday, we published Mallory Stock's report on The Ripped Bodice. on Thursday we ran Alison Keiser's report on Greenlight Bookstore. And Friday featured Brianna Angeliz's report on The Strand. Today Suzanne Hutt reports on Book Culture.

Book Culture's Cody Madsen (back row, left) with NYU Summer Publishing Institute students. photos: Suzanne Hutt

Cody Madsen, v-p of operations at Book Culture, outlined the history and day-to-day experience of running an indie bookstore recently to NYU Summer Publishing Institute students.

Book Culture was founded in 1997, originally as Labyrinth Books, and houses both new and used books of all genres. The West 112th St. flagship store has a close relationship with Columbia University and the surrounding neighborhood; in fact, the first week of September is just as busy as the December holiday rush due to coursebook sales. The bookstore company is led by owner & president Chris Doeblin, v-p & head buyer Devon Dunn, and head sideline & gift buyer Susan Doeblin, who help provide a carefully curated selection of books and gifts that contains something for nearly everyone.

The story of Book Culture is a master class in taking risks. For instance, when beloved Morningside Bookstore, on the corner of West 114th St. and Broadway, was closing its doors in 2009, Chris recognized an opportunity to expand. Even though the two locations would be extremely close by, he saw it as a chance to create a different model for Book Culture, where the new space could focus on specific categories (like bestsellers, new releases, and a robust children's section at the Broadway location). That shift led to more locations, in Long Island City and Pittsford, N.Y. Each Book Culture store has a distinct identity while maintaining the same characteristic warmth.

A risk-taking approach also applies to Book Culture's events programming. Book Culture has a full calendar of 50 or more events each year, but they are also very intentional about the events they host. They want to ensure that programming serves the neighborhood and champions authors they love. Sometimes, this means going out on a limb to ask local celebrity authors to see if they'd be interested in doing an event, like R.L. Stine and Bill Nye (who said yes!).

Is working at a bookstore as dreamy as we like to think? Cody explained that it's not like Audrey Hepburn at the start of Funny Face, where she's staring wistfully out the window most of the day. It's a dynamic environment with a constant flurry of activity. Still, there's no lack of movie magic at Book Culture, for example, when a Hollywood star turns up in the second row at a community poetry reading. And the true magic, of course, is in the everyday interactions with fellow readers, helping them find the perfect next read. Current sought-after titles include The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong, Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood, Spent by Alison Bechdel, and I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman.

Staff recommendations also make a huge impact. Cody compared working in the store with tending a garden. "If we have someone on staff who really loves poetry, poetry sales will go up," he said. "If you pick up something and touch it and move it, the psychic energy of that will also encourage the customers to interact with it. So the space is very much a reflection of the booksellers that work here."

Cody's message for new indie booksellers is to cultivate your network, including people near you and around the country, and to get creative about growing your community. And if we may take a page from the Book Culture playbook, taking risks can make all the difference.

Suzanne Hutt (Northwestern '13) is a recent graduate of NYU's Summer Publishing Institute. She loves writing fiction, recording music, and working at her sister's bookstore, Bookish Notions in Media, Pa. Suzanne has lived in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan for 10 years and can often be found in Fort Tryon Park with her favorite combo: chai and a good book.

Bob Ditter, longtime sales rep and co-owner of Towne Center Books, Pleasanton, Calif., died on July 5 as a result of a heart attack.

Towne Center Books noted that "Bob was a long-time book person. He loved sharing stories and meeting buyers, booksellers, authors, and publishers during his 40+ years as a publisher's rep. Those experiences fuel many conversations at our bookstore to this day.

"He and his wife, Judy [Wheeler], bought Towne Center Books in 1998. Many know that Saturday was Bob and Judy's 'date night' at the store. They enjoyed spending time together talking about books with anyone who ventured into the store. Bob enjoyed discussing books with friends, family and customers, sharing favorite passages and recommending new and old titles. While sharing a book, he may have slipped a sports comment, fishing story or even a grandchild anecdote into the conversation.

"He would meet you as you walked in the door with a 'have you heard about this [insert book]' and then he would start telling his stories. If you needed a history book (or even if you didn't), you left the store a little more knowledgeable (and more likely than not with a book) after talking with Bob."

The store is putting together a special display of Bob's picks, which should be completed by tomorrow, Saturday, July 12. All are welcome to visit, share a memory, or add a comment to the store's journal.

Leah Jordan, co-owner and founder of Pearl's Books in Fayetteville, Ark., died on July 14.

Leah Jordan

Daniel Jordan, her husband and co-owner of Pearl's Books, wrote on social media that she "was the spark and driving force behind making this place come together. I have always been a little hesitant to jump into new things, but her energy, enthusiasm, and courage are infectious. She loved this store with her whole heart, and put so much love and care into everything about it: paint color, chalk signage, shelf talkers, hiring wonderful people, rugs, furniture and fixtures, it was all Leah. If there's something you love about Pearl's, you can thank Leah."

Jordan also thanked the Pearl's Books staff, writing: "I owe a huge thanks to the beautiful folks who work here who have kept this place going while Leah has been sick. Hallee, Darinda, and Amanda have been here from the start. Julia, Schuyler, Robin, Marinna, and Justin have been added to staff and I can’t imagine Pearl’s being the place it is without each of their influence."

"Pearl’s is a legacy that proves that Leah’s love for reading, community, and Fayetteville particularly will live on long after her physical body," Jordan continued. "I love you all so much."

Per 5NewsOnline, other Arkansas independent bookstores offered tribute to Leah Jordan. 

Dickson Street Bookshop, also in Fayetteville, wrote of Jordan: "Our book-loving community just suffered a huge loss. And our hearts are broken for Daniel and our sweet friends at Pearl's. Please support them whenever you can. May Leah's legacy live on for many, many years to come." 

"Our hearts are heavy with the loss of a true powerhouse in the Northwest Arkansas literary world," Bookish in Fort Smith, Ark., wrote. "Her passion built more than just a bookstore; it built a haven for readers. Our book community is better because of the work Leah did. To the Pearl’s Books family: as we mourn alongside you, we will celebrate the incredible life of Leah. We will be thinking of you during this difficult time."

A memorial service for Jordan will be held this afternoon at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Fayetteville. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to a preferred charity in Leah Jordan's name.

Andrea Gibson, "a master of spoken-word poetry who cultivated legions of admirers with intensely personal, often political works exploring gender, love and a personal four-year fight with terminal ovarian cancer," died July 14, the New York Times reported. They were 49. Gibson "was among the leading voices in a resurgence of spoken-word, or slam, poetry in the mid-2000s, centered in cafes and on college campuses around the country."

Andrea Gibson

They published seven books, primarily poetry, along with seven albums, all while touring. Despite chronic stage fright, Gibson performed shows as long as 90 minutes. From their poem "Ode to the Public Panic Attack": 

To step towards the terror.

Its promised jaw.

To scrape your boots on the welcome mat.

To tell yourself fear

Is the seat of fearlessness.

Even when you're falling through the ice that is never

Been weakness. That is the bravest thing I have ever done in my life.

The documentary film Come See Me in the Good Light (2025), directed by Ryan White, focused on Gibson and their wife, Megan Falley, during Gibson's struggle with cancer. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year and won the Festival Favorite Award.

"Poetry and art in general can be this amazing connective tool," Gibson told Westword in 2023. "It engenders empathy. And sometimes I can forget this, but adding beauty to the world is a thing unto itself. We were born astonished. We should never grow out of our astonishment."

Gibson's books include Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns (2008), The Madness Vase (2012), Pansy (2015), Take Me With You (2018), Lord of the Butterflies (2018), How Poetry Can Change Your Heart (with Megan Falley, 2019), and You Better Be Lightning (2021).

Recalling earlier developing their own gender and sexual identity, mostly in secret, Gibson wrote in Out magazine in 2017: "I had a solid idea of what I would lose if I came out and I knew it would be excruciating, but not more excruciating than losing myself. So after a long time of mastering how to leave the pronouns out of all my love poems--I finally started telling people about the softness of my love's face."

In 2021, Gibson received a diagnosis of ovarian cancer and began chemotherapy. In their 2023 poem "In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don't lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down," they wrote:

Jenny says when people ask if she's out of the woods,
she tells them she'll never be out of the woods,

says there is something lovely about the woods.
I know how to build a survival shelter

from fallen tree branches, packed mud,
and pulled moss. I could survive forever

on death alone. Wasn't it death that taught me 
to stop measuring my life span by length,

but by width? 

In 2023, Colorado Governor Jared Polis named Gibson the state's poet laureate. Colorado Public Radio noted that Gibson "wrote that they were initially worried about accepting the post because their health would limit their ability to do in-person events, and afraid they might not live through their two-year term. But they decided to take the role in part to open up possibilities for more chronically ill and disabled poets."

They observed: "I've been very public about my cancer journey, not because I want people to know that I'm mortal, but because I so badly want others to know that they are. Knowing that I could die any day saved my life. Understanding, really understanding the brevity of this existence, has given me more gratitude, awe, and joy than I thought would be possible for me in this lifetime. I wish that joy for everyone. (Minus the cancer.)."

John Martin, "an adventurous independent publisher who brought out the raucous work of the poet Charles Bukowski, as well as the writing of other offbeat literary rebels like Paul Bowles, John Fante and Wyndham Lewis," died June 23, the New York Times reported. He was 94.

Martin founded Black Sparrow Press in 1966 as "a shoestring operation that he ran out of his home for years" with the help of part-time assistants and his wife, Barbara Martin, who designed the books. The company became well-known, as John Martin "promoted, encouraged and printed the vast, uncompromisingly demotic and self-reflexive work of Bukowski, a West Coast cult figure who drew hundreds to his readings and whose books were reportedly among the most stolen from bookstores," the Times noted.

Martin launched Black Sparrow to publish Bukowski's work. As the manager of a large office supply store in Los Angeles, Martin had access to a printing press and published some of Bukowski's poetry, which he distributed to friends. He guaranteed Bukowski $100 a month if the author would quit his post office job and write full time for Black Sparrow. 

Among the books that followed were the novels Women (1978) and Pulp (1994), the story collection Hot Water Music (1983), and the poetry volume The Roominghouse Madrigals (1988). "The flood continued long after his death in 1994 at 73, guaranteed by the large volume of his unpublished work," the Times noted.

In the documentary film Bukowski: Born into This (2003), Martin said the legendary poet would be "as well thought of in 50 years as Walt Whitman is now.... He's the butt of every joke. He doesn't turn on people and make them look stupid. Bukowski is neither wise, smart nor cool. He's us."

While still working as an office supply store manager, Martin began collecting first editions of work by writers he admired. The collection helped launch Black Sparrow when he sold the books in 1965 to the University of California at Santa Barbara for $50,000. By 1969, he had quit his job, enlisted Bukowski as well as poets like Robert Creeley, and was working 80 hours a week out of his small Los Angeles apartment.

"He read a lot of different people in the beginning, and then it just grew," Barbara Martin said. "I sat at the dining room table and designed the books."

Black Sparrow also published early works by Joyce Carol Oates (nine novels by 1980), John Ashbery, and Ron Loewinsohn. Other books on Black Sparrow's list included Paul Bowles's Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977) and Collected Stories (1979). Martin republished the British writer and artist Wyndham Lewis's The Complete Wild Body (1982) and The Apes of God (1981). He also "revived the fortunes" of the 1930s Los Angeles novelist and screenwriter John Fante with the republication of his 1939 classic, Ask the Dust (1980), featuring a foreword by Bukowski.

When writer Richard Kostelanetz visited Martin in 1980 for an article for the New York Times Book Review, the publisher was living in a spacious villa in Santa Barbara. Black Sparrow, operating out of the pool house, was grossing $500,000 annually and releasing 15 new titles a year.

Martin sold Black Sparrow to HarperCollins in 2002. He also sold his backlist, his inventory of 96,000 books, and his contracts with living authors to Boston publisher David R. Godine for $1.

"He never published anyone because they would sell," Barbara Martin said. "He published them because he liked their work."

Fanny Howe, a poet "whose words mined her own complicated personal history, expressing pathos, and beauty in a life of upheavals," died July 8, the New York Times reported. She was 84. Howe's "heritage and her life story--one of contradiction and struggle as a scion of Boston Brahmins, a civil rights activist and the mother of biracial children--shaped a discursive verse style that veiled sharp edges and melancholy resolutions."

Howe published more than two dozen books of poetry and more than 20 works of fiction, as well as memoirs, essays, and children's books. She was also a professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Her many honors include being named a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry for Second Childhood; the Poetry Foundation's 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize; the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for Selected Poems; and a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize. 

Through her father, Harvard Law School professor, historian, and civil rights activist Mark De Wolfe Howe, "who spent his 1965 summer vacation in Mississippi defending other activists, she was a descendant of Josiah Quincy III (1772-1864), a mayor of Boston, congressman and president of Harvard, and of other famous Quincys," the Times noted. "Her mother was the Irish playwright, actress and novelist Mary Manning, friend of Samuel Beckett and founder of the Poets' Theater in Cambridge, Mass."

"Roots don't give up," Howe wrote in her poem "The Definitions":

Ghoulish are the ghosts
Of time past: ancestors
With our same names.

In a recent interview with the Paris Review, Howe described herself as a "a sort of permanent adolescent wanting to participate in a rebellion against grown-ups." She dropped out of Stanford University and later joined the Congress of Racial Equality. She married a Black writer from Montgomery, Ala., Carl Senna, who became an editor at Beacon Press in Boston. 

"The legacy of her activist father pushed her into political and social engagement--she fought for school integration, among other things--not calculated to ease a path back to Beacon Hill," the Times noted. 

Howe experienced desperate times as a single mother in the late 1970s, trying to provide for her three children with occasional part-time teaching jobs. She kept writing and publishing, however, during a period that her daughter, the writer Danzy Senna, recalled in an interview as "bohemian and peripatetic.... She was living in another state of being, constantly scribbling things on napkins."

Howe's first book of poems, Eggs, was published in 1970, followed by nine more by 1990, as well as eight books of fiction, including Holy Smoke (1979) and In the Middle of Nowhere (1984). Her poetry collections also include Manimal Woe (2021), Love and I (2019), The Needle's Eye (2016), Come and See (2011), On the Ground (2004), and Gone (2003). Senna said her mother had just completed another book of poems, to be published next year.

From Howe's poem "The Cenotaph":

I want to leave this place
unremembered.
The gas stove is leaking
and the door of the refrigerator
stained with rust.
The mugs are ugly
and there are only two forks.

Martin Cruz Smith, best known for the Arkady Renko series that started with Gorky Park, died on Saturday at age 82. As noted by his publisher Simon & Schuster, the New York Times called Smith "the master of the international thriller," the New Yorker wrote that he was "brilliant," and the Washington Post called the series "a work of art."

Martin Cruz Smith with his daughter Luisa Smith at NCIBA in 2016.

Smith's children--including Luisa Smith, editor-in-chief of Mysterious Press and Scarlet and former head buyer at Book Passage in Corte Madera and San Francisco, Calif.--made an announcement about their father's death, writing in part, "Our dad died peacefully late Friday night. We sat next to him, telling him how much we loved him, and in the last moments he let us know he heard us and loved us too. We already knew, in everything he had done in life he had let us know, but after Parkinson's had taken his voice, it felt like both a small miracle and a typical show of his ability to defy the odds that he could find a way to once again show his love.

"The world knew him best through Arkady Renko, the disillusioned Soviet investigator with a moral compass stubborn enough to function even in a blizzard of lies. First introduced in Gorky Park, Renko was not so much a hero as a survivor. Like dad, he mistrusted institutions, prized observation, used humor to expose hypocrisy, and believed that truth, though often buried, still mattered."

Early in his writing career, Smith wrote two westerns under the name Jake Logan; three Nick Carter spy novels; six Inquisitor series novels using the name Simon Quinn, about a spy agent employed by the Vatican; and a science fiction novel, The Indians Won, a Native American speculative novel. Several of his novels featured Roman Grey, a gypsy art dealer in New York City, and one, Canto for a Gypsy, was nominated for an Edgar. Nightwing, a 1977 thriller with a Native American setting, was adapted into a movie directed by Arthur Hiller.

As his children wrote, "Before Gorky Park, there were westerns and pulp thrillers, written under various pseudonyms, a cloak of anonymity that let him hone his craft without the burden of expectation. But once Renko entered the scene, everything changed. Gorky Park was both a commercial and critical success: a crime novel that slipped through the Iron Curtain and returned with secrets. A single book that changed our lives, moving us from New York to California, and allowing him to take greater chances with his writing."

Gorky Park was published in 1981 and was an immediate bestseller, staying on the lists for many months. It won a Gold Dagger from the Crime Writers' Association and was made into a 1983 movie directed by Michael Apted and starring William Hurt and Lee Marvin.

The first three Renko books were set during the Soviet period, and lauded for their portrayal of life in that era from the viewpoint of a police investigator who understands the limitations of his position but nonetheless investigates and follows all leads, regardless of vast political sensitivities. The eight following books loosely followed events in Russia, including the rise of Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine.

"What followed were a dozen more novels that never bowed to convention," his children added. "His sentences were sparse but musical. He distrusted glamour, preferred questions over answers, and could describe a man's character through a single gesture, the way a cigarette burned, the way a lie paused."

After the publication of Gorky Park, Smith also wrote several novels distinct from the Renko books, including Stallion Gate, Rose, December 6, and The Girl from Venice.

Cruz received the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award, as well as two Hammett Prizes, for Rose and Havana Bay, from the International Association of Crime Writers, North American Branch.

Hotel Ukraine, the 11th and "final Arkady Renko novel," was published last Tuesday by Simon & Schuster, which noted: "For the last three decades, Smith lived with Parkinson's, and he innovatively incorporated the condition into the more recent Renko novels, with his protagonist facing it as courageously as the author himself. As Smith writes of Renko in Hotel Ukraine: 'He could stay at home, do nothing, and surrender as his symptoms got worse... He was defined by who he was and what he could still do. Put that way, it wasn't even a choice.' "

"The same was true of Martin Cruz Smith," Sean Manning, v-p and publisher of S&S and Smith's editor, observed. "He was a writer, and he did it beautifully and valiantly until the very end."

Smith's wife, Emily Smith, called him "a beloved husband, father and grandfather; an adventurer, traveler and researcher; and a man of deep humanity, humor and insight. He felt that he was the luckiest man alive."

His children wrote, "His death leaves a silence, but not a void... [He] will live in our hearts forever."

On Wednesday, Shelf Awareness sent our new Kids & YA Pre-Order E-Blast to more than 200,000 of the country's best book readers. The e-blast went to 228,552 customers of 53 participating independent bookstores.

The mailing features four upcoming titles selected by Shelf Awareness editors and three advertised titles, one of which is a sponsored feature. Customers can buy these books via "pre-order" buttons that lead directly to the purchase page for the title on each sending store's website. A key feature is that bookstore partners can easily change title selections to best reflect the tastes of their customers and can customize the mailing with links, images, and promotional copy of their own.

The pre-order e-blasts are sent the second Wednesday of each month; the next will go out on August 13. This is a free service for indies. Stores interested in learning more can visit our program registration page or contact our partner program team via e-mail.

Ad spots are also available in the Kids & YA Pre-Order E-Blast. For more information contact sales@shelf-awareness.com for details.

For a sample of the July Kids & YA Pre-Order E-Blast, see this one from Breakwater Books, Guilford, Conn.

The titles highlighted in the pre-order e-blast were:

The Book of Dust: The Rose Field by Phillip Pullman (Knopf Books for Young Readers)
Scarlet Morning by ND Stevenson (Quill Tree Books)
Aggie and the Ghost by Matthew Forsythe (Paula Wiseman)
The Executioners Three by Susan Dennard (Tor Teen)

Birdhouse Books and Gifts in Austin, Tex., hosted a sold-out Scholastic Summer of Baby-sitters Club event with graphic novelist Gabriela Epstein (Claudia and the New Girl; Good-Bye Stacey, Good-Bye). Epstein gave a presentation full of stories about adapting Ann M. Martin's novels, and led a live drawing demo where she taught the kids how to draw Claudia. The kids also made friendship bracelets and had a dance party, and Birdhouse Books raffled off two Summer of BSC beach towels.

More than 100 people came to New York City's The Strand for an event featuring Claire Jia (r.), author of the debut novel Wanting (Tin House/Zando), in conversation with writer Jenevieve Ting.

Members of the Minnesota literary community welcomed Cindy Burnett, host of the Thoughts from a Page podcast, to the Twin Cities.

Pictured: (l.-r., front) Kara Thom, Ellie Temple, Tasha Coryell, Lorna Landvik, Sarah Stonich, Sheila O'Connor, Tony Halleen, Priscilla Paton, Nicole Kronzer, Ashley Shelby; (middle) Pamela Klinger-Horn, Shannon Olson, Anika Fajardo, Katie Terhune; (back row) Joan Klinger-Horn, Molly Beth Griffin, Laurie Sigel, Trisha Speed Saskin, Emma Nadler, Curtis Sittenfeld, Lin Salisbury, Rima Parikh, Cindy Burnett, Loretta Elsworth, Angie Ross, Kristi Belcamino, Holly Schellbach, Judity Kisner, Ann Woodbeck, Nigar Alum, Erin O. White, Julie Schumacher, and Mary Webber O'Malley

Michael Ansara (center) signs his memoir, The Hard Work of Hope (Cornell University Press), at the launch event at Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass. He was joined in conversation by Archon Fung (left), professor at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance.

Posted on Facebook by Tome Books & Novelteas, Cincinnati, Ohio: "A bookstore is more than just a place to buy books, it's a space to slow down, connect, and feel inspired by the creations of others. Come by today to grab a new read, hang out with a friend, or just sit and enjoy the quiet magic of being surrounded by stories."

"This blind date is kinda awkward," Talking Animals Books, Grapevine, Tex., noted in sharing a video on Instagram: "They're both a little shy but ended up really hitting it off after this. I guess this is a sign to get a Blind Date With A Book from us, who knows, maybe it'll be your soulmate!"

The two most popular books in June at Reading Group Choices were The Witchstone by Henry H. Neff (Blackstone Publishing) and The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez (Ecco).

"We had a wedding! Mike and Nancy got married," Byrd's Books in Bethel Conn., noted, adding that store owner Alice Hutchinson, a Justice of the Peace, conducted the ceremony.

Pittsburgh prep. A group from the ABA visited Pittsburgh, Pa., recently, preparing for the next Winter Institute, which will be held in the Steel City February 23-26 next year. See pictures here. Booksellers can still apply for a Winter Institute 2026 scholarship but need to do so by July 24.

Marketing calendars for the fourth quarter listing holidays and observances and suggestions for booksellers on how to tie into them are now available. Included is everything from National Cookbook Month to Picture Book Month to longtime gems like Small Business Saturday/Indies First.

Booksellers have until August 7 to order the 2025 Best Books for Young Readers catalogs.

"Are you having a good day?" Moonstruck Market bookshop in Melbourne, Fla., asked this question on the shop's sidewalk chalkboard, followed by two possible answers and one solution: "Treat yourself to a new book!"

"Fact: Books make you 20 degrees cooler. Yes, this is your sign to come buy a new book or... 5." That was the sidewalk chalkboard message in front of Flint Hills Books, Council Grove, Kan., which noted: "So lucky to have a talented young artist join the bookstore’s team! Stop in and see our new releases! Summertime is reading season!"

Independent Publishers Group is adding five publishers to its sales and distribution programs:

One Peace Books, Long Island City, N.Y., founded by Japanese publisher Sanctuary Books in 2006 to translate and publish Japanese entertainment and literature, including manga, light novels and literary works, for a North American audience. Its major titles include The Rising of the Shield Hero, which has sold more than a million copies in the U.S. and more than 11 million copies worldwide, and I Hear the Sunspot, which was nominated a Best Graphic Novel for Teens by the American Library Association. (Worldwide print distribution, beginning January 1, 2026.)

Apex Book Company, which publishes dark fiction from a diverse collection of talented writers. Apex says its publishing program "can be summarized in four words: Strange, Surreal, Shocking, and Beautiful. They produce books that will open your mind to worlds beyond ours, expand your way of thinking, and take you on a journey." (Distribution beginning August 1.)

SHP, which publishes "genre-bending stories combining horror, science fiction, adventure, and reimagined classics into daring, intelligent and unique comic books and graphic novels." Founded by Shawn Hainsworth in 2021, SHP features the work of many up and coming artists. (Worldwide distribution, beginning August 1.)

Sam and Mi, which publishes books for children up to age eight that have themes of empathy, problem solving, and communication. When introduced at an early age, these skills can contribute to a happy and successful life, the company believes. Its books are based on research and trials with children, and the stories are built through playful text and supported by beautiful illustrations. (Worldwide distribution, beginning August 1.)

Measure Publishing, a new publisher that hold the rights to Unfailing Hope by Pope Francis, his final published work. The book has already been released in Italy, Spain, and Latin America, and is now in the final stages of preparation for the English-language market. (Distribution beginning August 1.)

"Welcome to Copperfish Books. We'll be your entertainment today," Copperfish Books, Punta Gorda, Fla., posted on Instagram along with a video: "POV: When a customer walks in while we're filming bookish content."

"We lose ourselves in books (and we find ourselves there, too)." That was the sidewalk chalkboard message in front of Anthology for Books, Geneseo, Ill., which noted: "Get lost in a good book. Chances are, you'll find yourself there, too!"

"Coal, our new bookstore cat, is waiting for the UPS guy. Yes, From My Shelf Books & Gifts get new books in five days a week," From My Shelf Books & Gifts, Wellsboro, Pa., posted on Facebook.

Simon & Schuster will distribute the trade publications of Dynamite Entertainment in the book market worldwide. Dynamite Entertainment's distribution in the "direct market" of specialty comic retailers will continue to be handled by Lunar Distribution, Universal Distribution, and Diamond UK. A longtime comic book publisher, Dynamite is expanding its line with more prose, children's, and instructional books.

Nick Barrucci, CEO and publisher of Dynamite, said, "We've recently celebrated 20 years of publishing at Dynamite, and this industry poses unique challenges at times, though such moments also can serve as great opportunities. Partnering with Simon & Schuster is exciting and key for our business, to make sure that our books continue to get into as many hands as possible. With our deep range of titles, including hits like The Boys, Red Sonja, Vampirella, Project Superpowers, James Bond, our ever-expanding partnerships with both Disney (DuckTales, Lilo & Stitch, Disney Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas) and Warner Bros. Discovery (ThunderCats, The Wizard of Oz, The Powerpuff Girls), and many others. The timing could not be better as we are expanding our line with children's titles such as Nickelodeon's PAW Patrol, Blue's Clues & You!, USPS' Mr. ZIP and more, with high profile instructional books to be announced. We expect the strength of our new releases and backlist to continue to grow in the marketplace, and allying with Simon & Schuster will help both parties, as well as retailers and the wider publishing industry."

Michael Perlman, senior v-p, Simon & Schuster Publishing Services, said, "Dynamite Entertainment is one of the most dynamic publishers of comics and graphic novels, and we are thrilled to welcome them to our family of client publishers. We look forward to working with them to expand the reach of their tremendous list into the worldwide book market."

Simon & Schuster will handle sales and distribution for Penzler Publishers in the U.S. and Canada, effective February 1, 2026.

Penzler Publishers was founded in 2018 by two-time Edgar Award-winner Otto Penzler,  founder of New York City's Mysterious Bookshop. Penzler Publishers includes four mystery imprints: the Mysterious Press (which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year), Scarlet (featuring domestic suspense), American Mystery Classics (reissuing Golden Age detective fiction), and Crime Ink (true crime).

Current Penzler Publishers authors include Lee Child, Charles Todd, Amy Bloom, Andrew Klavan, Joyce Carol Oates, Nicholas Meyer, Thomas Perry, and Charles Cumming.

Posted by Skylark Bookshop, Columbia, Mo.: "You may have been noticing some washi tape marking select titles! This is our new way of showcasing banned, lgbtqia+, and spicy books!!"

"Cool off with iced coffee and a book," the Book & Cover bookstore, Chattanooga, Tenn., recommended on the shop's sidewalk chalkboard, adding in an Instagram post: "We’ve heard that reading a book set in a cold climate brings your body temperature down! We’ve also heard submerging your entire body in ice works. Stop in and see if an iced coffee helps!"

At Ingram Publisher Services:

Devyn Nance has been promoted to senior manager of digital marketing.

Giuliana Caranante is joining the company as director of marketing and e-commerce. She was most recently director of marketing and publicity at Quarto and before that held various marketing leadership roles at Hachette Book Group.

Shannon Droge has been promoted to v-p, publishing, creative, and digital operations at HarperCollins Christian Publishing. She began her publishing career at Zondervan in 1998 and has held a variety of roles at HarperCollins Christian Publishing, starting in sales with ministry accounts, then publishing operations. She was named senior director of publishing operations in 2022, when she began overseeing content design.

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At the Penguin Random House Christian Publishing Group:

Olivia Peitsch is joining the marketing team as assistant director of marketing, effective July 14. She has 12 years of experience in Christian publishing and was formerly marketing manager at Baker Publishing Group.

Emily Loper has joined the creative services department as marketing designer, effective July 14. Loper was most recently at Lifeway Christian Resources, where she developed a wide variety of marketing materials in support of Lifeway and B&H Books. Previously, Loper worked at Colorado Christian University as a graphic designer.

Next Page Books in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is featured in Stephen King's new novel, Never Flinch, published May 27 by Simon & Schuster.

Per CBS2Iowa, a customer went into Next Page Books to let the staff know that on page 205 of Never Flinch, the store supplies a driver and car for one of the characters.

"I would love to have a driver," wrote store owner Bart Carithers on Facebook. "But I'm afraid that's beyond my means. In another life. As for appearing in King's latest, that's pretty phenomenal."

Bella Gibb has been hired as a publicity and marketing assistant at Page One Media. Most recently she was the director of TEDxNorthwesternU and the production assistant for artists Eve Sussman and Simon Lee.

Shina Patel has been promoted to senior marketing manager at Putnam Books.

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Kayah Hodge has joined Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing as digital marketing associate. She was most recently a marketing assistant at Macmillan.

Wayward Girls by Susan Wiggs (Morrow).

CeeCee: Underground Railroad Cinderella by Shana Keller, illustrated by Laura Freeman (Charlesbridge).

The Worst Day: A Plane Crash, A Train Wreck, and Remarkable Acts of Heroism in Washington, D.C. by Bruce Goldfarb (Steerforth Press).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Aisling Rawle, author of The Compound (Random House, $29, 9780593977279), a GMA Book Club pick.

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

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Zarna Garg, author of This American Woman: A One-in-a-Billion Memoir (Ballantine, $30, 9780593975022).

Today: Sharon Malone, author of Grown Woman Talk: Your Guide to Getting and Staying Healthy (Crown, $30, 9780593593868).

Tomorrow:
The View: Zarna Garg, author of This American Woman: A One-in-a-Billion Memoir (Ballantine, $30, 9780593975022).

Today:
All Things Considered: Tim Weiner, author of The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century (Mariner Books, $35, 9780063270183).

Fresh Air: Stacey Abrams, author of Coded Justice: A Thriller (Doubleday, $30, 9780385548342).

Tomorrow:
Today: Meredith Lavender and Kendall Shores, authors of Happy Wife (Bantam, $30, 9780593974377).

Jimmy Kimmel Live: Jeremy Renner, author of My Next Breath: A Memoir (Flatiron, $29.99, 9781250383532).

Today:
Good Morning America: James Patterson and Vicky Ward, authors of The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy (Little, Brown, $32.50, 9780316572859).

CBS Mornings: Daniel Silva, author of An Inside Job: A Novel (Harper, $32, 9780063384217).

Fresh Air: Calvin Duncan, co-author of The Jailhouse Lawyer (Penguin Press, $32, 9780593834305).

Sherri Shepherd Show repeat: Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings, author of You Deserve to Be Rich: Master the Inner Game of Wealth and Claim Your Future (Crown Currency, $30, 9780593728192).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: J. Randy Taraborrelli, author of JFK: Public, Private, Secret (St. Martin's Press, $35, 9781250346384).

Drew Barrymore Show repeat: Kate McKinnon, author of The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, $17.99, 9780316554732).

Today:
Fresh Air: Danzy Senna, author of Colored Television: A Novel (Riverhead, $18, 9780593544389).

Screenwriter Arash Amel (A Private War, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare) will adapt Rebecca Yarros's 2021 romance novel The Things We Leave Unfinished, which Lionsgate has optioned, into a film, Deadline reported. Todd Lieberman will produce through his company Hidden Pictures.

"I am so thrilled to work with this incredible team at Lionsgate and Hidden Pictures to adapt The Things We Leave Unfinished for the big screen!" Yarros said. "This is my favorite book that I've written and it's a very special story to me, so I couldn't be more excited to see it come to life in Arash Amel's capable hands." 

Amel commented: "From the moment I read The Things We Leave Unfinished, I was swept away by its epic romance, cinematic scope, and emotional depth. Rebecca Yarros has created something truly special, and from our very first meeting, it was clear we connected over a shared vision. Teaming up with Todd Lieberman, who is second to none in guiding heartfelt and meaningful stories for the big screen, has been a natural creative alignment, and in Lionsgate we've found the ideal home for a tale of love and heroism on this scale. I can't wait to bring this sweeping love story to life for audiences around the world."

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 this weekend from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's website.

Saturday, July 19
4 p.m. Claire Hoffman, author of Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $32, 9780374601713).

Sunday, July 20
8 a.m. Isabel Allende, author of My Name Is Emilia del Valle: A Novel (Ballantine, $30, 9780593975091). (Re-airs Sunday at 8 p.m.)

9:05 a.m. Agustín Fuentes, author of Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary (‎Princeton University Press, $24.95, 9780691249414), at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass. (Re-airs Sunday at 9:05 p.m.)

10:18 a.m. John Tamny, author of Deficit Delusion: Why Everything Left, Right, and Supply-Side Tells You About the National Debt Is Wrong (Regnery, $32.99, 9781510784857).

2 p.m. Paul Hawken, author of Carbon: The Book of Life (‎Viking, $28, 9780525427445).

3:15 p.m. Quinn Slobodian, author of Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Zone Books, $29.95, 9781890951917), at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass.

7:35 p.m. Martin Dugard, author of Taking Midway: Naval Warfare, Secret Codes, and the Battle that Turned the Tide of World War II (‎Dutton, $32, 9780593473245).

Ariana Grande (Wicked) and Josh Gad (Spaceballs sequel) have been cast in voice roles for the new animated feature Oh, the Places You'll Go!, based on Dr. Seuss's classic children's book, Deadline reported. The project is from Warner Bros. Pictures Animation, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, and Bad Robot.

Directed by Jon M. Chu and co-director Jill Culton, the movie is scheduled for release in IMAX on March 17, 2028. Rob Lieber adapted the book, with Bad Robot's J.J. Abrams and Gregg Taylor producing. Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (La La Land) are creating original songs.

Eva Longoria will direct Xochitl Gonzalez's film adaptation of her own novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, for Searchlight Pictures, Deadline reported Longoria will also produce through her company, Hyphenate Media Group, with Cris Abrego, along with Jada Miranda. Longoria and Searchlight previously teamed on the 2023 film Flamin' Hot, which was her feature directorial debut. 

Gonzalez's bestselling debut novel, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), became a bestseller and was ordered to pilot by Hulu, with Gonzalez adapting. 

Longoria's recent work also includes Eva Longoria: Searching for Spain, an eight-part CNN Original series chronicling her immersive gastronomic journey across the country and a follow-up to her Searching for Mexico. She will expand the "Searching For" franchise with Searching for France, which is currently in production; and is also directing the upcoming Netflix comedy The Fifth Wheel, written by Paula Pell, with Gloria Sanchez producing.

Starz has released a trailer for Outlander: Blood of My Blood, a historical romance TV series that serves as a prequel to Outlander (2014–present), the television series based on Diana Gabaldon's novels. The new project premieres August 8 and will air weekly on Fridays.

Outlander: Blood of My Blood's logline: "After 11 years of epic romance on the groundbreaking series Outlander, the timeless tale continues--or rather begins--on the eve of an earlier Jacobite rebellion... [T]he series explores the lives and relationships of two couples as they fight against all odds to be together."

The cast includes Julia Moriston (Hermione Corfield) and Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine), the parents of Outlander's Claire Randall; Ellen MacKenzie (Harriet Slater) and Brian Fraser (Jamie Roy), parents of Jamie Fraser. Also starring are Tony Curran as Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat; Séamus McLean Ross as Colum MacKenzie; Sam Retford as Dougal MacKenzie; Rory Alexander as Murtagh Fitzgibbons Fraser; and Conor MacNeill as Ned Gowan.  

Matthew B. Roberts is the showrunner and executive producer, with Ronald D. Moore, Maril Davis and Jim Kohlberg also serving as exec producers. Outlander: Blood of My Blood is produced by Sony Pictures Television.

Actress Greta Lee (Past Lives, Russian Doll) will make her film directorial debut at Searchlight with The Eyes Are the Best Part, based on Monika Kim's bestselling novel. Lee is writing the script, with Matt Jackson and Joanna Lee producing through Jackson Pictures, Lulu Wang through Local Time and Dani Melia. Kim will exec produce.

Daniel Yu, senior v-p of production, and creative executive Taylor Friedman will be overseeing the project for Searchlight Pictures, reporting to co-heads of production and development DanTram Nguyen and Katie Goodson-Thomas. 

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 this weekend from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's website.

Saturday, July 12
1 p.m. Matthew Restall, author of The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus (W.W. Norton, $35, 9781324086932). (Re-airs Saturday at 1 a.m.)

Sunday, July 13
8 a.m. Joseph Torigian, author of The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (Stanford University Press, $50, 9781503634756). (Re-airs Sunday at 8 p.m.)

4:35 p.m. Chile Eboe-Osuji, author of End of Immunity: Holding World Leaders Accountable for Aggression, Genocide, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity (‎Prometheus, $34.95, 9781633889903). 

5:35 p.m. Paul Rice, author of Every Purchase Matters: How Fair Trade Farmers, Companies, and Consumers Are Changing the World (PublicAffairs, $30, 9781541704039).

6:45 p.m. Patrick McGee, author of Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company (Scribner, $32, 9781668053379).

Ursula Krechel has won the €50,000 (about $58,000) Georg Büchner Prize, awarded annually by the German Academy for Language and Literature to authors "writing in the German language whose work is considered especially meritorious and who have made a significant contribution to contemporary German culture."

The jury said that with her poems, plays, radio dramas, novels, and essays, Krechel "counters the devastation of German history and the rigidity of the present with the power of her literature."

One of Germany's most prestigious literary awards, the prize is named in honor of the author of the influential German play, Woyzeck.

Miriam Toews, author of nine novels and a memoir this fall, was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in a recent announcement by Governor General Mary Simon. The Order of Canada recognizes people across all sectors of society who have made extraordinary and sustained contributions to the country, Quill & Quire noted.

Toews was recognized as "a pre-eminent writer whose novels explore human tragedy and comedy in one fell swoop. Her unique ability to portray very human stories of overcoming adversity and finding meaning is a gift to her readers, and a source of inspiration to her adoring students and fans."

Among those named a Member of the Order of Canada were children's book authors and illustrators Élise Gravel, who "has published some 50 picture books internationally that have been translated into over a dozen languages," and Marianne Dubuc, who "has published internationally and seen her works translated into over 30 languages." 

Also honored as a Member was former Parliamentary Poet Laureate Louise Bernice Halfe, also known by her Cree name, Sky Dancer, who "advocates language learning and preservation, and her thought-provoking work articulates, in both Cree and English, the history and experiences of Indigenous peoples."

Among the other members of the order named were social documentary photographer Vincenzo Pietropaolo, whose work has been collected in several books; cartoonist Michel Rabagliati, best known for his books based on the character Paul; Lorraine Greaves, director general of the B.C. Centre of Excellence for Women's Health and author of books on women's health; and museologist and editor Robert R. Janes, author of books on museology.

Finalists have been selected for the $50,000 2025 George Washington Prize, which honors "the year's most outstanding works on America's founding era, particularly those that deepen public understanding of early American history" and is sponsored by George Washington's Mount Vernon, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Washington College. The finalists will discuss their books at an event at George Washington's Mount Vernon on August 12, and the winner will be announced at a gala dinner in New York City on October 8.

The finalists:

Jane E. Calvert, for Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson (Oxford University Press)
Francis D. Cogliano, for A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson, and the American Republic (Harvard University Press)
Michael D. Hattem, for The Memory of '76: The Revolution in American History (Yale University Press)
Tyson Reeder, for Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison's America (Oxford University Press)
Cara Rogers Stevens, for Thomas Jefferson and the Fight against Slavery (University Press of Kansas)

Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library, said, "The finalists are the best of rigorous and thoughtful history, written with delightful prose, compelling storytelling, and an eye to why history matters today. These books give us a better understanding of the founding era and our current moment, as only the best history can do."

James Basker, president and CEO of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, said, "These insightful and thought-provoking works highlight the complexities of America's founding and the struggles of its key figures. From John Dickinson's foundational role in the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson's contradictory stance on slavery, each book offers a fresh, nuanced perspective on the moral, political, and social challenges that shaped the early republic."

Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold director of the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College, said, "In the two decades since the first George Washington Prize was conferred in 2005, the award has honored an extraordinary range of works that shed new light on previously neglected histories. The 2025 roster of nominees shows that we are still experiencing a golden age of original scholarship on our nation's founding era."

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Margaret McDonald and her editors, Alice Swan and Ama Badu, won the 2025 Branford Boase Award for Glasgow Boys. The award honors the author and editor(s) of a debut novel for young people. The author gets £1,000 (about $1,340) for the win, and she and the editors receive engraved trophies.

Chair of judges Julia Eccleshare, co-founder of the award, called the book "a deeply moving story shaped by the struggles against class and poverty.... Despite all, Margaret McDonald's characters are full of hope and the story is refreshingly strong and bold, too."

McDonald said, "Alice and Ama treated Banjo and Finlay as I do myself, which is as real people. I worked on every single aspect of Glasgow Boys with Alice and Ama, and it wouldn't exist as it does today without them, truly. Glasgow Boys is a piece of my soul and to have it recognized in this way is unbelievably special, but also to have my incredible editors Alice and Ama recognized for the magnificent work they did, taking such care of Banjo and Finlay, is more than half of the joy."

Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, July 22:

Arcana Academy by Elise Kova (Del Rey, $32.99, 9780593726341) is the first entry in a new romantasy series.

The List by Steve Berry (Grand Central, $29, 9781538770870) is a thriller set in a small Georgia town owned by a malicious paper mill company.

The Last Wizards' Ball by Charlaine Harris (S&S/Saga Press, $27.99, 9781668038123) is the sixth and final installment in the Gunnie Rose fantasy series.

Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar: A Novel by Katie Yee (S&S/Summit Books, $26.99, 9781668084212) follows a woman who finds out her husband is cheating and she has cancer.

Not Quite Dead Yet: A Novel by Holly Jackson (Bantam, $28, 9780593977057) is a thriller about a woman who has a week to discover the perpetrator of her imminently fatal head injury.

Recess by Lane Smith (Abrams, $19.99, 9781419776892) is a picture book with the aim of creating high energy, extremely entertaining read-alouds.

Schoolbot 9000: A Graphic Novel by Sam Hepburn (Dial, $14.99, 9780593699423) is a middle-grade graphic novel in which all the teachers at one school have been replaced with robots.

Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource by Sam Bloch (Random House, $32, 9780593242766) covers the necessity of shade in urban planning.

The Boys in the Light: An Extraordinary World War II Story of Survival, Faith, and Brotherhood by Nina Willner (Dutton, $35, 9780593471272) chronicles a meeting between American soldiers and Holocaust survivors during World War II.

Sharing in the Groove: The Untold Story of the '90s Jam Band Explosion and the Scene That Followed by Mike Ayers (St. Martin's Press, $31, 9781250287458) is an oral history of bands like Phish, Dave Matthews, Blues Traveler, and others.

The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne by Chris Sweeney (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, $30, 9781668025840) is a biography of the world's first forensic ornithologist.

Paperbacks:
Chasing Shelter (Sparrow Falls Book 5) by Catherine Cowles (Sourcebooks Casablanca, $18.99, 9781464241635).

The Sandy Page Bookshop: A Novel by Hannah McKinnon (Atria/Emily Bestler, $18.99, 9781668025215).

The Stone Door by Leonora Carrington (NYRB Classics, $15.95, 9781681378947).

The Red Letter by Daniel G. Miller (Poisoned Pen Press, $17.99, 9781464246395).

Semifinalists have been selected for the $10,000 Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award, which honors "excellence in thoroughbred sports literature published in 2024." Three finalists will be named this summer, and the winner announced this fall. The semifinalists:

A Beggar's Ride by John Perrotta
Dark Horses: A Memoir of Redemption by Arthur B. Hancock III
The History of the Kentucky Derby in 75 Objects by the Kentucky Derby Museum and Jessica K. Whitehead 
Jockey Queen: Lillian Jenkinson Holder, Horse Racing's Fearless Lady by Roger Peach
Letters From Country Life: Adolphe Pons, Man o' War, and the Founding of Maryland's Oldest Thoroughbred Farm by Josh Pons
What Horses Do After Racing: The Story of Good Carma by Jay Privman

Dobby Gibson has won the 2025 Four Quartets Prize for his poem "Hold Everything" from the collection Hold Everything (Graywolf Press). Sponsored by the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, the prize celebrates the multipart poem and is awarded for a unified and complete sequence of poems published in the U.S. in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book.

Judges also selected CAConrad, for Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books), and Morgan Võ, for "To Market" from The Selkie (The Song Cave) as finalists.

Gibson receives $20,000, and each finalist receives $1,000.

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As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us by Sarah Hurwitz (HarperOne) has been selected as the Summer 2025 Natan Notable Book, sponsored by Natan and the Jewish Book Council and highlighting nonfiction books that "promise to catalyze conversations aligned with the themes of Natan's grantmaking: reinventing Jewish life and community for the twenty-first century, shifting notions of individual and collective Jewish identity, the history and future of Israel, understanding and confronting contemporary forms of antisemitism, and the evolving relationship between Israel and world Jewry." The author receives $5,000 and promotional support.

photo: Yvonne Wong Photography

Susan Wiggs has been telling stories ever since she was old enough to talk, scribbling on paper while dictating dramatic narratives to her parents and siblings. She still scribbles on paper, writing each book in longhand, but eventually, the scribbles become novels that blend heart, history, and humanity with vivid settings and unforgettable characters who navigate love, loss, and the resilience of the human spirit. She's the author of more than 50 novels; Wayward Girls (Morrow, July 15, 2025) is a life-affirming novel based on a true story of six girls in a Catholic reform school in 1960s Buffalo, N.Y.

Handsell readers your book in about 25 words:

A wrenching but life-affirming novel based on a true story of when six girls from a Catholic reform school in 1960s Buffalo reunite decades later to seek justice.

On your nightstand now:

The new REI catalog, a Seabourn cruise brochure, a jar of Kanberra hand lotion, and an overflowing e-reader. Also, The Girls of Good Fortune by Kristina McMorris. It's brand new, and heartbreakingly wonderful--a harrowing but hopeful survival story of a half-Chinese woman who awakens in Portland's notorious Shanghai Tunnels, drugged and about to be shipped off as forced labor.

Favorite book when you were a child:

You Were Princess Last Time by Laura Fisher. Susie, nine years old and a tomboy, is taunted when she cuts off her long, beautiful braids. It struck fear into my heart, since I was a tomboy with long, beautiful braids.

Your top five authors:

Octavia Butler. Kindred was assigned reading in school, and I ended up devouring everything I could get my hands on for her unique takes on power, survival, race, and gender.

Jodi Picoult. She has a remarkable ability to capture authentic teenage voices without relying on stereotypes. She excels at portraying the intense emotional landscape of adolescence--social pressures, bullying, first love, parental conflicts, academic stress, and power dynamics. And she's fearless about tackling controversial topics.

Diane Ackerman. Her narrative nonfiction takes an interdisciplinary approach, no matter the topic. Her sensuous, deep curiosity and personal observations make her eminently readable, regardless of the topic.

E.B. White. A writer's writer who writes with clarity and simplicity, precision of language, gentle humor, and emotional depth.

Alice Walker. The sheer, stunning power of her prose knocked me over the first time I read her, and it still does. When I finish an Alice book, I often flip back to the beginning and read it all over again.

Book you've faked reading:

Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. When it became a global phenomenon, I tried it, because I wanted to participate in conversations about the book. I ended up letting fans of the book fill me in on what I'd missed.

Book you're an evangelist for:

The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne is a classic saga that spans decades. It will make you laugh out loud. It will break your heart and piss you off as it explores homosexuality in Ireland, the influence of the Catholic Church, and the AIDS crisis. Ultimately, it will introduce you to Cyril, one of the most beloved characters you'll ever meet.

Book you've bought for the cover:

A 1970s-era paperback of The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, published before the movie came out. I bought it with my allowance at Shakespeare & Co. bookshop in Paris, where we lived, and I couldn't stop staring at those tough, brooding boys on the cover.

Book you hid from your parents:

None. Not a single one. My mom was a reader for the library acquisitions team, and she would often give us challenging books to read and report on, never worrying that we'd be harmed by a book. When I was nine or 10, she gave me a book which depicted two boys kissing, and when I asked her about it, she just said, "Oh. Must be a typo." And that was it. I figured it out on my own.

Book that changed your life:

The Diary of Anne Frank. I was 13 when I read it, and it showed me how one writer's authentic words can touch millions. I was already a writer, but that was the book that made me resolve to make writing my life.

Favorite line from a book:

" 'Where's Papa going with that ax?' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast."

This is probably the most effortlessly effective opening of a novel I've ever read, because it encompasses the entire theme, trajectory, and drama of the novel--the power of friendship and family, the inevitability of mortality, and the transformative impact one individual can have on many. When I was in graduate school, I wrote an entire paper on the first 88 words of this novel. Can you guess the title? (Charlotte's Web by E.B. White.)

Five books you'll never part with:

The Four-Minute Mile by Sir Roger Bannister--he signed it when I met him. Lovely gentleman.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle--autographed when she visited my classroom in the '80s. She was Meg in the flesh--brilliant, awkward, honest, and honorable.

The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice--autographed with a special message to me.

The Silver Wolf by Alice Borchardt--Anne's older sister, who was one of my dearest friends.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, which was initialed by my grandmother, my mom, me, and my daughter (we initial the books we've shared). I think it's the only book all four of us have read.

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

Here Be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman. One of those books that you weep over and think about for days.

What made you tackle Wayward Girls, a novel that is markedly different from previous works?

When I posted a photo of a historic walled complex in Buffalo to a Facebook group called "Buffalore," I didn't expect the deluge of comments that flooded in with anecdotes about the notorious Good Shepherd Institute, where girls were sent to for "reform" by a strict order of nuns. I knew then that there were stories to be told, and I got to work on Wayward Girls.

As a child, I remember more than one babysitter who "went away," a euphemism for girls sent away when they became pregnant. Many were pressured against their will to surrender their parental rights. Others were told falsely that their babies didn't survive. Between 1945 and 1973, an estimated 1.5 million to 4 million women in the U.S. lost their children to irregular adoption.

The more I learned, the more deeply I felt the pain and rage of these young women. Their stories ignited my imagination, and Wayward Girls became one of my most personal and involving novels to date. I hope my passion for this topic touches readers' hearts, and I look forward to sharing it with the world.

From last week's Indie bestseller lists, available at IndieBound.org, here are the recommended titles, which are also Indie Next Great Reads:

Hardcover
Sunny Side Up: A Novel by Katie Sturino (Celadon Books, $28, 9781250344205). "Very rarely do we ever fit into a mold. This book completely forges a new path in accepting yourself and others for who we are. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and this is just what the doctor ordered!" --Suzanne Lucey, Page 158 Books, Wake Forest, N.C.

The Girls Who Grew Big: A Novel by Leila Mottley (Knopf, $28, 9780593801123). "Just as she did in Nightcrawling, Leila Mottley gives voice and understanding to parts of life that our culture often tells us to ignore. The book is full of life and heart and hope." --Beth Black, The Bookworm of Omaha, Omaha, Neb.

Paperback
The Undercurrent by Sarah Sawyer (Zibby Publishing, $17.99, 9781958506431). "The Undercurrent is an impressive literary work of fiction that pulls the reader in and never lets them go. Two families grapple with the disappearance of a young girl in their neighborhood, leading them to an unimaginable truth. Intelligent, gripping, and beautifully written!" --Kathy Mailloux, East City Bookshop, Washington, D.C.

Ages 3-6
Zebra and Yak: The Backwards Alphabet Book by Paul Friedrich (Putnam Books for Young Readers, $19.99, 9798217002108). "Zebra and Yak are running through the alphabet backwards trying to find Apple, who never showed up. Watch out for that slithery Snake--and what's with all the violins? Have a zany time with this alphabet book that both kids and parents can enjoy!" --Amy Lane, Bards Alley, Vienna, Va.

Ages 8-12
On Guard!: A Marshall Middle School Graphic Novel by Cassidy Wasserman (Random House Graphic, $21.99, 9780593649985). "A story about a middle schooler who discovers fencing for the first time! It helps her make friends, gain confidence, and helps with her mental health while struggling with her parent's divorce. Kids navigating big feelings will feel seen in this." --Meghan Bousquet, Titcomb's Bookshop, East Sandwich, Mass.

Ages 14+ (An Indies Introduce Title)
Arcana: The Lost Heirs by Sam Prentice-Jones (Feiwel & Friends, $19.99, 9781250290229). "Magical, mysterious, and queer--some of my favorite words all in one place! Arcana: The Lost Heirs, with its beautiful and fluid illustrations, is full of cryptic clues, secret histories, and found family." --Heather Albinson, Wild Rumpus, Minneapolis, Minn.

[Many thanks to IndieBound and the ABA!]

photo: Jen Daywalt

Drew Daywalt was amazed at the age of seven, while sitting in the movie theatre watching the credits roll on the original Star Wars, to see that people actually made movies--they weren't just found items like mountains or rivers or clouds. That night, at story time with his mom, he noticed there were names of people on the front of books, too. That's when he learned about authors and writers. And he never looked back. Daywalt is the author of the Crayons picture book series, illustrated by Oliver Jeffers, including The Day the Crayons Made Friends (Philomel Books); other books include The Legend of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Little Freddie Two Pants, and the middle-grade novel They Call Me No Sam!, illustrated by Mike Lowery. Daywalt lives in California with his wife, two kids, two dogs, two goldfish, a cat, and some local raccoons who like pizza crusts.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

We don't just color with our crayons. They're also toys, tools, and friends.

On your nightstand now:

Diavola by Jennifer Thorne. I love a good ghost story, and boy is this one spooky! It also tackles complicated big-family dynamics. And since I grew up in a haunted house, the youngest of six kids, this one hits home like crazy.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Rutgers and the Water-Snouts. It's long out of print now, but it's by a brilliant writer named Barbara Dana. Imagine if Monty Python wrote Winnie-the-Pooh. You can find a cheap used copy if you look around. It's worth the hunt, trust me. It was the book that really jumpstarted my love of reading.

Favorite book to read to a child:

Anything by Dostoevsky. HA! No. I don't have a favorite book to read to kids, but I do have one rule: Never bother with a book that talks down to children. It's dishonest. Kids are smart. They know rubbish when they hear it and so do you, so don't do it.

Your top five authors:

Kurt Vonnegut, J.R.R. Tolkien, Maya Angelou, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde.

Book you've faked reading:

Moby-Dick. I mean, c'mon. Seriously.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut--greatest book I've ever read. He seemed to be writing about the meaning of life here, and I was all in.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook, first edition. The promise of adventure and danger on that cover completely captivated me when I was 11. And it absolutely delivered. I've been playing D&D ever since. It gave birth to my life of storytelling and now I even play it with my kids.

Book you hid from your parents:

I was blessed with super-cool parents. I never had to hide a book from them. There were no banned books in the Daywalt house.

Book that changed your life:

I'd have to say the collected gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It changed my life because when I finally read about Jesus from the guys who knew him, I realized what a cool guy he was. When you read about him from his friends, and not through the filter of some gate keeper who claims to "interpret it for you," you skip the stupid game of telephone and get to the person he really was. He was a rebel, a fringe thinker, and a kind-hearted social liberal who called out a broken and corrupt conservative church. He stood by the marginalized and the downtrodden. He held up a mirror to hypocrites in power and showed them how ugly their judgment and selfishness was. He professed kindness, empathy, and compassion for everyone--no exceptions--and ironically, he turned me into a liberal and an ally to people who are being persecuted and marginalized by the powers that be. I'm not as nice as him though. 

Favorite line from a book:

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." --from Oscar Wilde's play The Duchess of Padua. Oscar Wilde's wit makes me simultaneously want to sit down and write and never write again.

Five books you'll never part with:

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut because it contains the meaning of life and beautifully articulates the concept of time not being linear. As I was reading it, I felt like I had read it before even though I knew I hadn't--and now that actually makes sense. 

The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R Tolkien because fantastical worlds are often better at explaining this one than real ones. Also, I gotta say, at this point in American history, I'd gladly drag my butt across Mordor and throw a ring in a volcano if I thought it would end the tyranny. 

The Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss because my mom read it to me every night when I was little. And the copy I have contains the only sample I have of her handwriting, where she signed it to me before she passed away.  

Rutgers and the Water-Snouts by Barbara Dana because it was like Winnie-the-Pooh, only funnier. Much funnier. Also, it was filled with loving, loyal friendships.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson because it was my introduction to philosophy as a kid. Also, Bill lived near me in Ohio and he'd go into my local bookstore, The Learned Owl, and secretly sign copies of the book. I ended up getting a copy that he'd ninja-signed. And as an author myself now, I do that too. I'll sign books in the bookstore without telling anyone. I like the idea of a child opening the book and getting a surprise signed copy. 

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

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I read it when I was 10 and I'd never dreamed of a world like that--filled with elves and dwarves and orcs and dragons. I'd experienced something similar when I saw Star Wars at age seveb, and I'd been hungering for a world as fantastical and dangerous as that. So, when I sat down and read The Hobbit, I burned through it in two days, which is saying a lot because I'm such a slow reader. Thank you, dyslexia. I also marveled at the heroism of the diminutive protagonist, Bilbo Baggins. And I was deeply touched by how much Gandalf believed in him. As a child at the time, and the youngest of six siblings, I deeply empathized with Bilbo, who was also the smallest, meekest, and least qualified in his adventuring party. And when he was the only person at the end, in the battle of five armies, to recognize the senselessness of violence and the myth of vilifying "the other." I saw who I wanted to be when I grew up. Only maybe a little taller.

Finalists have been selected in two categories for the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, honoring "writers whose work uses the power of the written word to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding." Winners are awarded $10,000, and the first runners-up receive $5,000. The winners and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award will be named in September. The winners, first runners-up, and other finalists will be honored at an awards ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, the weekend of November 8-9. This year's finalists are:

Nonfiction
The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years by Sunil Amrith (W.W. Norton)
John Lewis: A Life by David Greenberg (Simon & Schuster)
Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor (Pantheon)
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen (Dutton)
A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging by Lauren Markham (Riverhead)
The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora by Wendy Pearlman (Liveright)

Fiction
Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris (Knopf)
James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Knopf)
Freedom Is a Feast by Alejandro Puyana (Little, Brown)
The Women by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin's Press)
The Good Deed by Helen Benedict (Red Hen Press)

Leila Aboulela won the 2025 PEN Pinter Prize, which is awarded annually to a writer residing in the U.K., the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth, or the former Commonwealth who, in the words of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize in Literature speech, casts an "unflinching, unswerving" gaze upon the world and shows a "fierce intellectual determination... to define the real truth of our lives and our societies."

Aboulela will be honored October 10 during a ceremony at the British Library, where she will deliver an address. The prize is shared with a Writer of Courage, "who is active in defense of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty." The co-winner, selected by Aboulela from a shortlist of international cases supported by English PEN, will be announced at the ceremony.

Judge and chair of English PEN Ruth Borthwick said: "Leila Aboulela's writing is extraordinary in its range and sensibility. From jewel-like short stories to tender novels, she tells us rarely heard stories that make us think anew about who lives in our neighborhoods and communities, and how they navigate their lives. She is not the first to write about the experience of migration, but Leila is a writer for this moment, and my hope is that with this prize her gorgeous books find new readers, and open our minds to other possibilities."

Prize judge Mona Arshi commented: "I am so delighted that Leila Aboulela is the recipient of the PEN Pinter Prize 2025. Over the past few decades, she has made a significant contribution to literature and writes with subtlety and courage in the way she storifies the interior lives of women who are often ignored or silenced in our culture. She offers us nuanced and rich perspectives on themes that are vital in our contemporary world: faith, migration, and displacement."

Judge Nadifa Mohamed added: "Leila Aboulela is an important voice in literature, and in a career spanning more than three decades her work has had a unique place in examining the interior lives of migrants who chose to settle in Britain. In novels, short stories and radio plays she has navigated the global and local, the political with the spiritual, and the nostalgia for a past home with the concurrent curiosity and desire for survival in a new one. Aboulela's work is marked by a commitment to make the lives and decisions of Muslim women central to her fiction, and to examine their struggles and pleasures with dignity. In a world seemingly on fire, and with immense suffering unmarked and little mourned in Sudan, Gaza, and beyond, her writing is a balm, a shelter, and an inspiration."

"This comes as a complete and utter surprise," Aboulela said. "Thank you English PEN and the judges for considering my work worthy of this award. I am honoured to win a prize established in memory of Harold Pinter, a great writer who continues to inspire so much loyalty and consistent high regard. For someone like me, a Muslim Sudanese immigrant who writes from a religious perspective probing the limits of secular tolerance, this recognition feels truly significant. It brings expansion and depth to the meaning of freedom of expression and whose stories get heard."

photo: Cirsty Burton

Benedict Nguyễn  is a dancer and gym buff. Between pistol squats and muscle-ups, she works as a creative producer in live performance. She's written for the Baffler, BOMB, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Vanity Fair, the Brooklyn Rail, the Margins, and other publications. In 2022, she published nasty notes, a redacted e-mail zine on freelance labor. Hot Girls with Balls (Catapult, July 1, 2025) is her debut novel, an outrageous and deeply serious satire about two star indoor volleyball players who juggle unspoken jealousies in their off-court romance ahead of their rival teams' first rematch in a year.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Friends to lovers/secret enemies; volleyball; jealousy; dyke dolls in the straight boys club; horny, hateful, hilarious discourse; literary grumpy sunshine; Six and Green summer.

On your nightstand now:

Tiny books! Tiny, tiny books! Some of these recents could be called novellas, but what are labels anyway? There's Vera Blossom's resounding and humorous essay collection How to Fuck Like a Girl and Katie Yee's wryly contemplative debut novel, Maggie; or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. I don't know how Omar El Akkad wrote the sharply constructed essay collection One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This in such a short timeline but we applaud it for every reason. In poetry, there's Tramaine Suubi's stellar debut collection, Phases, structured around the moon, and Zefyr Lisowski's dazzling and dizzying (both compliments) Girl Work.

Katie Kitamura's Audition and Michael Amherst's The Boyhood of Cain paint such vivid character studies and they're tiny books! Must mention Andrea Abreu's Dogs of Summer and Natasha Brown's Assembly and Henry Hoke's Open Throat and the new re-issue of Elaine Kraf's 1979 The Princess of 72nd Street. Just finished Sebastian Castillo's Fresh, Green Life, which meditates on yearning for an old crush (totally unrelatable, btw) and that uneasy commitment to a life of ideas with humor, depth, and fewer than 150 pages. Tiny books, big punches!

Favorite book when you were a child:

Juniper by Monica Furlong follows a young teenage witch assuming her powers, which, of course, go beyond magic!

Your top five authors:

I could never! But this year in "would drop everything to read the next" presents at least two contenders. First, Anelise Chen's memoir Clam Down. Her debut novel, So Many Olympic Exertions, was infectiously curious about not just human physicality but will and spirit too. I promise I read about other kinds of character journeys; I'm just on a theme right now! Also, Susan Choi's Flashlight! Has anyone captured the embarrassment of young adulthood better than Choi in My Education?

Book you've faked reading:

I would never! If such a book exists, my having faked it has also been wiped from the hard drive. Truly can't wait to read XYZ! ;)

Book you're an evangelist for:

For the past couple years, Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson has been a consistent rec. Refracting the way the novel as a whole treats its titular subject matter with its protagonist's view of herself and her life is must-discuss literature.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The new collection by Clarice Lispector, Covert Joy, is glossy all over and incidentally, the work's translator, Katrina Dodson, is also very glamorous!

Book that changed your life:

Monique Truong's The Book of Salt and all of its beautifully fraught character dynamics.

Favorite line from a book:

Recently, from Harron Walker's essay collection Aggregated Discontent: "You can't shatter a glass ceiling if you're afraid of a little blood." Smash! Via a speculative reread that aligns Anne Hathaway's characters in The Devil Wears Prada and The Intern in the same narrative arc, Walker pillories white girlboss feminism with delicious disdain. This tour de force of an essay is discomfitingly uncanny and, of course, hilarious.

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

If one could retcon books into the past, teenage me would've appreciated all the wisdom in Jeanne Thornton's A/S/L on womanhood and friendship and the Internet back then! Adult me loves it too, of course!

In June of 1985, a small private plane, a Piper Cub, crashed on its owner's property in northern Georgia. The pilot, Lamar Chester, was killed. His only passenger, his five-year-old daughter, AJ, sustained severe injuries but lived. In death, Lamar escaped prosecution as a marijuana smuggler. His widow, hoping to protect her child, removed the young AJ from the life she'd known, isolating them from family and friends who had been involved in the smuggling business. AJ grew up to be Artis Henderson (Unremarried Widow), who spent decades turned away from her father's story, interpreting her mother's silence as shame. Her eventual readiness to examine the truth of her father's life, their brief but loving relationship, and his end has resulted in No Ordinary Bird: Drug Smuggling, a Plane Crash, and a Daughter's Quest for the Truth, which combines investigation and personal excavation in a searing, moving memoir.

In their few years together, Lamar made a strong impression on his youngest child, one that has been enriched by her later research. She remembers him as a loving and beloved father, and deeply charismatic, although his attitudes toward women in particular appear problematic through a modern lens. Henderson is thoughtful about such judgments, and careful in considering her father's upbringing as a factor in his life. And a wild life it was, with an early marriage yielding three surviving children and one lost; divorce and remarriage; and a colorful career as a pilot, smuggler, and ostentatious party boy in 1970s Miami. Increasing profits and outward success allowed Lamar to acquire ever-more-impressive possessions, and he became involved in ever-more-risky ventures, until he faced federal prosecution and the plane crash that killed him.

Henderson's work is both investigatory and personal: "I'm grappling with this story as much as I'm reporting it." She loved her father, sympathizes with the demons he faced, and remembers a childhood of "uncomplicated happiness. My father made me feel safe and protected." She trusts that there was a time when, "to him, the line between the good guys and the bad guys was still very clear," but also realizes that he made choices that endangered his family and, she concludes, led to his own death. No Ordinary Bird is a loving portrait that benefits from the nuance of understanding that, as Lamar liked to say, "you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys." It is both research-based inquiry--involving travel to Miami, Georgia, Colombia, Nicaragua, Iran, and beyond--and also a memoir of family, love, and risk. Henderson excels at the subtlety required by such a story, and her telling is intriguing, painful, and cathartic. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: A daughter's study of her father's life and death artfully reveals intrigue, astonishing slices of world history, and a loving but flawed man.

Danish novelist and poet Olga Ravn hauntingly combines Nordic folklore and historical sources to fiercely reimagine the experiences and tribulations of a 17th-century noblewoman accused of witchcraft in The Wax Child. She reunites with award-winning translator Martin Aitken after her 2021 International Booker Prize shortlisted novel, The Employees.

The titular wax child is "shaped in beeswax... made like a doll the size of a human forearm" by Christenze Kruckow in Nakkebølle on the Danish island of Funen. It is held in her right arm for 40 weeks like "a proper child," then christened under the still darkness of night. As Ravn's narrative opens, Christenze is dead, but the abandoned wax child insists on bearing witness to its mistress's horrific demise: "Now I speak again to the soil that covers my face."

Christenze, born noble but impoverished, works at Nakkebølle Manor as a servant, while also befriending the Manor's young wife, Anne, whose newborn children do not survive. After losing 15 infants over 12 years, Anne "cast her gaze at Christenze," who remains unmarried at 36, "ruddy-cheeked" and "preferring to horse-ride on her own and drink red wine and read letters well into the night." By May 1615, Anne has convinced others that Christenze "is behind it all," this murder of all her babies, prompting her husband to request "a thing-witness, an assembly of eight good men to be convened... to initiate proceedings against [Christenze] with the charge that she did harm by means of witchcraft." Leaving behind a written reply to this "mendacious accusation," Christenze flees to northern Aalborg in 1616, a "city of hate." First she meets Maren and is "enchanted by the forbidden love of a woman." Maren introduces her to the others--Mette, Sidsel, Bodil, Dorte--a collective of strong wives who sow and spin the flax, who clean and pickle the herring. Among them, too, is Elisabeth, who is abused by her pastor husband and who eventually betrays these women to her jealous husband's machinations.

Ravn first acknowledged these women on stage in her 2023 theater production, HEX, at the Royal Danish Theatre. "This novel builds on that play, dialoguing with the script I wrote for it." Her author's note illuminates fascinating historical provenance, the "letters, ledgers, court documents and theological texts" associated with Danish witch trials recorded between 1596 and 1621. The "spells" recorded throughout are also borrowed, from "so-called black books, grimoires and other such works." Four centuries later, Ravn enthrallingly immortalizes those long-silenced voices. --Terry Hong

Shelf Talker: In The Wax Child, novelist and poet Olga Ravn turns 17th-century terrifying Danish women's history into a sublime novel of struggle and resilience.

Delightful and visually inventive, Emmie Builds Something New by Marjorie Crosby-Fairall (illustrator, The Boy in the Big Blue Glasses) is set in a dusty attic brimming with "things no-one wanted." Though Emmie the mouse is small, she is an inventor, engineer, and dreamer, transforming cast-offs into fantastical contraptions. In one intricate spread, she's cobbled together a machine from an old dollhouse, toy parts, and tiny tools that turns one sunflower into a consistent source of "breakfast, lunch & dinner." Crosby-Fairall fills the scene with delightful detail, including what appear to be handwritten notes and arrows labeling parts of the invention. These annotated diagrams add an extra layer of realism, inviting close inspection. The attic itself is packed with visual treasures, and Emmie's many "clever creations" are as much a joy to study as they are to imagine in motion.  

Emmie's imaginative world is upended when a "huge problem" appears, its presence announced by a looming feline shadow. With her trademark ingenuity, Emmie leaps into action. "She built something new," the text repeats, a refrain that pulses with momentum. Each solution grows more elaborate: a lion-shaped machine, a bat-winged gadget, and, finally, an elephant outfitted with a discarded watering can that sprays water.

But when the water-spewing elephant robot succeeds, Emmie notices something unexpected: the cat isn't menacing; it's frightened. Emmie responds with compassion, offering an apology--a final invention that is not a weapon but a welcome. This offbeat resolution turns predator-prey logic on its head, embracing the possibility that understanding can replace fear. It's a moment of heart as well as humor, underscoring a message about empathy, flexibility, and creative problem-solving.

Crosby-Fairall's text is driven by action verbs (Emmie sketches, scavenges, paces, and ponders) and uses a satisfying structure to build tension before gently dissolving it. The cool-toned palette--full of teals, coppers, and dusty greens--adds to the atmosphere, giving the attic world a muted glow that feels both forgotten and full of potential. The perspective shifts and textured lines bring Emmie's world to life with energy and wit. The illustrations brim with mechanical marvels and visual riddles, and the story hints at broader ideas: that even long-held assumptions, like cats and mice being enemies, can be reimagined through curiosity, creativity, and a little kindness. --Julie Danielson

Shelf Talker: Inventive, detailed, and unexpectedly tender, Emmie Builds Something New celebrates the power of imagination and the surprising places it can lead.  

Sarah McCoy's charming seventh novel, Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely?, combines a lush, compelling story of young love and Hollywood glamour with a quiet, nourishing narrative of a woman who found her true vocation thousands of miles from stardom. McCoy (Mustique Island; The Mapmaker's Children) explores the motivations that led a rising young starlet to abandon her career for a lifetime tending gardens--and her own soul--in the woods of Connecticut. Inspired by several real-life actresses turned nuns, including Mother Dolores Hart, McCoy's novel asks important questions about one's calling, love, and whose opinion really matters.

In 1990, Lori Lovely's niece and namesake, Lu, travels to the abbey where Lori lives to interview her aunt about her abrupt career change and her life as a nun. McCoy intersperses their conversations with flashbacks to Lori's childhood in small-town North Carolina, her eventual move to New York City to work in her sister's photography shop, and her lucky break auditioning for a musical film, which leads to her brief movie career. She chronicles the young ingenue's transformation from Lucille Hickey to Lori Lovely, and her breakout role as Juliet opposite heartthrob Lucas Wesley. Though she loves acting, Lori is inexperienced and naive, unprepared for the rigors of life on set or the sharks that are circling, waiting to devour innocent young women like her. Lucas's tragic death and its circumstances prompt Lori to flee to the abbey, where she eventually decides to establish her life.

McCoy creates a thoroughly detailed mid-century world, as Lori goes out dancing at London nightclubs or shoots Juliet's scenes in an Italian villa. In the later Hollywood scenes, the movie glitter is mixed with a hefty dose of darkness, a sharp contrast to the eventual peace of the convent and its bucolic setting. McCoy dwells less on Lori's spiritual journey and ethereal connection to God than her mental and emotional state, and her firm belief that the rhythms of the abbey would help anchor her, as they had done for so many people.

As Lu presses her aunt for answers about her life, she unearths a few hard-won insights about her own--both her past and her uncertain post-college future. Meanwhile, Lori reflects on the events that propelled her from California to Connecticut, and the choices--large and small--that made her the woman she eventually became. Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely? draws the reader in with an unlikely gown-to-habit costume change, but its true appeal is in its quiet contemplation of choices, challenges, and how they shape a person's life. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Shelf Talker: Sarah McCoy's charming seventh novel combines a Hollywood story of glamour and young love with a quiet narrative of a woman who found peace far from the movies' glitter and grit.

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a novel as expansive, funny, and poignant as its title promises. With his signature wit and irreverence, Rabih Alameddine (The Angel of History; The Wrong End of the Telescope; An Unnecessary Woman) charts decades of Beiruti history and trauma through the life of his narrator, Raja, a reclusive, aging teacher of French philosophy.

The novel opens and closes in 2023, when Raja shares his apartment with his overbearing but deeply endearing mother, Zalfa. The bulk of its sections jump back in time: to the pre-civil-war 1960s, Lebanon's civil war in 1975, the banking collapse and Covid-19 epidemic, and Raja's ill-fated trip to the United States for an artists' residency in Virginia. (He should have more fully recognized how suspicious the invitation was: he had written a book 25 years earlier, but "I'm not a writer, not really. I wrote a book, that was it. It was an accident.") Writer or no, Raja is a knowing, purposeful narrator, teasing his reader with what is to come, defending his story's chronological shifts: "A tale has many tails, and many heads, particularly if it's true. Like life, it is a river with many branches, rivulets, creeks...." Self-aware and self-deprecating, Raja names himself the Gullible, the Imbecile, the Neurotic Clown, the Dimwit. His mother is "Raja the Gullible's Tormentor." "Deciphering [her] was a feat that would have surely flummoxed Hercules--my mother as the unthinkably impossible thirteenth task." They bicker constantly, foul-mouthed but fiercely loving.

In past timelines, the reader learns of Raja's troubled childhood as a gay younger son, bullied by much of his family, especially Aunt Yasmine, "the wickedest witch of the Middle East." During the civil war, in his teens, he is held captive for weeks by a schoolmate and soldier with whom he begins a sexual relationship that is part experimentation, part Stockholm syndrome. He describes his accidental path to teaching, 36 years of it; he refers to his students as his "brats," but his care for them and, even more, theirs for him will become gradually apparent. Amid terrible events, like the port explosion of 2020, Raja's mother befriends a neighborhood crime boss named Madame Taweel: "Only my mother would find a mentor at eighty-two, let alone the most inappropriate one." Bawdy, rude, and impossibly sweet, with "a laugh so delightful, so impetuous, so luminous," Raja's mother is the indomitable star of this loving, heartwrenching novel. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: An especially wry, wise, comic style distinguishes this unforgettable tale of national trauma, community, familial love, and forgiveness.

Hell is a campus. Or at least, the lower circles are, as Cambridge student Alice Law discovers when she makes the decision to journey into the underworld to retrieve the soul of her academic adviser after an unfortunate accident, and finds it a mirror of the world she descended from. Appropriately, acclaimed fantasy author R.F. Kuang's Katabasis is named for the ancient Greek term for a journey into the underworld. Her dark academia fantasy interrogates themes of loss, grief, and human nature in its refracted version of Cambridge University where Analytical Magick is a field that allows those able to master mathematics, logic, linguistics, and philosophy to bend the rules of reality.

Alice Law's dream has been to dominate that field; the only person who could stand in her way is Peter Murdoch, her adviser's other graduate student. They have been pitted against each other from the beginning as the two potentially brightest students of their cohort, so when he tags along at the last moment as she prepares for her descent into Hell, she does not know what to think. But while they both are at the top of their class, bright, full of promise, and exceptionally well trained, nothing could have prepared them for the reality of the shifting landscape where they now are reliant on each other to survive. Hell is both crueler and kinder than they could have expected, and navigating the terrain that no chart or sojourner's account has ever fully managed to map forces them to pull out their darkest secrets and lay them bare before each other. Their journey pushes them further than they could have anticipated and teaches them more than they could have imagined about life itself. They learn what it might mean not only to choose a life that is about more than surviving, but also to find one's true friends in an environment that celebrates solitude and an imitation of asceticism as a marker of one's potential for success.

Kuang's hellscape is dark, gory, and brutal, but more ruthless is the mirror she holds up to institutional norms and structures that will feel all too familiar to those in the know. As Kuang (Yellowface; Babel) reveals abusive relationships and the glorification of poverty wages and overwork, she does not hold back from depicting a reality that is sometimes even more horrifying than the carnage of Hell itself. With enthralling prose that makes it impossible to put down, Katabasis is a timeless fantasy that explores what it might mean to travel through death to discover the meaning of life. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: R.F. Kuang's dark academia fantasy epic takes readers to Hell and back in an unforgettable journey.

How do you adapt a graphic novel into an audiobook? It has been done before, of course, but I was never tempted to listen to one.... until now. 

Earlier this spring, I read, reread, and loved Alison Bechdel's latest book, Spent (HarperCollins), a sharply observed and amusing portrayal of a cartoonist (named Alison Bechdel) whose life in Vermont is complicated as well as enhanced by interactions with her partner, Holly, and found family (many of them transplants from "out of state").  

Although I've lived in upstate New York for 15 years, I'm a Vermont native who spent my first six decades watching the state change dramatically (for better or worse, depending on your perspective, though I happen to fall in the "for better" category) with the ever-changing influx of what we once called "flatlanders." 

When I learned there would be a full voice cast Spent audiobook (HarperAudio) releasing this month, I wasn't sure how that would work, but the preview sample I received was promising. Now I've heard the full version, then listened again while following along with my hardcover copy. Both experiences can be summed up in my two-word review: highly recommended. 

So, back to my first question: How do you adapt a graphic novel into an audiobook? Who better to ask than Bechdel, beginning with a question about her initial goals and concerns for the project. 

"Well, first I had to ask myself, why would anyone buy an audiobook of a graphic novel?" she said. "For many graphic novels, an audiobook just wouldn't work. I've had people interested for some time in creating an audiobook of my graphic memoir Fun Home, for example, and I keep saying no. It's not like you can just extract the text--the drawings are integral to how the story is told. But that being said, Fun Home is very essayistic, it tells a very internal story through first person narration. Whereas Spent has lots of dialogue among the characters and a familiar dramatic structure that proceeds via scenes. And this kind of story lends itself much better to an audio adaptation."
 
To create an audio version of a visual reading experience, Bechdel noted that she "started playing around with the text, and it took a little while to get the hang of it but eventually I realized that I could use sound effects in much the same way that the graphic novel had used images. I'm used to working in that hybrid way, so I just had to start thinking in terms of sounds instead of drawings."

Alison Bechdel (photo: Elena Siebert)

Casting the roles presented another challenge. Early versions featured Jenn Colella as Alison, but other cast members weren't quite what Bechdel was looking for. "As recording got underway, I could see that some of the readers weren't really getting the lesbian voice down," she recalled. "I found it hard to describe to the producers what I meant by this--and I hate stereotyping. Is there such a thing as a lesbian voice? Do I have a lesbian voice? I feel like my voice is pretty generically feminine, but in general, I think straight women tend to modulate their voices a lot, certainly more than straight men do. Like, there's more up and down, while men stay within a flatter range. I would go so far as to say that some gay men speak with more modulation, and some lesbians speak with less. (Think Jane Lynch as the coach in Glee.) 

"So, some of the women readers for Spent were just sounding too straight! At that point, Harper agreed to bring in some ringers--my partner Holly actually read for the character based on her. And Ali Liebegott, who's a writer and standup comic and wrote for Transparent (and also played this great character on the show, Tiffany the security guard, a butch dyke who rides around in a golf cart) came on board and read for the character Lois. That added a whole new dimension to the project."
 
When I mentioned that I'd also listened to Spent while following along in the book, melding two different reading experiences, Bechdel observed: "I actually have a fantasy that people might do that--it's just a fantasy, of course--who has that kind of time or money? But in recent years, if I find a book I really like, I will often get the audiobook, too, and toggle back and forth between the versions. If people do that with Spent, they will be rewarded, because each version has something that the other one doesn't. The audiobook has a fair number of extra lines, so it's a slightly expanded version of the story, with a few more details and jokes."

Vermont changed a lot during the 60 years I lived there as the son and grandson of marble quarry/mill workers. Bechdel has been a Vermonter since the 1990s, and I wondered what her first impressions had been and whether they had altered with time. 

"It's startling to realize that I've been living in Vermont for 35 years, much longer than I've lived anywhere else," she said. "The big thing for me when I came here in 1991 was finding a place that was rural, yet felt safe to me as one of those counterculture flatlanders. There were lots of lovely rural places, but very few where I would have felt welcome as an out lesbian. But Vermont was used to all kinds of oddballs inhabiting its hollows and hills, and I fit right in here. There's been so much development over these three decades, though, so the rural character is beginning to shift a bit, at least in the area around Burlington where I live." 

Spend a little time in Bechdel's corner of the state with a graphic novel audiobook that definitely has this Vermont native's stamp of approval. 

Every day is a 'prime' time to shop your local indie bookstore. Come in and get a thoughtful recommendation from people who love books as much as you do!

--The Bookies Bookstore, Denver, Colo.

At Thank You Books, Birmingham, Ala.

Like so many things regarding Amazon, Prime Day is not what the online retailer claims it is. This year the once-tagged "Black Friday in July" has been extended to four days, one more than in 2024. Fast Company considered the possibility that Amazon added a day due to concerns about "tariff-related price worries and possibly some consumer boredom with an event marking its 11th year."

Satirists have been out in force, their pens already sharpened by a certain $50 million Venetian nuptial spectacle, already dubbed Jeff Bezo's Big Fat Geek Wedding.

Andy Borowitz cracked: "Less than two weeks since he tied the knot with Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos has been finding it 'nearly impossible' to return wedding gifts to Amazon.... Bezos has experienced an unacceptable level of difficulty navigating the Amazon returns system and has failed 'repeatedly' to get a customer service representative to speak to him."

Bookshop.org got in on the fun with its anti-Prime Day promotion, in the form of a mock wedding invitation ("You are cordially invited to our Anti-Prime Sale, where every purchase will financially support bookstores, NOT billionaires."). TechCrunch had earlier noted that whoever designed a portion of the Bezos/Sánchez wedding invitation "could not even shell out for a Canva subscription. The image made the rounds across social media, with users speculating whether its lo-fi, childish design could have come from Microsoft Word clip art."

Alibi Bookshop, Vallejo, Calif., shared Bookshop.org.'s invitation on Instagram, noting that while "that A-word" is sometimes convenient, "what I also hear are complaints about downtown Vallejo, how there's nothing here, everything that's wrong with it, so on and so on. There are many things that can be done, and one of those things is buying locally and thoughtfully. If you want your city to thrive, and have places to go to, shopping on A***n definitely isn't going to make that happen."

Also having an Anti-Prime Day blast was Irish bookseller Red Books in Wexford, which shared a "Prime Day? More like Slime Day" video, noting: "While some online giants might have their one day sale last for four days, everyday is Prime Literature Day at Red Books. We have 250,000 books waiting for you to meet, many long forgotten by the algorithm. Visit a real world bookshop today. It's prime therapy."

And Talking Animals Books, Grapevine, Tex., offered up a cautionary video: "Shop indie July 8th-11th! Or else... (Note to viewers: don't be alarmed. No staff members were harmed in the making of this video. Maybe.)."

At Kings Co-op Bookstore

Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul, Minn., gave a shoutout to Libro.fm, which is running a Love Your Indie Sale all month: "This week seems like a great week to learn more about @librofm and all the great audio books available for listening! Plus there's an awesome sale happening right now! A small business run by booksellers that helps out indie bookstores?? It's a partnership made in book heaven!"

Other indie booksellers checking in with Anti-Prime Day thoughts: 

Kings Co-op Bookstore, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: "This week during prime day sales take a moment and think about what you need, how quickly you really need it, and where you might be able to get it in your community! It's surprisingly easy to boycott the crummiest company on earth and there's no shortage of great reasons to start trying. Thanks to our new friend @chris_rouleau for the amazing boxes that we've now got up in the shop, come on in and take a photo with one to show how much you think amazon sucks!"

Blue Marble Books, Fort Thomas, Ky.: "We highly recommend avoiding prime this week and going out instead to your closest indie location. Our recommendations come from real readers and never an algorithm. You get the books then and there from us, and your personal information isn't out there for those cookies to track when you shop locally. Instead you get kind booksellers looking for the perfect read on your journey now, not tracking your search history ever.... You're a reader, not a customer profile, and we remember you here."

Bayside Books, Panama City, Fla.: "While we may not be able to compete with the prices when Amazon undercuts themselves (and everyone else), we can offer homemade baked goods, a coffee bar, personalized book recommendations, special editions that Amazon will never be able to carry, a safe space for your children to play while you shop, and knowledgeable people ready to help with whatever you need."

Huxley and Hiro Bookstore, Wilmington, Del.: "Communities over corporations every day, but especially today! July 8-11 is Anti-Pr*me Week! Shop local, support indie, and fight the power."

The Bookworm, Omaha, Neb.: "It's prime time to shop local and independent! Ditch the algorithms and let actual book lovers help you find your next read at The Bookworm.... Indie bookstores like us believe your reading habits are yours, and that joyfully stumbling upon the perfect book is better than being sold something by a soulless computer. These Prime Days, shop local, support small."

The Snail on the Wall, Huntsville, Ala.: "We never try to compete with those Pr*me Days happening this week. That's all about discounts and algorithms, while bookstores are all about COMMUNITY. Our Snail community is a beautiful, magical thing that we're grateful for every day. Thank you for supporting us, for shopping with us, and for believing in community."

The bestselling self-published books last week as compiled by IndieReader.com:

1. Wealthy and Well-Known by Rory Vaden and AJ Vaden
2. The Curse That Binds by Laura Thalassa
3. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
4. The Ritual by Shantel Tessier
5. The Boyfriend by Freida McFadden
6. Insatiable by Leigh Rivers
7. Little Stranger by Leigh Rivers
8. Binding 13 by Chloe Walsh
9. Kiss of the Basilisk by Lindsay Straube
10. Hunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]

The following were the most popular book club books during June based on votes from book club readers in more than 92,000 book clubs registered at Bookmovement.com:

1. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Doubleday)
2. James: A Novel by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
3. The Wedding People: A Novel by Alison Espach (Holt)
4. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead)
5. All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker (Crown)
6. The Women: A Novel by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin's Press)
7. The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali (Gallery Books)
8. Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall (Simon & Schuster)
9. My Friends by Fredrik Bachman (Atria)
10. The Briar Club: A Novel by Kate Quinn (Morrow)

Rising Stars:
Like Mother, Like Mother by Susan Rieger (The Dial Press)
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi (Allen Levi)