Poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib has been named Indie Bookstore Ambassador for 2026 by the American Booksellers Association. ABA launched the Indie Bookstore Ambassador program in 2022 to highlight independent bookstores year-round.

Hanif Abdurraqib (photo: Kate Sweeney)

"At a time when access to books and meaningful literary engagement feel more important than ever, the Indie Bookstore Ambassador ignites indie booksellers around a shared purpose: fostering future generations of readers while championing the freedom to read, both central to indies and ABA's mission," the organization noted.

In accepting the invitation to be the ambassador, Abdurraqib said, "When I am traveling, the places I often go to first are the independent bookstores in a city, because independent booksellers often have a unique understanding of the place they are in and the responsibility they have to the people in the place, which means they can make a unique map of a city and the interests of people in it.... I am honored to serve in this role because I believe indie booksellers are masters of close attention, and the benefit of that close attention is the ability to place something in someone's hand that can be transportive, and life-altering."

Abdurraqib is the author of There's Always This Year, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; A Little Devil in America, winner of the Carnegie Medal and a National Book Award finalist; The Crown Ain't Worth Much; They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us; Go Ahead in the Rain; and A Fortune for Your Disaster, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He is also a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant."

ABA senior marketing manager Courtney Wallace noted: "Like the best independent bookstores, Mr. Abdurraqib's work reminds us that literature isn't a luxury--it's a lifeline. Whether through poetry, criticism, or cultural commentary, he fosters the kind of thoughtful, empathetic, and deeply human conversations that indie bookstores create every day. As he prepares to publish a new poetry collection in 2027, we're honored to welcome Abdurraqib as an ambassador who celebrates the power of books, the importance of literary culture, and the essential role independent bookstores play in bringing communities together."

Verse & Vine, a romance-focused bookstore and wine lounge, opened in Poulsbo, Wash., on July 3, the Kitsap Sun reported. Located inside of a renovated historic home at 19679 Front St. NE, Verse & Vine carries a wide selection of romance titles. The lounge serves wine, tea, and a selection of small bites. There is also a garden, which customers can reserve for things like book club meetings.

Owners and mother-daughter team Jaci Bryant and Carmen Garringer described Verse & Vine as a love letter to the Poulsbo and Kitsap County communities, which helped raise money when Garringer was diagnosed with cancer as a child. 

"This community as a whole has really taken care of us," Bryant told the Kitsap Sun. "While we were gone at treatment, the Kitsap County as a whole, but particularly North Kitsap County, were raising funds so we could continue on with what life looked like and reduce stress."

Both avid readers, Garringer and Bryant were inspired to start a romance bookstore of their own after going to a book signing at another romance bookstore. Adding wine to the mix, Garringer said, was an immediate next step. 

They found Verse & Vine's future home in December 2025 and purchased it in February. Built in 1906, the house had previously belonged to a CPA office and had not been renovated since the 1980s. 

Bryant and Garringer have turned it into a cozy, living room-like space, and are adding a 700-square-foot addition they are calling the Conservatory. They plan to use it for events, including author talks, movie nights, and paint-and-sip nights, and aim for it to be open by October. 

So far, Verse & Wine has been very well-received, with the owners reporting there were more than 300 transactions on opening day alone.

Nicole Stephens is the new owner of Keystone Bookstore, a Christian bookstore in Lewistown, Mont., the Lewistown News-Argus reported. Located at 417 W. Main St., Keystone Bookstore has been in business since 1970 and sells Bibles, Christian books, music, and gifts. Stephens purchased the bookstore from previous owner Jason O'Neal.

Looking ahead, Stephens plans to add clothing, children's toys, more children's books, and some adult books that are not explicitly Christian, along with more non-book items made by local entrepreneurs and craftspeople. She will also have to find a new home for the bookstore before winter, as its building is being sold.

Stephens has lived in Lewistown with her family for about four years. She decided to buy the bookstore rather spontaneously, after learning that it was up for sale.

"There's been a lot of people that have come in and been so thankful that someone local was able to buy the store because it does mean so much to the community," Stephens told the Lewistown News-Argus, noting that many of the Christian bookstores in nearby communities have closed. "So many people grew up coming here."

Cafe Rothem, a bookstore and cafe in Duluth, Ga., will close later this month, WhatNow Atlanta reported. Located at 3585 Peachtree Industrial Blvd #128, Cafe Rothem has been in business for 10 years. Alongside books, the business sells vinyl records, CDs, and apparel, while the Korean-style cafe serves coffee, pastries, rice bowls, waffles, and a variety of specialty beverages.

In a social media post, the cafe thanked its customers for "ten wonderful years of your beautiful love and community." The store did not provide a reason for the closure.

Cafe Rothem's last day in business will be July 18. Until then, all retail items will be 40% off.

Members of the Hachette Workers Coalition

Staff at Hachette Book Group have voted 388-130 to unionize with the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, and the newly certified Hachette Workers Coalition will begin negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with the company, the News Guild said. The union also represents workers at the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Bloomberg, and other companies and organizations.

Hachette is now the second of the Big Five publishers to have a union. A predecessor part of HarperCollins unionized 60 years ago, and some Harper staff are part of that union, affiliated with the UAW. The Hachette Workers Coalition is the largest union in book trade publishing and represents about 600 employees.

Eric Arroyo, a Hachette digital production coordinator and union member, said, "We look forward to meeting management at the bargaining table, and we have every expectation that we can come together in good faith to build a groundbreaking first contract that, by uplifting workers, will allow both Hachette and the wider publishing industry to flourish."

Brenna Haney, a metadata associate in digital sales at Hachette, said, "This is the culmination of years of hard work by employees who came together to fight for better working conditions for ourselves and the publishing industry as a whole. We withstood months of anti-union campaigning from the company, and today, we march forward united, ready to bargain for better benefits, stronger protections, and increased equity, transparency, and agency in our workplace."

In a memo to staff, Hachette Book Group CEO David Shelley said that Hachette will "enter into this new era with hope and in good faith."

Paul Champagne, a longtime manager of the Harvard Cooperative Society (the "Coop") in Cambridge, Mass., died June 23. He was 79. 

Paul Champagne

Champagne spent more than 50 years working at the Coop, beginning as a 16-year-old salesperson and eventually rising to the position of operations manager for all six bookstores, including the main Harvard Square location.
 
Born in Dorchester, Mass., Champagne was raised in Brighton. He graduated from St. Patrick's High School in 1964, and continued his education at Massachusetts Bay Community College and Framingham State.

While working at the Coop, he met his future wife, Betsy, and formed a group of many lifelong friends. Upon retirement in 2014, the couple moved to Plymouth to live year-round at Priscilla Beach.

"Family and friends remember him as Paul was meticulous in his detailed record keeping, making Excel spreadsheets for everything. He was also known for always having a list of projects, his love of local sports, woodworking and reading," Champagne's obituary noted.

Eagle Harbor Book Company, Bainbridge Island, Wash., hosted a Summer of Love party to celebrate the paperback release of Susan Wiggs's historical novel Wayward Girls (HarperCollins). The festivities included door prizes, costumes, a dance party (check out the '60s playlist), themed food, and a conversation between Wiggs and author Lynn Brunelle. Pictured: Wiggs, event coordinator Jim Albert, Brunelle.

Bridgeside Books in Waterbury, Vt., shared an Instagram video about "preparing for the Netflix documentary about bookstore owners who only read fiction set in Italy," noting:

"Katya reads fiction! (Set in Italy). As the bookstore owner and book buyer, Katya orders books based on what our customers love to read, past sales data, publisher recommendations but.... Her own preferences sneak onto the shelves! You might find an above average number of books set in Italy, about Italy, inspired by Italy. Katya loves Italy (and has an Italian passport to boot!)."

"Book selling is in our human nature," Book + Bottle in Saint Petersburg, Fla., posted on Instagram, along with a video answering the question "Do you have any book recommendations?" with some choice dance moves.

Megan Pagano has been promoted to senior director, sales analysis, at HarperCollins.

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Melanie DeNardo has joined Cave-Henricks Communications as publicity director.

Women Shaping the West: Stories from Wyoming by Lindsay Linton Buk (The Collective Book Studio).

Today:
Fresh Air remembers Robert Kimball, author and co-author of several books about musical theater and popular song, including Cole, about Cole Porter, written with Brendan Gill, and co-editor with Robert Gottlieb of Reading Lyrics. Kimball died July 1 at age 86.

Apple TV has revealed a first look at Nocturne, a new series based on the internationally bestselling crime novels Lazarus and The Sandman by Lars Kepler. The 10-episode drama stars and is executive produced by Liev Schreiber and Zazie Beetz. It will make its global debut October 30 on Apple TV with the first two episodes, followed by new episodes every Friday through December 25.

The cast also includes Stephen Graham, Bill Camp, Rory Culkin, Chrissy Metz, Poorna Jagannathan, and Gary Carr. Nocturne was written and executive produced by John Hlavin (Shooter, The Man Who Fell to Earth), who also serves as the showrunner. It was created for TV, written, and exec produced by Rowan Joffé (Tin Star, Ballad of a Small Player). 

The project "tells the story of Jonah Lynn (Schreiber), an ex-soldier turned homicide detective who, tired of working the tough streets of Philadelphia, moves to a small town in western Pennsylvania for a quiet life. But, as the town and his family come under attack from the diabolically cunning serial killer Jurek Walter (Graham), Jonah must protect all that he holds dear. When the desperate search for Jurek's last missing victim forces Jonah to send his surrogate daughter, FBI Agent Saga Bauer (Beetz), up against Jurek, how far will Jonah go?" Apple TV said.

Writer, academic, and feminist critic Jacqueline Rose has won the PEN Pinter Prize 2026, awarded annually to a writer resident in the U.K., the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth or former Commonwealth who, "in the words of Harold Pinter's Nobel 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.' " 

Rose will be honored on October 8 during a ceremony at the British Library. The award will be shared with the PEN Pinter Prize Writer of Courage 2026--selected by Rose--who is active in defense of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty. 

"I never imagined I would join such illustrious and courageous company, those who in past years have received this prize, and the PEN movement in its ongoing struggle against oppression and injustice," Rose said. "I am honoured to join their ranks at a time when racial and sexual violence, state torture, and daily violations of international humanitarian law, from Gaza to Ukraine and Sudan, cast their shadow across a shrinking planet. This prize will help me to speak out more boldly, and go some way to meet the self-reproach: Why has horror been given free rein? What more could I have done, and still do, to help create a fairer world?"

Judge and chair of English PEN Ruth Borthwick said: "As we face a world in crisis, on so many levels, we need Jacqueline Rose's thoughtful and incisive analysis to cut through the suffocating layers of obfuscation and denial that beset us, so that we can understand our common humanity and make sense of the world we all inhabit.... Jacqueline Rose is a dazzling winner of the PEN Pinter Prize 2026."

Judge Tanika Gupta called Rose "one of the great intellectuals of the past 50 years, a writer whose thought moves with rare depth, clarity, and grace.... As public discourse contracts and courage grows scarce, her voice remains a beacon of brave, ethically serious thinking--a reminder of what it means to write fearlessly in full view of the world."

Prize judge Will Harris added that "Rose's work insists that truth can only be found by looking more closely at what we fear, at what makes us vulnerable, and by tracing the connections between our hidden desires and shared histories. To read Rose is to be confronted by the depredations of our time, but also to find a way through them."

photo: Jacob Atwood

Emeline Atwood graduated from the Michener Center for Writers in 2023. She writes fiction and poetry and is a recipient of the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize, the Louis Begley Prize, the Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry, and the Le Baron Russell Briggs Fiction Prize. She lives in Austin, Tex. Her first novel, A Real Animal (Catapult, July 7, 2026), follows a young woman as she navigates three distinct romantic relationships, reckons with the false promise of family intimacy, and seeks connection with the sublime and natural worlds.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Are you a sister? Do you ever feel like your loved ones don't know you? Have you ever wanted to inhabit a different body?

On your nightstand now:

Is a River Alive? By Robert Macfarlane
Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov
A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf
Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf
On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward
Collected Works by Lorine Niedecker
The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector

Favorite book when you were a child:

Tracking and the Art of Seeing by Paul Rezendes. I was committed, as a child, to knowing the names and signs of every single wild thing living in our back woods. I wanted to be able to name every fern and identify every paw print, every pile of scat, and every tree in any season, not just from their leaves but from their branching patterns and buds.

Your top five authors:

Toni Morrison. Morrison can shatter my heart, twist it up, set it free, and spook me, all in a single sentence: "We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow." (from The Bluest Eye)

Denis Johnson. Johnson has made the most normal things in the world transform before my eyes.

Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov helps me see the luxury and heartbreak and magic in every misprint and coincidence and instance of mimicry in this world, and--of course--find the butterflies.

Jhumpa Lahiri. There is a voice--calm, tender, cool, and startling--in Lahiri's work that speaks to something very, very deep in me.

Joy Williams. Every story by Williams is packed with nerves, a sequence of little gasps.

Titans, all of them.

Book you've faked reading:

I find myself saying "yes" when people ask me if I've read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen or Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, even though I finished neither.

Then, in college, I struggled through Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov, even though I adore his others.

Books you're an evangelist for:

Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tufte

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer

I don't want us to forget how to write--and finish--our own sentences, and how to make them excellent. A single sentence can do extraordinary things.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I didn't buy this remarkable book just for the cover, but I would've, even if I hadn't known anything about it: The Coin by Yasmin Zaher. One of the most striking, piercing covers out there.

Book that changed your life:

So many, but what's been top of mind for me lately is Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Two months ago, I revisited that short story "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling"--a tale more urgent now than ever--and it ignited in me an obsession with penmanship that has fundamentally changed the way I compose, think, and hold a pen. I now default to a tripod grip, without even thinking about it! I thought my quadrupod grip was one of those things I'd never be able to right. I am pleased, and also confused how the side of one's middle finger isn't always so swollen?

Favorite line from a book:

"I have a life that did not become" --A.R. Ammons, "Easter Morning," included in his collection A Coast of Trees

I've memorized this poem. It is precious to me. And that first line echoes constantly.

(Also, a day doesn't go by that I don't think about those eagles. That might be an exaggeration, but I don't think it is. I am still too scared, as a person, about the permanence of the past, and the path not taken, and loss, and the act of looking back. I hope I grow out of that.)

Five books you'll never part with:

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson. Reading this book always makes me want to write.

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Open up to any letter and feel full of awe and longing and envy and, I think, what I weirdly have to call nostalgia? It's hard to explain my attachment to this book.

The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I am always remembering some part of a Joan Didion essay and having to pull one of these books off the shelf to locate it. If I didn't have these books constantly available to me, I'd have to find new copies.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. My mom gave this book to me, and I read it in one sitting in high school, and it made me not only want to write something just like it but also be a writer who publishes things like it, which are two different things, I think. I guess, put another way, this book feels very important to my ambition, not just my vocation.

Roget's International Thesaurus. I need this to write.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. I have a decade and a half of marginalia in my copy. I could never give it away.

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

'Night, Mother by Marsha Norman. This is a play. It is stunning, and it broke me. It took me a very long time to catch my breath. I want to read it again so badly but haven't mustered up the courage and don't know if I ever will.

Seasoned culture writer Josephine Riesman probes the wild and weird career of a mononymous musician whose eclectic arrangements and idiosyncratic lyrics flabbergasted the music industry. But The Last Temptation of Beck: The Untold Story of a Pop Messiah searches beyond the boundaries of hagiographic nostalgia and instead boldly centers Scientology within the equation of Riesman's savvy analysis.

In January 1994, Beck Hansen lumbered down a dirt road and into American households with the MTV debut of "Loser," a lo-fi single that had been catching fire on college and modern rock radio stations for nearly a year. The mordant slacker anthem was a culmination of everything the young countercultural artist had absorbed from the antifolk music scene around Los Angeles, and it propelled him to monumental celebrity status over the ensuing decade and beyond.

But the Beck who gave interviews and autographs often evaded discussions about religion, growing even more cryptic in public than the nonsensical babbling he poured forth on an increasing number of albums. According to Riesman, many of Beck's early associates were gradually crowded out of his team and replaced by members of the Church of Scientology. By the 2002 release of his eighth studio album, notably titled Sea Change, Beck was inaccessible to many who had been closest to him up to that point. In July 2007, Sea Change cover art designer Jeremy Blake and his girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, died by apparent suicide after drafting an extensive allegation of targeted harassment from church members.

To gauge the shape of her enigmatic subject, Riesman (Ringmaster; True Believer) gathers an impressive array of interview sources that include musician collaborators, the webmaster for Beck's popular fan site, and firsthand witnesses to significant events both public and private. She also wades through available family history, extensive music criticism, and piles of research on the notoriously secretive Church of Scientology, a religion into which Beck was born and through which his father holds great influence.

But The Last Temptation of Beck is no hit piece. Riesman brings a great deal of empathy to her subject as a longtime fan. Hers is a portrait of a man in conflict: with his great passion for music, he is vulnerable to exploitation by an institution obsessed with celebrity and capable of fierce intimidation tactics. In a heartfelt coda, the author lays bare her own vulnerability to describe how Beck's image as a svelte counterpoint to conventional masculinity propped open the closet door for her as a transgender woman. And it's this measured yet personal approach that makes Riesman's investigation every bit as complex and intriguing as the pop star himself. --Dave Wheeler, senior editor, Shelf Awareness

Shelf Talker: Josephine Riesman's captivating profile of the Gen X pop sensation boldly parses the influence of Scientology on his life and career.