Lakeville Books and Stationery has opened a second location, in Great Barrington, Mass., the Berkshire Eagle reported.

The general-interest bookstore, at 63 State Rd., has an emphasis on illustrated books in categories including gardening, architecture, design, automobiles, photography, and cooking. It occupies the building that previously housed the Bookloft, which closed in July after more than 50 years in operation.

Store owners Darryl and Anne Peck opened the original Lakeville Books and Stationery in Lakeville, Conn., just this past April; they moved so quickly to open a second store because they knew the Bookloft's closure would leave a void in the Great Barrington community. The new store is about 20 miles from Lakeville.

Darryl Peck told the Berkshire Eagle that his first thought upon hearing of the Bookloft's closure was, "Oh please don't tell me this right now, we just spent a year getting this store going," but his second thought was, "Well, Great Barrington cannot be without a bookstore." He and his wife knew "that we were going to have to do something."

They initially considered options for saving the bookstore but realized that doing so would have been a very long and complicated process. The Pecks decided instead to open a new bookstore in the same space. 

Peck said he understood that the Bookloft was struggling for a few years, but he wanted "everyone to know that this is not the Bookloft, it's Lakeville Books, and I hope people give us a chance to prove to them that it can be done properly."

Eric and Evelyn Wilska, the founders and original owners of the Bookloft, owned the store for 42 years before selling it to Pamela Pescosolido in 2016. In 2020 Pescosolido moved the store to 63 State Rd., and in 2022 she sold the business to Giovanni Boivin. Ultimately, Boivin closed the store after significant financial difficulties.

Prior to opening Lakeville Books, the Pecks owned Righton Books in St. Simons, Ga., which they opened in 2019. They opened the first Lakeville Books this spring and sold Righton Books to Jim and Burch Barger in late August.

Volume Bookshop & Studio hosted its grand opening celebration earlier this week at 7 East Main St. in Buckhannon, W.Va. My Buckhannon reported that the store features new and used books, a podcast studio, children's books, puzzles, vinyl, art supplies, and more. Owners Nicki Bentley-Colthart and Spike Nesmith have also partnered with Back Porch Quilters to sell their quilts.

Nicki Bentley-Colthart and Spike Nesmith

They decided to open the store to make sure the community has a local source to purchase books. "We heard that Argo Books was closing, and we hated to see the community lose a bookstore," Bentley-Colthart said. "We are readers and lovers of the community, so we wanted to have a space where people can come hang out, pick up a book and try some Scottish/British foods. We have British tea, a few sweets and shortbread, building on Spike's culture, which is tied to a lot of our Appalachian culture. A lot of us have Scottish heritage, so we wanted to bring a little bit of that here."

Nesmith is a nonfiction reader and Bentley-Colthart a fiction reader, she said, so "between the two of us, I think we have a good, well-rounded vision of what's out there and what people like.... We always want to make it inviting and welcoming.... We just want to be a hub where people can come in and have that little adventure through a book." 

Nesmith, who has more than 30 years of experience in radio, said he is willing to help produce and develop podcasts: "I'd say we probably lean more on the books than anything else, but we also have a podcast studio, where if someone wanted to come in and record something, they can use that studio." He is also working on an Internet stream that will play music and feature community announcements.

The California Independent Booksellers Alliance has launched a Certified Indie Campaign, designed to help shoppers feel good about supporting indie bookstores year round. The campaign was spearheaded by CALIBA board members Vanessa Martini, buyer at Green Apple Books, San Francisco, and Katerina Argyres, owner of Noe Valley Books, also in San Francisco.

"As we head into the busy holiday season, CALIBA wants to help you communicate with your community about what makes real indies unique," the organization noted. "The Certified Indie campaign was made to provide clear, strong branding and easily shared assets to member stores. The campaign is intended to make customers who choose to shop with us feel like they've done a good, cool thing (because they have!) by buying from a Certified Indie vs. other stores that may lack this seal. We encourage [our members] to use the available assets and linked information to begin a dialogue with your neighbors about how choosing a Certified Indie is choosing your community."

CALIBA is offering members a digital Certified Independent Bookstore logo (designed by Works by Abigail) to display on websites and marketing materials as well as an infographic and social media assets describing the good that small businesses do for their communities and why shoppers should be proud to support Indies. Members can also order a window decal of the Certified Independent Bookstore logo.  

Currently the assets are available only to CALIBA bookstore members, but the organization noted that if you are interested in participating or have questions about the campaign, contact executive director Hannah Walcher.

Seiwado Bookstore, Osaka

The Japanese government "intends to work on revitalizing local bookstores, which play a vital role in preserving culture," Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said last week at a general question session during a House of Representatives budget committee meeting, the Japan News reported. 

During the session, former economy, trade, and industry minister Ken Saito said more than a quarter of all municipalities nationwide did not have any bookstores. "It is a grave situation that children are losing opportunities to pick up books," said Saito, who had formed the Bookstores Promotion Project Team during his tenure as economy minister.

In response, Takaichi noted: "Bookstores are vital cultural hubs in communities, allowing residents to encounter diverse works. Their role is also significant from the perspective of preserving Japan's beautiful traditional culture."

She added that the government would "continue to firmly advance the revitalization of bookstores" based on the Bookstore Revitalization Plan, which promotes the widespread adoption of IC tags for books and the introduction of an online ordering system between bookstores and publishers, the Japan News wrote.

In October, results from a survey conducted by the Yomiuri Shimbun found that 70% of respondents "said they approve of central government support that improves the business operations of bookstores and encourages people to open new ones," the Japan News reported, noting that "behind the efforts lies a sense of crisis over the decline in the number of bookstores."

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Earlier this week, the management committee for BookPeople, the Australian booksellers organization, met for its final meeting of the year. "It's one of the few times we gather in person, and it was great to be in the same room together," noted Gavin Williams, BookPeople president and owner of Matilda Bookshop in Stirling.

He added that the meeting was also notable for highlighting a change of leadership for the new year: "We were pleased to welcome incoming CEO Susannah Bowen, who joined us ahead of her early-December start. Susannah shared her thoughts on what her first six months in the role will look like, and the committee listened with real interest and enthusiasm.

"Alongside the usual business--finance reports, governance matters, and staff updates--we took time as a committee to express our sincere thanks to outgoing CEO Robbie Egan for his work over the past seven years. It was unanimously agreed that the organization is in a far stronger position today than when Robbie first stepped into the role. We thanked him wholeheartedly for his dedication to our members and the wider industry and wished him all the very best for the years ahead."

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Cool Idea: The Canadian Independent Booksellers Association posted on Facebook: "If you're in Nova Scotia and want to save money while supporting local authors and publishers, there's a new pilot program that you can be a part of right now! Eleven participating booksellers, including Block Shop Books, Lunenburg Bound in Lunenburg, Bookmark, and Woozles in Halifax, and On the Same Page Books in Sydney, will offer $10 vouchers for book lovers to use on thousands of qualifying titles. The program only runs until Feb. 28, 2026, so don't wait to grab your vouchers and show your support for great reads by Nova Scotian authors and publishers!"

British-Ukrainian author Marina Lewycka, who "often drew on her Ukrainian heritage and her family's experiences as refugees," died November 13, the Guardian reported. She was 79. Lewycka was best known for her debut novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, which "established her as a distinctive voice in contemporary British fiction."

Published in 2005, when she was 58, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian became an international bestseller and was translated into 35 languages. It won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

"Marina burst on the scene with her memorable and bestselling first novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian," said her agent, Bill Hamilton. "It introduced her unique comic sensibility, with a strong flavor of farce, matched with a campaigning sense of social justice, which played out magnificently over subsequent novels and in her public life."

Juliet Annan, her former editor, said, "It was the greatest pleasure to edit and publish Marina. There are very few true originals around and she was one of them--funny, warm, eccentric, political in the best way imaginable, impossible and wonderful. Her crusading fiction will live on as an extraordinarily serious and hilarious record of times and places."

Lewycka was born in 1946 in a British-run refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, "the daughter of two Ukrainians who had been taken [to Germany] as forced laborers by the Nazis. Her family later moved to England, where she grew up and was educated," the Guardian wrote. She lectured in media studies at Sheffield Hallam University, where she joined a creative writing course and refined the manuscript that became A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

Her later novels include Two Caravans (2007), shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing; We Are All Made of Glue (2009); Various Pets Alive and Dead (2012); The Lubetkin Legacy (2016), which was also shortlisted for the Wodehouse Prize; and her final book, The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid (2020).

In later years Lewycka, struggled with multiple system atrophy (MSA), a rare, progressive neurological disorder that causes the degeneration of nerve cells in the brain. "I have come to depend on friends and the kindness of strangers.... One of the few advantages of this condition is that I get to see human beings at their best," she observed in the Guardian in 2020, adding that although she wrote more slowly, "sometimes the mistakes can open up new avenues of creative thought.... It keeps me smiling when there's not much else to smile about."

Horror and dark fantasy author Christina Henry (r.) celebrated the release of her novel The Place Where They Buried Your Heart (Berkley) at Brookline Booksmith, Brookline, Mass. She was in conversation with author Christopher Golden.

"It's an ideal autumn day in the Short North! Come find the next story to take you away... and then take you to the nearest coffee shop," Prologue Bookshop in Columbus, Ohio, advised while sharing a photo of the shop's latest, quotable sidewalk chalkboard message: "Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made." --Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars 

"May you all rest as soundly as a bookstore cat melting across uneven book spines," Blue Cypress Books, New Orleans, La., posted on Facebook.

ACC Art Books will represent books from the Mundo Domingo in North America, effective January 1.

Mundo Domingo, with headquarters in Mexico City, focuses on Mexican gastronomy through editorial, audiovisual, and culinary projects. The Guía Domingo series, the first books to be represented, document and honor taco culture in different cities in Mexico.

In 2010, Mexican cuisine was designated a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Mundo Domingo's new books are beautifully designed collectibles on the most authentic and influential taquerias; they are an important contribution to the preservation of Mexico's food traditions.

Mundo Domingo commented: "Working with ACC is a big step toward achieving our mission of celebrating the richness of Mexican culture with a wider audience."

John Brancati, general manager of ACC North America, said, "Mexican food is popular here, but Guía Domingo offers a level of understanding we haven't seen before. We're looking forward to this special partnership."

Ride: Most Iconic Wheels of the Silver Screen (For Movie & Car Lovers) by Chris Nashawaty, Chad Oppenheim, and Matt Stone (Tra Publishing).

Today:
Fresh Air: Rachel Lance, author of Chamber Divers: The Untold Story of the D-Day Scientists Who Changed Special Operations Forever (Dutton, $32, 9780593184936).

Tomorrow Studios (The Better Sister, One Piece) has acquired the novel Don't Let the Devil Ride by Ace Atkins, which will be adapted for TV by award-winning showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker (Marvel's Luke Cage).

The story: "Addison McKellar thought she knew the man she married--charming, successful Dean McKellar--until he vanished. Fearing the worst, she hires private investigator Porter Hayes, an old friend of her father and a legend in Memphis. As Hayes starts pulling at loose threads Addison's entire life unravels. Her husband's prosperous construction firm? It doesn’t exist. Instead, her easy, affluent lifestyle is funded by blood money from Dean's shadowy international mercenary firm--and she doesn't even know his real name."

"Ace Atkins is a singular voice, and we flew through this novel for the wild ride it is; nabbing an utterly dynamic and meticulous creator like Cheo to adapt it for series is the perfect pairing. We can't wait to introduce audiences to Porter Hayes in a story that takes us from the streets of Memphis all around the world," said the studio's CEO/partner Marty Adelstein, president/partner Becky Clements, and executive v-p Alissa Bachner, who are executive producing Don't Let the Devil Ride, along with Atkins and Coker.

Finalists have been unveiled for the C$10,000 (about US$7,145) Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction, which is administered by Wilfrid Laurier University, Quill & Quire reported. The prize recognizes a Canadian writer of a first or second published book with a Canadian locale and/or significance. The winner will be named later this spring. This year's shortlisted titles are:

Hell of a Ride: Chasing Home and Survival on a Bicycle Voyage Across Canada by Martin Bauman
The Last Logging Show: A Forestry Family at the End of an Era by Aaron Williams

The winner will be named in early December, with an award ceremony to follow in spring 2026 at Wilfred Laurier in Waterloo, Ont.

(credit: Matthew Stein Photography)

Theodora Goss is the World Fantasy, Locus, and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of the Athena Club trilogy of novels--The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, and The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl--as well as several short story and poetry collections. Her most recent short story collection, Letters from an Imaginary Country (Tachyon Publications, November 11, 2025), takes readers to imaginary places and is deeply influenced by her Hungarian childhood during the Communist era. Each of these intricate stories focuses on storytelling and identity, including Goss's own.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Do you like traveling? How about to imaginary countries? This collection will take you to Cimmeria, Pellargonia, and Thüle, as well as Mars and Budapest.

On your nightstand now:

I have a bad habit of piling a bunch of books on my nightstand--some of which I'm reading, some of which I want to read at some point. Currently that pile includes Reading: A Very Short Introduction by Belinda Jack (for work), Things That Are: Essays by Amy Leach (which I haven't started yet, but it was blurbed by David Abram), Tales of the Seal People: Scottish Folktales by Duncan Williamson (which I'm particularly looking forward to), The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip (which I last read as a teenager and want to re-read), Understanding a Photograph by John Berger (for work), The Years by Annie Ernaux (because I really liked another of her books), The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (also for work), and What Shall I Wear: The What, Where, When, and How Much of Fashion by Claire McCardell (which I already read, but haven't yet put back on a bookshelf). I think books are my security blanket. As long as I'm surrounded by a lot of books, I feel as though everything is all right.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Definitely The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. I've read it so many times. Of course I wanted to go to Narnia, and took heart when Aslan said, in Prince Caspian, that there were portals to Narnia scattered around our world. I looked for them--but now the books are my portals.

Your top five authors:

Honestly, I don't have a top five list--I could list my top 50 authors more easily than five. But I'll list five authors that I particularly love: Jane Austen, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, Angela Carter, and Agatha Christie. Can I also add T.H. White, Susanna Clarke, Jorge Luis Borges, Dorothy Sayers, and Peter S. Beagle? That's 10 rather than five, but I honestly can't narrow it down. I could add so many more!

Book you've faked reading:

The only ones I can think of are for graduate school, when I didn't have time to finish the readings before class. I skimmed Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory--I hope that counts?

Book you're an evangelist for:

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It's about a middle-aged woman who decides that she will no longer live with her oppressive relatives, and instead moves to the countryside to become a witch. I recommend it to everyone. A second choice would be Shirley Jackson's Life Among the Savages. If you only know Jackson from "The Lottery," you might be startled by this book about her life in New England with her husband and children. It's savagely funny--one of the funniest books I've ever read.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Hobbit, with the cover illustrated by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Book you hid from your parents:

Anything after bedtime. I was one of those children who read under the covers with a flashlight because I could not stop whichever book I was reading. Otherwise, I was allowed to read whatever I wanted. My mother believed in reading.

Book that changed your life:

Most of them? I guess the books that changed my life the most were the ones that first inspired me to become a writer. In addition to Ursula K. Le Guin, my other inspirations were Anne McCaffrey, Tanith Lee, and Patricia A. McKillip. They wrote the fantastical books I found in the mall bookstore, right around the time I turned 15. I adored the Earthsea trilogy, the Dragonriders of Pern series, the Tales from the Flat Earth series, and the Riddle Master trilogy. They showed me that I could create entire worlds through words.

Favorite line from a book:

This is from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, when Mole and Water Rat take their boat to find a missing otter cub, and encounter the Piper at the Gates of Dawn--the god of nature, Pan himself.

"Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

Isn't that glorious? But you need to read the book to really understand it.

Five books you'll never part with:

I don't want to part with any of them, but the ones that are most precious to me are the ones I had as a child. For example, I have a boxed set of Le Guin's Earthsea books that are absolutely tattered. I would not want to part with my old copies of Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, White's The Once and Future King, Astrid Lindgren's The Brothers Lionheart, or any of my Louisa May Alcott books--I have a whole bunch of them, including obscure ones like Rose in Bloom. Can we count each author as one? That sort of makes five.

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

Honestly, none of them. I like the experience of reading books over and over again, and the truth is that I forget details. I've read Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd probably five times, and it doesn't matter that I know whodunnit. I appreciate the book each time. Once you're in the know, it's a pleasure to see how she misleads the reader.

If you could be any book, what would you be?

Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim. It starts with a description of her garden in Central Europe and turns into her being snarky about everything you can imagine. It's very funny. I would love to be snarky with a garden in Central Europe--one can dream!

In debut novelist Jared Poon's witty, engrossing urban fantasy, City of Others, a paranormal catastrophe erupts in Singapore and thrusts a midlevel civil servant who manages the supernatural into a dangerous investigation.

"So there I was in the office," begins Benjamin Toh, beleaguered middle manager, "processing paperwork to register a batch of undead ducklings." Ben is a team member at the Division for Engagement of Unusual Stakeholders (DEUS) in Singapore's Ministry of Community. In other words, his government-appointed duty is to provide services and regulation to the many and diverse paranormal beings who call Singapore home, supported by a team composed of Jimmy the office psychic, Mei the "spell-slinging bomoh," and Fizah, a young jinni interning at DEUS. Ben himself is a Gardener, his inner landscape filled with a magical forest that gives him superhuman strength. When an entire residential block vanishes under an inexplicable wave following a "ghosty" energy spike, he finds himself trying to balance his investigation of the phenomenon, a new romance with a gorgeous man, and pressure from his elderly, widowed father to be at home more. Ben undergoes a run-in with a wyvern, the revelation that his boyfriend can move through layers of existence invisible to the human eye, and the machinations of powerful jinn factions. Worse, the answers he needs may lie in an otherworldly night market, but the dangerous "deity-level" snake creature who protects it and his fierce cadre of guards have no love for civil servants. However, Ben's greatest challenges will not lie in office politics or paranormal combat, but in the complex patchwork of grief and love that motivate the human heart.

This mix of action and adventure, magical metaphysics, and deep emotional journeys has excitement and grit to spare, plus a strong element of swoonworthy romance. Most of the paranormal beings Ben encounters come from Southeast Asian lore, grounding the setting despite their fantastical nature. Poon's sense of humor shines when he plays up the juxtaposition between dire supernatural peril and the mundanities of civil servant life, such as popping into realms beyond mortal sight during office Sports Day but needing to get back for Ultimate Frisbee or risk a telling-off from one's supervisor. Reminiscent of well-loved urban paranormal series of the late '90s and early aughts combined with contemporary workplace comedies, City of Others will resonate with fantasy fans and anyone who recognizes the importance of an unofficial office group chat. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Shelf Talker: This urban fantasy set in Singapore is a loving sendup of life in civil service and a fascinating interdimensional adventure in one.