This past weekend marked the 20th anniversary of our first issue of Shelf Awareness Pro, which went out to a short friends & family list of subscribers. In those days, founders John Mutter and Jenn Risko did most of the work and rarely caught their breaths. We've grown a bit since then.

Over the years, we've added new products, including Shelf Awareness for Readers, Maximum Shelf, Dedicated issues, GLOW (Galley Love of the Week), the Pre-Order E-Blast, and our Job Board--all in an effort to help make it easier for booksellers do their jobs and to spread the word about books and authors. We've also added more than a dozen staff members and a range of freelance reviewers and other contributors. This year, new products have included the Kids/YA Pre-Order E-Blast and Extra! issues, and as we begin to celebrate our 20th anniversary, we have plans for more and redesigned products and initiatives in 2025 and 2026.

For helping us reach this milestone, we offer heartfelt thanks to our friends throughout this exceptional industry: readers, booksellers, wholesalers, distributors, publishers, authors, agents, and book lovers of all kinds. This is a special community that in this difficult time we treasure all the more. Together we will persevere, and we can't wait to celebrate our 25th and 30th anniversaries with you.

Today we want to express special gratitude to the Shelf Awareness staff, who work hard, smart, diligently, and with elan:

CEO Neil Standberg is thoughtful, incisive, and is a wizard at all things tech (key at Shelf Awareness!), HR, organization, conducting meetings, and more.

Publisher Matt Baldacci is responsible for sales and the strategic direction of the company and is always brimming with creative ideas, new approaches, and new products that can help the industry spread the word about books and sell more books.

CFO Richard Jobes has been with Shelf Awareness from the very beginning, when he first did what he continues to do so well: run the numbers, then give wise, invaluable counsel that transcends the numbers.

Partnership marketing manager Kristianne Huntsberger works cheerfully and helpfully with more than 300 bookstore partners on the Readers and Pre-Order E-Blast programs and is the face of Shelf Awareness at trade shows across the country.

Contributing editor Robert Gray reports about movies and TV, book-related social media posts, obituaries, and much more, but we thank him especially for his nearly 20 years of writing one of the best weekly columns on bookselling.

Managing editor Robin Lenz has the often thankless task of managing a fast-moving, constantly changing editorial landscape and making sure that Shelf Awareness departs into the world on time and accurately.

Associate editor Alex Mutter is an excellent reporter and features writer who handles the most sensitive topics with flair, clarity, and accuracy, and covers myriad conferences and shows in the U.S. and abroad.

Senior editor Dave Wheeler is Shelf Awareness's tastemaker for adult book reviews and author interviews, highlighting the best, most interesting, promising books and authors.

Children's and YA editor Siân Gaetano heads our children's/YA coverage, particularly reviews and author interviews, with passion, tenacity, thoroughness, and dedication.

Associate editor Elaine Cho ably helps choose, edit, and traffic adult book reviews and author interviews, managing the several dozen reviewers on our roster and mediating the editing process for each with great care, patience, and humor.

Production assistant Casey Stryer makes sure that all of the partner mailings function correctly and look good, has a meticulous attention to detail, and is one of the best troubleshooters, knowing everything about procedures and how things work here at the Shelf.

Publishing assistant Madison Gaines juggles and places thousands of ads in Shelf Awareness and works with publishers to make their ads look as good as possible. She's often ready with a joke or riddle, and as a former bookseller at Third Place in Seattle, she has a good instinct for bookseller interests.

Sales assistant Jess Mayfield, who joined Shelf Awareness in September after working at Village Books and Elliott Bay Book Company, has already had a direct impact on increasing sales by establishing great working relationships with our advertisers.

Marilyn Dahl, our former longtime reviews editor, has an amazing ability to pick out great works, from poetry and literature to books about football, and she now focuses on Max Shelves and GLOWs.

Art director Alex Baker is Shelf Awareness's graphic design guru, who in every context provides a look that conveys our essence.

John Barich, an ordained minister known at the Shelf as "Padre," is an ebullient figure who does yeoman's work sorting and keeping track of the many galleys we receive every day.

Tobias Mutter is one of Shelf Awareness's long-term contributors, who started doing back-office work while in high school. Adept at everything from compiling Media Heat to writing an insightful review to inputting stories, we're delighted to say that he is officially joining the staff today.

And again, we thank you, our devoted readers!

Send comments, congratulations, condolences, etc., here.

Yours Truly Bookshop, a romance-focused bookstore, opened Friday in Roseburg, Ore., the News-Review reported.

Located at 544 SE Main St., Yours Truly sells a wide variety of romance titles along with nonbook items like candles, mugs, and stickers. Looking ahead, owner Miranda Hinshaw plans to start hosting book clubs and author events.

Hinshaw, who moved back to Oregon after living in Reno, Nev., has relied on her family and the support of other local businesses to open the bookstore. She's been very encouraged by the response to Yours Truly.

"It's been great, honestly, so far," Hinshaw told the News-Review. "My neighbors in particular have been helpful and the community has been very welcoming. I was really nervous at first, but having that has taken my nerves away. Everyone has been super nice and it's a lot of good vibes, good feelings being down here for sure."

Bluestockings Cooperative in New York City has launched a GoFundMe campaign to help it recover from financial difficulties, Gothamist reported.

The worker-owned cooperative is hoping to raise $150,000 and has so far raised just over $53,000. Money raised will go toward paying off roughly $100,000 in debt to publishers and distributors as well as rebuilding the bookstore's inventory, which has become reliant on donated titles.

The financial difficulties are the result of a protracted dispute over the bookstore's harm reduction and support services, particularly those benefiting people who are unhoused. Those services, as well as Bluestockings' policy allowing anyone to use the bathroom and to stay as long as they liked, led to unhoused people congregating at the bookstore, which in turn led to mounting tension with nearby residents.

In October 2023, the bookstore received a 15-day "notice to cure" from its landlord, claiming that the bookstore was violating its lease. Since then, the bookstore has staved off eviction but has faced legal costs along with the cost of additional staff and security, which the store hired to allay residents' concerns.

Jay Gandhi, one of the bookstore's worker-owners, told Gothamist that Bluestockings once "had a book-buying budget of $35,000 a month," but hasn't been able to buy new books since late September 2024.

Worker-owner Stella Becerril added, "foot traffic is slow, but it's rebuilding. Rumors were circulating that we were closing, but we're here."

The Dark, Unbound, a speculative fiction-focused bookstore, will open in Falls Church, Va., later this summer, Northern Virginia magazine reported. 

Located at 112 W. Broad St., the bookstore will carry predominantly used titles in the fantasy, science fiction, horror, and metaphysical genres, with an emphasis on diverse and underrepresented authors. 

Alongside books, co-owners Annette Gumm and Margaret Nguyen will carry tarot cards and crystals. Their event plans include author readings, book clubs, and possibly tarot readings. The shop will feature comfortable seating as well as coffee and tea, and they told Northern Virginia they care deeply about both physical accessibility and price accessibility.

"One of our focus areas is making sure that we're providing accessibility to people, to the authors that they can't find, that they aren't hearing about on BookTok but are really fabulous authors," Nguyen remarked.

The owners are aiming for a July or August opening.

Jane Stanton Hitchcock, "a daughter of privilege who skewered the foibles of her tribe in a series of addictive crime novels, and who then uncovered a real-life crime when her mother was swindled by her accountant," died June 23, the New York Times reported. She was 78.

Jane Stanton Hitchcock

Hitchcock's mother was Joan Stanton, a 1940s-era radio star who played Lois Lane on the radio version of The Adventures of Superman. Her father, Arthur Stanton, who adopted her when she was 9, had made a fortune importing Volkswagen cars after World War II. The Times wrote that the Stantons "were known for their elaborate parties, where Leonard Bernstein might be found at the piano. For Jane's 21st birthday, Neil Simon composed a sketch." At 29, Jane Stanton married William Mellon Hitchcock, an heir of the wealthy industrialist and Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon, "mixing her newish money with his gilded-age wealth."

Hitchcock drew from this background for her work, beginning with a series of films and Off Broadway plays, but it was when she began mixing social satire with murder that she found her voice. "Murder concentrates the mind," she told the New York Times in 2002.

Her first novel, Trick of the Eye (1992), was praised for its "crackling dialogue that expresses character while steadily, stealthily advancing the plot" by the New York Times Book Review. Her other books include The Witches' Hammer (1994), Social Crimes (2002), and One Dangerous Lady (2005).

In an interview, Jonathan Burnham, Hitchcock's longtime book editor, said: "Nobody of her background wrote about their world the way she did--that New York high society world that has virtually disappeared. She managed to send it up in elegant satire. It slipped down very easily."

Former media executive Lynn de Rothschild observed that Hitchcock's books "slammed the hypocrisies and excesses of the world in which she was born, but in the funniest way... she never betrayed anyone. She just murdered them off."

In 2009, however, Hitchcock's fifth book, Mortal Friends, was published and some people did take offense. She was by then married to Jim Hoagland, the Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, editor, and columnist for the Washington Post, and this was her first book set in D.C., where she lost a number of friends after its release.

Hitchcock also spent several years trying to "untangle the transgressions of her mother's longtime accountant, Kenneth Starr (no relation to the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton)," the Times wrote. "She had been told by her mother's gardener that Mr. Starr was siphoning off tens of millions of dollars from Mrs. Stanton, who had turned her $80 million inheritance over to him after her husband's death in 1987." The district attorney's office eventually found that Starr had been pilfering from clients such as Al Pacino, Carly Simon, and Uma Thurman.

Hitchcock's mother died in 2009, and a month later, the publication of Mortal Friends and its fallout left Hitchcock feeling battered, as did the ongoing investigation of her mother's accountant. She found solace in online poker and her final book, Bluff (2019), was set in that world and won the Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence, given by the North American branch of the International Association of Crime Writers.

"You know in the Bible where it says it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven?" she wrote in Mortal Friends. "Well, that's why rich people invented loopholes."

Barnes & Noble has chosen The Letter Carrier by Francesca Giannone (‎‎‎Crown) as its July national book club pick. Readers are being encouraged to check their local Barnes & Noble for live, in-store discussions hosted towards the end of July.

B&N described the book this way: "Get swept away by the inspiring story of Anna, the first female letter carrier in a town stuck in its traditional ways. Set against the backdrop of the small Italian village of Lizzanello in the midst of World War II, Anna is determined to make a life for herself--a life bigger than being a docile wife and mother while the world passes her by. Becoming the integral link between friends, lovers, families and foes, Anna delivers letters that can change lives--or break them. Tender and poignant, this is a big-hearted historical fiction story you won't want to miss."

At Sourcebooks:

Jamie Tan has joined as senior marketing & publicity manager.

Barbie Altorfer has joined as senior project manager, calendar & general merchandising.

MJ Gryzik has joined as digital marketing product assistant.

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In Bloomsbury's adult trade division:

Lauren Wilson is being promoted to publicist.

Maria DeKoning is being promoted to associate publicist.

Buzz! Boom! Bang!: The Book of Sounds by Benjamin Gottwald (NorthSouth Books).

Today:
All Things Considered: Tamara Yajia, author of Cry for Me, Argentina: My Life as a Failed Child Star (Bloomsbury, $26.99, 9781639733910).

Fresh Air remembers Bill Moyers, who died last week.

Tomorrow:
Today: Brad Thor, author of Edge of Honor: A Thriller (Atria/Emily Bestler, $29.99, 9781982182274).

The View repeat: Dawn Staley, author of Uncommon Favor: Basketball, North Philly, My Mother, and the Life Lessons I Learned from All Three (Atria/Black Privilege Publishing, $28.99, 9781668023365).

Matt and Ross Duffer (Stranger Things) are developing Ron Currie's novel The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne for Netflix, with the author and his writing partner Joshua Mohr set to pen the series and executive produce, Deadline reported. Hilary Leavitt will also exec produce with the Duffers through their Upside Down Pictures.

Currie is the author of four novels and one collection of short stories. As a screenwriter, he worked most recently on the Apple TV+ series Extrapolations. Mohr has published several books. As a screenwriting team, they have previously developed projects with AMC Studios, Amblin Television, and ITV America.

The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City's Soul by Scott W. Berg (Pantheon) has won the $25,000 2025 Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award, which celebrates works that transform public understanding of Chicago, its history, and its people and is sponsored by the Newberry Library and the Pattis Family Foundation.

Astrida Orle Tantillo, president and librarian of the Newberry, said the book is "a compelling narrative of the Great Fire and provides new insight into how Chicago's Gilded Age story has been told. Every Chicagoan is familiar with the fire and how it transformed Chicago for decades to come. The Burning of the World shows in dramatic ways the importance of re-visiting this history."

The judges also recognized two other books, whose authors will receive $2,500:

Onward to Chicago: Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois by Larry A. McClellan (Southern Illinois University Press) and The Salt Shed: The Transformation of a Chicago Landmark by Sandra Steinbrecher (Trope Publishing).

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Natalie Sue won the C$15,000 (about US$10,965) Stephen Leacock Medal for Humor, which honors "the best Canadian book of literary humor published in the previous year," for her debut novel I Hope This Finds You Well.

The other finalists, who each received C$3,000 (about US$2,190), are Greg Kearney for An Evening With Birdy O'Day; and Patricia J. Parsons for We Came From Away.

Seven intriguing stories compose Taiwanese American author and screenwriter Elaine Hsieh Chou's first collection after her lauded debut novel, Disorientation. She opens with "Carrot Legs," about a precocious 13-year-old Taiwanese American visiting her grandparents in Taipei. She's arrived solo this time and her 16-year-old cousin, LaLa, is assigned "to take care of [her] while [she's] here." Sharing a bedroom together encourages sharing and secrets--even plans for violence against a meddling auntie--until a new boyfriend drives the girls apart. A potential love interest also causes a disturbing rift in "You Put a Rabbit on Me," featuring a pair of meta-doppelgängers. "I had primarily come to Paris to find the real me," American Elaine explains, arriving in France to work as an au pair. She meets her exact mirror, French Elaine, in a grocery store's yogurt aisle. An inseparable bond is inevitable--one that's at first devoted but turns punishing when a dating app match upsets their surreal pairing.

In two stories spotlighting parent/child relationships, Chou's characters, either child or parent, exhibit disturbing behaviors excused under the guise of filial or parental duty. In "Happy Endings," a DNA researcher claims his mother's frailty as his reason to eschew a family of his own, instead turning to "professional, uncomplicated relief" that grows more heinously brutal. In "The Dollhouse," a mother uses the figures in her nine-year-old daughter's toy dollhouse to reveal her troubled past as a carer to real-life "dolls," pregnant immigrant women paying exorbitant fees to birth babies with birthright citizenship. Chou sets the collection's novella closing, "Casualties of Art," in a writing residency, capturing pivotal moments of a tumultuous affair between an as-yet unpublished Korean Chinese author, David, and an adopted Korean American artist, Sophia, visiting her white writer husband. Their brief relationship provides David plenty of fodder for a story he plans to submit to a prestigious contest.

While deftly exploring diverse genres--coming-of-age, speculative, contemporary realism, auto- and meta-fiction--Chou convincingly interrogates and exposes unsettling relationships between family members, lovers, and former strangers. Beyond her multi-layered narratives (race, privilege, sexism, and identity are all contained here), she also notably, slyly inserts a sense of unreliability in her storytelling. Meanwhile, her novella offers a non-ending in five potential variations, adding numerous possibilities but never easy clarity. Yes, fiction is imagined and created, but Chou also manages to shrewdly, impressively deceive. --Terry Hong

Shelf Talker: Novelist Elaine Hsieh Chou's intriguing first collection of stories showcases diverse genres, agitated relationships, and--oh, so very cleverly--unreliable narration.

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

1. Echo Fort by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti
2. Cash by Jessica Peterson
3. Firm Feedback in a Fragile World by Jeff Hancher
4. Trust Me Always by Meagan Brandy
5. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
6. Shoveling $H!t by Kass Lazerow
7. Till Summer Do Us Part by Meghan Quinn
8. Butcher & Blackbird by Brynne Weaver
9. Down to the Wire by Rich Galgano
10. Hunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]