Simon & Schuster is relaunching the Pocket Books imprint, which was for many years was one of the premier mass market publishing imprints in the U.S. The relaunched Pocket Books will be part of the Atria Gallery Publishing Group and headed by Anh Schluep, who is joining the company today as v-p, editorial director & deputy publisher of Pocket Books. Pocket Books will focus on commercial fiction, particularly romance as well as romantic thrillers, dark romance, and horror. It will launch with two to three titles a month beginning in January 2027 and aims to be "the top choice for bestselling entrepreneurial authors."

Anh Schluep

Schluep was formerly associate publisher of the Montlake, Skyscape, and 47 North imprints at Amazon Publishing. During her 15-year tenure at Amazon, she helped launch and build Montlake, a romance line, where she published Colleen Hoover, Devney Perry, Rebecca Yarros, Jeneva Rose, and Sylvia Day, among others. Before joining Amazon, she worked in sales at Penguin Group and Random House and started her book career working at her local Waldenbooks.

Jennifer Bergstrom, executive v-p and publisher of Gallery Books, said, "Anh Schluep is one of the most innovative publishers working in our industry today. She has deep expertise in how modern authors want to partner with a publisher. I'm thrilled to be working with Anh and delighted to relaunch Pocket Books with its new mission. Pocket will offer a home for forward-thinking writers, including bestselling indie and hybrid authors looking to amplify their reach using our unparalleled strengths in marketing, publicity, and print distribution."

Schluep said, "This is how I think about it: Pocket Books was originally created to reach a mass market readership. I want to honor that idea and collaborate with authors to bring their stories to the widest audience."

"That's what gives me hope--because out there is a generation of young people around the world that cares about the world," said Lois Lowry, Newbery Medal-winning author of The Giver and Number the Stars, during the closing keynote of Children's Institute 2026 in Schaumburg, Ill., Monday afternoon.

Lois Lowry

Lowry, whose new novel, Building 903, is due out from Clarion Books in September, was in conversation with Cathy Berner, children's & YA specialist at Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, Tex. The pair discussed the origins of Building 903, Lowry's reasons for writing for young people, and the "dangerous work" of putting books in the hands of children. 

Elaborating on feeling hopeful, Lowry said the "future right now is a very ambiguous thing," and there are so many liberties "we fear losing." But, ever since the pandemic, Lowry has been doing virtual classroom visits with teens all over the world, in places as diverse as Romania, South Korea, Japan, Turkey, and even Iran. The conversations are almost always about The Giver, and the big question that students keeping asking Lowry is: How can we keep this from happening? That shared concern, Lowry reiterated, is "what gives me hope."

Building 903, which marks a return for Lowry to the subject of a dystopian future, grew out of a short story she wrote for the children's magazine Kazoo. Each issue has a theme, and the theme for Lowry was future. What Lowry envisioned was a story featuring a seven-year-old girl, living in a time when books have largely disappeared. Lifespans are much longer, and when her 130-year-old neighbor is preparing to go to an assisted living facility, the neighbor gives the girl a key to a room full of books.

The story is brief and generally cheery, Lowry said, but the scenario of a "time when books have disappeared" stuck with her, and it began to seem like something "much more ominous." Set in 2099, Building 903 also features a world without books, but here they've been banned for decades by order of the totalitarian Leader. And in Building 903, the protagonist is a 14-year-old girl named Tessa, who is searching for her missing twin brother. When Tessa's elderly neighbor gives her a key to a room full of books, it opens up a world of both wonder and danger.

Berner mentioned that Building 903 features a character describing the experience of reading a book and the emotional, visceral reactions it can create. She asked Lowry what books have caused that sort of reaction for her; Lowry's answer was The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, which her mother read to her when she was around nine years old. It was an adult book, Lowry pointed out, and full of things like racism and tragedy that were "supposed to be above the interest and intellect of an eight- or nine-year-old child."

Asked what made her decide to write books for young people, Lowry explained that she majored in writing, and when she began her writing career she wrote for adults, fully intending to one day write the "Great American Novel for adults." However, after she wrote a short story for adults that was told through the eyes of a child, an editor wrote to her asking if she would consider writing for kids. Lowry proceeded to write a book for children based on the death of her sister, A Summer to Die (1977), and she got such "passionate, heartbreaking letters" from young people that she decided "this was what I'm going to pursue."

The conversation concluded with Berner asking Lowry to read a portion of her 1994 Newbery Medal acceptance speech, which Lowry noted was addressed to librarians but equally pertained to booksellers. 

Lowry read: "Let me say something to those of you here who do such dangerous work. The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things." --Alex Mutter

Chapter & Hearth Books, an all-ages, general-interest bookstore, opened Friday in Collinsville, Va., the Martinsville Bulletin reported. 

The bookstore, located at 3408 Virginia Ave. in Collinsville Plaza, carries new and used titles along with puzzles, cards, and bookish gifts. There is a dedicated children's section and a selection of rare and out-of-print books.

Owner Ed Williams said he and his team aim "to create a welcoming and warm environment where individuals can take their time, browse without feeling rushed, and leave feeling inspired."

My Secret Shelves in Pineville, La., has expanded with the opening of two new rooms, KALB reported. The expansion has allowed owners Tanja and Brad Lunney to stock a wider variety of books and to create both a reading room and a writing area for local authors.

"We've expanded into these areas in a way that not only makes the store bigger," Tanja Lunney told KALB. "I feel like it provides a way for extra activities and really just a community-like hub for people to just come in, relax, enjoy, and actually have something to do in Pineville."

My Secret Shelves opened in February. Located at 1315 Military Hwy., it carries general-interest titles mainly for adults, along with some children's and YA books. The store spans several rooms and includes a variety of secret spaces, such as an area that is accessible through a hidden door and another that is opened with the pull of a lever.

Lunney noted that with Pineville rapidly growing, My Secret Shelves is expanding to keep pace. "And we wouldn't be able to do that without the community support. And we're truly so grateful."

Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, Calif., one of many organizations that recently lost NEA grants and other funding, has launched a GoFundMe campaign to make up the for the funding losses and some unusual expenses resulting from storm damage and vandalism. 

As the press put it, "For 32 years, Red Hen has published extraordinary poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, championing voices that might otherwise go unheard. Today, that work is under serious financial threat.

"We are the biggest non-university non-profit publisher in Southern California. Every year, we publish 25 books, teach poetry to more than 350 students in our Writing in the Schools (WITS) program, host at least 30 international events, mentor 50 interns, provide eight publication awards, and publish almost 500 authors through the Los Angeles Review. To date, this comes to over 700 published books (including our imprints), 5,000+ WITS students, hundreds of events, over 200,000 hours of mentorship, more than 60 awards, and thousands of authors featured through the Los Angeles Review.

"Without independent publishers like Red Hen Press, many authors' incredible work might never find the audience they deserve. Our award-winning authors, books, and cover designs would go unseen. We love our authors and their incredible stories, and we yearn to champion their work, to spread it like morning glories to our community of readers eager to see themselves reflected in the pages they read." 

Red Hen aims to raise $500,000 and has received $180,000 so far.

Martin Walker visited McIntyre's Books in Fearrington Village, N.C., where he read to a full house from A Murder in Springtime (Knopf), the latest in his Bruno, Chief of Police series. The bookstore reported, "Not only did he wow the audience with tales of Bruno, the Perigord, and French history, but he finished with an a capella rendition of a Jacques Brel love song."

A Founding Mother by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie (Morrow Paperbacks) is the July pick for Reese's Book Club, which described the book this way: "Our July Pick transports us to Revolutionary America through the eyes of a founding mother: Abigail Adams. Told over the course of 50 years, readers will get to intimately know the formidable woman behind two U.S. presidents and her profound influence on a young country. Abigail’s story sheds a light on the oftentimes forgotten women in history and serves as a powerful reminder of the strength and perseverance women continue to demonstrate in times of uncertainty."

Reese said: "Celebrating America’s 250th with a story about one remarkable woman."

Former Congressman Steve Israel shared a photo of the front window of his bookstore, Theodore's Books, Oyster Bay, N.Y., featuring an American flag book display for the holiday weekend.
Israel wrote:

"As we celebrate the Fourth of July, we must remember that America's story has always been written by people willing to imagine something better. From the very beginning, they believed in possibility. 

For two and a half centuries, the American story has been shaped by presidents and patriots, but most enduringly by teachers, dreamers, dissenters, and readers who believed that ideas have the power to shape history! 

At Theodore's Books, we believe that books are one of the greatest expressions of the American experiment. They challenge us and unite us, despite our differences. Each story invites us to see the world--and each other--with greater understanding as we turn the page on to this nation’s next chapter together. 

Whether you're spending the holiday with family, friends, or simply a good book, we hope you'll take a moment to celebrate the stories and freedoms that continue to define our country." 

Booksellers from Boulder Bookstore, Boulder, Colo., shout-out their favorite bookstores (other than their own, of course!).

At HarperCollins Children's Books:

Lauren Tambini has been promoted to assistant director of marketing. She was previously senior manager, marketing.

Shannon Cox has been promoted to assistant director of marketing. They were previously manager, marketing.

Jenny Lu has been promoted to senior publicity manager. She was previously publicity manager.

Emma St. John has been promoted to senior manager of marketing & publicity. She was previously manager, marketing & publicity.

Abby Dommert has been promoted to senior publicist. She was previously publicist.

Matt Maguda has been promoted to senior associate of marketing & publicity. He was previously associate, marketing & publicity.

Elba Luz has been promoted to marketing associate. She was previously coordinator, marketing.

Hachette Book Group will sell and distribute Paperblanks in the U.S. and the Caribbean. The journal, planner, and stationery company with headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, Paperblanks became part of Hachette UK in 2022. The new arrangement consolidates Paperblanks' U.S. sales and distribution under HBG.

Ed Spade, senior v-p of commercial operations at HBG, said, "We have long admired the artistry and quality behind Paperblanks' journals and stationery. It's a brand built on real care, and one we're proud to welcome."

Graham Conway, CEO of Paperblanks, said, "Paperblanks joining HBG's selling and distribution network is a pivotal moment for our expansion plans in the U.S. market. HBG is a best-in-class operator, and this collaboration will not only drive growth, but will also help us reach more customers over the coming years."

Tomorrow:
Late Show with Seth Meyers repeat: David Sedaris, author of The Land and Its People: Essays (Little, Brown, $30, 9780316264839).

Winners have been named for the 12th annual Firecracker Awards, celebrating "the best of independently published literature" in books and magazines and sponsored by the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses. Each book winner receives $2,000--$1,000 for the press and $1,000 for the author.

The book winners:

Fiction: Blood Work and Other Stories by Donald A. Carreira Ching (Bamboo Ridge Press). The judges commented: "Rarely is a collection written with such veracity and unwavering resolution. Blood Work and Other Stories delves into the contemporary lives of Hawaiians as they navigate grief, housing instability, and questions of belonging. These seventeen masterfully crafted stories are ones of grit, loss, and sorrow, while also erupting off the page with the unexpected splendor of pōhinahina growing in an ABC Store parking lot. They remind us that despite climate change and development, gentrification and intergenerational trauma, Hawai'i is a place of enduring beauty and strength. Donald A. Carreira Ching has written a marvel of a book that commands our attention and obedience."

Creative Nonfiction: Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed by Sangamithra Iyer (Milkweed Editions). "Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed weaves together research and personal narrative in a genre-blurring work that is both a memoir and an argument. Within it, Sangamithra Iyer builds bridges between the different aspects of her identity, between humans and animals, between the past and the present. She writes to seek truth and reckon with grief. Iyer challenges us to have more compassion and empathy/sympathy for all living things, to think in a thoughtless world, and to feel when the world tries to numb us. The book is indeed a confluence, and one that offers a model to other writers who live intersectional lives and write intersectional stories that hold both the personal and the political. Governing Bodies is a stunning book, both in content as well as form, with a cover and table of contents whose designs are just as thoughtful as the words within."

Poetry: The Choreic Period: Poems by Latif Askia Ba (Milkweed Editions). "The Choreic Period is a striking contribution to contemporary disability poetics, challenging ableist reading habits and expanding what poetic accessibility and difficulty can mean. We were moved by its pared-down nature, its illustration of the relationship between syntax and disability, and its innovative formal elements, including interruptive punctuation, staccato lineation, multilingual code-switching, and deliberate difficulty. Its force and voice made this conceptually sharp, powerfully embodied book a clear choice for the Firecracker Poetry Award."

photo: Lyndon French

Chicago author Daniel Kraus won a Pulitzer Prize for Angel Down. His novel Whalefall received a front-cover review in the New York Times Book Review, won the Alex Award, was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune. With Guillermo del Toro, he coauthored The Shape of Water, based on the idea the two created for the Oscar-winning film. Also with del Toro, Kraus coauthored Trollhunters, which was adapted into the Emmy-winning Netflix series. He co-wrote The Living Dead and Pay the Piper with filmmaker George A. Romero. Kraus's The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch was one of Entertainment Weekly's Top 10 Books of the Year. Kraus has won the Bram Stoker Award, a Scribe Award, two Odyssey Awards (for Rotters and Scowler), and more. His latest novel, The Sixth Nik (Saga Press, June 23, 2026), is a galaxy-spanning adventure set aboard a ship woven from biomatter and capable of reacting to every need of its human crew.

Handsell readers your book:

I've made a nice, long career writing disturbing novels, but nothing I've ever written touches The Sixth Nik. This is me at my most unchained and deranged--but hopefully, emotionally, and intellectually challenging too. It's about a nine-year-old cultist who is raised to be brilliant for roughly three years before the tech in her brain drives her insane. She is assigned the task of boarding a ship made of living tissue to discover the fate of a colony of plague-ridden spacefarers. It is absolutely bonkers.

On your nightstand now:

Gettysburg by Stephen W. Sears. My comfort spot in literature right now is anything about the U.S. Civil War, not only because every single leader endlessly fascinates me, but because, as you might expect, all those reads are leading toward a work of my own that I've planning for many, many years. I've read Gettysburg books before, but not this one, which many say is a modern classic. So far, so good.

Favorite book when you were a child:

No single book stands out from pre-middle school, so I think I'll go with Richard Adams's Watership Down. It blew my mind the way that Tolkien books were no doubt blowing the minds of other kids my age. I rarely read books more than once, but I've read this several times, and eventually did my own homage called the Teddies Saga.

Your top five authors:

This question is cruel and unusual, and so my answer will be slapdash and flawed. I suppose, just for today, I'll go with Jonathan Eig, Shelby Foote, Junji Ito, Kathe Koja, and Maryse Meijer.

Book you've faked reading:

While I can't recall ever doing this specifically, I assume I have faked knowing more about the works of Homer than I really do.

Book you're an evangelist for:

One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve by M. Shaw. Genius.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Toad by Katherine Dunn. Good book, too.

Book you hid from your parents:

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. My mom actually bought it for me at my request, but neither of us had any idea what was inside.

Book that changed your life:

Danse Macabre by Stephen King. It was my pre-Internet Internet; it described media beyond my wildest dreams that was all the more tantalizing because I couldn't actually see, read, or listen to hardly any of it. It got my brain spinning, and it's never stopped.

Favorite line from a book:

"My tale was not one to announce publicly; its astonishing horror would be looked upon as madness by the vulgar." This is a quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and I used it at the front of my book Rotters.

Five books you'll never part with:

Since I can always rebuy books, I interpret this question as asking about specific copies of books that for various reasons mean something to me. To that end, I will choose my beat-up copies of Clive Barker's Weaveworld, Peter Straub's Ghost Story, Grace Metalious's Peyton Place, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

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

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. I swear, it taught me how to plot.

Alexandria Scott-Christensen peels back the layers of cacao in her multifaceted debut picture book about chocolate, the "almost universally loved food." She takes young readers into the forests where cacao trees thrive, the factories where the fruit is processed, and across the continents and through history to show cacao's wide variety of purposes; she even propels readers into "the future of chocolate."

Chocolate Unwrapped is divided into several different sections, each displayed on an illustrated double-page spread. Main text gives readers an overview of the topic--"Anatomy of the Fruit," "Cacao's Home," or "Mesoamerican Origins"--while sidebars add delightful tidbits of information to the topic at hand. Readers can learn that "cacao pods grow directly on the tree's trunk or limbs," and that "it takes about 400 cocoa beans to make one pound of chocolate." Scott-Christensen describes chocolate's Mesoamerican origins and uses in medicine, currency, religious rituals, and more. She clearly explains how chocolate was colonized by Europeans; they conquered the peoples and land of Mesoamerica, used the fruit and forced labor to create massive wealth for themselves, and ultimately dedicated other colonized locations to continue growing cacao trees with forced labor. With the Industrial Revolution came improved processing for developing chocolate, making it cheaper and easier to produce and less of a luxury good. Scott-Christensen also discusses scientific elements of the beloved confection, describing how a chemical in chocolate makes "your brain release dopamine, which can make you feel happy" and that "cacao waste can be turned into biochar" (a substance "like charcoal, but better for the environment").

Yoko Baum (A Very Asian Guide to Japanese Food illustrator) uses an earth-toned palette for the book's digital illustrations, which work to encapsulate the various topics addressed on each page through inset bubbles, diagrams, and spot illustrations. To emphasize the layers of elements necessary for cacao trees to thrive, Baum even changes the illustrative format mid-book, requiring readers to turn their books--or heads--90 degrees. The lively art has a mostly two-dimensional feel, with human figures drawn in a naïve style.

Back matter includes a recipe for hot chocolate and an interview with "the first ever chocolate maker in Guinée, West Africa," Djenabou Diallo. Young chocolate afficionados will likely leave the pages of Chocolate Unwrapped with an appreciation for chocolate, its long history, and its potential future uses. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

Shelf Talker: Young readers can devour the history and science of cacao beans and their delicious product in this fact-filled, enlightening debut picture book.