On May 2, the same day that the first Independent Bookstore Day takes place in the U.S., independent bookstores across Canada will team up for the first Authors for Indies Day. Like Indies First in the U.S., the one-day event will feature authors volunteering at their local independent bookstores to talk to customers and handsell books. Some stores, in addition to having authors as guest booksellers, have also planned special readings, events and promotions for the day.

Janie Chang

In much the same way that Sherman Alexie spearheaded Indies First, Canadian author Janie Chang provided the impetus for Authors for Indies. She initially envisioned the event as a British Columbia-only event, but enthusiasm for the movement quickly spread across Canada.

So far, more than 100 bookstores and 500 authors have signed on. Among the authors are Joseph Boyden (The Orenda), Guy Gavriel Kay (River of Stars), Ann-Marie MacDonald (Adult Onset) and Cathy Marie Buchanan (The Painted Girls).

More information on participating stores and authors can be found here. --Alex Mutter

Books Inc. has won the bidding process for a store in the renovated Terminal 3 at San Francisco Airport. The company will begin construction on the Compass Books store in July and open in time for the Terminal's grand opening on November 15. United is in process of taking over all of Terminal 3 and rebuilding it. Books Inc.'s longtime store in the Terminal was closed, and during construction, it's had a 350-square-foot temporary store. Books Inc. also has a Compass Books store in Terminal 2.

Owner Michael Tucker said the Terminal 3 store "is a pretty big deal for us." The 2,500-square-foot location will be the only bookstore in the Terminal, which will have some 9.5 emplanements (or passengers boarding or departing planes) a year. Each of those passengers, Tucker said, spends on average 75 cents to a dollar at bookstores. The location of the store should be advantageous: it's the only retail location across from where passengers come out into the terminal after going through security, the so-called "recomposure area."

In other good news for Books Inc. (which came the same day the bookstore learned it had won the bidding process for the airport store), the company received a building permit for its new location on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, where it will move its Fourth Street store. Books Inc. submitted for the permit in December and had hoped to open last February. Construction is starting.

Written Words Bookstore, Shelton, Conn., plans to move from its current location on River Road to the Conti Building on Howe Street. On Facebook Sunday, the bookseller posted: "Please trust that the decision did not come lightly. I've always liked the idea of a community-type setting, and Mike (The Glass Source) and Nicole (Bring-the-Hoopla) have certainly created an exciting one at the Conti building. So when they approached us with the opportunity to be a part of their family, we jumped at the chance to discuss the idea with the Contis and the rest is history."

In an update Monday, Written Words noted: "We've started work on our new space and will be moving in at the end of the month. Having moved once before, we're better prepared this go around (at least mentally!) and things should go much smoother. The legions of volunteers that showed up last time made a huge difference, and many of you have already offered to help again this time. (We're so, so blessed!) Thank you thank you, and yes, if you'd like to help, let us know and we'll add you to the list!"

Residents in Winter Garden, Fla., launched a Change.org petition in an effort to save the local Barnes & Noble store at Winter Garden Village, which is leaving the location later this year. The Orlando Business Journal reported the petition claimed mall management plans to end the lease with Barnes & Noble on June 3.

In a statement, B&N said: "The lease at our Winter Garden location will expire at the end of July 2015 as a result of negotiations with the property owner. We will work diligently to find another location in the Winter Garden area as soon as possible."

Matt Schuler, senior director of communications with DDR Corp., which owns the Winter Garden Village, told the West Orange Times and Observer: "We regularly meet with our retail partners to review existing store locations across our portfolio, and the decision to vacate was mutually agreed upon between Barnes & Noble and DDR."

Kobo has launched a new e-reader, the Kobo Glo HD, which will be available in black and retail for about $129 online and in-store starting May 1 in Canada, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand; May 22 in France; June 1 in the U.K., Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain. Beginning today, customers can pre-order Kobo Glo HD at Kobo.com in Canada, and at selected retailers in Canada, Australia and New Zealand; and can pre-order as of April 24 in the U.S. at Kobo.com.

Michael Tamblyn, Kobo's president and chief content officer, called the Kobo Glo HD "the perfect device for the booklover who hasn't made the jump to digital. Our surveys show there is a huge contingent of avid readers who simply haven't tried digital because they love the print experience."

Good E-Reader noted that the "device was designed to heavily compete against the Amazon Kindle Voyage, giving readers a reason to stick with, or switch to the Kobo brand."

For a standing-room-only crowd at McNally Jackson in New York City, Tor Seidler and his editor-turned-agent, Holly McGhee, discussed the reissue of his National Book Award finalist Mean Margaret, illustrated by Jon Agee, and his just-released novel Firstborn (both Atheneum/S&S).

Yesterday, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a limited-edition stamp honoring poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou during a dedication ceremony at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., the Washington Post reported. Those in attendance included Angelou's family, First Lady Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Attorney General Eric Holder, poets Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez, singers Roberta Flack and Valerie Simpson, as well as Malcolm X's daughters, Attallah and Ilyasah Shabazz.

Noting that "the day felt more like a loving memorial than a stuffy government ribbon cutting," the Post also observed that there was no mention of a controversy surrounding the stamp's featured quotation--"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."--which first appeared in Joan Walsh Anglund's 1967 poetry collection, A Cup of Sun, published in 1967.  

After initially defending the use of the quotation, Mark Saunders, a Postal Service spokesman, said, "Had we known about this issue beforehand, we would have used one of [Angelou's] many other works.... The sentence held great meaning for her and she is publicly identified with its popularity."

Consortium Book Sales & Distribution has added two publishers, both effective June 1:

Hispabooks, Madrid, Spain, founded in 2013, which specializes in fiction in English-language translation from a range of voices in contemporary Spanish writing. Lead fall titles include Luisgé Martín's The Same City and August, October by Andrés Barba.

Secret Acres, Brooklyn, N.Y., a comics company founded in 2006 by Barry Matthews and Leon Avelino that publishes story collections and original graphic novels with a focus on emerging artists. Secret Acres also sells and distributes its creators' mini-comics and other self-published works. Fall titles include Palefire, a collaboration between comic superstars MK Reed and Farel Dalrymple, and Theo Ellsworth's The Understanding Monster, the third book in a trilogy.

Rose Water and Orange Blossoms: Fresh & Classic Recipes from My Lebanese Kitchen by Maureen Abood (Running Press).

Today on Fresh Air: Brooke Borel, author of Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World (University of Chicago Press, $26, 9780226041933).

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Tomorrow morning on Fox & Friends: Robert Putnam, author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon & Schuster, $28, 9781476769899).

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Tomorrow on Ellen: Bethenny Frankel, author of I Suck at Relationships So You Don't Have To: 10 Rules for Not Screwing Up Your Happily Ever After (Touchstone, $24.99, 9781451667417).

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Tomorrow on Diane Rehm: Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock: A Diary (Doubleday, $26.95, 9780385538985).

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Tomorrow on Watch What Happens Live: Jon Cryer, author of So That Happened: A Memoir (NAL, $27.95, 9780451472359). He will also appear on the Talk.

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Tomorrow night on the Daily Show: Senator Elizabeth Warren, author of A Fighting Chance (Picador, $17, 9781250062253).

Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland, State of Play) will direct and executive produce the first two episodes of Hulu's original series 11/22/63, based on Stephen King's novel. Variety reported that the production has added several principal characters to the cast, in addition to the previously announced lead James Franco. New cast members include Chris Cooper, Sarah Gadon, Cherry Jones, Daniel Webber, George MacKay, Lucy Fry and Leon Rippy. Hulu has not announced a premiere date yet.

The fiction and poetry longlists have been released for this year's Best Translated Book Award, sponsored by Three Percent and honoring "the best works of international literature published in the U.S." Nominated authors on the two longlists represent 23 different places of origin and 14 languages. There are also 50 translators in the running for this year's awards. The finalists for both the fiction and poetry will be announced May 5, with the winners named May 27 as part of BookExpo America.

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The American Library Association announced finalists for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. During the ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco in June, each winning author will receive $5,000, with the four finalists each receiving $1,500. The shortlisted titles are:

Nonfiction
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson (Spiegel & Grau)
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (Henry Holt)
Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin and Sadat at Camp David by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)

Fiction
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (Scribner)
Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín (Scribner)
On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead)

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X. J. Kennedy won the $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize, presented by Poets & Writers magazine annually to "an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition." The judges noted that "Kennedy's forms are perennial, his rhetoric is at once elaborate and immediate, and his language and diction are always of the American moment. He translates the human predicament into poetry perfectly balancing wit, savagery, and compassion. His subtly dissonant rhymes and side-stepping meters carry us through the realms of puzzlement and sorrow to an intimated grace. The size of his poems is small but their scope is vast."

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Atticus Lish won the $15,000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Preparation for the Next Life. Judge Deirdre McNamer said the novel "represents a certain kind of triumph over fiction that hedges its bets. With ferocious precision, Atticus Lish scours and illuminates the vast, traumatized America that lives, works and loves outside the castle gates. The result is an incantation, a song of ourselves, a shout."

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The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators announced the winners of this year's Spark Award, which recognizes excellence in a children's book published through a non-traditional publishing route. Wendy Ulmer took the illustrated book category for My Twelve Maine Christmas Days, illustrated by Sandy Crabtree. Winners of the book for older readers category are The Men Who Made the Yankees by W. Nikola-Lisa and Melt by Selene Castrovilla.

The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance has announced its spring Okra Picks, titles that Southern indie booksellers are most looking forward to handselling this season:

Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World by Leigh Ann Henion (Penguin)
Trisha's Table: My Feel-Good Favorites for a Balanced Life by Trisha Yearwood (Clarkson Potter)
The Water and the Wild by Katie Elise Ormsbee (Chronicle)
Lowcountry Boneyard by Susan M. Boyer (Henery Press)
The Bone Tree by Greg Iles (Morrow)
Valiant by Sarah McGuire (Egmont USA)
Minnow by James E. McTeer III (Hub City Press)
At the Corner of King Street by Mary Ellen Taylor (Berkley)
The World's Largest Man: A Memoir by Harrison Scott Key (Harper)
Anything Could Happen by Will Walton (Push)
The Evidence Room: A Mystery by Cameron Harvey (Minotaur)
Duncan the Story Dragon by Amanda Driscoll (Knopf Books for Young Readers)
A Week at the Lake by Wendy Wax (Berkley)

photo: Anna McGuire

Adrian McKinty is the author of 16 novels, including The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, In the Morning I'll Be Gone, the first three Detective Sean Duffy novels and, most recently, The Sun Is God. Born and raised in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, McKinty was called "the best of the new generation of Irish crime novelists" in the Glasgow Herald. His newest book, Gun Street Girl, was just published by Seventh Street Books.

On your nightstand now:

Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton. Always been a big fan of well-written science fiction, especially sci-fi with a mystery element and this is it.

Favorite book when you were a child:

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. Always been a big fan of books with maps at the front, too.

Your top five authors:

Angela Carter, Jane Austen, J.G. Ballard, James Ellroy, Philip K. Dick. Don't think they have much in common except terrific prose (well maybe not in PKD's case) and ideas.

Book you've faked reading:

Never done it and don't really understand why anyone would. Just read the bloody book, it's not that hard.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Red or Dead by David Peace. The craziest prose stylist working in English lit today. Read a page and you'll see what I mean. This is a book about Liverpool FC (an English football team) and how it became the greatest football club in the world under legendary manager Bill Shankly.

Book you've bought for the cover:

All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, cover by Chip Kidd. Sheer beauty from start to finish. But actually the book is pretty good, too.

Book that changed your life:

Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Cosmos taught me that all the things they were drumming into my head at church, Sunday School, Bible study class and Boys Brigade weren't necessarily true.

Favorite line from a book:

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me" --Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. That's how you start a novel.

Which character you most relate to:

Maybe Wooster from Jeeves and Wooster except that in my life there is no Jeeves.

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

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. A young man decides to walk from London to Istanbul in 1933. Gorgeous prose, humane observations, fascinating time period.

Book you wish you hadn't read:

Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. Hugely overrated bore fest that says almost nothing interesting about the human condition.

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

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy: that book amazed, horrified, excited and terrified me. I'd love to have that experience again. Also Crash by J.G. Ballard for the same reasons. 

Books you would take to a desert island:

Ulysses by James Joyce, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, the complete Jane Austen, the Jeeves novels of P.G. Wodehouse....

Worst book you ever finished:

Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Racist and anti-Semitic ramblings by a second-rate writer and first-class bore.

If a comet were going to hit the Earth and you could send one book into space as a kind of representative memorial to human culture, what would that be?

The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin. Larkin said everything that needs to be said about the human condition in this book.

Eisner Award–nominated author Nadja Spiegelman (Zig and Wikki in Something Ate My Homework) and European cartoonist Sergio García Sánchez, making his U.S. debut, deftly combine history, geography and a touch of engineering in a graphic novel centered on a budding friendship in New York City.

Readers get their bearings with the opening endpapers with a subway map of New York City (from 96th Street in Manhattan eastward through Brooklyn and Queens). The title page offers a cutaway view of street level, turnstile level (the subway entrance) and the subway platform level. Author and artist introduce a girl in a ponytail excitedly talking about the field trip scheduled at school. In a related sequence, a new boy at school named Pablo arrives with his parents. Mr. Bartle, the teacher, introduces Pablo to the class, and the girl with the ponytail, Alicia, volunteers to be his field trip partner.

When Mr. Bartle asks which subway line comes closest to the Empire State Building, the destination for their field trip, the kids tick off N, R, Q, 1, 2, 3 and 6, and their teacher agrees, "All these will work." A subway map with a superimposed Empire State Building validates their answers. Even native New Yorkers will likely learn something from Mr. Bartle's history of both the tallest building in the world (when it was opened in 1931) and the construction of the subway system, chronicled in black-and-white photographs in a chronology indicated through interconnected dialogue balloons.

At 96th Street (an excellent example of New York's four-track system, the first of its kind, Mr. Bartle explains), Alicia and Pablo get separated from the group, hopping on the express while their class takes the local train. They blame each other, and at 42nd Street, Pablo angrily dashes to the 7 Train, losing Alicia. Luckily, the Empire State Building is easily identifiable and reachable. In a clever wordless spread, Sánchez charts all three routes (taken by Alicia, Pablo and Mr. Bartle's class) with a close-up grid of the subway. A happy reunion in the lobby of the Empire State Building seals the friendship between Alicia and Pablo.

New Yorkers and newcomers alike will savor the bounty of interesting facts. Copious endnotes offer additional details about the New York City subway, the Empire State Building and Sánchez's process of researching the book, as well as further resources in print and online.

[Also available in a Spanish-language edition: Perdidos en NYC (9781935179856), translated by Lola Moral.] --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Shelf Talker: A graphic novel tale of friendship that combines fascinating facts about the New York subway system, the Empire State Building, history and geography.

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

1. The 20/20 Diet by Phil McGraw
2. Shopping for a Billionaire by Julia Kent
3. Awakening You (Unraveling You #3) by Jessica Sorensen
4. Consolation (The Consolation Duet Vol. 1) by Corinne Michaels
5. Revved by Samantha Towle
6. Fisher's Light by Tara Sivec
7. Falling for My Best Friend's Brother by J.S. Cooper and Helen Cooper
8. Red Hot Lovers by Various
9. The Love of a Rogue (The Heart of a Duke Book 3) by Christi Caldwell
10. Alpha Bad Boy Shifters Boxed Set by Eliza Gayle

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]