Silly Bunny Toys & Books, a children's bookstore and toy shop, opened last month in Salem, Mass., Patch.com reported.

Located at 260 Essex St., Silly Bunny carries titles for children and teens, from board books to YA, along with a wide variety of toys including puppets, dolls, LEGO, fidget toys, games, and much more. The store is co-owned by Denise Kent, who is also the co-owner of Wicked Good Books in Salem, and is managed by Rachel Bolton.

Kent told Patch that the team is still "coming up for air" after opening three weeks ago, but they plan to start hosting a variety of community events and they intend to have a grand opening celebration soon.

"We love to help spark creativity and fun for ages 1 to 101," Kent said.

The Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore, Md., will open a new location in the Whitehall Market in September, the Baltimore Banner reported.

Located inside of a renovated mill complex in Baltimore's Hampden neighborhood, Whitehall Market houses a variety of vendors and restaurants. The Ivy Bookshop location within the market will be smaller than the main store at 5928 Falls Road, and store owner Emma Snyder told the Banner that as a result the inventory will be smaller and more "curatorial."

Event plans for the new location include frequent children's events in a family-focused area of the market as well as larger author events held inside the mill several times per year. And though the store won't open until September, the Ivy Bookshop will hold its first event at the mill in July, with a launch party for Laura Lippman's novel Prom Mom.

Snyder, who was approached about opening a new location inside the market, said she loved the idea of being part of the larger business community at the mill. "Getting to be a part of that and feeling like we're meeting a community interest seems really fun to us. And, it seemed different than what we're doing in our other spaces."

Quill Books & Beverage in Westbrook, Maine, which sells both new and used books, will be closing later this month. The Portland Press Herald reported that Matthew Irving and Allison Krzanowski opened the store in 2018 and during the Covid-19 pandemic "offered customers pickups and subscription boxes with food, drink, and books."

The owners had renovated and reopened Quill for limited hours in April, but in a recent Instagram post explained their decision to close at the end of June: "As we're sure you've noticed, we reopened with limited hours to feel things out, to see if we could make Quill work again despite the changes around our location over the last few years. 

"The Westbrook we returned to after the pandemic is a different place and we have come to the realization that Quill in its current location is no longer viable. Hundreds of local workers have transitioned to remote work--which we fully support--but this has created a gap in our day to day business which is not easily made up.... We love the community we met through Quill. Thank you to all of you who made Quill what is was. We hope that this is not goodbye forever and perhaps in the coming years we will be able to start again somewhere new."

Follett will assume management of Manhattan College's bookstore in New York City, effective June 14. The store was previously operated by Barnes & Noble College, but Follett returns to the campus after operating the location prior to 2014. The bookstore is temporarily closed during this transition and will reopen on June 20. Follett Corporation operates more than 1,100 locations in North America.

Robert Gottlieb (photo: Michael Lionstar)

Robert Gottlieb, the renowned editor of many of the most important authors and works in the last half of the 20th century at Simon & Schuster, Knopf, and the New Yorker, died yesterday. He was 92.

As the New York Times noted, "Colleagues called him incisive but sensitive to writers' eggshell egos. His skills won him a loyal following of authors."

Those authors included John le Carré, Robert Caro, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, Chaim Potok, Michael Crichton, Ray Bradbury, Antonia Fraser, Barbara Tuchman, Bill Clinton, Katharine Graham, Jessica Mitford, Anthony Burgess, V.S. Naipaul, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Nora Ephron, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul Simon, Lauren Bacall, Sidney Poitier, Elia Kazan, Katharine Hepburn, and Irene Selznick.

He was editor of such classics as Catch-22, The Andromeda Strain, The Satanic Verses, most of Toni Morrison's oeuvre, The American Way of Death, Heartburn, and many more.

Gottlieb joined Simon & Schuster in 1955 as assistant to the editor, Jack Goodman. In 1957, he became a senior editor. He was made editor-in-chief in 1965.

In 1968, he joined Knopf as v-p and editor-in-chief. He became president of Knopf in 1973. In 1987, he made a move that shocked the book--and magazine--world: he became editor of the New Yorker, succeeding William Shawn, the longtime second editor of the magazine. He held the position until 1992, and then began editing books for Knopf again as an editor-at-large.

His arrival at the New Yorker was met by protests among the staff, who defended Shawn. Still, as the New Yorker noted yesterday, he soon was warmly welcomed: "He padded around the place in the outfit of a Columbia undergrad of his generation (khakis, sports shirt, shoes optional), and he proudly exhibited, in his office, a sampling of his vast collection of plastic handbags. And he worked tremendously hard, reading manuscripts almost instantly as well as thoroughly, mindful of the anxious writer waiting by the telephone for some kind of reaction."

During his first period at Knopf, Gottlieb edited The Power Broker by Robert Caro, his biography of Robert Moses, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He went on to edit the first four books of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Caro's epic biography of the former president. Caro has been working on a final volume of the biography for more than a decade, and Gottlieb had planned on editing it to its completion. The project was the subject of a charming documentary last year called Turn Every Page, directed by Gottlieb's daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb.

Caro said yesterday, "I have never encountered a publisher or editor with a greater understanding of what a writer was trying to do--and how to help him do it."

In 2016, John le Carré told the Times that Gottlieb "wasn't just an editor, he was the editor. I never had an editor to touch him, in any country, nobody who could compare with him." He added that Gottlieb, the Times wrote, "often gave editorial direction through hieroglyphics scribbled in the manuscript's margin--a wavy line, for example, meant the language was too florid; an ellipses or a series of question marks meant think harder and try again."

In a wide-ranging 2016 interview with Gottlieb in the Paris Review, Toni Morrison said, "I never write with Bob in mind; that would be very bad for me. He isn't the ideal reader for the product, but he is the ideal editor for it."

Pico Iyer wrote on Twitter, "Hard to believe that the craggy giant of recent American literature Cormac McCarthy--akin to a rock archway in Utah--and the most revered editor in America, Robert Gottlieb, die within 24 hours of one another. May the next generation be worthy of their majesty."

Gottlieb was also a dance critic for the New York Observer, wrote book reviews for the New York Times, and wrote several books, including the memoir Avid Reader: A Life; Near-Death Experiences... and Others, a collection of essays; biographies of George Balanchine, Sarah Bernhardt, and Greta Garbo; a book about Charles Dickens's family; and A Certain Style: The Art of the Plastic Handbag, 1949-1959.

In Avid Reader, he wrote, "There are editors who will always feel guilty that they aren't writers. I can write perfectly well--anybody who's educated can write perfectly well. It's very, very hard, and I just don't like the activity. Whereas reading is like breathing."

Plenty, the Downtown Bookshop, Cookeville, Tenn., shared an Instagram video, noting that bookseller Ashley "went a little viral with her ladder video this week. Bookshops are fun!"

The two most popular books in May at Reading Group Choices were The Nurse's Secret by Amanda Skenandore (Kensington) and The Night Flowers by Sara Herchenroether (Tin House Books).

Rebecca Atkinson has been promoted to assistant marketing and publicity manager at Sourcebooks.

Mrs. S by K. Patrick (Europa Editions).

Today:
Here & Now: Holly Smale, author of Cassandra in Reverse (MIRA, $30, 9780778334538).

Fresh Air: Cade Metz, author of Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World (Dutton, $20, 9781524742690).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Adam Davis, author of Unconquered: 10 Principles to Overcome Adversity and Live above Defeat (BroadStreet, $16.99, 9781424565320).

The View: Luke Russert, author of Look for Me There: Grieving My Father, Finding Myself (Harper Horizon, $28.99, 9780785291817).

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 this weekend from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's website.

Saturday, June 17
9:30 a.m. Jonathan Darman, author of Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President (Random House, $32, 9781400067077). (Re-airs Saturday at 9:30 p.m.)

2 p.m. Jonathan Noyalas, author of Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era (University Press of Florida, $26.95, 9780813080000).

5:20 p.m. Paul Kix, author of You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America (Celadon, $30, 9781250807694).

Sunday, June 18
8 a.m. James Risen and Thomas Risen, authors of The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys--and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy (Little, Brown, $32, 9780316565134). (Re-airs Sunday at 8 p.m.)

10 a.m. Michael Waldman, author of The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America (‎Simon & Schuster, $29.99, 9781668006061). (Re-airs Sunday at 10 p.m.)

2 p.m. Philip Zelikow, co-author of Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report (‎PublicAffairs, $18.99, 9781541703803).

4:35 p.m. Rep. Katie Porter, author of I Swear: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan (Crown, $28, 9780593443989).

6:05 p.m. Patrick Deneen, author of Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (Sentinel, $30, 9780593086902).

Winners of the 33rd annual Reading the West Book Awards, sponsored by the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association and chosen by booksellers and readers, have been announced. The virtual event Tuesday night featuring acceptance remarks from each winning author can be seen here. The winners:

Fiction: Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine (One World)
Debut Fiction: Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah (Algonquin Books)
Poetry: Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light by Joy Harjo (W.W. Norton)
General Nonfiction: Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau by Craig Childs (Torrey House Press)
Memoir/Biography: When I Was Red Clay by Jonathan T. Bailey (Torrey House Press)
Eating the West (Culinary/Cookbook): The Big Texas Cookbook by the Editors of Texas Monthly (Harper Wave)
Picture Book: Brave Every Day by Trudy Ludwig; illus. by Patrice Barton (Knopf Books for Young Readers)
Young Reader/Middle Grade: The River Between Hearts by Heather Mateus Sappenfield (Fitzroy Books)
Young Adult/Teen: Abuela, Don't Forget Me by Rex Ogle (W.W. Norton)

---

Barbara Kingsolver won the £30,000 (about $37,990) Women's Prize for Fiction for her novel Demon Copperhead (Harper). She is the first double winner of the prize in its 28-year history. In addition to the cash award, Kingsolver received the "Bessie," a limited-edition bronze figurine by Grizel Niven.

Chair of judges and author and journalist Louise Minchin said: "Barbara Kingsolver has written a towering, deeply powerful and significant book. In a year of outstanding fiction by women, we made a unanimous decision on Demon Copperhead as our winner. Brilliant and visceral, it is storytelling by an author at the top of her game. We were all deeply moved by Demon, his gentle optimism, resilience and determination despite everything being set against him.

"An exposé of modern America, its opioid crisis and the detrimental treatment of deprived and maligned communities, Demon Copperhead tackles universal themes--from addiction and poverty, to family, love, and the power of friendship and art--it packs a triumphant emotional punch, and is a novel that will withstand the test of time."

Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, June 20:

Zero Days by Ruth Ware (Gallery/Scout Press, $29.99, 9781982155292) is a thriller about a hacker wife accused of murdering her husband.

The Only One Left: A Novel by Riley Sager (Dutton, $28, 9780593183229) follows the young caregiver of an elderly survivor of a Lizzie Borden-like massacre.

The Quiet Tenant: A Novel by Clémence Michallon (Knopf, $28, 9780593534649) is a psychological thriller about a serial killer and the women around him.

Welcome to Beach Town: A Novel by Susan Wiggs (Morrow, $30, 9780062914163) follows a surfer's daughter attending an elite school in a California beach town.

The Spare Room by Andrea Bartz (Ballantine, $28.99, 9781984820495) is a novel of psychological suspense about a woman who falls for her best friend and her best friend's husband.

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30, 9780374600396) explores a psychoanalytic institute that became a cult.

What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator by Barbara Butcher (Simon & Schuster, $28.99, 9781982179380) chronicles 20 years of working for the medical examiner's office in NYC.

Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I: The Mother and Daughter Who Forever Changed British History by Tracy Borman (Atlantic Monthly Press, $29, 9780802162069) examines two of England's most important women.

Garden of the Cursed by Katy Rose Pool (Holt, $19.99, 9781250846662) is the first in a fantastical YA mystery duology about a teen curse breaker.

You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron (Bloomsbury, $19.99, 9781547611546) features a Black teen determined to survive when her fake slasher summer camp falls victim to a real murderer.

Paperbacks:
The Menopause Reset: Get Rid of Your Symptoms and Feel Like Your Younger Self Again by Mindy Pelz (Hay House, $16.99, 9781401974398).

A Fatal Illusion (A Lady Darby Mystery Book 11) by Anna Lee Huber (Berkley, $17, 9780593198483).

Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird: Stories by Agustina Bazterrica (Scribner, $17.99, 9781668012666).

From last week's Indie bestseller lists, available at IndieBound.org, here are the recommended titles, which are also Indie Next Great Reads:

Hardcover
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea: A Novel by Debra Magpie Earling (Milkweed Editions, $26, 9781571311450). "A much anticipated and gorgeous book from Debra Magpie Earling. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is immersive and engaging, drawing the reader into a new way of seeing what we think of know of the story of Sacajewea." --Mara Panich, Fact & Fiction Downtown, Missoula, Mont.

Hardcover: An Indies Introduce Title
Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea: A Novel by Rita Chang-Eppig (Bloomsbury, $28.99, 9781639730377). "A beautiful, meditative, fascinating read. This is exquisitely written and while I knew that the subject would be fascinating, I was still unprepared. Perfect for fans of Four Treasures of the Sky." --Cari Quartuccio, Shakespeare & Co., New York, N.Y.

Paperback
Florida Woman: A Novel by Deb Rogers (Hanover Square Press, $18.99, 9781335455031). "Jamie is grateful to be able to live out her house arrest term at a monkey sanctuary in the Florida wilderness. The women there seem so spiritual and welcoming… but what's really going on behind closed doors? I couldn't put this down!" --Suzanna Hermans, Oblong Books, Millerton, N.Y.

For Ages 5 to 7
Manolo & the Unicorn by Jackie Azúa Kramer and Jonah Kramer, illus. by Zach Manbeck (Cameron Kids, $18.99, 9781951836528). "This is a magnificent story about an inquisitive little boy who succeeds in making an ordinary world feel extraordinary. The book's ethereal artwork and charming story make it a top book to put into the hands of magic seekers of all ages." --Courtney Roach, The Novel Neighbor, Webster Groves, Mo.

For Ages 10+
Once There Was by Kiyash Monsef (Simon & Schuster, $18.99, 9781665928502). "With a mixture of Persian fairy tales, mystery, magic, friendship, grief, and a pinch of romance, Monsef explores fantasy in a way that is grounding and entertaining. Perfect for fans of fractured fairy tales and mythical creatures." --Emma Butler, The Briar Patch, Bangor, Maine

For Teen Readers: An Indies Introduce Title
I Kick and I Fly by Ruchira Gupta (Scholastic, $18.99, 9781338825091). "This book had me crying AND cheering on the subway. It's an age-appropriate indictment of global sex trafficking that's also inspiring and illuminating, and a powerful story about courage and community. Highly recommended!" --Rebekah Shoaf, Boogie Down Books, Bronx, N.Y.

[Many thanks to IndieBound and the ABA!]

Every few years, an academic work arrives that transcends genre, combining unparalleled research skills with engaging storytelling. The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America is undoubtedly one such book. Authors Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer (co-authors of $2.00 a Day), and Timothy J. Nelson here assemble a work that harnesses the most powerful aspects of big data while diving into historic narratives that continue to inform and instruct. The scope of the book is significant, highlighting four distinct localities in the United States that they have identified as the most disadvantaged places in the country. Using their Index of Deep Disadvantage, the researchers found that these communities (in eastern Kentucky, southern Mississippi, rural South Carolina, and south Texas) all have similar obstacles to well-being, including high rates of poverty, poor health outcomes, and significant crime and corruption. Surprisingly, none were in large cities; instead, all were rural areas with a common history of "intensive resource extraction and profound human exploitation not seen to the same degree elsewhere in the United States."

Too often, the researchers argue, studies focus on individual metrics like poverty. The authors insist, " 'disadvantage' is more accurate than simply 'poverty' because it implies an injustice. The term is moral. People are being held back--unfairly." With this ethical focus, the book does more than simply unite large swaths of data around a thesis, though it does that beautifully. At every turn, the argument is clear, cogent, and supported by data--and fully humanized throughout the stories, past and present.

The authors suggest that these parts of the U.S. are best defined as internal colonies, drained of their resources by an exploitative power, and then left to manage. In many, but not all, of these communities, race is a significant contributing factor, as seen when they turn to those most advantaged communities--all found in the homogenous upper Midwest. Always, the researchers are careful to note nuance: "When we examined the relationship between whiteness and rank on the index, we found that a higher percentage of white residents is a significant predictor.... But it is not as predictive as the level of inequality, the unemployment rate, or the degree of educational attainment in a place is." Not content to focus only on the negatives, the book points to possible solutions, asking, "How do we build not injustice, but justice into place?" and providing six principles for action, including investing in social infrastructure and focusing on intergenerational mobility. With detailed notes and indexing, two appendices that chart the history and theory of internal colonies, and the development of the Index of Deep Disadvantage, this book is sure to be a meaningful addition to the conversation for academics and socially conscious citizens alike. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

Shelf Talker: Combining data analytics with a humanistic approach, The Injustice of Place makes a well-researched argument about how the history of a place influences the health and well-being of its people.