Romance-only bookstore the Ripped Bodice will officially open its new location in Brooklyn, N.Y., this weekend. 

Located at 218 Fifth Ave. in Park Slope, the Brooklyn store spans 1,900 square feet and carries the same variety of diverse and inclusive romance titles as the original store in Culver City, Calif. The opening festivities on Saturday will feature appearances by authors Casey McQuiston (Red, White and Royal Blue) and Alexis Daria (Take the Lead).

Co-owner Leah Koch, who founded the Ripped Bodice with her sister Bea Koch almost eight years ago, is running the Brooklyn store; the flagship store will continue to operate as usual.

The Curious Cat Bookshop, an all-ages bookstore that debuted as a pop-up shop earlier this year, has found a permanent home in Winsted, Conn., the Register Citizen reported.

Owner Stacy Whitman, who is also the publisher of Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books, described the opening as a soft launch. For the time being the shop at 386 Main St. is open only on evenings and weekends, and Whitman has launched an Indiegogo campaign to help raise money for the bookstore. The store's hours will expand once Whitman hires someone to run things during the week (she will keep her full-time job in publishing), and she hopes to have a grand opening sometime in the fall.

The store carries a wide variety of children's books along with plenty of titles for adults. The inventory is all new, and Whitman also stocks nonbook items like candles, greeting cards, bookmarks, and cat-themed merchandise. Whitman has already started a book club, and her future event plans include author signings, story hours, Dungeons & Dragons nights, poetry nights, and more.

"The most important thing I want to do with the bookshop is offer the community a gathering place," she told the Register Citizen. Winsted, she noted on the store's Indiegogo page, has not had an indie bookstore like hers since the Corner Bookstore closed in the 1990s.

Whitman started working on her business plan in 2020. Around the same time she began collecting furniture for an eventual bricks-and-mortar space. The Curious Cat debuted earlier this year as a pop-up inside of Live at Home, and Whitman has also done a few school book fairs.

With the Indiegogo campaign, she hopes to raise enough capital to secure an SBA loan, which would serve as the "final piece of the funding puzzle," after her own personal contributions, a $10,000 forgivable loan from the town of Winsted, and an investment from Audry Taylor, former creative director of Go! Comi.

"Obviously there's still a lot of work to do, like art on the walls, more bookshelves in the space, more inventory, but it's a start," Whitman said.

Rachel Goldstein

Rachel Goldstein has been promoted to executive v-p, Penguin Random House Publisher Services, assuming overall day-to-day management and strategic development of PRHPS. She joined PRHPS in 2006 and was most recently senior v-p, client operations, finance and strategy.

Jeff Abraham, who has been president of PRHPS since 2006 and in February took on the additional role of PRH's president of publishing operations, technology, and services, responsible for IT, publishing operations, and PRH Labs, said in a letter to colleagues and PRHPS's more than 50 publisher clients, "The past seventeen years have brought major transformations to our publishing world: among them, the 2008 financial crisis, the digital transformation of books, the merger between Penguin and Random House, the pandemic and its innumerable impacts on the book business, and the post-pandemic (and high cost) universe. Throughout, Rachel Goldstein has been a constant source of insight, support, and guidance to me, and to so many of you....

"Rachel's unique ability to problem-solve through a simultaneously strategic, financial, and operational lens--particularly useful perspectives and expertise given the current market conditions--coupled with my recent additional responsibilities for Penguin Random House--makes now the perfect time for her to assume a broader leadership role. My oversight for PRHPS remains a key aspect of my purview as president, publishing operations, technology, and services. My commitment to the growth and prosperity of you, our clients, is unwavering, and my personal involvement and connection to you all will continue, albeit on a slightly less frequent basis.

"Since Rachel joined PRHPS in 2006, her strategic foresight, clear-eyed leadership on large-scale projects, and impeccable financial and operational acumen, have all produced competitive advantages for you, our clients--and have been the source of best practices shared across PRH.

"Achievements representative of the depth and scope of Rachel's impact include: creating, building, and leading our meta-data services team, and our manga editorial, managing editorial, and production teams, as well as expanding our engage and business-analytics programs.  She originated the vision and strategy for our comics distribution capabilities, and is one of the key engineers of its success.

"On a personal note, Rachel has been a relied-upon, trustful, and instrumental partner to me, and to our PRHPS colleagues. Her pragmatic critical thinking, coupled with her infectious laugh, make any challenge feel a little (often a lot) less insurmountable."

Dawn Rennert, owner of Concord Bookshop in Concord, Mass., noted that many of her store's neighbors are gift shops and she tries not to overlap with their offerings. As such, she doesn't carry some mainstays like socks, jewelry, or candles, but Concord Bookshop does carry jigsaw puzzles, reading glasses, activity kits, and greeting cards.

For puzzles, Rennert has carried Pomegranate puzzles "for many years," and she's sourced from other suppliers like Galison and Flame Tree. The activity kits come from manufacturers such as Klutz, and the greeting cards include both individual and boxed cards. There are New Yorker cards that are "instant pick-me-ups," and "everyone loves" the store's branded tote bags from Enviro-Tote, based in New Hampshire. Recently the store added Slumberkins, which feature animal-themed snugglers paired with a board book and affirmation card. Rennert added that, fortunately, the store has not seen any supply-chain issues related to sidelines lately.

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At Arcadia Books in Spring Green, Wis., owner Nancy Baenen said cards and stickers are selling especially well. In fact, the shop sold more than 4,400 cards in 2022 and "probably just as many stickers." She sources them from a variety of wholesalers, publishers, and Faire. Recently, after realizing that the store had no "low-priced items for kids to buy with their own money," she brought in Dog Man and Dr. Seuss pencils, erasers, and bookmarks from Geddes. They've been "flying off the shelves."

Asked about locally sourced items, Baenen pointed to pressed flower cards made by  local artist Christl Iausly; a "delightfully sassy" line of cards from a studio in Madison called Mina Lee; cards and stickers from Ink & Splash in Green Bay; and a new line of cards from Milwaukee called She Said It, featuring watercolor art and empowering quotes from women. On the subject of perennial favorites for the store, Baenen mentioned Cavallini Papers & Co. whose cards, puzzles, journals, aprons, and calendars all sell well.

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Store-exclusive Reading Bug plush.

In San Carlos, Calif., the Reading Bug does very well with store-branded merchandise, particularly color-your-own Reading Bug book bags and plush Reading Bugs, reported store owner Lauren Savage. Much of that success, Savage explained, is thanks to the store's podcast, Reading Bug Adventures. Many listeners visit the store on summer break and "leave with Reading Bug stickers, coloring books, and merchandise."

Jellycat stuffed animals are another staple for the store, though Savage noted that recent price increases have presented a challenge. Plush that once retailed for $24-$36 now go for $48-$60. As such, it's become harder to sell a plush along with a picture book, which now are frequently hitting $18.99, $19.99, or higher. What was once a $40-$55 purchase is now $75-$80, and "that is not birthday gift-friendly pricing."--Alex Mutter

If you are interested in having your store appear in a future Sidelines Snapshot article, please e-mail alex@shelf-awareness.com.

Jean Fagan Yellin

Historian Jean Fagan Yellin, "whose six years of sleuthing revealed that what had been presumed to be a 19th-century white author's fictional account of a young woman's life as a slave in the American South was, in fact, a rare autobiography written by a formerly enslaved woman," died July 19, the New York Times reported. She was 92. Yellin published Harriet Jacobs: A Life in 2004. 

Jacobs's book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, "vividly recounted her enslavement from her birth in North Carolina in 1813. She was taught to read and write by the benevolent mistress whose family owned her," the Times noted, adding: "She recalled that when she was 12, she fell into the hands of a sexually abusive plantation owner who, years later, would threaten to sell her children if she rebuffed his advances. Her children had been fathered by another white man, who ultimately freed them. She managed to escape, hiding in a three-foot-high crawl space in her free grandmother's attic, where for seven years she read newspapers and the Bible. In 1842, she fled as a fugitive to New York."

Published in 1861,  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was promoted as "Written by Herself," though under a pseudonym, Linda Brent, and widely credited to its editor, Lydia Maria Child, a journalist, abolitionist, and advocate for women's and Native American rights. 

Yellin originally came across Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl while writing her dissertation on 19th-century American literature. A crucial clue was provided by a letter from Jacobs found in the archives of Smith College, which included the line "I am sitting under the old roof 12 feet from the spot where I suffered all the crushing weight of slavery." The letter mentioned the names of real people whom Yellin could match with the characters in Incidents.

In 1987, Henry Louis Gates Jr. observed in the New York Times Book Review that by the end of the 1860s, only a handful of Black women had published their memoirs. "The fate of Jacobs's text--its loss and rediscovery--makes it an emblem of the history of the Black woman's literary tradition," he wrote, adding that "few instances of scholarly inquiry have been more important to Afro-American studies than has Ms. Yellin's."

Yellin's other books include Women and Sisters: The Anti-Slavery Feminists in American Culture (1990) and The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Anti-Slavery and Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America (1994, with John C. Van Horne).

Harriet Jacobs: A Life won the Frederick Douglass Prize and the Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Yellin received a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and helped establish the Harriet Jacobs Papers Project, a collection of nearly a thousand documents. 

Bookstore owner Steve Iwanski worked the Charter Books tent at the 2023 Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island this past weekend, selling a curated selection of books on music for all ages, as well as staff picks and music on vinyl.

Two Meridian, Idaho, women "are making their voices heard through a book-stocked vending machine," Idaho Press reported. Last year, after the Concerned Citizens of Meridian gave the local Library a list of more than 50 books it wanted to restrict access to, Chelsea Major, co-owner of Pearl House Collective, and Shelley Searle, who runs two creative vending machines in the Treasure Valley, teamed up to create a banned book vending machine.

"Our bookstore had been doing pop-ups, but we really saw a need to create a book club, focusing on those books that were being banned and really just creating a space where people can come read the book, and we can talk authentically about what's challenging in it," Major said. "Books aren't always easy, but we think that books are meaningful and just because you don't like something doesn't mean you should ban it."

The vending machine features books that have been banned historically or have been under fire in recent years, along with items like bookmarks and earrings. Recently the vending machine opened for customers at Loose Screw Beer Co. in Meridian.

"These are books that touch on things that are integral to being a human: trauma, sexuality, understanding yourself, understanding your body, understanding differences across race and gender," Major said. "All of these are just ways we walk within the world. When we try to hide or act like these things don't happen, we aren't fixing the problem, we're skirting around it.... Naysayers aren't looking at what the story is trying to tell people--they pick and choose things and take pieces out of context."

The vending machine is an attempt to bring books to the forefront of local conversations and make books more accessible to people. Major said, "It's all about community at the end of the day. We don't really have any bookstores that have a community space where you can just hang out, come up with a business idea, meet up with a friend and grab a coffee."

Searle added: "You can't fix what you don't know is what is going on. It's the little things in life that make us happy. We want to bring back that sense of wonder and remind people that you can take action and part of that is by buying these things and supporting locals, supporting banned books.... Anytime someone is trying to restrict access to knowledge, it's something that we should be looking at." 

Several book clubs meet at the Loose Screw, where Searle pitched the idea for a vending machine to owner Mike Garcia, who said, "We're excited to be a part of it. It really fits in with our clientele. We're very family friendly here, so I think the mix fits well with our crowd."

Mary McCue is joining Little, Brown Books for Young Readers as v-p, publicity & strategic communications, effective August 28. She will also join the Hachette Book Group senior management group. Most recently, she worked at Random House Children's Books for nine years, where she served as executive director of publicity & strategic communications as well as the divisional lead on the PRH Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Council. Before that, she worked for four years in various publicity roles at Simon & Schuster's Gallery Books imprint.

Abrams will handle distribution for Enchanted Lion Books and Familius, beginning with the spring 2024 season. Enchanted Lion's full catalog will be sold in North America by Abrams. The Familius list of board books, picture books, and nonfiction titles for parents and caregivers will be sold in the U.S. In addition, Abrams will distribute internationally for both publishers, in the U.K. and Europe through Abrams & Chronicle Books, the joint venture sales and distribution service, and in the rest of the world via Abrams's network of global agents.

Founded in 2003, Enchanted Lion Books, Brooklyn, N.Y., publishes illustrated children's books that "spark imagination and inspire curiosity, awareness, and wonder in readers everywhere." They publish original titles, books in translation from around the world, and reissues from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s.

Founded in 2012, Familius publishes board books and picture books for kids, in addition to nonfiction for parents and caregivers. Guided by the belief in helping all families find greater joy, Familius titles invite families to live the Familius Ten Habits of Happy Family Life: love together, play together, learn together, work together, talk together, heal together, read together, eat together, give together, and laugh together.

Abrams president and CEO Mary McAveney said, "Each publisher's titles complement our own, demonstrating esteemed publishing that is both forward-thinking and reader-focused. Today's bookselling landscape requires reach across multiple layers of distribution and a variety of retail environments, which Abrams provides with its strong, dedicated in-house team. We look forward to expanding the reach of these two innovative publishers into channels and territories around the world where Abrams is well established."

Claudia Bedrick, publisher of Enchanted Lion Books, said, "We have every confidence that [Abrams's] many strengths as a publisher will give us the structure, scope, and energy needed for our further growth and flourishing. We have loved and valued where we have been, but feel ready, hopeful, and ambitious for this next, most promising adventure."

Christopher Robbins, founder and president of Familius, said, "I've admired Abrams for more than 30 years and long thought their books some of the most artistic and creative works published. We're thrilled and humbled to join Abrams as a distribution client. As Familius is one of the industry's fastest-growing independents year in and year out, we look forward to even greater success under Abrams's tremendous sales prowess."

Bird Day: A Story of 24 Hours and 24 Avian Lives by Mark E. Hauber, illustrated by Tony Angell (University of Chicago Press).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Stacie Stephenson, author of Glow: 90 Days to Create Your Vibrant Life from Within (Harper Celebrate, $22.99, 9781400240135).

Imagine Entertainment has struck a pre-emptive film rights deal for Whalefall, the soon-to-be-released novel from Daniel Kraus, Deadline reported. The deal for the book option was reached ahead of its August 8 publication by MTV Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. (As reported earlier this week, Whalefall has also inspired a new beer.)

Noting that agreements like this are not common now amid the SAG-AFTRA and the WGA strikes, Deadline wrote that the plan is "to develop Whalefall for the big screen, at the point when Hollywood is again back up and running. No development will be done and no writing services will be rendered here until new Guild contracts are struck."

Allan Mandelbaum, Imagine's senior v-p, features, headed the acquisition and will oversee along with Karen Lunder, president of features. In a statement, they said, "We are thrilled to be entrusted with the adaptation of Whalefall. Daniel Kraus has crafted an extraordinary primordial adventure that is equal parts moving character study and edge-of-your-seat thriller. At Imagine, we are passionate about bringing stories to the screen that convey the full range of the human experience, and Whalefall is a perfect addition."

Finalists have been named for the $10,000 Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award, given to a book with "a thoroughbred horse racing premise/backdrop." The winner will be announced November 9.

The finalists are:
Horse by Geraldine Brooks
Landaluce: The Story of Seattle Slew's First Champion by Mary Perdue
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan

photo: Cedric Loison

Three books by Jean-Philippe Blondel have been translated into English by Alison Anderson for New Vessel Press: The 6:41 to Paris; Exposed; and Café Unfiltered (July 11, 2023), an ode to the French café as a magical place of anonymity and encounter. Blondel was born in 1964 in Troyes, France, where he lives and works as an author and English teacher.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Nine characters in a French café on the same day. None of them will be the same by the time darkness falls.

On your nightstand now:

A French novel by an author who now lives in San Francisco, Olivier Mak-Bouchard, called La ballade du feu. I hope this novel will be translated. Honestly, I've seldom been so engrossed in a story. I have just finished Bournville by Jonathan Coe, because I love the way he depicts the post-Brexit United Kingdom. Erin Swan's Walk the Vanished Earth is next. The bookseller on my street corner highly recommended it, and I trust her advice.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I was six years old the first time I read it, and I got the impression I fell with her through the rabbit hole and that she and I were the same person. That's how I found out about the power of words--and of identification. I kept reading it again and again, keeping it hidden from view, because a boy obsessed with Alice was considered very weird then.

Your top five authors:

Marcel Proust, because he changed my life forever. I have read all the volumes of In Search of Lost Time three times in my life (at 19, at 30, and at 50), and I know that I will soon hear Proust calling me again.

Emily Brontë, as I am fascinated by Wuthering Heights, which is the only book (apart from Proust) that I have ever re-read.

Next? David Mitchell. I remember being in awe when I discovered Cloud Atlas when I was on holiday on the Atlantic coast. I just couldn't stop reading it, day and night, and his other works all proved to be original, thrilling, and beautifully written.

I would add Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, both for her novels and her essays. In Café Unfiltered, one of the minor characters is called Ifemelu, as a (discreet) tribute to Americanah.

Finally, Patrick Modiano, whose works I discovered when I was 16, thanks to a girl I was in love with. The girl didn't stay with me. Modiano did. Each time one of his novels is published, I rush to the bookstore and I get the first copy. I am his number-one fan. (OMG! Do I sound like Annie Wilkes in Stephen King's Misery?)

Oh no! Let me add Willa Cather. I know My Ántonia almost by heart. I identify so much with Jim, the narrator.

Book you've faked reading:

Ulysses by Joyce. For years, I have pretended I had read it. I tried and tried and tried, first in the corny French translation, then in English. I never could. Each time the subject pops up in a conversation (which, fortunately, is rare), I look down at my feet, and I start blushing.

Book you're an evangelist for:

In Search of Lost Time. The reasons why people are afraid of it (the number of volumes, the length of the sentences) are unfounded. Nobody has ever re-created the world as he did. Entering his work is just like stepping into the most beautiful monument you have ever seen.

Book you've bought for the cover:

What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt--in the French edition. The cover was a detail from a painting by Edward Hopper that I loved. I couldn't resist.

Book you hid from your parents:

On the Road by Jack Kerouac. The French cover showed beatniks hitchhiking. My father would have thrown it away.

Book that changed your life:

Apart from Proust (yes, I know, but as you put it, I'm an evangelist for his works), Rides by Charles Simmons (Les locataires de l'été in French), because for the first time I thought, I could have written that novel. And it made me realize that all those novels I was writing in secret, from the age of 19, might be worth publishing then. At least I could try.

Favorite line from a book:

"One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise." --F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack-up. This sentence has guided me over the years.

Five books you'll never part with:

In Search of Lost Time. (Yes, I can be a pain in the neck.)

On the Road (my teenage years).

Wuthering Heights. (I even wrote a YA novel whose hero is called Heathcliff.)

My Ántonia by Willa Cather.

La chambre d'ami by Yves Dangerfield. It has never been translated into English and Dangerfield died years ago, but as soon as I mention this book, read at 15, my eyes are brimming with tears.

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

The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal. I regard her as one of the best French writers of all times.

The reason you became an English teacher and not a French teacher:

Virginia Woolf, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Willa Cather. And, yes, Shakespeare.

Andrew Joseph White's sophomore novel, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth, is a riveting, spellbinding Victorian horror about a neurodivergent trans boy desperate to escape the life his family has planned for him.

White begins with narration by the spirit of Frances, describing how doctors killed her and dissected her body. The focus then shifts to 16-year-old Silas, whose violet eyes allow him to interact with spirits by lifting the Veil between the mortal world and the spirit world. Silas sees this ability as a curse and wishes he could live as his true self and become a surgeon like his older brother. His parents, though, exploit his power and force him to suppress his trans identity. They believe that if Silas hides who he is and stifles his neurodivergent traits, he will be ideal marriage material.

After an unsuccessful attempt to avoid an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with "Veil sickness" and placed against his will in an abusive sanitorium for violet-eyed medium girls who need to be "cured." As he investigates why residents keep disappearing, Silas lives closeted: "I just need to find a way out.... And until then, I will keep myself safe. That is not self-betrayal. That is self-preservation."

Silas's expressive first-person narration is made even more powerful by how he communicates with his deepest fears, which he manifests as a little gray rabbit that lives in his chest. In italicized text, the creature verbalizes Silas's anxiety, self-doubt, and ingrained self-loathing by attacking him with threats and cruel epithets. Spirit girls like Frances also narrate sporadically, and the circumstances surrounding their deaths contribute to the suspense.

White shows in this sharp, tense novel the same kind of visceral prose that garnered such acclaim for his debut, Hell Followed with Us. He paints an authentic and painfully tender portrayal of Silas's neurodivergent and trans identities, the former of which his parents and society have trained him to mask for the comfort of others. "My tutors called me callous and unfeeling," he thinks. "I'm not.... I just express things differently."

In his author's note, White explains that the book was inspired by "Victorian England's sordid history of labeling certain people 'ill' or 'other' to justify cruelty against them." The plot's candid, often gory accounts parallel the stunningly rendered characters whose physical and emotional wounds bleed out onto the pages. --Kieran Slattery, freelance reviewer, teacher, co-creator of Gender Inclusive Classrooms

Shelf Talker: A neurodivergent trans teen fights for his survival in this striking, spellbinding Victorian YA horror novel.