After several years of virtual programming during the pandemic, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance and the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association have combined to present the first in-person New Voices New Rooms show, taking place this week in Arlington, Va. The 442 attendees include 278 booksellers (157 from NAIBA; 121 from SIBA), including 33 new stores (19 from NAIBA; 14 from SIBA).

Julia Fabris McBride

The first day of the show began with a lively and interactive keynote by Julia Fabris McBride, author of When Everyone Leads (Bard Press). She urged booksellers to "practice leadership--everyone can get better at it," and emphasized that everyone should be a leader, not just owners and managers. She posed a series of questions to help "define the kind of culture you want to see in your community and bookstore," and asked attendees at each table to discuss topics such as "the biggest issue for your store"--the answers were wide-ranging, and included censorship and relationships with education institutions, the high cost of business and health insurance,  sustainability, and the negative effects of social media.

In the afternoon, booksellers had a choice of activities: workshops targeted to store managers, owners, or children's booksellers, or one of four bus tours to the many bookstores in the D.C. area.

A busload of NVNR booksellers visited Sankofa in Washington, D.C.

The first day of programming wrapped up with a reception featuring debut and veteran authors from indie presses.

Danny Caine, owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kan., and author of How to Protect Bookstores and Why (Microcosm Publishing), with Melissa Taylor, E. Shaver, Bookseller, Savannah, Ga.

Rebekah Mauschbaugh and Cameron Nuss

Lamplight Bookstore opened for business late last month in Warrensburg, Mo., with a grand opening celebration on July 29.

Located inside of Meyer's Market in Warrensburg, Lamplight is a micro-bookstore with a general-interest inventory. Although used-only for the time being, owners Rebekah Mauschbaugh and Cameron Nuss plan to start selling new books once they've found their footing.

The festivities on July 29 included cocktails, lattes, cookies, a scavenger hunt, and special gifts for the first 10 customers to purchase books.

Nuss noted that she's dreamed of owning a bookstore since she was a kid, and Lamplight "is the beginning of making that dream a reality." She and Mauschbaugh are "so excited to share this dream, and this reality, with the community that has shown us so much support and love since we became more active members last year."

Bookstore Romance Day, the annual celebration of the romance genre, its readers, and independent bookstores, is returning on Saturday, August 19. 

Independent bookstores around the country are participating with in-store celebrations, and eight virtual panels about the genre are scheduled for Saturday. The panels will explore subjects including fantasy romance, YA romance, disability in romance, queer romance, and much more. Additional information about the panels, as well as registration details, can be found here. They are free and will be presented over Zoom.

Bookseller Billie Bloebaum founded Bookstore Romance Day in 2019 to help bring the romance community and indie bookstores together.

PEN America has issued a new report called "Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm" In it, the free expression and writers organization warns that "social media blowback and societal outrage are imposing new moral litmus tests on books and authors, chilling literary expression and fueling a dangerous trend of self-censorship that is shrinking writers' creative freedom and imagination."

PEN America "implores" people throughout the book world "to be zealous guardians of literary freedom and to avoid giving in to pressure to pull books because of content that some consider offensive.... As a society we need to be able to engage in free debate about books without resorting to denying readers the opportunity to read them and come to their own conclusions." The report also rejects "an identity-essentialist approach to literature: that writers can only responsibly tell the stories that relate to their own identity and experiences," which the organization called "incompatible with the freedom to imagine that is essential for literary creation."

Ayad Akhtar

PEN America president Ayad Akhtar, the playwright and novelist, wrote in the report's foreword: "We believe that it is possible to move boldly forward for equity in publishing without disavowing individual books and applying new moral litmus tests to stanch ideas deemed offensive."

Among the topics the report covers are social media judging books over racial or other forms of representation; considering an author's identity as a test for what they are allowed to write; authors' estates revising the authors' work to meet contemporary standards; authors revising their works in response to criticism, including books not yet published; publishers withdrawing book contracts or published books in response to criticism of the book or author; and the increasing cases of publishers' staffs saying publishing certain books and authors clashes with industry values.

Noting that these are "some of the most controversial issues in the literary world today," PEN America says the report shows that "new litmus tests over identity in literature can hurt the very writers they are intended to serve--such as LGBTQ+ writers or writers of color"; challenges the idea that "expanding diversity in publishing requires publishers to withdraw or disavow books from authors who write about communities not their own"; warns that readers and reviewers who decry books as "harmful" or "dangerous" risk giving credence to the narratives of book banners; and calls for "an industry-wide recommitment from publishers and literary institutions to the principles of the Freedom to Read Statement--and by offering specific advice to publishers on how to defend their books in the face of calls for withdrawal."

Rain Taxi presented translator Angela Rodel (l.) for a pop-up literary salon, in celebration of her receiving, with author Georgi Gospodinov, this year's International Booker Prize for the novel Time Shelter--the first time a Bulgarian work of fiction has won the prestigious prize. Rodel discussed her translation work and life in Sofia with Rain Taxi editor Eric Lorberer (r.). The event took place in the home of Rain Taxi board member Eric Ortiz; book sales were handled by Magers & Quinn Booksellers.

Booksellers were celebrating International Cat Day yesterday with social media posts featuring their bookselling feline staff members. Among the highlights: 

Powell's Books, Portland, Ore.: "To be a bookseller's cat means always having a box to sit in and a book to read (or knock off the shelf, depending on the mood). Celebrate #internationalcatday with picks from some of Powell's feline friends. Which cat captures your reading vibe?"

Googey

BookMarx, Springfield, Mo.: "Googey is spending #internationalcatday resting up before the Birthplace of Route 66 Festival starts this week."

Mabel's Fables Bookstore, Toronto, Ont., Canada: "In honour of International Cat Day, please enjoy some photos of her majesty Mabel the Third."

Cupboard Maker Books, Enola, Pa.: "Thank you for the shout out and for doing such incredible jobs wrapping our cat cars!--Queen Annika, Prince Fluffytail and Count Zakula."

WordPlay, Wardensville, W.Va.: "Tabby cat Max thinks these books are purr-fect to share with your furry friend in celebration of International Cat Day. He can’t stop talking about them!"

Downtown Book & Toy, Jefferson City, Mo.: "Ernie & Hazel want to remind you that it’s International Cat Day."

At Analog Books

Analog Books, Lethbridge, Alb., Canada: "Happy International Cat Day from your favourite bookstore cat!"

lala books, Lowell, Mass.: "We've been receiving a lot of cat things lately... #internationalcatday."

Maggie Mae's Bookshop, Gresham, Ore.: "Today is international cat day! Although we are named after a beloved bulldog, many of our employees have a special place in our hearts for cats! Celebrate your love of your favorite set of murder mittens by getting a cat book or two today in store, OR join us this Saturday for story time featuring the coolest, grooviest cat character around, Pete the Cat!""

Subterranean Books, St. Louis, Mo.: "We heard a little meow letting us know it's International Cat Day, and we can't pass that up! Here is Ayra, Tory's kitty enjoying some excellent reading/lounge time. We encourage you to do the same!"

Interabang Books, Dallas, Tex.: "Happy International Cat Day! Like our feline friends, we love curling up with a good book or two (or three). Mark a spot on your bookshelf for your 'To Be Read' pile with a Züny Tuxedo Cat bookend!"

Strand Bookstore, New York, N.Y.: "It's #newbookTuesday AND #internationalcatday! Swipe right, and on this cat-scale, how do you feel about these new arrivals?"

Back Again Bookshop, Myrtle  Beach, S.C.: "Happy International Cat Day from these two cuties."

Posted on Facebook by Frenchtown Bookshop, Frenchtown, N.J.: "We were delighted to meet Brittany and Zach, a beautiful couple who took their engagement photo at the Bookshop and will be married this week at The Ciderhouse at Ironbound Farm. 'We wanted to express how much the shop means to us. We’ve been stopping in together from the beginning of our relationship and it’s our favorite destination.' Swoon!"

The Open Book, Warrenton, Va., shared a photo on Facebook of the bookshop's sidewalk chalkboard message: "Every now & then I like to pick my head up out of my book & reacquaint myself with the world, take a HARD PASS, & go back to READING!"

The Glorious Forest that Fire Built by Ginny Neil (Amicus Ink).

Today:
Fresh Air: Shane McCrae, author of Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping (Scribner, $27, 9781668021743).

Tomorrow:
Jennifer Hudson Show repeat: Kristin Cavallari, author of Truly Simple: 140 Healthy Recipes for Weekday Cooking (Rodale, $29.99, 9780593578780).

Apple TV+ has released a trailer for the new series The Changeling, an eight-part drama starring and executive produced by Academy Award-nominee LaKeith Stanfield. The Changeling will make its global debut September 8 with the first three episodes on Apple TV+, followed by one new episode every Friday through October 13.  

Based on the 2017 book by Victor LaValle, The Changeling also stars Clark Backo, Adina Porter, Samuel T. Herring, Alexis Louder, Jared Abrahamson, and special guest star Malcolm Barrett. The project is written and adapted by showrunner and executive producer Kelly Marcel, and the pilot episode was directed by Melina Matsoukas.

The series is produced by Apple Studios and Annapurna. Megan Ellison, Patrick Chu and Ali Krug are executive producers on behalf of Annapurna. Showrunner Marcel, author LaValle, David Knoller, and director Jonathan van Tulleken executive produce alongside star Stanfield. Director Matsoukas serves as executive producer through her De La Revolución Films. Sue Naegle and David Wolkis also serve as executive producer, Khaliah Neal as co-executive producer.

Shortlists in the four categories of the 2023 Ned Kelly Awards have been announced and can be seen here. Sponsored by the Australian Crime Writers Association, the awards honor published works in the categories of best crime fiction, debut crime fiction, true crime and international crime fiction. Winners will be named in about four weeks.

Noting that the shortlist highlights the "strength and identity" of Australian crime writing, the ACWA said, "It is particularly pleasing to see authors continuing to break away from some of the more common crime tropes, with an even larger variety of characters, settings and social diversity in this year's entries than we have received before."

photo: Laura Turbow Photography

Yael Goldstein-Love is the author of The Passion of Tasha Darsky and The Possibilities (Random House), a novel about motherhood and the multiverse. She is completing her doctorate in clinical psychology, with a focus on maternal mental health, and lives with her son in Berkeley, Calif.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

The Possibilities captures the trippy psychological reality of becoming a new parent by reimagining motherhood as a hero quest with a sci-fi twist.

On your nightstand now:

Two galleys: Lydia Kiesling's Mobility and Edan Lepucki's Time's Mouth, both out midsummer, both phenomenally smart page-turners. (Full disclosure: the three of us used to be in a writing group together, but my opinion on this is still 100% accurate.) Also, two books from my other life in psychotherapy: Psychic Retreats by John Steiner and Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman, both of which have been on my nightstand for about a year, because experiences with my patients keep sending me back to them. Finally, Junie B. Jones Is a Beauty Shop Guy. My six-year-old son and I are obsessed with this series.

Favorite book when you were a child:

D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. I loved that the beauty of it wasn't sanitized or sentimentalized, that gorgeous images sat side by side with rage, violence, and cruelty. It felt so respectful to my child's mind, because this mingling of good and bad was clearly true of the world as I experienced it, and no one was lying to me about it in those pages.

Your top five authors:

This feels like a trap. If I don't say Henry James, some 25-year-old version of myself is about to cut ties with me. But if I don't say Emily St. John Mandel, then current me feels snubbed. I'll compromise with a mix of long-standing favorites and current obsessions: Octavia Butler, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Karen Joy Fowler, Victor LaValle. (Yes, I cheated and snuck in seven.)

Book you've faked reading:

When I was in sixth grade, everyone showed up one week, with no warning, talking about Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. I have no idea why everyone just upped and read that book all at the same time. I had not, and couldn't stand being left out of the conversation, so I just went ahead and voiced strong opinions about characters and plot lines I was hearing about for the first time. It was frightening to me how well this worked, how the brazenness of my lies made them all the more believable. I think it made me more honest going forward, because I did not care for the black magic I'd just harnessed.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence by Rozsika Parker, which is the best book about motherhood that I have ever read and probably ever will. It should be handed out to every birthing person upon discharge from the hospital, along with the mesh underwear. Actually, it occurs to me that it is the motherhood equivalent of D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths in that it takes the gorgeousness of the experience and sets it side by side with the ugly aspects in a way that does not try to sanitize away the bad or sensationalize away the good. It also occurs to me that this is exactly what I tried to do with The Possibilities.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I don't think I've ever done this and am now wondering what deficiency this reveals about me.

Book you hid from your parents:

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume. It seemed very important that my parents not know I was subject to puberty, despite the increasingly obvious evidence of my breasts, and association with that book would have been a dead giveaway.

Book that changed your life:

Victor LaValle's The Changeling. I read that book in a single night when my son was a few weeks old, and it gave me a lifeline. It wasn't just how good the book was--although it's magnificent--it was that the book made me realize that there was meaning to be made from the dark chaos of my postpartum experience, and all I had to do in order to access it was switch the genre of my own internal narration, branch out past realism.

Favorite line from a book:

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." --Middlemarch, George Eliot

Five books you'll never part with:

What makes a book precious to me is whether it cracks open (for me) some new level of understanding about what it's like to be a human being. Literature and psychology both do this, and I think with each of my favorites you could really call them either--literature that's like a secret key to the human mind, psychology that's so forcefully explanatory that it is literature. Among others, these include: Middlemarch by George Eliot; To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf; Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout; Playing and Reality by Donald Winnicott; Schopenhauer's Porcupines: Intimacy and Its Dilemmas by Deborah Anna Luepnitz.

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

The Zero by Jess Walter. There's something about that book that astounds me, no matter how many times I read it. It's so meticulously constructed that it seems you couldn't change a word without destroying the whole edifice--and yet so fully alive, I half expect the characters might rearrange the plot whenever I look away. I feel if I could read it again for the first time, I could cut through this paradox and know something new and true about how fiction works.

Justine Pucella Winans (Bianca Torre Is Afraid of Everything) makes their middle-grade debut with The Otherwoods, an excitingly suspenseful portal horror led by a cleverly humorous, adorably queer, and intrepid nonbinary tween.

Twelve-year-old River Rydell pretends they can't see the shimmering portals inviting them to the Otherwoods, "a world overlapping our own, where monsters reign" and "the darkness of magic runs free." Yet the place is persistent, and every disgusting creature that slips through is visible to River. "The Otherwoods is coming for you," warn the spirits (yet another group of beings only River can see).

No one believes in River's ability, which requires awkward exercises in self-control. Namely, not screaming out loud over what their classmates cannot see slithering on their desks. Standing out is something River already struggles with; "it [doesn't] help to be deadnamed in front of the whole class" by Ms. Deery, who is "the type of monster that everyone [can] see." At least "amazing" Avery Davis stands up for River. Unfortunately, the first time they hang out together after school, a monster attacks and takes Avery into the Otherwoods. River, knowing only they can help their crush, goes in after her. Now, River must finally face the truth about why the Otherwoods has always beckoned.

Winans conjures a chilling atmosphere. River is unsettled by the "wet, mossy... rust" scent of the foggy land, its "strange, color-changing trees," the low buzz of magical energy "compelling them forward." Every moment in the eerie place tests River's mettle. They brave a gnashing winged beast, a lizard-like horror erupting with tentacles that ooze ink, a valley writhing with stomping and clawing and bleeding things--as well as a cursed bridge and a "very unhelpful psychic." Support comes via Xavier, an "endearing and annoying" spirit who becomes like an older brother ("How rude, asking a spirit how he died when we only just met."); Mr. Fluffy Pancakes, River's kickass cat sidekick who protects against possession; and Charles, the six-foot-tall bug monster under River's bed. Teasing, situational antics and wry deliveries hit perfectly ("Stab and hope for the best!"). Above all, River's magic is a brilliant parallel to their nonbinary identity: "River could be murdered by monsters and everyone would tell their body they were simply imagining it." The Otherwoods is creepy fun with a queer heart, and a cunning and determined protagonist whose growing self-confidence is a joy to experience. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer

Shelf Talker: A clever, sarcastic, and loyal nonbinary tween must play hero to save their crush from a magical otherworld in this middle-grade horror novel celebrating queer tweenhood.