"It's really important to us to make sure everybody feels at home here," said Hans-Sebastian Palacios, co-owner of the Little Bookshop in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, N.Y.. 

In May, Palacios; his fiance, Ashley Jones; and his mother-in-law-to-be, Mary Jones; opened the Little Bookshop, a 750-square-foot bookstore and cafe at 239 Bushwick Ave. The space can seat about 40 people and features an open floor plan, with most of the books shelved along the walls and a pull-out stage located in the corner farthest from the bar. 

The Little Bookshop carries general-interest titles for all ages, and though the inventory is still growing, readers can find literary fiction, fantasy, and romance, as well as narrative nonfiction, self-help, and a few cookbooks. There is a poetry section called the "Edgar Allan Poetry Corner," along with a "big Pride selection" and a small amount of Spanish-language titles. "We have maybe 30% of what we will have," Palacios said. Asked about sidelines, Palacios pointed out that Mary Jones is an artist and has made book bags, shirts, and jewelry for the store. 

Noting that he is half-Mexican and Ashley and Mary Jones are Black, Palacios said it is "very important to us to have minority and local authors," and inclusivity is a major focus of all that they're doing. They are "doing as much as we can" with community events and are taking pains to stock books and hold events that "reflect the culture" in the area. They are also trying to make sure that "the people who have been in the neighborhood for years see it not as an intrusion, but as something positive."

Their event plans, along with author readings and signings, include small art fairs, live music, and creative networking events, such as happy hours for artists, writers, and other creatives. They're also "still figuring out" ways they can bring local organizers and activists to the space. Ashley Jones works with after-school programs and is planning to do storytime sessions as well as book fairs for both children and adults. 

The Little Bookshop owners (from l.) Mary Jones, Ashley Jones and Hans-Sebastian Palacios

The cafe side of the business, meanwhile, offers full coffee service and a limited food menu, with soups and sandwiches. The Little Bookshop will be getting a liquor license soon, and the team will start serving beer, wine, and cocktails. They plan to create book and drink pairings and do events that combine readings with tastings.

Prior to opening the Little Bookshop, Palacios did not have any experience in bookselling but did have experience managing and operating a cafe. Ashley and Mary Jones had "always wanted to open a bookstore," and Palacios and Ashley Jones had experience organizing art events together. All three are working artists and have always "wanted to build a community."

When the right space opened up, they felt they had to do it, even with Palacios and Jones's wedding coming up in August. The trio rented a retail space and "started full tilt into it," Palacios recalled. They were able to open in about a month and a half.

So far, he continued, the community response has been "astounding." The Little Bookshop is around the corner from Palacios's previous cafe, and some customers have followed him to the new space. In just a few weeks, the store already has "a decent amount of regulars," and there was a lot of support when the owners put out a petition related to its liquor license. "It got a lot of people excited about us," Palacios said. --Alex Mutter

Bonfire Bookstore & Yarnery hosted its grand opening earlier this month at 108 N. Main St. in Woodstock, Va. The store, which sells new and used books as well as yarn, jigsaw puzzles, board games, and gifts, notes on its website: "Our mission is to cultivate a love of reading, learning, and creative play among residents of and visitors to Shenandoah County. We aim to be a third place where everyone in the community feels welcome to spend time, make new friends, and relax."

After the opening, owner Kara Balcerzak posted on Instagram: "I was absolutely blown away by the crowds who came out to support my bookstore tonight! Thank you, everyone!!!! My heart is so full, and my body is so exhausted."

A few weeks before the ribbon-cutting festivities, Balcerzak had shared the story of her path to becoming a bookstore owner with the Northern Virginia Daily, which reported that "her intention is to ignite a spark--a burning ember for reading or a glowing inspiration for just plain social conversation--similar to how people gather at a bonfire, a community meeting spot where people have fun."

Bonfire Bookstore's design includes social spaces for organized or impromptu board games, puzzles, children's play, along with reading areas and casual corners where people can gather. An avid knitter and crocheter, Balcerzak is offering impromptu lessons as well as supplies of various yarns and materials. 

After graduating from the University of Virginia, Balcerzak was in the Peace Corps before returning to the U.S. and joining AmeriCorps. "I spent years working in anti-poverty and sustaining communities. And all that time, I was thinking, 'I want to have a bookstore,' " she recalled, adding that her mother and grandmother were librarians. "This is my version of the family legacy. This feels like it is my destiny." 

Page Society Bookshop has been making appearances around southwest Oklahoma since its spring debut, the Lawton Constitution reported.

Based in Duncan, Okla., the mobile bookstore carries general-interest titles for children and adults alongside nonbook items like bookmarks, greeting cards, and notebooks. 

Owner Kara Sanders made a few initial pop-up appearances in March prior to an official opening in April. So far the Page Society Bookshop has visited Duncan, Marlow, and Comanche; her next scheduled appearance is a stop at the Cotton Blossom Winery in Marlow on June 28.

Sanders told the Lawton Constitution that one of the main reasons for opening a bookmobile instead of a bricks-and-mortar store was that both her children compete in cross-country running, and this allows Page Society Bookshop to travel with them. She said, "My kids, they're a big part of my life, so I schedule around that, and that's why I chose to do it this way and not open a physical store so that I have the flexibility to do that."

Moonstruck Market bookstore will celebrate its grand opening at 329 N. Babcock St. in Melbourne, Fla., on July 26 and 27. Spectrum News 13 reported that author Connor Bryan, and her wife, August Bryan, are co-owners of the new and used bookstore, but "for them, it's more than a business--it's a vision years in the making."

Noting that they want the bookstore to be a welcoming environment for everyone, but particularly for members of the LGBTQ+ community, Connor Bryan said: "Two years ago, I woke up one day and I went, 'I could open a bookstore. I think I could do this.' And I told my wife, August, and I said, 'I think this is something we need to do, because Melbourne, it has a lack of third spaces and community spaces and safe spaces.' "

After an initial attempt to open in 2023 didn't come through due to funding and real estate challenges, they finally secured a location in May and have been working with volunteers to build furniture, paint walls, and other preparations.

The bookstore will feature a wide variety of genres--from queer fiction and romance, to thrillers and children's books--along with a dedicated book club room. Local gifts, art, and pop-up events in collaboration with other small businesses will also be on offer.

August Bryan, who is handling much of the organization and design, said the project "has been a whirlwind for sure. I mean, we really decided to start getting the ball moving in January of this year. Now, we've gotten an immense amount of support. We have gotten a building. We have made a lot of progress on the building. It's been incredible. We have a whole team."

Grace Stiles Williams, the store's events coordinator, said every aspect of the store has been shaped by local input: "We put four different colors up on the wall and had people vote on it. And this was the one everyone liked the most. We also put the voting on social media for the folks who couldn't come to the Vision Night."

Susan Beth Pfeffer, "whose novels for young adult readers delved into sensitive subjects like suicide, sexual harassment and the sheer complexity of growing up in a modern American family, and who found late-career success with a bestselling series set in postapocalyptic Pennsylvania," died June 23, the New York Times reported. She was 77.

A prolific author, Pfeffer published more than 70 novels, beginning with Just Morgan in 1970, a year after she graduated from New York University. Her last book, The Shade of the Moon, was released in 2013. She "wrote across a wide variety of genres, including historical fiction and science fiction dystopias, but certain themes ran through all her works--above all, how families operate, or don't, in the face of challenges, whether quotidian or catastrophic," the Times wrote.

Pfeffer considered retiring from writing before Life as We Knew It (2006), about a family trying to survive after an asteroid knocks the moon closer to Earth, achieved success. She followed it up with The Dead and the Gone (2008), along with two more books in the series: This World We Live In (2010), and The Shade of the Moon.

Her other books include Better Than All Right (1972), The Year Without Michael (1987), and The Ring of Truth (1993). In 1997, she published four books in her Portraits of Little Women series, exploring characters in Louisa May Alcott's classic novel. 

Pfeffer wrote quickly, sometimes two or more books a year, the Times noted, adding that she told interviewers "she rarely wasted time on finding the perfect word or crafting a detailed character description; like the former film student she was, her focus was pacing and dialogue.... Though she did not score a best seller until Life as We Knew It, Ms. Pfeffer developed a reliable core of readers, who followed her through her wide-ranging genre journeys."

Authors Martin Porter and David Goggin launched Buzz Me In: Inside the Record Plant Studios (Thames & Hudson)--their chronicle of the famed studios where iconic albums like Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, and the Eagles' Hotel California were recorded--at Book Soup, West Hollywood, with many alums of Record Plant's Los Angeles studio in attendance. Pictured (l.-r.): Martin Porter, David Goggin, his wife, Keiko Kasai Goggin, singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb, and her husband, Roey Hershkovitz.

The Summer Reading Challenge of Green Apple Books and Friends and Neighbors, in San Francisco, Calif., kicked off last Sunday with rousing reading music from the Lowell High Drum Corps. The challenge runs through September 21; last year's edition was highlighted in a recent New York Times article about how summer reading challenges, which used to focus on kids, have expanded to include challenges for adults. The Green Apple/Friends and Neighbor challenge rewards readers for how many hours they read.

"Books & air conditioning? Priceless!!" That was the message on the sidewalk chalkboard in front of Fiction: A Novel Bookshop, Wiscasset, Maine, which noted: "We’re keeping it cool in Wiscasset!!"

"It is a buried in books kind of day," the Green Dragon Bookshop in Fort Dodge, Iowa, posted on Instagram.

Kelly Rudolph has been promoted to senior v-p, publicity and integrated marketing strategy for the Morrow Group and HarperCollins Children's Books. When the company combined the integrated marketing and marketing design teams at William Morrow and HarperCollins Children's in 2023, Rudolph took on the expanded role of v-p of publicity and integrated marketing for both groups.

Leo Woodall (One Day, The White Lotus Season 2, Prime Target) will star opposite Rachel Weisz in Vladimir, a new Netflix limited series adapted from the 2022 novel by Julia May Jonas, Deadline reported that the eight-episode project was greenlit in March, with Weisz attached to star and executive opposite creator and writer Jonas.

Executive producers also include Sharon Horgan, Stacy Greenberg, and Kira Carstensen (Merman), Jason Winer and Jon Radler for Small Dog Picture Company, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. 20th Television, where Small Dog had an overall deal, is the studio.

The Orwell Foundation has named this year's winners of the Orwell Prizes, recognizing "work which comes closest to George Orwell's ambition 'to make political writing into an art.' " The 2025 book award winners receive £3,000 (about $4,125).

The Orwell Prize for Political Writing was awarded to Looking at Women, Looking at War, an unfinished novel by Victoria Amelina, who was killed in the Ukraine war in 2023. Kim Darroch, chair of judges for the award, said: "Victoria Amelina was a successful Ukrainian novelist, and founder of a book festival, living in the Donetsk region of Eastern Ukraine. The Russian invasion stripped all of this away overnight. Rather than fleeing the country, she travelled it, supporting humanitarian projects, helping others evacuate, researching war crimes, and chronicling the harrowing, sometimes surreal, challenges and experiences of living in a war zone. Then, on June 27, 2023, she was in a pizzeria in Kramatorsk when it was hit by a Russian missile. Sixty-four were injured and thirteen killed. Victoria was among them.

"Her book, Looking at Women, Looking at War, put together after her death by a group of friends and colleagues, is unavoidably fragmentary--a collection of diary entries, interviews, audio files, notes and drafts. But it is all the more powerful for its episodic structure, conjuring up the reality of daily life when mere survival is an achievement. She brings to her narrative the acuity of a journalist and the artistry of a born writer. The result is an unforgettable picture of the human consequences of war."

The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction went to Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan. Jim Crace, chair of judges for the prize, commented: "We have an outstanding shortlist of eight political novels for this year's Orwell Prize for Fiction. All of them are winners. But the single work that has finally emerged as our overall champion is Donal Ryan's Heart, Be at Peace. For its clarity. For its twenty-one perfectly pitched voices. For the neatness and breadth of its form. For its humanity and kindness. Here is a small deprived community in rural Ireland--after the Good Friday Peace Accord and the collapse of the Celtic Tiger--suffering and recovering from the bruises of its political and economic past. The boom years--in both senses of that word--might be over, but in Donal Ryan's exceptional Heart, Be at Peace, the echoes still reverberate and hum."

photo: Adalena Kavanagh

Sebastian Castillo is the author of several books, including SALMON and, most recently, Fresh, Green Life (Soft Skull, June 24, 2025), a blackly humorous tale set on a single snowy night when a young writer attends a New Year's Eve party in hopes of reconnecting with old classmates. Castillo lives in Philadelphia, Pa.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

It's like if Don Quixote was about watching too many YouTube videos.

On your nightstand now:

I have a big stack right now: Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance: Vol. II; The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings by Hugo von Hofmannsthal; The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola; Gerald Murnane's Barley Patch, which I'm rereading for a book club; A Legacy by Sybille Bedford; Go Figure by Rae Armantrout; The Bridge by Hart Crane; Mr. Cogito by Zbigniew Herbert; and God's Ear by Jenny Schwartz, a play recommended to me by a friend.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I didn't read very much as a child. I mostly played video games, practiced the guitar. I had daydreams of being good at skateboarding, which never materialized. I suppose I was a late bloomer compared to some--I didn't become an obsessive reader until my early 20s, though I did read with interest occasionally before then. The first book that really affected me was Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which I read when I was 16. It convinced me enough that life was not something to waste, though I guess 20 years later the solution to this problem has remained unclear.

Your top five authors:

I find this too impossible, so I'll stick to five writers I've read consistently and loved very much in the last few years: Thomas Bernhard, Javier Marías, Jane Bowles, Robert Glück, Muriel Spark.

Book you've faked reading:

I've never done this. Speaking of childhood, I loved faking sick as a kid. My mother either believed me or didn't have the energy to challenge me on my performances. My junior year of high school I was absent 36 times. One of the biggest regrets in life is that I didn't skip school even more than I did. But now that I'm nearly 40 I think I'm ready to go back; I would be a good student. I would do the reading. Behave.

Book you're an evangelist for:

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr. I'm wild on that one.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Dag Solstad editions from New Directions. And I'm glad I did, as he's become a favorite writer. Rest in peace!

Book you hid from your parents:

The only thing I hid from my mother was a pack of cigarettes.

Book that changed your life:

I read 2666 by Roberto Bolaño when it was first published in English--I was 20 thereabouts--and it certainly changed my life, as it was the book that convinced me to dedicate my life to literature as both a reader and writer.

Favorite line from a book:

I don't often remember lines from books. When I think of a book I've read, I have an image of myself reading it, and if the book was good the image is warm, and I think of my time with it fondly. If I didn't like the book or felt ambivalent toward it, I find it difficult to create this image.

Five books you'll never part with:

Despite my bibliophilia and my overzealous tendency toward book collecting, I don't feel this kind of attachment to any one book I own. Maybe one: I have a signed copy of The Literary Conference by César Aira, which he signed for me when he read in Brooklyn in 2015, which I believe might be the only time he's read in the United States.

I like to tell this story sometimes: at that reading, I sat next to a gruff-spoken, chatty, elderly Black man, who seemed to be interested in speaking with whomever he was sitting next to, though actually he did not speak with me. It dawned on me a little later: this was the jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. Why? Because Aira, many years ago, had written a short story titled "Cecil Taylor," a fictional biography of the musician. And he read it there, that night. Actually, there is a line from that story I do remember, though I've had to look it up:

"...[T]he career of the innovative musician was difficult because, as opposed to the conventional musician, who had only to please an audience, the innovator had to create a new one from scratch, like someone taking a red blood cell and shaping it with patience and love until it's nice and round, then doing the same with another, and attaching it to the first, and so on until he has made a heart, and then all the other organs and bones and muscles and skin and hair, leaving the delicate tunnel of the ear with its anvils and miniature hammers till last.... That was how he might produce the first listener for his music, the origin of his audience, and he would have to repeat the operation hundreds and thousands of times if he wanted to be recognized as a name in the history of music, with the same care every time, because if he got a single cell wrong, a fatal domino effect would bring the whole thing crashing down...."

Afterward, I witnessed Aira kiss Taylor on the hand. When I asked Aira to sign the copy of my book, I told him in Spanish how much his work had meant to me, but as I was saying this, I noticed he was checking out the attractive woman behind me and ignoring my panegyric. I found this moment then and now perfect. I will always love César.

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

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. And when I reread it in about a decade, it will be the first time I read it, as that book's author would probably say.

Tell us a secret:

I've included the word "clown" in every book I've published and will continue with this practice indefinitely.

Sam Wachman's beautiful, heartbreaking debut novel, The Sunflower Boys, follows a pair of young brothers whose world is upended by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. As they travel west, hoping to escape the chaos of war and reunite with their father, who has been working in the U.S., narrator Artem captures details of their journey in his sketchbook, creating a poignant account of what he has loved and lost.

Wachman begins his story in peacetime, when Artem's life in Chernihiv, north of Kyiv, is blessedly ordinary. He walks to school with his little brother, Yuri, and best friend, Viktor; he does his homework, draws, and swims in the River Desna; and he and Yuri talk to their tato (dad), sharing stories of their lives in different countries. Every fall, Yuri and Artem travel to a nearby village to help their grandfather, Did Pasha, harvest the sunflower seeds on his farm. Artem is mostly content, but he's starting to wonder two things: one, what it truly means to be a man, and two, if his growing feelings for Viktor will make him a fundamentally flawed man. When Russia launches its attack on Ukraine, Artem and Yuri flee their city, first heading to Did Pasha's village with their mother and grandfather, then further south and west on their own. The peaceful, almost pastoral, quality of the novel's early chapters serves to heighten the jarring contrast with the sudden upheaval destruction of war.

Wachman depicts the brothers' harrowing journey through small, stark details: blistered feet and clothes stiff with grime, Yuri's stuffed crocodile, and Artem's precious sketchbook, which he carries everywhere, even when he can't draw a thing. On their journey, the brothers encounter people both callous and kind: a family of villagers who welcome them in for the night; aid workers at refugee centers who help them find beds and showers; others whose promise of safe passages turns out to be a lie. Artem's primary focus is keeping Yuri safe, but he also worries for his friends, especially Viktor, who has also fled Chernihiv with his parents. As Artem searches for his tato and tries to care for Yuri, he continues to wrestle with his feelings for Viktor and his own identity in an increasingly chaotic and confusing world.

Tender and poignant, shot through with deep sadness and wry humor, The Sunflower Boys is a bittersweet rendering of life in modern-day Ukraine, the effect of war on ordinary lives, and a young person discovering who he is. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Shelf Talker: Sam Wachman's bittersweet, beautiful debut novel follows a pair of brothers displaced by the war in Ukraine, through the eyes and sketchbook of the older brother, an artist.