The Wandering Page bookstore and coffee bar held its grand opening celebration on June 30 at 3925 Farnam St. in the Blackstone District of Omaha, Neb. In a social media post, co-owners Amber Henson and Yajaira "Jay" Vacanti wrote: "Wander with us... would you? Today is our official GRAND OPENING--and we're feeling so loved! The support, the smiles, the sweet messages--it's all been absolutely incredible. We can't wait to see even more of you tonight, tomorrow, and all week long!... We're honored to be part of the Blackstone District and can't wait to add a little more magic to this amazing community."

The new bookstore occupies "two bays that once held a yoga studio," the World-Herald reported. "Part of it is a bookstore with places to sit and read, and another part is a coffee bar featuring lattes, macchiatos, cold brews and more, plus macarons, cakes, sesame cookies, baklava and other pastries. It also will serve wine, beer, and hard seltzers.

Henson and Vacanti met at an Omaha corporation and discovered they had a lot in common. "We instantly bonded over books and coffee," Henson said.

Deciding they wanted to open a place where others share their vision, they subsequently quit their jobs as co-leaders of a compliance team at Fusion Medical Staffing to pursue what Henson called "a longtime dream."

Their 1,800-square-foot midtown location is "in a neighborhood filled with restaurants, shops, apartment complexes and some single-family homes. They expect it to draw not only students and young professionals, but also families," the World-Herald noted.

The Wandering Page sells both new and used books. "We want people to buy books, but if they want to grab one off the shelf and sit and read, we're not against that," Henson said. "We just encourage reading."

Roots Bookstore & Market, a new and used bookstore and community space, opened last month in Miami, Fla., the Miami Times reported.

Phillip Agnew and Isaiah Thomas (via Facebook)

Located at 6610 NW 15th Ave., Roots Bookstore sells titles for all ages across many genres, with an emphasis on Black, banned, and local authors. Owners Isaiah Thomas, Phillip Agnew, and Sherina Jones welcomed customers for the first time on Juneteenth and opened the store with the help of a GoFundMe campaign that has raised more than $13,000. 

"There's something unique about holding a book in your hand," Agnew told the Miami Times. "We want our people--Black, Latino, immigrant folks--to be able to come in and see themselves on the shelves. They'll also have the opportunity to experience other worlds that they wouldn't otherwise experience."

The books Roots carries "tell a story," Thomas said. "A lot of people in our government don't want that story to be told. When someone reads a book, you can take them places and give them ideas. It's embedded in them."

Roots Bookstore grew out of Roots Black House, a collective and community space launched by Thomas and Daniel Agnew, Phillip's brother, in 2017. As the collective grew over the years, Daniel Agnew talked about wanting to open a bookstore but was never able to do so before his death in a car accident in 2023. When they discussed the future of Roots Black House afterward, Thomas and Phillip Agnew decided to pursue Daniel's idea of opening a bookstore.

The Roots collective has a long history of partnerships with community nonprofits, which the bookstore will continue. Long-term goals for the space include adding a cafe.

"We want folks to really feel a level of ownership and a level of comfort in the space that we have, and safety," Agnew added.

Burn Bright Books opened in April at 269 Park Ave., in Rochester, N.Y. The Rochester Beacon reported that the shop "provides a niche most other bookstores in the city don't have--a romance-only book catalog and merchandise."

Owner Shauna Cox's original inspiration came a few years ago when, "after a long day of wrangling her three kids, including a newborn," she was scrolling through TikTok and found a video by Meet Cute Romance Bookshop, La Mesa, Calif., the Beacon noted, adding that she was intrigued by the realization that, "on the other side of the country, a group of women were documenting the beginning of their romance bookstore."

"I really wanted a space for women," she said. "Romance gets such a bad rap. I wanted to make a safe space for people to explore romance and everything that comes with that." Suffering from postpartum depression while working a corporate job, Cox immersed herself in the world of romance fiction, which eventually prompted her decision to launch a bookstore. "I did this for myself, and I want to show my kids that. I'm in my mid-30s, and I managed to start a business."

Cox bought a guidebook on how to open a bookstore and spoke with other romance bookstore owners. Burn Bright Books opened as an online-only store before hosting occasional pop-ups, and now the bricks-and-mortar location is a reality.

"I'm a one-woman show," she said. In addition to book orders and shelf-stocking, she handles her own social media, outreach to local businesses for collaborations, events planning, and the business side.  

The bookstore's website notes: "At Burn Bright Books, we believe that every love story deserves to be shine bright. We will strive every day to provide a community space where we can celebrate love in all its forms; where every person can find themselves among the stories and where everyone feels welcome no matter what."

Barnes & Noble is opening a store in Keene, N.H., this Wednesday, July 9. The store is located in Monadnock Marketplace at 32 Ash Brook Road in the space formerly occupied by Bed, Bath & Beyond, next to Ulta.

The ribbon-cutting ceremony at 10 a.m. features New Yorker cover artist and author Harry Bliss, who will sign copies of his books, including You Can Never Die: A Graphic Memoir (Celadon Books).

B&N CEO James Daunt noted that this is "our third brand-new Barnes & Noble in New Hampshire, having opened new bookstores in Seabrook last year and in West Lebanon in 2023. Our Keene booksellers have been hard at work preparing a bookstore built for browsing and tailored to their community."

Poet and critic David R. Slavitt, who "wrote more than 130 books, mostly collections of poetry and translations of classics, as well as lowbrow novels under a pen name," died May 17, at the age of 90, the New York Times reported. Slavitt's work included translations of Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca, and his poetry "exhibited a mastery of traditional forms, though in a contemporary voice packed with wit and erudition." 

David R. Slavitt

His writing résumé also had another side. In 1966, as an up-and-coming poet and novelist in New York City, he was having lunch with publisher Bernard Geis, who had just released Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls. 

Slavitt had just written "a scathingly funny review" of Anya Seton's novel Avalon for the New York Herald Tribune, and Geis asked him to write his own Valley of the Dolls, the Times noted, adding that Slavitt initially resisted because he had a "serious" novel, Rochelle, or, Virtue Rewarded, coming out later that year. He did, however, propose an alternative. Under the pseudonym Henry Sutton, he wrote The Exhibitionist, "about an actress and her rich father, appeared in 1967. Tame by today's standards, it was decried as near pornography. And it sold four million copies." He went on to write seven more novels as Sutton, including The Proposal (1980), and even used the name of his first wife, Lynn Meyer, for a mystery novel, Paperback Thriller (1975).

"The theory was that it would be nice to make some kind of distinction between the two kinds of work, and the two kinds of audiences," he said in an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air in 1978. "When Longines makes a cheap watch for wide sale, they call it a Wittnauer."

Under his own name, he wrote a bawdy "children's book" titled The Cock Book, or, The Child's First Book of Pornography (1987); as well as a 2006 memoir, Blue State Blues: How a Cranky Conservative Launched a Campaign and Found Himself the Liberal Candidate (and Still Lost), about his unsuccessful 2004 run for the Massachusetts State House of Representatives. 

Slavitt's "serious" novels include the comic Anagrams (1970), about a poet invited to speak at a literary festival where no one has read his work. His first poetry collection was Suits for the Dead (1961) and his final one, Last Words, is scheduled for publication in 2028. He also wrote the libretto for an opera about the welfare system, based on a film by the Frederick Wiseman, and a play, King Saul, which made its debut Off Broadway in 1967.

"I do what entertains me," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996, adding that he was able to write so widely because "I have an absolute absence of any kind of fear."

Prior to becoming a full-time author, Slavitt worked at Reader's Digest, taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology and received a master's degree in literature from Columbia University before joining the staff of Newsweek in 1958, where he focused on criticism and became a movie reviewer and editor. He left the magazine in 1965.

"Though he wrote fiction at the same rate that he turned out poetry, he considered himself a poet first and foremost, writing novels and ephemera on the side to make enough money to raise a family," the Times noted.

"If I had been in it just for the money," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer, "I would've gone where the real money is: Business."

Missoula, Mont.'s Shakespeare and Company hosted a reading and discussion with Colleen O'Brien, whose debut novel, Baited (Unbridled Books), is set in the state's Glacier National Park. O'Brien (left), who's also a bookseller at the store she co-owns, the Glacier Park Trading Company in East Glacier, is pictured with Debra Earling, author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea (both Milkweed Editions).

Today co-host Jenna Bush Hager has chosen Happy Wife by Meredith Lavender and Kendall Shores (Bantam) as her July Read with Jenna book club pick. In Happy Wife, a "prominent lawyer goes missing on the night of his birthday party in Florida, rocking the small community of Winter Park--and the townspeople are quick to suggest his younger wife is capable of murder," Today said.

"Happy Wife is one of those delicious, fun summer books that you'll open on the beach and never put down," Hager said. "The setting in a community outside of Orlando, with tons of secrets, is so much fun for the summer, and I found the women of this novel to be complex and interesting, while it being the type of mystery you can't wait to finish."

Lavender, a TV writer and producer, and Shores, who works in communications, wrote Happy Wife together over the course of a few months. Shores summarizes the book: "A young woman falls in love with a man who is older than her and his friends don't approve of the courtship or the marriage, so she throws a party in the hopes of winning them over, and the morning after the party, he's missing." 

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The Compound by Aisling Rawle (‎‎Random House) is the GMA Book Club pick for July. Good Morning America described the book as: "The story follows Lily, a bored and beautiful twenty-something who joins a wildly popular reality show set in a remote desert. To win, she must outlast 19 other contestants by surviving in the Compound the longest, competing in challenges for luxury items like champagne and lipstick, as well as essentials to outfit their communal home, such as food, appliances and even a front door.

"When the unseen producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur. If Lily makes it to the end, she'll receive prizes beyond her wildest dreams--but what will she have to do to win?

"The Compound offers a chilling, addictive look at how entertainment, control and survival collide when the cameras never stop rolling."

"Hot summer reads." That was the promise on the sidewalk chalkboard in front of Wicked Good Books in Salem, Mass., which noted: "Hot new chalk art by our very own Adrian!"

At Harlequin Trade Publishing:

Laura Gianino is now associate director of publicity.

Sophie James has been promoted to senior publicist.

The AI Incident by J.E. Thomas (Levine Querido).

Today:
Good Morning America: Molly X. Chang, author of The Nightblood Prince (Random House Books for Young Readers, $20.99, 9780593897362).

CBS Mornings: Parvati Shallow, author of Nice Girls Don't Win: How I Burned It All Down to Claim My Power (The Dial Press, $30, 9780593730577).

Jimmy Kimmel Live: Stacey Abrams, author of Coded Justice: A Thriller (Doubleday, $30, 9780385548342).

Late Show with Stephen Colbert repeat: Jacinda Ardern, author of A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir (Crown, $32, 9780593728697).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Christine Pride, author of All the Men I've Loved Again: A Novel (Atria, $28.99, 9781668049532).

Today Show: Eden Grinshpan, author of Tahini Baby: Bright, Everyday Recipes That Happen to Be Vegetarian (Avery, $35, 9780593713426).

Ken Kesey's classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was adapted into Milos Forman's 1975 film, "is being spun off for the small screen" in a new series adaptation, Deadline reported. 

Producer Paul Zaentz, the nephew of the film's original producer, Saul Zaentz, said he has signed an agreement with Kesey's widow to develop a TV series that "we'll make through the point of view of the Chief for the first season. Following the first season, we'll see what happens to the Chief after he escapes [from the psychiatric hospital]." 

Ken Kesey had disavowed Forman's movie, "in part because it diverged from his novel, which was told from the point of view of Chief Bromden, aka the 'Chief' (memorably played in the film by Will Sampson)," Deadline noted, adding that it is not clear yet who is writing the new project or whether there is a studio on board. Zaentz was a producer on Netflix's 2020 prequel series Ratched, which ran for one season.

The winners in a dozen categories of the Crime Writers' Association 2025 Dagger Awards include the KAA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of the Year, which went to Anna Mazzola for The Book of Secrets, and the ILP John Creasey First Novel Dagger, which was won by Katy Massey for All Us Sinners. Mick Herron won the Diamond Dagger lifetime achievement in crime writing, which was announced in the spring. 

Two new Daggers were introduced this year. Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra won the Twisted Dagger, which celebrates "psychological thrillers, dark and twisty tales that often feature unreliable narrators, disturbed emotions, a healthy dose of moral ambiguity and a sting in the tail." The Whodunnit Dagger, which recognizes books that focus on the intellectual challenge at the heart of a good mystery, went to Lisa Hall's The Case of the Singer and the Showgirl. Check out all the Dagger winners here.

CWA chair Nadine Matheson said: "This has been another exemplary year, and our judges once again faced the exciting but difficult task of selecting from a truly impressive shortlist. The winners reflect the strength, diversity and continuing legacy of crime writing today. I would also like to extend our congratulations to the winners of the Twisted Dagger and the Whodunnit Dagger, Tracy Sierra and Lisa Hall. The inclusion of these two new categories continues to highlight the evolution and innovation happening within the genre."

A healer dedicated to curing poisoned patients is swept into a royal mystery in Hemlock & Silver, an eerie and clever dark retelling of "Snow White" from fantasy and horror novelist T. Kingfisher (A Sorceress Comes to Call).

Anja has just finished dosing herself with snake poison when "the king arrive[s] to inform [her] that he had murdered his wife" for killing one of their young daughters. In truth, he has come to ask for Anja's help with his other daughter, 12-year-old Princess Snow, who is slowly dying of an unexplained illness. He suspects poison and wants an expert opinion. Anja, whose passion is developing cures for poisons, agrees to travel to his castle and investigate, though with some worry for herself should she fail in her mission. Any hopes that she might solve the case with expediency quickly fade; Snow's symptoms provide little clue as to who or what is poisoning her. Anja's unease is worsened by the princess's aloof manner and the oversized mirror in her assigned bedchamber, a treasure from the dead queen's dowry. Mirrors give her an "instinctive fear that if I look in one, I'll see something moving that shouldn't be." Catching onto one of Snow's secrets leads Anja to fall through a mirror into a strange gray world where she meets a talking cat with attitude. At first the disquieting reflected world seems empty, but she comes to realize it contains a force that could upend reality forever. Anja will need all her prowess at experimental design as well as the support of silent but steady royal guardsman Javier and the talking cat to save their kingdom and her own life.

Kingfisher smashes the well-known "Snow White" story and reworks it into a shadowy mosaic underpinned by its original themes of envy and usurpation. The magical world on the other side of the mirror feels like a construct from one of Kingfisher's horror novels, unsettling and sometimes grotesque, but it grafts into this twisted fairy tale seamlessly. Anja, a brilliant, full-figured woman prone to blurting her first thoughts, is a heroine in whom many readers will see glimmers of their own reflections. Her irreverent narration, bashful romance with Javier, and unabashed fascination with poisons provide a humorous counterpoint to the story's more frightening elements. Readers looking for a menacing, off-kilter fantasy that keeps some lightness will enjoy peering into this glass. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Shelf Talker: A healer falls into a perilous mirror world while investigating a princess's possible poisoning in this eerie, clever retelling of Snow White.