Lagardère, owner of Hachette Book Group, reported group revenue of €8.9 billion (about $10.5 billion), up 8.5% on a year-to-year basis. Revenue in the U.S. was up 7%. That gain included results from Union Square, which Hachette bought in November 2024. Without Union Square, results were level.

Hachette Book Group CEO David Shelley said revenue was "fueled by instant bestsellers The First Gentleman by James Patterson and Bill Clinton (Little, Brown) and J vs. K by Kwame Alexander and Jerry Craft (Little, Brown for Young Readers) as well as top-ranking releases Big Dumb Eyes by Nate Bargatze (Grand Central), The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig (Orbit), and Nightshade by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)--all of which debuted at #1 across multiple categories."

Other important titles published in the quarter included Will the Pigeon Graduate by Mo Willems (Union Square), Can't Get Enough by Kennedy Ryan (Grand Central), Say You'll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez (Grand Central), Strangers in Time by David Baldacci (Grand Central), and Quicksilver by Callie Hart (Grand Central).

Shelley said the company expects "a notably strong upcoming Q3" with the publication of Gone Before Goodbye by Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben (Grand Central), Circle of Days by Ken Follett (Grand Central), The Academy by Elin Hilderbrand (Little, Brown), Softly, as I Leave You by Priscilla Presley (Grand Central), and Disrupt Everything--and Win by James Patterson (Little, Brown).

Shelley added that Hachette distribution operations "were strengthened in Q2 with back-to-back announcements about our new venture with the Stable Group, as well as the continuation of our sales and distribution relationship with independent children's publisher Nosy Crow. This is an area we are focusing on in terms of strategy."

During the second quarter, Hachette also launched the website for Raising Readers, the initiative that addresses the crisis of children reading for pleasure, as well as updated its partnership with Inkluded, a nonprofit dedicated to DEI in publishing, for which Hachette will provide in-kind support and tuition stipends to this summer's participants.

Snapdragon Books and Gifts, a new and used bookstore at 4471 Bridgetown Rd. in Cincinnati, Ohio, is hosting its grand opening celebration tomorrow, Saturday, July 26, Local12 reported. 

Owned by Bill and Andrea Macfarland, Snapdragon Books & Gifts is located in a renovated old house. The bookshop features different rooms devoted to specific themes or genres, including new releases, bestsellers, and local titles on the main floor and YA titles on the top floor.

The Mcfarlands will also have space to host book clubs, game nights, author readings, and other events. They hope to become a community hub.

Following the retirement of founder Willa Robinson, Willa's Books and Vinyl in Kansas City, Mo., will become a public archive, programming space, and headquarters of the Kansas City Defender, Startland News reported. 

(photo: Kansas City Defender)

The Kansas City Defender, which is a Black-led media company and advocate for the city's Black community, began working with Robinson in spring 2024. It has turned the store's inventory of more than 20,000 books into a public archive, and it will use the space at 557 Troost Ave. to host programming like its educational initiative B-Real Academy. Activities at the former bookstore will also support the Defender's mutual aid endeavors.

"We didn't want to see the longest-standing Black bookstore in Missouri just disappear," Nina Kerrs, a mutual aid organizer with the Kansas City Defender, told Startland News. "Until people walk into this space and see what the books are, the first editions and the deep history, they won't understand. But this place matters."

The Defender held a farewell celebration for Robinson, who is 84 years old, on July 12. "I'm not ready to retire, but it's time for me to retire. All of these books, all this music, all this art, is dedicated to you all," she said.

Robinson opened Willa's in 2007 in a space on Troost Ave. In 2012 she moved the book and record store to a space in the Citadel Office Building before returning to Troost Ave. in 2022. At the time, Robinson relied on a crowd-funding campaign to help the bookstore move; the campaign raised $19,600, nearly double the $10,000 goal. 

When Kerrs learned that Robinson was considering selling the inventory and closing the store, it was an "immediate call to action."

Kerrs called the transition "life-changing" for the Defender. "To have a space where we can be ourselves and be safe, to learn, organize, and grow, that's what Miss Willa gave us, and now, we'll carry it forward."

Les Renards & Co., a new and used bookstore benefiting the Norfolk Library Associates, held a grand opening earlier this month in Norfolk, Conn., NorfolkCT.org reported.

The bookstore, which resides in the historic Arcanum Building in Norfolk, is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and carries titles for all ages. Roughly 30%-40% of the store's inventory is from the Norfolk library's collection, with other used titles acquired from other sources. It also will stock unusual novelty items from France. (The store's name, "the foxes" in French, is a play on the elusive creature often seen in Norfolk.)

The bookstore grew out of a pop-up shop that appeared last year in the same location. It was intended to augment the library's book sale, which is held every year in August. Trish Deans, who came up with the idea for the pop-up along with Michael Selleck, said the pop-up worked so well they thought, "Why not pay the rent and make it permanent?"

Deans is heading the bookstore. Selleck, who retired in 2017 after a long career at Simon & Schuster, most recently as executive v-p, sales & marketing, has headed the Haystack Book Festival for the last seven years. The store will carry titles from authors appearing at the festival, which is held the first weekend in October, and will expand its hours to coincide with special events in town.

Last weekend, Booksellers Aotearoa NZ honored three New Zealand booksellers with Lifetime Achievement Awards, and a Bookshop of the Year prize was presented "to a thriving store in a year that has seen seven independent bookstores close around the country" during the Book Industry Awards ceremony at a gala dinner in Auckland, Stuff NZ reported. See a complete list of winners here.

Brenda Channer, Martinborough Books & Post

Fifteen awards were presented for excellence, success and innovation, including Bookshop of the Year: the Martinborough Books & Post, which the judges called "a fantastic example of diversifying to thrive." Booksellers NZ manager Renee Rowlands noted that owner Brenda Channer and her team have "thought outside the box to secure a future for the store in a difficult trading environment." 

Lifetime Achievement Awards were presented to Bruce McKenzie of Bruce McKenzie Books in Palmerston North; Jo McColl, co-founder of Unity Books; and Tony Moores of Poppies Howick.

The Titlepage Bookselling Trailblazer of the year award went to Mandy Myles of online retailer Bookety Book Books. "Her marketing and programming skills are among the best in the industry," the judges said.

Among the book award winners, the Booksellers Choice Adult Award went to former police officers and now bookstore owners Gareth and Louise Ward of Wardini Books in Hawke's Bay, whose bestselling "cozy crime" novel, The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone, is loosely based on their lives.

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In Hong Kong, at least six companies in the independent book industry have faced simultaneous tax office audits over the past year and a half, Hong Kong Free Press reported, adding that indie bookstores are one of the main distribution channels for independent publishers, as major chains reportedly censor books on specific topics or those written by certain authors, such as pro-democracy figures.

Hunter Bookstore

Leticia Wong, owner of Hunter Bookstore in Sham Shui Po since 2022, has been the subject of an ongoing tax audit on her company since early 2024, when the Inland Revenue Department began investigating her business's taxes. In addition to financial reports, Wong had to submit monthly statements of her personal bank accounts, and later had to report dozens of personal transactions dating back several years before the company was founded.

"It's annoying. For example, if someone transferred HK$300 [about US$40] to you in 2019, would you still remember who it was?" Wong asked. "The IRD also requested that I submit the residential addresses of the remitters." A former district councilor, Wong finds the probe puzzling because she only started running her business recently.

In addition to Hunter Bookstore, at least five other booksellers have faced simultaneous tax audits. HKFP reported that "since the Beijing-imposed national security law was enacted at the end of June 2020, Hong Kong's publishing sector has experienced various forms of censorship." 

"The most draining part is the human cost... handling all those queries from the IRD," Wong said. "Among all the different government departments, the IRD is the one I fear the most because, with its scope and investigative capability, it can be really disconcerting." 

As Hunter Bookstore awaits further responses from the IRD about its tax audit, Wong continues with her work. From late May to mid-July, the bookstore held an exhibition titled "Confronting Fear," which included documents the bookshop received from various government departments related to different types of inspections, and a calendar marking all the "greetings" from authorities.

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In a narrow passage between two buildings on High Street in San Fernando, Mervyn Baisden has built a bookstall that supplies second-hand schoolbooks to students across Trinidad. The Trinidad & Tobago Guardian reported that Baisden, who was unable to afford new books as a child, "remembers the feeling of not having, so if someone needs a book and cannot pay for it, he gives it away at a trade, or sometimes, for free."

His bookselling career began as a small sidewalk setup that later moved to a space at City Mall, which burned down and left him nowhere to go. "We used to sell outside, but I got locked up more than once. Then a family friend who owns this building gave me this space. We've been here since," he said, adding: "This is about giving back. We don't turn anyone away. We don't ask where you come from. If you need help, we help." --Robert Gray

Joanna Macy, "a pioneer in facing the emotional stress caused by climate change, who wrote books and led workshops on what became known as eco-despair or eco-anxiety," died July 19, the New York Times reported. She was 96.

Although Macy was not a psychotherapist, she was trained in religious studies and systems theory, and drew from those fields, as well as her Buddhist practice, "to propose a way past the heartbreak and hopelessness that many people feel," the Times noted, adding that "one of her fundamental insights was that what lies at the root of people's despair over the environment is a reverence for the earth's magnificence and an understanding that human beings are part of the web of life."

"You have to allow yourself to experience the love that is underneath the horror," she told  the San Francisco Examiner in 1999. 

"Between the beauty of this world and the knowledge of what we are doing to it came a luminous and almost unbearable grief," she wrote in World as Lover, World as Self (1991).

Her other books include A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time (2020); Coming back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work that Reconnects (2014, with Molly Brown); Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're In Without Going Crazy (2012, with Chris Johnstone); Widening Circles (2000), a memoir; and World as Lover, World as Self (1991). She also translated four books of poetry and prose by Rainer Maria Rilke, with Anita Barrows.

In 1977, Macy attended a symposium in Boston, held by the Cousteau Society, on threats to the environment. Soon after, she began leading workshops in what she called "despair work," allowing participants to explore their anxiety about the fate of the earth and, if possible, to find ways to positively channel their emotions, the Times noted.

"Pain for our world, like pain for the loss of a loved one, is a measure of caring," she wrote in Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age (1983).

Over time, Macy and other workshop leaders refined their approach, calling it "the work that reconnects" and offering a workshop that included four stages, which she referred to as a spiral: acknowledging gratitude for the world; expressing pain for the world; "seeing with fresh eyes"; and "going forth" to make a difference.

The Work That Reconnects Network, an organization founded by her followers, continues to hold online and in-person workshops based on her ideas. The Joanna Macy Center for Resilience & Regeneration at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., where she taught environmental leadership, also spreads her philosophy.

In 2020, David Loy wrote in Tricycle magazine: "Her genius has been the ability to design transformative practices and workshops that enable participants to go beyond an intellectual understanding to an empowering embodiment." 

Obodo Serendipity Books, Stratford, Conn., shared photos on Instagram of a "day in the life of a newish bookstore owner. Swipe to see what a normal day looks like —>."

Bear Pond Books, Montpelier, Vt., is holding a "Backdoor Sidewalk Sale" to adapt to construction taking place in front of the store, noting: "We're having a Sidewalk Sale out back! Discounts start at 50% off, no construction and plenty of parking!"

"Our AC is cold but our books are fire." That was the sidewalk chalkboard message in front of the Snail on the Wall bookstore in Huntsville, Ala., which noted on Facebook: "New sign, who dis? Our AC is on full blast, but the books? Scorching. Come chill with us and leave with something hot to read."

Randy Odaga has joined Abrams as e-commerce channel manager.

Fresh Air runs an interview with the late Jessica Mitford, author of The American Way of Death, Poisoned Penmanship, and other books and one of the Mitford sisters, subjects of a new Britbox series.

Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster will adapt Anna Johnston's debut novel The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife. Deadline reported that Netflix has optioned the book, which the screenwriters brought to them, and will produce through their Blue Harp banner.

Fitzerman-Blue and Harpster spent four seasons writing and producing Transparent, and were writers and executive producers on A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, starring Tom Hanks, Netflix noted. They wrote the sequel to Maleficent, and adapted Jess Walter's novel Beautiful Ruins for Amblin and Sam Mendes. For Netflix, they served as showrunners and creators of the series Painkiller.

A shortlist has been released for the £2,000 (about $2,580) Little Rebels Award, which is given by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers to recognize radical fiction for children up to 12 years old. 

The prize was established in conjunction with Letterbox Library and is administered by Letterbox Library and Housmans Bookshop in London. The winner will be named at a ceremony in October. This year's shortlisted titles are:

Cottonopolis by S.F. Layzell
The Fights That Make Us by Sarah Hagger-Holt
Keedie by Elle McNicoll 
Kende! Kende! Kende! by Kirsten Cappy & Yaya Gentille, illustrated by Rahana Dariah 
Mayowa and the Sea of Words by Chibundu Onuzo, illustrated by Paula Zorite
Zac and Jac by Cathy Jenkins, illustrated by Monique Steele 

photo: Matt Valentine

Carrie R. Moore is the author of the debut story collection Make Your Way Home (Tin House, July 15, 2025), 11 stories that span Florida marshes, North Carolina mountains, and Southern metropolitan cities, following Black men and women who grapple with the homes that have eluded them. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, New England Review, the Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications. She is a recipient of the Keene Prize and the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Steinbeck Writers' Retreat, and earned her MFA at the Michener Center for Writers. Born in Georgia, she currently resides in Texas with her husband.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Make Your Way Home is an intimate collection of Southern stories, each exploring a complicated love of place, family, and romance.

On your nightstand now:

I just finished rereading Toni Morrison's Beloved, and every read feels like the first time. The way memory functions in that novel blows me away. Next up is Dionne Brand's Nomenclature, which I've been leaving on my nightstand so I have something to anticipate. (I adored The Blue Clerk.)

I also keep a glass of water, a fountain pen, and my Midori 1-Year Diary. I get restless at night, so lately I've developed a practice of journaling for three minutes in sentence fragments. It gets my brain to slow down.

Favorite book when you were a child:

In elementary school, I had this obsession with David Shannon's A Bad Case of Stripes. The main character Camilla's skin starts changing colors. I'm a very visual person, and some of those illustrations still stay with me. Part of me wonders if I now write stories around different colors because of early exposure to this book. I'll decide a story is "red" or "green" or "yellow" and add details to bring out that sensation.

Your top five authors:

Toni Morrison. Lauren Groff. Edward P. Jones. Jhumpa Lahiri. Ntozake Shange. These writers are such masters of language and emotional resonance. A single turn of phrase just devastates you.

Book you've faked reading:

In truth... I don't think I've ever faked reading a book. I don't think I could get away with it! I also have no problem admitting when I've skimmed something. Why pretend when you can shift the topic toward a book you love?

Book you're an evangelist for:

I will recommend Anne Enright's The Wren, the Wren to anyone, anytime. I adore the mother-daughter relationship, as well as the careful, interior prose. And what a perfect structure!

Book you've bought for the cover:

Cristina Henríquez's The Great Divide. That cover is just so vibrant and intricate. What's even better is that the novel is so darn good. I adore the cast of characters and the strong setting. Plus, the concept of "separation" works on multiple levels. The inside of the book has a soul that matches its outside.

Book you hid from your parents:

I don't think I've ever had to hide a book from my parents. Mostly, they censored music and film. Books--in their eyes--had this veneer of respectability. (That didn't mean I wanted them to know the full contents of my Nora Roberts romance novels, though.)

Book that changed your life:

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. My 11th grade English teacher assigned it, and I've never thought about literature the same way since. Those rhythms of speech. How much desire Janie feels for her own life. It's so honest about hardship yet so authentically hopeful.

Favorite line from a book:

"But the idea that he had been there, out there in weather of whatever sort, out there in the dark offering no sign and no sound, out there for months and perhaps years of her life, seemed to give her something to measure her life by. But she did not know how to do that." --Edward P. Jones, "Bad Neighbors"

Five books you'll never part with:

Some of the books I return to the most are about writing or the lives artists have led. (Maybe this is because I find writing so difficult, and I always think I'll find some sort of peace if I just work harder and learn more.) These books are full of my underlines and notes, and they feel like an indication of what I needed at various points in my life. Giving them away would feel like giving away parts of myself!

The Blue Clerk by Dionne Brand
The Black Notebooks by Toi Derricotte (Thank you, Gabby, for giving this to me.)
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
The Art of Fiction by John Gardner
Art on My Mind by bell hooks

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

Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It was my grandmother's favorite novel, and she kept it on her bookshelf for much of my childhood, when I was too young to read it. A film professor finally assigned it my freshman year of college, and I immediately felt seen by its portrayal of girlhood, desire, and disappointment. I also felt like I was understanding a part of my grandmother I hadn't before--as if, because we both loved this novel, we were forming yet another connection to one another. It's one of the only books that has made me simultaneously discover something about myself and another person I loved deeply.

Favorite book when you were an adolescent:

In my late middle and early high school years, I must've read Sarra Manning's Guitar Girl a dozen times. The romantic relationship between Molly and Dean felt so layered to me, and I felt haunted by how the novel portrayed the dark side of getting your dreams.

With books like Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Mary Roach has earned a well-deserved reputation for delivering useful scientific information to a general readership with impressive style and wit. Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy, a lively survey of the state of the art in the field of regenerative medicine--a collection of disciplines that, in the aggregate, function as the equivalent of a human auto body shop--continues on that same path.

Each of Replaceable You's chapters focuses on a discrete body part or system, such as hair follicles and the rectum. With Roach as an inquisitive, intelligent guide, readers learn about mundane topics, like the evolution of the technology for joint replacements, alongside exotic research into editing pig genes to reduce the probability that their organs will be rejected when implanted in humans, and more. That problem, as Roach explains in her chapter on hair replacement, is what drives the search for "stealth" cells--"a line of iPS [induced pluripotent stem] cells that are able to dodge the human immune system, making immunosuppression unnecessary," something she calls the "Holy Grail of regenerative medicine."

In describing efforts like these, Roach isn't afraid to step out from behind her computer and observe cutting-edge research and practice up close. Among other places, her travels took her to Sichuan, China, where researchers are working to overcome traditional Chinese reluctance to donate organs by exploring ways of adapting pig organs to human beings, and to a clinic in Tbilisi, Georgia, attempting to track down a doctor who uses fingers for penis transplants.

Roach also engaged in participatory journalism, as she trained in the critical skill of intubation with a group of medical residents at Stanford and even spent some time inside one of the last working Emerson ventilators--better known as an iron lung--to experience what it felt like to have it breathe for her. She caps off the book with a visit to a Pittsburgh organ procurement organization where she observed a tissue harvesting session.

In the chapter on fashioning a vagina out of a colon, Roach comments on the "remarkable and sometimes surreal adaptability-- the agreeableness--of the human body." That characterization provides a touchstone for many of the examples she discusses in her intriguing book. But as she cautions in her chapter on 3D printed organs, citing Carnegie Mellon biomedical engineer Adam Feinberg, when it comes to implanting entire functional bioprinted organs in patients, we are "somewhere around the Wright brothers stage." Despite that caveat, anyone interested in an informative, entertaining exploration of the fast-moving developments in these fields will enjoy taking that trip with Mary Roach. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: In a survey of the history and state of the art of regenerative medicine, Mary Roach leads readers on a fascinating journey through the science of replacing failing and failed human body parts.