"The last three weeks in DC have been hard. With federal law enforcement including ICE, and the FBI harassing businesses and arresting our neighbors, and umpteen National Guard troops standing around doing nothing, it's been tense. However, we need to remember that one of the surest ways to stand up to authoritarians is to loudly and publicly build community and to experience joy in the face of despair. We hope that Solid State Books can be a place for you to build community in the coming weeks, either by joining us for a book club, event, or just stopping by to browse and chat. Read on for more ways to connect with your neighbors and fight back against hopelessness and tyranny....

"Looking for a way to get involved in the resistance? Free DC is a renewed campaign to protect Home Rule and win lasting dignity for our communities. They have a bunch of great resources and ways to get involved right now to help end the occupation. Sign up for an orientation session to get started and join your neighbors in creating a truly Free DC."

Sip-N-Read Bookbar, a bookstore and wine bar in Detroit, Mich., opened for business earlier this week, the Detroit News reported. 

Tamela Todd

Located at 1620 Michigan Ave., Suite 122, in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood, Sip-N-Read spans 2,400 square feet and carries a selection of general-interest titles. The bar side of the business serves Michigan-made wines in 5- or 8-ounce pours, mocktails, and light food options like charcuterie boards. 

Sip-N-Read will host public literary events like author talks and book signings while also being available for community members to rent for private events. A members-only wine club is in the works as well.

Owner Tamela Todd, an author and winemaker, told Detroit News that she's been working on opening Sip-N-Read since 2019. She was inspired by book bars in cities like Denver, Paris, and New York, and she chose to emphasize Michigan wines "because Michigan does not get a lot of press about Michigan wines. I've put my love for books, my love for wine, and my state all in one place."

Protagonist Books & Coffee, a new woman-owned, queer-owned, author-owned bookstore and cafe that strives "to be an inclusive third space where you can 'find your story,' feel at home, and build community around books" will host its grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony on Tuesday, September 9, at 8 W. Main Street in Dryden, N.Y.

Sam Gellar-Smith, co-owner with Amber Gellar-Smith, told Ithaca.com: "We aren't beholden to different contracts with whatever's being highly marketed. We can choose our own books according to what we think is a good fit for the bookstore. That's one of the huge benefits of independent bookstores, is you're just able to make your selection the way you want to make it and you're not driven by the commercial machine that's behind Amazon and some of those big-box stores." In addition to books, Protagonist has a cafe and will host events, including author readings and board game nights.

The owners had long discussed opening a bookstore, but originally considered doing so in retirement. Ithaca.com wrote that their plans changed "when North Carolina, where they lived until recently, passed the 'Don't Say Gay' laws in 2023, which Sam said created an environment more hostile to lesbians than when she first came out in the 1990s."

"As an author, I do a lot of school visits," Amber Gellar-Smith said. "I was told that I wasn't allowed to mention that I had a wife, because North Carolina had just passed these terrible 'Don't Say Gay' laws. Anyway, that was the point where we seriously considered that we wanted to move away into a more welcoming community."

They discovered Dryden, near Ithaca, while on a vacation to the Finger Lakes, and found it to be more welcoming. After seeing a beautiful home there, they put in an offer a day later. "All of the different components really fell into place, so we decided to go for it," Amber Gellar-Smith said, adding: "We really know what it's like to not feel welcome, and so we want to make this space a very inclusive and welcoming space for people of all walks of life.... It's been really exciting to see this dream starting to become a reality. We're really excited to share it with the community."

Following its debut last week, Amethyst and Ink Books in Lawton, Okla., has a grand opening slated for Friday, September 5, Z94 reported.

Located at 1814 W. Gore Blvd., Amethyst and Ink sells new, general-interest titles for all ages, along with a variety of bookish gifts. Owner Lydia Kelley is also partnering with local vendors to sell their items on a consignment basis.

The grand opening festivities on September 5 will include photo ops, a children's storytime, a raffle, and more.

Books-A-Million has opened a new store in Bossier City, La., the Shreveport-Bossier City Advocate reported. 

The new store is located at 2920 Meadow Creek Dr. and does not have a cafe, as it has a smaller footprint than most other BAM stores. It also replaces a BAM store that closed in 2014, though Bossier City does have a 2nd & Charles, which is owned by the same parent company. 

Earlier this year, Books-A-Million said it plans to open 15 new stores in 2025.

David Allen

Australian bookstore chain Dymocks has named David Allen as its new CEO, effective September 8, Books+Publishing reported. Allen replaces outgoing CEO Mark Newman, who announced he would be stepping down earlier this month after five years in the role.

Allen spent more than 12 years with jewelry company Pandora, holding senior leadership roles, including president for Europe, Middle East and Africa, "a division with over A$2.5 billion [about US$1.6 billion] in revenue," Dymocks noted.

"This appointment is a statement of our ambition," said Dymocks Group chairman John Forsyth. "David is the world-class operator we need to grow our market share and build on our 146-year legacy as a cornerstone of Australia's cultural life."

Allen commented: "To lead a brand that is part of Australia's cultural identity is a profound responsibility. I look forward to working with the corporate team, store managers and our passionate network of franchisees to amplify that unique strength and ensure Dymocks remains the most loved destination for Australian readers and gift-givers."

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Super Thursday, the U.K. publishing industry's annual day (usually during the first full week of October) when more new hardcovers are released than on any other day of the year, is being dubbed "Not-so-Super Thursday" in 2025. The Bookseller reported that this year's edition "will be the lightest since the phenomenon was first identified in 2008, and comes amid a sharp drop in frontlist titles from trade publishers in the run-up to Christmas."

Super Thursday will fall on October 9, with just over 1,000 new books slated to be published, of which 316 are hardbacks, according to NielsenIQ BookData. The Bookseller noted that the previous low was in 2023, when 341 hardbacks were released, compared to before the pandemic, when the day would routinely feature around 550 hardbacks, "with other 'mini-Super Thursdays'--usually in mid-September and late October--recording launches of circa 350 hardbacks."

This year's reduction "seems a concerted strategy, coming at a time when several houses have extolled the virtues of 'fewer but better' publishing," the Bookseller added, noting: "The contraction of titles also perhaps reflects a wariness among trade publishers of a shaky nonfiction market, even though autumn is the category's prime season.... It is perhaps important to stress here that the volume of titles released is no predictor of a publisher's Christmas run-in performance--and, of course, a reduced slate may actually boost sales and the bottom line."

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Bookseller moment: Australian bookshop Gleebooks in Dulwich Hill, New South Wales, posted on Instagram: "Tree hugging for booksellers. Too many boxes. Send help." --Robert Gray

Applications open September 1 for the seventh annual Carla Gray Memorial Scholarship for Emerging Bookseller-Activists, which was created in honor of the executive marketing director at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who passed away suddenly in May 2017. Applications will be accepted through September 20. Eligibility requirements and the application can be found here. 

The winning bookseller will be awarded a year-long scholarship for professional development, which includes travel and hotel to attend Winter Institute 2026; travel and hotel to attend their 2026 regional fall trade show; and a $1,000 stipend to fund a community outreach project. The goal of the community outreach project is to find new readers and ensure access to books that improve readers' lives while integrating bookstores even more fully into their communities. 

Presented by the Friends of Carla Gray Committee and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc), the scholarship is intended to help a bookseller with at least one but fewer than 10 years of experience connect with other booksellers, publishers, and authors as well as establish the long-term relationships needed to keep the book industry thriving.

Binc executive director Pam French said: "Binc is honored to support booksellers through this scholarship and professional development opportunity that celebrates Carla's legacy and her enthusiasm for books, bookstores, and their communities. We look forward to meeting the winner at Winter Institute and learning more about their outreach project."

Sara Paretsky, author of the V.I. Warshawski detective series and founder of Sisters in Crime, with Clay Stafford, founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers' Conference, at this year's 20th anniversary conference, which took place recently in Franklin, Tenn. Paretsky won the John Seigenthaler Legends Award. To see winners and finalists of Killer Nashville's the Silver Falchion and Claymore Awards, click here.

Congratulations to Books of Wonder, New York City, which is celebrating its 45th anniversary this weekend, with a sale on everything in the store that starts today and runs through Tuesday, September 2. Books, toys, and merch are 20% off, and posters, all treasures in the old rare collection, and more are 30% off.

Owner Peter Glassman wrote to customers, "This Tuesday will mark the 45th anniversary of the day I opened the doors of the first Books of Wonder store at 444 Hudson Street in New York City's famed Greenwich Village. As a matter of fact, it also happened to be a Tuesday! So much has changed over the years since September 2nd, 1980, but one of the constants I am most grateful for has been that the outpouring of wonderful children's books continues.

"Today, we have more diversity and representation in young people's books than ever before, as well as an abundance of exciting ways to tell stories--from classic prose to novels in verse, from interactive books to to graphic novels, and each year brings new talents who continue to create tales that inspire.

"But even as we forge forward, old challenges continue to provoke. At the beginning of this year, a study was released indicating that 33% of eighth graders and 40% of fourth graders are at below basic reading skills, the largest in decades. These declines are echoed in tests of adults' skills encompassing the same time frame.

"More than ever, it is so important to put books kids will love into their hands! No one disputes that children who read for their own enjoyment have great vocabularies, comprehension, creativity, and empathy. And helping young readers, their parents, and everyone who loves them find the books that will create a lifelong love of reading is what Books of Wonder has been here to do for the past 45 years!...

"I have continued to be astonished by and grateful for the spectacular community of book lovers--from authors and illustrators to young readers and the grown-ups who foster their love of reading to those adults who just never stopped reading and loving great kids books--that we have built. Thank you for continuing to trust us to introduce you to the best in books for young readers of all ages!"

Justice Leonard, the lucky winner

To celebrate the one millionth copy sold of Catherine Steadman's thriller Something in the Water--a Reese's Book Club pick and the story of a honeymooning couple's shocking underwater discovery--Ballantine Books held a treasure hunt on Waikiki Beach at the luxury Halekulani hotel in Hawaii. People were invited to search for a key dropped into the waters off Waikiki. The prize: a $1,000 Bookshop.org gift card, a two-night stay at the Halekulani, and a signed, complete set of novels by Steadman. The winner: Justice Leonard, a local surfing instructor.

Barnes & Noble has chosen Buckeye by Patrick Ryan (Random House) as its September national book club pick. In a live virtual event on Tuesday, October 7, at 3 p.m. Eastern, Ryan will be in conversation with Lexie Smyth, campaign manager for fiction at B&N, and frontlist buyer Brenda Allison.

B&N described the book this way: "A multigenerational family drama akin to the Pulitzer Prize winners Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, this book is destined to join the canon of Great American Novels. This is not a book you simply read; it's a book you feel. Buckeye is a beautifully crafted work of historical fiction with an unyielding heartbeat that readers will absolutely devour this fall."

Click here to join the October 7 event.

IPG has added two publishers to its sales and distribution programs:

Hachette India, the Indian arm of Hachette UK, which was founded in 2008 has published fiction and nonfiction by authors such as Subroto Bagchi, DSC Prize winner Anuradha Roy, and World Chess Champion Viswanathan Anand. A children's bestseller is The Mahatma and the Monkeys. (Effective September 1.)

Giunti Editore, Florence, Italy, one of the country's oldest and most prominent publishing houses. Giunti Editore has a catalog of more than 14,500 active Italian-language titles, covering all segments of the book industry. IPG will distribute Giunti's inaugural English-language list, which will feature approximately 35 titles, selected from its children's, art, and classics categories. (Effective this past August 1, in the U.S. and Canada.)

Shawn Abraham is joining Hachette Book Group as v-p, international, effective September 8. For the past six years, he has built and led the international sales team at Sourcebooks and earlier held international sales roles at Penguin Random House and Ingram Publisher Services.

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Tiffany Gonzalez has joined Simon & Schuster's Independent Retail Sales Team as independent retail marketing manager. She was previously marketing manager and event coordinator at Books Are Magic, Brooklyn, N.Y.

HBO has acquired the rights to develop the nonfiction book The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp in what it describes as a "fiercely sought-after deal," Deadline reported. The series will be executive produced by Harp along with Len Amato, through his company Crash&Salvage. A search is currently underway for a writer/showrunner.

The Fort Bragg Cartel "details the investigation into a string of unsolved killings in and around the special operations base, revealing a network of narco-trafficking conspiracies that corrupt police abetted and the military covered up," Deadline wrote.

Eighteen finalists have been selected for the 2025 Kirkus Prize in fiction, nonfiction, and young readers' literature. Winners in each category receive $50,000, and will be announced October 8. See the finalists here.

Kirkus Reviews editor-in-chief Tom Beer commented: "In a time of shortened attention spans and endless news feeds, books have the unique power to slow us down, to help us to think deeply and imagine freely. This year's finalists for the Kirkus Prize promise readers these and other riches; they're exceptional works to be studied and savored for years to come."

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Finalist have been selected for the 2025 Washington State Book Awards, sponsored by the Washington Center for the Book. Winners will be announced September 16. To see the 42 finalists in seven categories, click here--and don't miss the fiction nominees, who include Shelf Awareness's Elaine U. Cho, for Ocean's Godori (Zando).

Thomas Schlesser is the director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation in Antibes, France. He teaches art history at the École Polytechnique in Paris and is the author of several works of nonfiction about art, artists, and the relationship between art and politics in the 20th century. He is the grandson of André Schlesser, known as Dadé, a singer and cabaret performer who founded the Cabaret L'Écluse. Mona's Eyes (Europa Editions, August 26, 2025) is Schlesser's second novel and his U.S. debut, centering on a girl and her grandfather who have 52 Wednesdays to commit great works of art to memory before the girl loses her sight. It has been translated into 38 languages, including Braille. Schlesser was awarded 2025's Author of the Year by Livres Hebdo.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

A young girl, threatened with blindness, explores great paintings with her grandfather--a journey where art becomes an existential lesson about beauty, loss, and wonder.

On your nightstand now:

Gou Tanabe's manga adaptations of Lovecraft: not ideal for falling asleep, but absolutely brilliant.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien--before the movies were released!

Your top five authors:

Marcel Proust: the perfect combination of linguistic richness and analytical subtlety.

Guillaume Apollinaire: the pinnacle of a singing melancholy.

Marguerite Duras: characters like scalpel strokes, and a unique atmosphere I feel I understand intimately.

Charles Baudelaire: his poetry is like a kind of intoxication.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline: sentences like electric shocks.

(That's a French list! I'll make an international one next time!)

Book you've faked reading:

Ulysses by James Joyce--but I don't think I'm the only one!

Book you're an evangelist for:

It seems to me that you're usually an evangelist when you're recommending the Bible!

Book you've bought for the cover:

Surprising question! I don't recall that ever happening to me; but when I publish books, I do hope the cover will have an impact--and I love the one for Mona's Eyes!

Book you hid from your parents:

No books! But maybe one or two magazines when I was 13.

Book that changed your life:

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Faced with the many failures I experienced in my youth, especially between the ages of 20 and 30, Proust was a great source of comfort to me, thanks to the lucidity of his gaze upon the world and our human frailties. I believe Proust is a writer one can only truly appreciate once he is deeply felt; studying him academically is a lost cause--he must be experienced to be understood.

Favorite line from a book:

"I am a cage in search of a bird." --Franz Kafka's The Blue Octavo Notebooks. Both funny and terrifying. It's an explosive image...

Five books you'll never part with:

I don't have a particularly fetishistic relationship with books--I can part with them without any trouble. In fact, feel free to come help yourself at my place!

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

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick.

Late in The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers (Stay Up with Hugo Best), protagonist Cora meets an older woman who insists, "If you agree to share your life with someone, you're never free again. No one is allowed to say it, but it's true." Cora, fighting thoughts of escape after years of pleasant but passionless marriage to Eliot, appreciates that she eschews politeness and says it anyway. Or does she? Did Cora really talk to her, or did their conversation take place on an alternate timeline?

Cora's life has been split between two worlds for years, since she first met Sam, a neighbor dad with a sexy mouth, a square jaw, and an infant one week older than her own. Sam and Cora develop an instant friendship, despite Cora imagining much more. In fact, after Cora jokingly suggests, "We should just go ahead and have sex," it becomes a reality, albeit one in a parallel universe: "Somewhere in the multiverse their alternates checked into a hotel room where the afternoon light came in at a slant and hit a champagne bucket just so. It was a cliché, but wild and enjoyable because it was happening to them, this mythic thing they'd heard about, this thing in quotes: 'an affair.' "

Cora is careful to keep her fantasy world and her real world separate, going about her regular life where she becomes close with Sam's wife, Jules, and cares for her children and for Eliot as he grieves his parents' deaths. Somers is careful, too, intentionally letting the steamy descriptions of one timeline blur into the ordinary details of the other. Never confusing, the narrative moves effortlessly between the real and the imagined and raises excellent questions about what happens when one gets the freedom they thought they wanted.

The Ten Year Affair is often funny, peppered with thorny observations (the women in Cora's neighborhood, expats from the city, insist "they were not suburban in their preoccupations; they were thoughtful and sophisticated. They had to prove this to each other over and over. They had to prove it to the world too, by posting the book club picks online with the caption 'Currently loving.' "). Somers balances the witty takes with profound introspection on the nature of commitment and longing, guaranteeing there will soon be countless readers "currently loving" The Ten Year Affair. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

Shelf Talker: The Ten Year Affair blends fantasy and reality, where the world of a sexy affair runs parallel to the ordinary world of carpool, taking kids to karate, and loving but familiar husbands.