Cider Monday celebrations, held yesterday nationwide, have become more of a complement to indie booksellers' evolving online sales prowess than counter-programming to Cyber Monday's craziness, which had been the initiative's original intent. Willard Williams, who launched Cider Monday in 2013, was co-founder of the Toadstool Bookshops, with stores in Keene and Peterborough (now under new ownership) and the renamed Balin Books in Nashua.  

The American Independent Business Alliance highlighted "Why Cider Monday Matters," noting: "Remember, every purchase--and click--counts.  Please think before you click this Cider Monday and every day!"

Many indie bookstores across the U.S. were raising a glass of cider to toast the day, including:

Balin Books, Nashua, N.H.: "Skip Cyber Monday--Come Celebrate Cider Monday! Instead of feeding the big online giants this Monday, swing by your friendly neighborhood bookstore for something sweeter: a free cup of delicious cider and a moment to slow down, reflect, and be thankful for all those who have deliberately chosen to keep some or all of their business local. Learn more about Cider Monday here." 

At City Lights Bookstore, Sylva, N.C.

City Lights Bookstore, Sylva, N.C.: "Come see us to celebrate Cider Monday! Enjoy a 15% discount, warm cider, and cookies while you explore our bookshelves or cuddle with Cedric."

Out West Books, Grand Junction, Colo.: "Sip on hot apple cider while you shop our hardbacks at 20% off! What could be better than being in a cozy bookstore on Cyber Monday?"

Harvey's Tales, Geneva, Ill.: "Step away from the screen, step into a real bookstore and enjoy a free 8oz cup of hot cider while you browse our shelves and gift options. Since it is 'Cyber Monday,' the first 3 people who go on line to Libro.fm (after we open at 11:00 am Monday) and either start a new membership, or renew their existing membership, and select Harvey's Tales as their bookstore, will get 2 audiobook credits courtesy of Harvey's Tales and Libro.fm. Audio books are great while shopping, baking or wrapping presents!"

Gibson's Bookstore, Concord, N.H.: "Happy Cider Monday! Your reward for choosing to shop local is a free hot cider in @gibsonscafenh! We appreciate you!"

The Book Tavern, Augusta, Ga.: "It's cozy pajama day here at the store, enjoy an unwinding experience with Hot cider + baked goods. A live local artist pop-up with Kenneth James Benson Illustration, Foltz Studio & Jay Jacobs. Dog Man & Kitty Corn paper crafts for the kiddos."

Queen Anne Book Company, Seattle, Wash.: "Join us on Cider Monday... as an anti-dote to Cyber Monday. Drop by our store for free hot cider and cookies and old fashioned neighborhood shopping."

South Main Book Co., Salisbury, N.C.: "Stay offline and keep shopping local tomorrow? We'll have cider and Dewey's cookies in the shop, plus the book cart outside, for as long as these freebies last! Thank you for all your support this weekend--we can already tell this has the makings of a fantastic holiday season for book lovers in Salisbury!"

At Titcomb's Bookshop

Titcomb's Bookshop, East Sandwich, Mass.: "Happy Cider Monday! Kick off December by enjoying a hot cup of apple cider and a cookie before browsing the shelves today."

Nooks Gallery & Book Shop, Lancaster, Pa.: "Two GOOD THINGS for your Monday: We've got HOT APPLE CIDER at the shop for #CiderMonday (until we run out) to warm you while you browse in person. AND our food drive for @cwslancaster is GOING STRONG."

Purple Couch Bookshop, North Andover, Mass.: "[U]nplug from Cyber Monday, and join us for a CIDER Monday VIP Shopping Event. Your $25 ticket will get you admission to the after-hours event, a limited edition reusable tote, a hard cider from Saltbox Cider, and 15% off all purchases during the event. Grab your ticket at the link in our bio or the events page of our website.... We are looking forward to a cozy, fun evening with so many of our favorite people and our new friends at @saltboxcider!"

Wheatberry Books, Chillicothe, Ohio: "Cyber Monday? Never heard of her. Around here, we celebrate Cider Monday. Stop by for a free cup of Hirsch's apple cider while supplies last!"

Roundabout Books & Cafe, Bend, Ore.: "Rather than Cyber Monday, please visit our store for a delicious cup of hot spiced cider. And shop online at roundaboutbookshop.com for 10% off your purchase of $50+ with the code CIDER25."

The Littlest Library, a Latina-owned, romance-focused bookstore, opened a bricks-and-mortar store in Independence, Mo., on Small Business Saturday, FOX4KC reported.

Located at 112 N. Liberty St., the Littlest Library sells a wide range of romance titles in both Spanish and English. The bookstore also features an event space where owner America Fontenot plans to host book clubs and private events. When it's not in use for events, the space will offer open seating for customers, and there will be a coffee station available for patrons.

The grand opening festivities ran throughout the weekend, beginning on Saturday with a ribbon cutting, a live DJ, and food and refreshments. Sunday's celebration included a charm crafting bar, a 15% off sale, and a shiba inu owner meet-up. During both days, Fontenot stamped passports for those taking part in the KC Book Crawl.

Fontenot told FOX4KC that her store is the Kansas City area's "first Latina-owned bookstore." Fontenot noted that growing up Latina, "it's been very hard to find representation. I've been an avid reader.... It is very important for me to have reading in my life. I just never really found books that represented who I was. So, finding local authors that offer those readings and just things that I would have enjoyed growing up, I felt like it was really important to share with other people."

The Littlest Library debuted in 2024 as a 10x10 pop-up within Painted Tree Boutiques. The new bricks-and-mortar location resides in the city's Independence Square neighborhood.

"I have always loved the square," said Fontenot. "It has such a charm to it. When you walk through as a kid, you're just so amazed with the theater, with all the small business stores, something that you don't really get from big commercial retail spots."

The Bluffton Bookshop will open next spring in Bluffton, S.C. The Island Packet reported that the new indie, paired with the Frozen Fiddler, an "icery" offering pre-packaged ice cream treats, shaved ice, and other grab-and-go items, "is set to bring fresh energy to the edge of Bluffton Oyster Factory Park." 

Future home of the Bluffton Bookshop

Owner Allyn Oliver said she will be fulfilling a lifelong dream with her new indie at 89 Bridge St. in Old Town Bluffton: "I've always been a huge reader. Owning a bookstore is just one of those pipe dreams." After a year of planning and preparing, she will open the general-interest bookstore, with a dedicated children's room featuring what she calls "a little hidden nook" for kids, in early April 2026. 

"We'll have a little bit of everything, hopefully something for everyone," she said, adding that she hopes the shop will feel rooted in the town's character. "We named it the Bluffton Bookshop because we really want it to be a shop that belongs to Bluffton and a space that carries a sense of community." 

Oliver has already started brainstorming events and programs, and also "plans to bring a pop of color to the building by adding a mural on the exterior wall along Wharf Street," the Island Packet noted.

Daniel Woodrell, who was "known for prose as rugged and elemental as the igneous rock of the Ozark Mountains, his birthplace, which he returned to just as his artistic craftsmanship peaked," died November 28, the New York Times reported. He was 72. Woodrell was best known for his novel Winter's Bone (2006), which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Jennifer Lawrence as Ree Dolly, "a girl in rural Missouri whose family home will be seized unless she finds her father, a meth cook on the lam."

Daniel Woodrell

Two more of his novels were adapted as films: Woe to Live On (1987), which became Ride With the Devil (1999), directed by Ang Lee; and Tomato Red (1998), a 2017 movie starring Julia Garner. Woodrell's other books include Give Us a Kiss (1996), The Death of Sweet Mister (2001), and The Maid's Version (2013).

Despite the attention from Hollywood, Woodrell "did not become a public figure himself. Instead, he was an artist admired by close observers of contemporary fiction as a master storyteller of rural America," the Times noted. In the early 2010s, Esquire described him as "one of American literature's best-kept secrets," and the Times said he "writes about violence and dark deeds better than almost anyone in America today."

"He writes high Greek tragedy about low people, and he never panders or looks down on the people he writes about," author Dennis Lehane told Esquire. "As a prose stylist, he's done what all the best do: taken the regional voice of the world he writes about and turned it into poetry."

Woodrell considered his novels "country noir," which he described in a 1994 Times article as portraying "the allegedly folksy and bucolic heartland as the frequently rude and savage and dark world those of us who've done our time there know it can be is to explode a happy myth of fantasy-America."

After serving in the military during the Vietnam era, Woodrell "took to hitchhiking with his military duffel and landed in Tijuana," the Times wrote. While eating street tacos, he was approached by "a scruffy young man" who offered to trade a copy of Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast for his last two tacos. Woodrell made the trade and went on to "read the book feverishly, not sleeping." 

In Hemingway's descriptions of becoming a writer, Woodrell discovered, as he later recalled in an essay in the Atlantic, "a sense of vocation.... I needed very much to devote myself to something demanding, something I would give everything to all the while knowing my everything might not be enough." He earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Kansas in his late 20s and then a master's degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Woodrell once told Esquire that the Ozarks "were a place to mind your own business, go off the grid, avoid the law, hide." In an Associated Press piece, he said that he was the last of his family still in West Plains, Mo., but was reluctant to move: "There are a lot of things you can hear in the air that you can't read. About half the stories are anecdotes I heard around town."

Congratulations to Basically Books in Hilo, Hawaii, which celebrated its 40th anniversary on Saturday, November 29.

Coinciding with Small Business Saturday, the anniversary festivities included local author events that began at 10:30 a.m. and continued well into the afternoon. The Basically Books team made cookies for customers, and surrounding small businesses also had special events going on as part of SBS.

Basically Books was founded in Hilo in 1985. It sells titles for all ages with an emphasis on Hawaii, along with maps, music, toys, and gifts.

"People who get their wedding photos shot at a bookstore are the best people. That's a scientific fact. Congratulations!" Magic City Books in Tulsa, Okla., posted on Facebook.

Jason LaCoursier is joining Simon & Schuster as v-p of distribution operations, effective December 15. He succeeds v-p of operations & distribution services Pat Kelman, who will retire at the end of the year after 35 years with Simon & Schuster.

"We're closed today! Stay safe and enjoy this cozy day," Ink & Page Book Boutique in Overland Park, Kan., advised in an Instagram reel titled, "POV: You're working at an indie bookstore on a snow day."

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Dan Pelosi, author of Let's Party: Recipes and Menus for Celebrating Every Day (Union Square & Co., $35, 9781454956785).

Drew Barrymore Show: Christopher Petroni, co-author of Parm to Table: Italian American and American Italian Recipes from Ponza to the Bronx (Harvest, $35, 9780063378582).

A trailer has been released for Run Away, "the latest high-stakes thriller from one of the world's most successful adaptation writers," Harlan Coben, Deadline reported. Starring James Nesbitt, the project was created with Coben's long-term writing partner Danny Brocklehurst and producer Nicola Shindler of Quay Street Productions. Coben is exec producing with Shindler, Brocklehurst, Richard Fee, and Nimer Rashed.

The cast also includes Lucian Msamati, Jon Pointing, Tracy-Ann Oberman, Annette Badland, Maeve Courtier-Lilley, Ellie de Lange, Adrian Greensmith, Ellie Henry, Ingrid Oliver, Finty Williams, Joe McGann, and Amy Gledhill.

Deadline noted that Run Away "is the latest in a long line of Coben Netflix thrillers, which includes Fool Me Once, Netflix's most-watched TV show of 2024. That one was followed by Missing You. Coben has also recently made Lazarus for Prime Video. Upcoming for Netflix is an American adaptation of I Will Find You starring Sam Worthington."

Ian McEwan's What We Can Know was named Blackwell's Book of the Year 2025, the Bookseller reported. The novel had previously been named Blackwell's fiction book of the year, joining Alice with a Why by Anna James, illustrated by Matthew Land (children's book of the year) and Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (nonfiction book of the year).

Zool Verjee, Blackwell's commercial manager, said, "What We Can Know stands out as one of Ian McEwan's very best. It is many things: masterful, multi-faceted and thought-provoking, a piece of speculative fiction, a literary mystery and a thorough examination of truth, but ultimately it is a captivating read with superlative storytelling."

McEwan commented: "Wonderful to be honored by marvelous Blackwell's, by those in daily contact with people who love literary fiction. I'm absolutely delighted."

Tracy Sierra (Nightwatching) conjures a terrifying narrative with Warning Signs, in which a 12-year-old boy grapples with hazards on several levels. This novel of horror and abuse is both enthralling and thought-provoking, liable to keep the reader up all night for a single-sitting read or to inspire nightmares--all worthwhile for the masterful handling of serious topics.

Chapter one introduces Zach, aged 11, his younger sister, Bonnie, and their mother, Grace. They are skiing uphill into the mountains of the American West, toward a hut where they will meet with other friends. Grace, an expert outdoorswoman, educates her young children in assessing avalanche risks, in survival, and how to manage fear. Chapter two jumps forward a year. Zach is 12, headed into the same mountains with his father, Bram. Bonnie has stayed home with a nanny; Grace is gone, for reasons not immediately explained. Where Grace was kind and patient, Bram is visibly short-tempered and exasperated. Zach fears him. They are to meet a group of men and boys at a backcountry ski hut for a fathers-and-sons ski trip, organized by Bram for the purpose of securing investments from the wealthier men he envies and courts. Zach has a role to play, but has always failed his father so far, never the rough-and-tumble, thick-skinned son Bram desires. Ironically, Zach's skiing and outdoor survival skills (thanks to his mother) far surpass Bram's, an imbalance that will matter in the coming days.

Over the long weekend, Warning Signs ratchets up the tension until it seems it can carry no more--and then ramps it up again. Zach is aware of at least three distinct threats: the perils of the natural world, including a very real risk of avalanche; his father's irascible self-interest and capacity for cruelty; and a mysterious creature stalking the dark and treacherously cold high-altitude woods. Bram's gathered group of men and boys presents a dangerous combination of skill and ignorance, hubris and machismo; Zach possesses good training and instincts, but as their youngest member, will be overlooked and ignored in an irony of Greek-tragedy proportions. Through it all, Zach (in close third-person perspective) continues to mull the absence of the dearly beloved Grace, and approach the horrifying truth about her loss.

With its triple-punch of terrors natural, human, and unknown, Sierra's sophomore novel is truly and profoundly frightening. Beyond the fine art of the horror or thriller novel, Warning Signs also considers domestic abuse and control, class and ambition, and how we try to care for those we love. Discomfiting, chilling, and unforgettable. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: A young boy faces a variety of dangers when he enters deep snow and high mountains with his father in this enthralling novel of horror, suspense, and psychological intrigue.