On Saturday evening at the 14th annual Children's Institute, taking place in Schaumburg, Ill., children's booksellers and publishing professionals from across the country gathered to meet, mingle and fight for costume supremacy.

At the opening reception, author T.C. Kemper (The Ginghams, Holt) won first place in the costume contest for her excellent interpretation of I Spy by Jean Marzollo and illustrated by Walter Wick.

Ballast Book Company, Bremerton, Wash., booksellers Miracle Lucketti (l.) and Marisa Spence won second prize for their Frog and Toad Together duo costume.

Additional fabulous children's book costumes included (above) a four-part ensemble for Scott Campbell's Cabin Head and Tree Head by Books & Company, Oconomowoc, Wis., booksellers (from l.) Kerry Hanson, Katrina Bright Yerges, Chloe Purton, and Lisa Baudoin; and (below) Northshire Books, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., bookseller Tara Ludwin as Escargot by Dashka Slater, illustrated by Sydney Hanson, with Aubrey A. Cece of Watchung Booksellers, Montclair, N.J., as The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt by Riel Nason, illustrated by Byron Eggenschwiler.

At Children's Bookselling 101: A Seminar, experienced booksellers (l.-r.) Jamie Thomas of Women & Children First, Chicago, Ill., Kristina Rivero from Books Are Magic, Brooklyn, N.Y., Emma Kawecki of bbgb tales for kids, Richmond, Va., and Sunny Bowles from Little Shop of Stories, Decatur, Ga., spoke to a room of almost entirely first-time Children's Institute attendees about the basics of children's bookselling and the ins and outs of running a store. Helpful suggestions included starting bookseller backlist book clubs, reading picture books to your staff, and making sure that, when interacting with young readers, booksellers ask them both what they enjoyed reading and what they didn't love.

At yesterday's author reception: (from l.) Adrianna Cuevas (Mischief and Monsters, FSG, Sept.), Julian Randall (Shook, Holt, Aug.), bookseller Kristina Rivero, Books Are Magic, Brooklyn, N.Y., and Kat Cho (House of Forgotten Souls, Bloomsbury YA, Jan. 2027).

Sourcebooks authors (l.) Daniel Nayeri (This Is a Door, Oct.) and (r.) Raj Haldar (What Rhymes with Pterodactyl, Oct.) show off their upcoming books with bookseller Michael Leali from Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore in Berkeley, Calif.

And special thanks to the people who make it all happen: ABA staffers at Ci

The American Booksellers Association kicked off its 14th Children's Institute in Schaumburg, Ill., on Saturday with a keynote that, to use highly professional language, was universally agreed to be an absolute banger. Leah Johnson, author of You Should See Me in a Crown and founder of Loudmouth Books, Indianapolis, Ind., moderated a freewheeling, high-energy panel featuring YA authors Elizabeth Acevedo (Anger Is Only a Shadow, Quill Tree Books, September 15), Jasmine Guillory (It's Only Dancing, Scholastic, October 6), and Nicola Yoon (Always One More Time, Delacorte, February 2, 2027). The keynote garnered laughs, snaps, applause, and a standing ovation.

(from l.) Elizabeth Acevedo, Jasmine Guillory, moderator Leah Johnson, Nicola Yoon.

During ABA CEO Allison Hill's introduction, Johnson shimmied, danced, and strutted her way onto the stage. "It is a great honor for me to be up here doing this conversation," Johnson began. She continued: "Some of you have paid attention to the news that Taylor Swift may or may not be getting married at Madison Square Garden next week.... I'm going to tell you this: This is my Madison Square Garden. These three? This is my Taylor Swift."

"Everything I have done," Johnson said, "was made possible because writers like these three made it possible. They opened those doors, they wrote the stories, and they taught me that it was possible to tell stories for a living." When the three authors took the stage, Johnson asked a series of incisive, fascinating, and sometimes hilarious questions.

In the "tradition of naming the people who got us here," Johnson asked, "I would love to hear who the folks are who made space for your work." Yoon answered, "Toni Morrison, obviously. The Bluest Eye was the first time I realized you could put a Black girl in a book and have it be about her." And, of course, she added, Jacqueline Woodson. "Definitely Jackie Woodson," Guillory seconded. "Renee Watson, I love her books so much. And the queen! Meg Cabot!" Acevedo praised Woodson "for the books and for the literary citizen that she is. She opened the door and she holds it open. Julia Alvarez is someone I love. And Lucille Clifton, who is the godmother of every poem I've ever written. She's known for her brevity, so I should stop talking."

Johnson said she loves that each author's books are about defining yourself on your own terms. "Was that a conscious choice? Was it an underlying theme you wanted to pull out?" For Guillory, the plot is a conscious choice. "The underlying themes," though, "are never a conscious choice. It starts with the character." Acevedo, before responding, asked the other two authors if they outline. (Yes.) "Y'all seem organized," Acevedo said, "You outline. I can tell. You might be able to tell that I do not. The idea of knowing the theme in advance? Girl, I don't even know the character's names." This, Yoon said, "is why I hate first drafting. Because you don't know anything. The reason I have a career is because I can revise really well, not because I can draft." Yoon said she began Always One More Time with a question in mind: How do you love again after heartbreak? "The answer is that you've just gotta do it again and again and again."

The protagonists in these books, Johnson said, feel grounded in "the specificity of who they are. What are you writing toward? What are you trying to reach?" Acevedo spoke first: "I think that one thing that really moves me in bell hooks's writing is that she feels every single person should have a love ethic. How do I show up in love for you? I'm trying to think of the way to turn toward myself in a loving manner. How do you love the people around you enough to let them grow, even if that means they grow away from you?"

Johnson paused: "You ate that for real. Somebody jot that down."

Next, Johnson turned to individual questions. She asked Yoon, "How has your relationship to your own work changed since you've been curating other books?" (Yoon runs an imprint, Joy Revolution, with her author husband, David Yoon, at Penguin Random House.) Yoon replied, "We publish love stories by and about people of color, and they're fabulous books and I love every single author we've published. This imprint has been the best thing about my career. But I'm also really good at compartmentalizing, so when I read a book it's very different from writing a book."

Johnson asked Guillory why she wrote It's Only Dancing as a "sort of Dirty Dancing" homage. "I used to dance," Guillory said. "I love every dance movie. I wanted to write something with that energy but in book form because I mostly read when I was a kid. I also realized that I wanted the main character to be a grumpy irritable teenager and the love interest to be a cheerful cinnamon roll who likes to dance."

Johnson asked Acevedo about the role grief plays in Anger Is Only a Shadow. "I think it speaks to you as a reader," Acevedo replied, "that you're able to catch how much grief is in this book. I think when no one dies in a book, we don't take into account how someone is fundamentally changed. But in this book, we're watching characters fight against their vision of life changing and how they accept grief. But the book is funny! Also it's really funny!"

Finally, Johnson asked Yoon, Guillory, and Acevedo why they are writing YA now. For Guillory, "it feels like most important thing I can do right now is write books about teenagers of color, Black teenagers specifically. Sometimes I feel very impotent, and the thing I can do is write books for these kids that let them know they're worthy and valued and important." Acevedo wished she "was that calculated. Honestly, I just write what feels urgent. I look at my catalog of ideas and then start writing the next thing that I'm being driven to write. I think I'll probably always toggle between adult and young adult and poetry and prose and an Instagram comment." For Yoon, "I write the question that I have. I don't know the answer before I write the book but the questions are always urgent for me." --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness

The inaugural Black Bookstore Day will be held on Saturday, August 29, and will be observed annually on the last Saturday in August. 

Founded last year by Latasha Eley Kelly, owner of Left on Read in Wichita, Kan., and member of the Black Bookstore Coalition, Black Bookstore Day aims to "recognize the history, cultural significance, and continued impact of Black-owned bookstores while honoring those whose work has made space for Black literature, ideas, culture, and community across generations."

Participation may include "hosting an event, sharing a bookstore's history, featuring Black literature, offering special programming, and encouraging community members to support Black-owned bookstores."

Booksellers can find more information here, and share their plans with the organizers here.

With a matching grant, Macmillan is giving $100 for each new donor to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc) campaign to increase the number of its regular monthly donors. The Binc campaign began earlier this month as part of the organization's 30th anniversary celebration and its efforts to ensure the continued support of bookstore and comic shop employees and owners for the next 30 years.

The Macmillan matching grant will be applied to the first 50 donors, and means, for example, that a monthly contribution of $10 will bring in $220 annually to Binc ($120 plus the $100 Macmillan donation), and a contribution of $20 a month will bring in $340 annually ($240 plus the $100 Macmillan donation).

For more information and to donate, click here.

Presented by Shelf Awareness, Phictly's inaugural Global Digital Book Festival takes place Saturday, July 25, featuring 80-plus authors across 11 genres, live readings, panels, and author signings. Headliners include Nisha J. Tuli and Cathy Yardley. Browsing is free via the Phictly app; VIP tickets include the opportunity to have a live private video call with authors (subject to authors' availability), signed bookplates, and a digital swag bag. The festival brings an immersive book fair experience to readers anywhere in the world. Don't miss this first-of-its-kind celebration of authors and the readers who love them. Purchase VIP tickets at phictly.com/bookfest. If you are interested in having your author appear at the Festival, please contact Phictly at events@phictly.com.

Brazos Bookstore, Houston, Tex., presented Lauren Hough (r.), author of Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America (Pantheon), in conversation with Keri Blakinger, author of Corrections in Ink (Griffin). They were joined by Hough's travel companion, Woody Guthrie (front). Oliver the Good Boy, part-time shopdog, photobombed the group picture.

Word Up Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria celebrated its 15th anniversary with a Quinceañera in New York City's Washington Heights earlier this month. The free community bash featured book giveaways, poetry, live music, dance, dinner, cake, kids' activities, and 15 honorees, which included collective members past and present. (Photo: Sam Popp)

Downtown Books in Dothan, Ala., which is in the process of moving from 150 North Foster St. to 179 North Foster St., enlisted the help of volunteers Monday evening to move thousands of books from the old location to the new.  

Per the Wiregrass Daily News, dozens of volunteers took part in the event, which was dubbed the "Great Downtown Book Move." The bookstore provided pizza and bottled water for everyone who helped, and volunteers were also entered into a prize raffle.  

The new space is larger and will allow Downtown Books to host bigger events, store owner Stacey Fountain told WDHN.

The bookstore shared a video recap of the move, saying: "What happens when an entire community shows up to support a local business? Absolute magic.... From the very first book packed to the final cheer echoing down the street, the energy at The Great Downtown Bookstore Book Move was nothing short of incredible."

Today:
Good Morning America: Emily Giffin, author of Love You More: A Novel (Ballantine, $32, 9780593600320).

Today: Isaac Fitzgerald, author of American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed (Knopf, $32, 9780593537794).

Also on Today: Yasmine Cheyenne, author of The Comeback Era: From Limiting Beliefs to Living Without Limits (HarperOne, $26.99, 9780063456198).

NPR's the World: Sally Hayden, author of This Is Also a Love Story: A Reporter's Search for Goodness in a Cruel World (Scribner, $30, 9781668034620).

The View repeat: J.D. Vance, author of Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith (Harper, $35, 9780063575011). 

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Stephen and David St. Russell, authors of Good Character: Design with Intention to Reveal Your Home's Personality (DK, $30, 9780593968727).

Winners have been chosen for the 2026 Orwell Prizes in nonfiction and fiction, honoring books that meet George Orwell's ambition "to make political writing into an art."

The Orwell Prize for Political Writing: Escape from Kabul: The Afghan Women Judges Who Fled the Taliban and Those They Left Behind by Karen Bartlett (published in the U.S. by the New Press).

Chair of judges Rohan Silva said: "For this year's prize, we especially looked for books that honour Orwell's commitment to lucid language and intellectual honesty. By both of these standards, Escape from Kabul smashes it out of the park. It's taut and crisp, and shines a light on a story that deserves attention. The plight of Afghanistan's immensely brave female judges in the face of Islamic fundamentalism is a gripping tale--and Karen Bartlett tells it with deep reserves of empathy and compassion. The book is truly Orwellian in the most positive sense, and a richly merited winner."

The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction: Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner (published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Chair of judges Fiammetta Rocco said: "Our shortlist is full of books which explore the world we know and look towards the world we want to see--our winning book needed to encompass both. For a book so slim, Transcription by Ben Lerner does so much. A forensic study of our insatiable appetite for new technology, it explores the unreliable stories we tell ourselves about hunger, love and connection. It is about dying with dignity and growing up in a new world. It's funny, brainy and timely. Lerner deserves to be a household name."

Riikka Pulkkinen (True) challenges readers to form their own impressions with Enchantment, a striking novel about girlhood, perception, and death.

"The sun is setting and they're at the beach. The sky is soft mallow and bronze. It's the last summer of their youth." Pulkkinen, in an atmospheric translation from the Finnish by Tabatha Leggett, emphasizes this cinematic view. The next scene, almost a year later, is a forensic autopsy. Philippa Laakso, age 17, has been found dead in the courtyard of her apartment complex.

Philippa is the center of this novel; all gazes are directed toward her. Observations come in various formats: interview notes by police investigators, flashbacks, and descriptions of videos recorded by Philippa on her treasured Olympus PEN camera, a gift from her mother on her 13th birthday. Chapters take the close-third-person perspective of various characters, rarely including Philippa herself. She adopted several personae, beginning with "little experiments in selfhood; facial expressions, gestures, hair flicks, kisses blown to the lens, the camera, whose naive but fearless eye devoured stories without judgement." Sometimes she co-created her online aliases with her longtime best friend, Saga, dark hair to Philippa's fair, the other side of Philippa's coin: "Two girls. Girl and girl. Me and me."

Philippa is a perfect enigma to those left behind. These include a compassionate, poetic forensic pathologist, who "has always believed that the deceased have a right to carry the truth with them"; an elderly neighbor, a widower, whom Philippa befriended; a woman who appears in Philippa's videos, screaming in rage; the older men she met via dating apps; the boy she dated seriously and recently broke up with; Saga, her friend and double; and Philippa's mother, from whom "the girl had learned the art of being a matryoshka. Beneath one layer was always another layer--happy, funny, strange."

Philippa has given the world many versions. She is a fantasy, a friend, a tormentor, an innocent, a vixen, a hero, a villain. "This girl is rarely considered wise, more rarely still intelligent. She can't possibly be profound because she's laughing in her pictures, pointing her chin downwards, like a child. She can't possibly be reflective, not while she still treats these affects of hers as accessories."

One of Enchantment's central concerns is the question of perspective, of what is possible to know about a person. Pulkkinen's dreamy novel delves into the line between truth and fiction, storytelling and self-creation. Philippa invented herself, and in the aftermath of her life, police investigate the question of her death, as everyone investigates how to view her and how to remember her. She has "become a dream, gossip, stories," and readers are left to parse the enchantment that remains. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: A singular girl stars in this unusual novel of identity and mysterious death.