Shane Mullen is the event coordinator and book whisperer for Left Bank Books in St. Louis. He serves as the treasurer for Midwest Independent Booksellers Association. When he is not slinging books, you might catch him acting, bartending, strolling, or planning the next adventure. He attended the Turin Book Fair thanks to a fellowship from Books Across Borders, a nonprofit organization that aims to connect booksellers to the international world of publishing. Here is his report:

Missouri to Wisconsin to Italy, Turin to Paris to New York City, and back to St. Louis--it feels like a trip that should have taken months, but was actually 17 whirlwind days. Before flying to Italy to the Turin Book Fair to represent independent bookstores across the United States, I was able to start my journey with the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association's Spring Road Trip in southwestern Wisconsin. Briefly, Spring Road Trip was filled with the beauty of a small community supporting the literary arts amidst an uncertain future. What I would soon discover is that the same struggles we face in our community are being faced all over the world.

At Salone Internazionale del Libro, where more than 1,000 publishers exhibited and 230,000 people attended, I was given the opportunity to speak to book professionals about the state of banned books in the U.S. I spoke about how the most recent wave of book banning started small--with groups overpowering school boards, and targeting bookstores and libraries. I explained how many of us are terrified of the effects of book banning on POC and queer communities, and how a lack of access to these titles limits our capacity for empathy for our fellow humans. As a member of the queer community, I feel this especially right now. And I know, from my own experience, when we are able to read about diverse experiences, we are able to see ourselves from others' eyes. I encouraged the publishers in the room to heed the call to publish voices from diverse backgrounds, and I encouraged readers to read those stories.

One of the more memorable panels discussed Boekenweek (Book Week) in the Netherlands. As they celebrate their 90th anniversary, it was impressive to hear about the numbers behind this tradition. Each year, booksellers, publishers, and libraries partner to bring a book written specially for the week to the Dutch people. Planning the "book gift" two years in advance, people who purchase €15 (about $17) worth of books receive the book gift as a way to promote and encourage reading. This drive to promote literacy and to celebrate a variety of Dutch authors was inspiring. They also keep the party going all year long with a range of programs and partnerships that work with media and celebrities to make reading a true celebration.

At Turin (from l.): Terrie Akers, Other Press; Daniel O'Brien, Books Across Borders; Shane Mullen; Lorenzo Dall'Omo, European and International Booksellers Federation

But the event was far from all panels! While the line of readers was too long for me to make it in to hear Jhumpa Lahiri, I was able to glimpse the very full space, and see one of my favorite authors through glass. After enjoying an afternoon spritz at Eataly with Terrie Akers from Other Press and Daniel O'Brien from Books Across Borders, we wandered booths finding new authors and some of my favorite U.S. authors in translation. I am so thankful for the time I got to sit down with Sandro and Eva Ferri from Edizioni E/O, discussing some of my favorite titles from Europa Editions (even though they wouldn't divulge who Elena Ferrante truly is!), and hearing about how they anticipate what titles will succeed in international markets.

Daniel took Terrie and me on a magical bike/scooter ride into the heart of the city and walked with us up and down the river banks. While exploring the city, we were also able to stop at a few of the local bookstores. The thing that really impressed me was how easy it was to differentiate publishing brands on the shelves of Libreria Internazionale Luxemburg. It felt that readers would really be able to find a distinct publisher that they could spend a lifetime reading. Each bookstore offered a wide variety of titles from some of my favorite authors that I could not resist sending pictures to.

Paolo Ambrosini, the president of ALI (Associazione Librai Italiani or the Italian Booksellers Association), was so gracious to host and speak kindly as an ambassador, and invited us to a wonderful author talk with Marina Pierri. Lorenzo Dall'Omo, policy assistant for the European and International Booksellers Federation (EIBF), was wonderful and helped me contextualize what I was experiencing (he was the moderator and translator for the panel on Book Bans) and also led us to the best Piedmontese food that Torino had to offer.

To name a favorite experience in Turin would be difficult, but I feel that I learned so much culturally and professionally. During the aforementioned author talk by Marina Pierri, reports of a tornado warning in St. Louis started to roll in on my phone. Hearing from co-workers that they barely had time to take shelter, my mind was, admittedly, and unexpectedly, in two places. Over the course of the rest of my evening, I walked the streets of Turin to chat with people from all aspects of publishing while seeing photos of the destruction that had occurred in St. Louis. Left Bank Books was able to escape damage narrowly while my co-workers encountered smashed cars and downed trees. Our surrounding neighborhood experienced the terrifying tornado destroying houses and a loss of five lives. To truly be physically in Turin with my heart and fears in St. Louis was something I did not expect to experience quite like this. But it also reminded me that it is the most human experiences--of love, loss, difficulty, and resilience--that unite us across the borders we often imagine.

Chapter House Books will open later this month in Fayetteville, N.C., the Fayetteville Observer reported. 

The new and used bookstore will reside at 225 Franklin St. and carry general-interest titles for all ages. Alongside books, there will be greeting cards, pencils, pens, and notebooks, and co-owners Annie Clymer and her husband, Andrew Ridgeway, plan to host book clubs, author readings, and other events.

Clymer--whose previous experience includes managing Odyssey Bookstore in Ithaca, N.Y.--told the Observer that Chapter House is a store "for folks who like, really, love to read, and it doesn't matter what you love to read, but people who appreciate a physical book. We're hoping that a little kid can come in and find something they're excited about, and also maybe your grandpa can come in and find something that he's excited about."

Ridgeway and Clymer, who met at a bookstore, moved to Fayetteville last July, after Ridgeway accepted a teaching position at Methodist University. Clymer was struck by the amount of enthusiastic readers in Fayetteville, and she noted that her plans for Chapter House have met with an encouraging response.

"Everybody that I've talked to, specifically about the bookstore, has been very supportive and very excited to have more places to come and find new things to read," she said. "We just want to add to the literary community."

The Little Read Book in Wauwatosa, Wis., will close next month after 40 years in business, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Co-owners Linda and Fred Burg plan to retire and have set a closing date of July 18 for the new and used bookstore. A final sale will begin on June 15 and continue until July 18.

Linda Burg told the Journal Sentinel that "neither of us are sick, neither of us are tired of selling books," but they are looking forward to having fewer responsibilities and getting to spend time with their grandchildren.

Burg founded the bookshop in July 1985 and in 1989 moved the bookstore into its current home at 7603 W. State St. Fred Burg started helping out at the bookstore after retiring from a previous career in social work. 

A few years ago the Burgs sold the building in which the Little Read Book resides, and it is unclear what will replace the bookstore. Linda Burg called it an "incredible sadness" that they have not found someone who "wants to put a bookstore in."

Reflecting on the generations of customers that supported the store, Burg said: "The most I can wish for any independent bookstore is to have a customer base as loyal as ours has been."

Award-winning poet Alice Notley, "who exulted in disobeying literary traditions in creating dreamlike worlds that drew from myth, motherhood and the voices of the dead," died May 19 in Paris, the New York Times reported. She was 79. Notley published more than 40 books over five decades. Her autobiographical collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1999 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry in 1998. She received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation for lifetime achievement in 2015.

Notley "took traditional forms of poetry like villanelles and sonnets and laced them with experimental language that fluctuated between vernacular speech and dense lyricism," the Times wrote, adding that she "also created pictorial poetry, or calligrams, in which she contorted words into fantastical shapes." In For the Ride (2020) a calligram took the form of a winged coyote.

"The signature of her work is a restless reinvention and a distrust of groupthink that remains true to her forebear's directive: to not give a damn," David S. Wallace observed in the New Yorker in 2020.

"It's necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against... everything," Notley wrote in a 2010 essay.

She shirked the labels critics gave her: feminist, expatriate, avant-garde provocateur, the Times noted. "Each of these labels sheds a little light on Notley's work, but it's the fact of their sheer number that's most illuminating," poet Joel Brouwer wrote of her collection In the Pines (2007) in the New York Times Book Review. "This is a poet who persistently exceeds, or eludes, the sum of her associations."

Poet Ron Padgett praised Notley for her "vastness of mind.... Alice's main influence was herself and her interior life, and by interior life, I mean both her conscious waking thinking and her dream life, especially."

In the 1980s, several of Notley's loved ones died, including her husband, poet Ted Berrigan, her stepdaughter, and her brother. Notley said their voices had continued to speak to her, so she translated them into poetry. From the poem "At Night the States," written two years after her husband's death:

At night the states
I forget them or I wish I was there
         in that one under the
Stars. It smells like June in this night
         so sweet like air.
I may have decided that the
         States are not that tired
Or I have thought so. I have
         thought that.

After spending most of her childhood in California, Notley moved to New York to attend Barnard College in 1963, then pursued an MFA in fiction and poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she met Ted Berrigan. In early-1970s Chicago, she edited Chicago, an important mimeographed magazine, and helped build the avant-garde scene there. After marrying Berrigan in 1972, they settled in New York.

In the 1990s, she moved to Paris with the poet Douglas Oliver and they founded two literary magazines there, Gare du Nord and Scarlet. Notley remained in Paris until her death and continued her prolific output. 

Her 2001 book, Disobedience, won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Times observed, adding that in 2023, Fonograf Editions reissued her first four collections and released The Speak Angel Series, six genre-defying books combined to form a 641-page epic.

This past week, Shelf Awareness sent our monthly pre-order e-blast to nearly 950,000 of the country's best book readers. The e-blast went to 949,343 customers of 266 participating independent bookstores.

The mailing features 11 upcoming titles selected by Shelf Awareness editors and a sponsored title. Customers can buy these books via "pre-order" buttons that lead directly to the purchase page for the title on each sending store's website. A key feature is that bookstore partners can easily change title selections to best reflect the tastes of their customers and can customize the mailing with links, images and promotional copy of their own.

The pre-order e-blasts are sent the last Wednesday of each month; the next will go out on Wednesday, June 25. Stores interested in learning more can visit our program registration page or contact our partner program team via e-mail.

For a sample of the May pre-order e-blast, see this one from Dog Ear Books, Russellville, Ark.

The titles highlighted in the pre-order e-blast were:

The Woman in Suite 11 by Ruth Ware (Gallery/Scout)
Finding Grace by Loretta Rothschild (St. Martin's Press)
Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Random House)
Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyen (Catapult)
The Peculiar Gift of July by Ashley Ream (Dutton)
Mean Moms by Emma Rosenblum (Flatiron)
Wayward Girls by Susan Wiggs (Morrow)
Italopunk: 145 Recipes to Shock Your Nonna by Vanja van der Leeden (Tra)
Terror at the Gates by Scarlett St. Clair (Bloom Books)
Karen's Ghost: A Graphic Novel (Baby-Sitters Little Sister #11) by D.K. Yingst and Ann M. Martin (Graphix)
Daybreak, Volume One by Moosopp (Webtoon Unscrolled)

The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King (‎Morrow) is the June pick for Reese's Book Club, which described the novel this way: "Part fantasy and part cross-generational family saga, The Phoenix Pencil Company follows Monica as she unearths the story of her grandmother’s war-ridden past. This magical debut is a rich narrative that showcases the impact of inheritance and the quiet resilience of women across time."

Reese wrote: "A reclusive coder uncovers a legacy of magic, espionage, and family secrets. You won't want to miss this one!"

Baker & Taylor Publisher Services is handling sales and distribution for three new publishing partners:

CamCat Books, Charlotte, N.C., which specializes in adult genre fiction as well as YA fiction. Its current list includes mystery, thriller and suspense, science fiction/fantasy, romance, horror, and adventure. CamCat has more than 130 titles in print with five new titles releasing later this year. Its books have already won and been nominated for such awards as the Audie Award, Edgar Award, and Bram Stoker Award. (Effective July 1, U.S. and Canada.)

Taffy Tales Press, which focuses on laugh-out-loud books in novelty formats for kids. They include heartwarming tales, reimagined classic fairy tales, goodnight giggles bedtime stories, and knee-slappers with fun flaps; every book is lively and colorful yet informative and educational. Taffy Tales has approximately 40 backlist titles with 15 new titles coming this fall. (Effective immediately, U.S.)

Chicken Scratch Books, a Montana publisher of middle grade fiction that blends elements of traditional literature with fresh writing styles and a fast pace. Its goal is to produce clean, engaging stories that highlight positive character traits and values as well as to show kids how to navigate diverse challenges, choices, and consequences. Its current list is 24 titles with plans for six new titles per year. (Effective July 1, U.S. and Canada.)

Caroline Payne is being promoted to senior marketing manager at Dutton.

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Breda Curran is joining Simon & Schuster's Distribution Client Sales Team as national account manager for Readerlink and Walmart. She was previously senior sales manager, mass channel and specialty retail at Union Square & Co. Publishing/Sterling.

Healing Relational Trauma: Move Beyond Painful Childhood Experiences to Deepen Self-Understanding and Build Authentic Relationships by Melissa Fulgieri (New Harbinger).

Today:
All Things Considered: Damon Young, editor of That's How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor (Pantheon, $28, 9780593317112).

Tomorrow:
Kelly Clarkson Show: Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of Atmosphere: A Love Story (Ballantine, $30, 9780593158715).

The View: Bill Clinton and James Patterson, authors of The First Gentleman: A Thriller (Little, Brown, $32, 9780316565103).

James Cameron's production company Lightstorm Entertainment has acquired the rights to The Devils, published last month, and the filmmaker is co-writing an adaptation with Joe Abercrombie, the book's author and a screenwriter, Indiewire reported.

"How do I describe The Devils? A sharply witty horror adventure? An epic battle between good and evil except most of the time you can't tell which is which? A twisted, stylish, alt-universe middle-ages romp, where your best hope of survival is the monsters themselves?" Cameron said. "This is Joe Abercrombie in absolute peak form, opening up a whole new world and an ensemble of delicious new characters. The twists and turns come at a rollercoaster pace, and with Joe's signature acerbic wit and style. The Devils showcases Joe's jaundiced view of human nature, in all its dark, selfish glory, as told through some decidedly un-human characters. But of course, Joe always teases with the flickers of redemption that make it all worthwhile--and ultimately quite heart-wrenching."

Cameron plans to begin work on the project after he completes Avatar: Fire and Ash, which opens in theaters this December and is the third of five planned Avatar films. 

Abercrombie commented: "I can't think of anyone better to bring this weird and wonderful monster of a book to the screen. As always with these things, I can't say much more at this point. Exciting news, it hardly needs to be said. I'm gonna be writing with, erm, James Cameron. Clearly there are few bigger beasts in the industry. But it remains an industry with no guarantees. My advice, as always with adaptations, is don't hold your breath."

The Women's Prize Trust has awarded the Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award, a special literary honor marking the 30th anniversary of the Women's Prize for Fiction and funded by Bukhman Philanthropies, to Bernardine Evaristo to recognize her "body of work, her transformative impact on literature and her unwavering dedication to uplifting under-represented voices across the cultural landscape."

Evaristo will receive £100,000 (about $135,350) and a special sculpture named "Thoughtful" by Caroline Russell, to be presented on June 12 at the Women's Prize Trust's summer party in London, along with the winners of the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction and the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.

Organizers cited Evaristo's "beautiful, ambitious and inventive body of work (which includes plays, poetry, essays, monologues and memoir as well as award-winning fiction), her dazzling skill and imagination, and her courage to take risks and offer readers a pathway into diverse and multifarious worlds over a 40-year career."

She has written seven novels, including Girl, Woman, Other, which won the Booker Prize in 2019, and Mr Loverman. She has also written the memoir Manifesto: On Never Giving Up and Look Again: Feminism.

Evaristo was also cited for being an "advocate for inclusivity in the arts... In addition to her literary and professional success, she has spearheaded innumerable initiatives to address inequities in the creative industries, inspiring future generations of writers and creatives to challenge the status quo and celebrate diversity."

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Abi Daré won the inaugural £10,000 (about $13,525) Climate Fiction Prize, which celebrates the most inspiring novels tackling the climate crisis, for And So I Roar (published in the U.S. by Dutton). The novel follows 14-year-old Adunni from her life in Lagos, Nigeria, where she is excited finally to enroll in school, to her home village where she is summoned to face charges for events that are in fact caused by climate change.

Chair of judges Madeleine Bunting praised the novel as "a book of real energy and passion which both horrifies and entertains with a cast of compelling characters, a story of how the climate crisis can provoke social crisis where often women and children are the victims. Despite the tragedy, Abi Daré holds faith in the strength of individuals and relationships and her hopefulness leaves us inspired."

Daré commented: "This prize matters because fiction lets us bear witness and makes the abstract real. It gets under your skin and moves the heart in a way data alone cannot."

photo: Elan Abitbol

Marcos Gonsalez is an author, essayist, scholar, and assistant professor of English at Adelphi University. His research on queer and trans Latinx aesthetics and cultural production has been supported by the Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Literary Hub, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Inside Higher Education, Ploughshares, Catapult, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New Inquiry, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pedro's Theory: Reimagining the Promised Land (2021) and In Theory, Darling: Searching for José Esteban Muñoz and the Queer Imagination (Beacon Press, May 20, 2025), which is a love letter to queer color theory and how it has helped him discover himself, reclaim identities, celebrate queer joy, and work toward liberation.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

How theory can change your life and the world around you. Also, how theory can be pleasurable.

On your nightstand now:

Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney. I love Austen's work, so Romney's deep dive into which writers informed Austen is such a cool idea for a book. I also love the work of Frances Burney, who is one of the writers Austen read, so naturally I need to read this book.

Favorite book when you were a child:

All the Animorphs books. I read and re-read these books voraciously. These books stemmed my love of the science fiction genre. I don't read as much science fiction these days as I would like, but I sure do watch plenty of science fiction films/shows and play science-fiction video games.

Your top five authors:

Hilton Als, Kate Zambreno, Wayne Koestenbaum, Saidiya Hartman, Jamaica Kincaid. All of these authors are stylists of the written word, which is why I love reading them. To see what writers can think up, dream up, through words. The sentences of each of these writers pushes me to rethink how the world can be.

Book you've faked reading:

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. The goal is to someday read it, along with Middlemarch by George Eliot--two very lengthy tomes. I feel as a literature professor, these are books I have to read in order to keep my cred. Some summer on a beach in the Caribbean I'll read them.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Mansfield Park. Not often the go-to Austen book for most people but this one charms me. Lady Bertram and her pug are everything to me.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Penguin Book of Demons (edited by Scott G. Bruce). I read this one on the subway--the stares one gets!

Book you hid from your parents:

Hero by Perry Moore. I borrowed this book from the library. Probably the first book I ever read that featured gay characters and storylines. Very formative for me as a little queer kid. I also remember crying while reading it.

Book that changed your life:

These two equally: The Women by Hilton Als and My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid. The ways in which these two writers approached the subjects of their books--admiringly, critically, speculatively, intimately--forever shaped my own writing and intellectual practice. These books and these authors opened up worlds for me I had not yet known.

Five books you'll never part with:

I dream of being a dilettante, and my guiding light in that endeavor is Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent. I have an entire book in me on Nugent's work--someday I hope I can write it. Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography by Edgar Garcia is an experimental wonder, just formative for anyone who wants to do decolonialized thinking and imagining. A strange one: Mornings in Mexico by D.H. Lawrence. This book of travel writing steered my dissertation in grad school, and I always find myself in awe of Lawrence's crudely exquisite prose and how it thinks of Mexico. Cane by Jean Toomer is another literary wonder for me. Just opened up doors for my own writing and what one can do on the page. A book of poetry I constantly think of and keep returning to is Diaries of a Terrorist by Christopher Soto. Soto is one of my favorite poets.

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

It was revelation the first time I read City of God by Gil Cuadros. The profoundly moving attention he gives to the queer Mexican American body was something I needed when I first encountered him in my early 20s. He gave me possibility when possibility was sorely lacking in my life.

Emmy Award-winning sports producer, journalist, and author Amar Shah (Play the Game series) and Eisner Award-winning cartoonist Rashad Doucet (Art Club) bring their tremendous talents to Wish I Was a Baller, a remarkable graphic memoir about Shah's extraordinary early life as a teen sports journalist.

On May 10, 1995, the Chicago Bulls visit Amar's school and the freshman is determined to get into the gym to see them--"Jordan's here!" Amar is turned away at the door for not having a media pass, so he makes the split-second decision to skip a geometry test and go to the journalism room to acquire one. The kid thinks that, since he's taking the class next year, Ms. Whitt might let him "get some experience." Ms. Whitt isn't there but journalism student Kasey ("a mixture of Cameron Diaz, Tinkerbell, and heaven") is, and she writes him a pass. Amar gets in and has a short and unimpressive encounter with B.J. Armstrong and is "ragged" by coach Phil Jackson for wearing a Knicks jersey. "I was stunned," a sidebar in Amar's voice states. "An hour ago I was sweating a math test and now I had just interviewed the former world champs."

Amar decides to reach out for more opportunities to attend games as press when he starts his journalism class. In his first year, Amar meets Shaquille O'Neal, who not only gives Amar an interview but also becomes a mentor. Unfortunately, it's not all hanging out with NBA superstars. Amar must juggle his new passion with being 15 years old--doing homework, having a crush, attending family events, and facing bullying for his height, his basketball mediocrity, and for being Indian American.

Shah's graphic memoir is an excellent depiction of high school in the '90s and is filled with appreciation for the "golden era of the NBA." Amar's interactions with stars Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, and Grant Hill are exciting even as his daily life remains relatively ordinary. Doucet's illustrations are full of action and '90s flavor. The cartoonist uses diagonal lines and panels to build momentum and has characters and text break those lines to create movement. Details like Amar's extra-large jersey, a classmate's extreme hi-top fade, and landlines set the scene. Extensive backmatter includes an author's note, pictures, and acknowledgements. Amar Shah's story is certain to delight any basketball fan. --Kharissa Kenner, library media specialist, Churchill School and Center

Shelf Talker: Amar Shah and Rashad Doucet capture the exhilaration of professional basketball in the 1990s in this energetic, approachable graphic memoir.

The bestselling Libro.fm audiobooks at independent bookstores during May:

Fiction
1. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (Penguin Random House Audio)
2. My Friends by Fredrik Backman (Simon & Schuster Audio)
3. James by Percival Everett (Penguin Random House Audio)
4. Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)
5. The Devils by Joe Abercrombie (Macmillan Audio)
6. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperAudio)
7. Silver Elite by Dani Francis (Penguin Random House Audio)
8. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Random House Audio)
9. The Wedding People by Alison Espach (Macmillan Audio)
10. Shield of Sparrows by Devney Perry (Tantor Media)

Nonfiction
1. Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green (Penguin Random House Audio)
2. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Tantor Media)
3. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Simon & Schuster Audio)
4. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Macmillan Audio)
5. Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Penguin Random House Audio)
6. Big Dumb Eyes by Nate Bargatze (Hachette Audio)
7. Cultish by Amanda Montell (HarperAudio)
8. We Can Do Hard Things by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle (Penguin Random House Audio)
9. Matriarch by Tina Knowles (Penguin Random House Audio)
10. Oathbreakers by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry (HarperAudio)