"Time Out is more than a retail space; it's a community hub that is a sea of familiar faces. Baby bumps turn into tiny little readers who are reading early chapter books before we know it. I get distracted while reading new titles, making a mental list of which of our customers I have to tell about them.

"What I really love about our customers, is that they know exactly how and where they can buy books online, but they see both the true value in keeping their dollars in the local economy as well as the ongoing benefits of having a thriving independent store in Mt. Eden."

Out West Books has opened in Grand Junction, Colo. Owner Marya Johnston "spent 20 years of her life helping at her mom's bookstore in Utah," and as an avid outdoorswoman and traveler, she "saw a need for a local bookstore, focused on the history of the region" when she moved to Grand Junction, the Free Press reported.

"I limited it to authors either from the West or who write about the West," she said. The bookstore also features travel books and a large children's book section, as well as sideline items like cards, maps and historic photos.

Johnston encourages customers to explore the shelves, or to order from her when they don't see what they are looking for. "A customer came in the other day and wanted a book," she said. "He couldn't remember the title; he brought it up on Amazon, and he could have just pushed order, but instead he had me order it."

Out West Books is located at 533 Main St., Grand Junction, Colo.; 970-986-8086; outwestbooks@gmail.com.

This Saturday, The Owl & Turtle Bookshop Café, Camden, Maine, will celebrate its grand opening under new owners Selena and Ricky Sheaves. They purchased the bookstore this spring from Nancy Borland, who had to put it up for sale earlier this year due to family circumstances.

Author Dave Morrison, who lives in the area, told the Penobscot Bay Pilot that "Ricky and Selena are going to keep all the things that worked, but they also seem to have a ton of ideas. They seem like they're really looking at it with a fresh eye, which is great."

"It was time to slow down and put our tendrils into a small community," Ricky said. "We come from small towns and we'd gotten to the point where our first careers had played out and we just decided to make the move. When we first came to Camden, we didn't really have an idea yet of what we were going to do. We were looking to open a business in the arts, something that might be conducive to the Maker Movement."

Selena added: "It worked out perfectly. It turns out Dave was the first person that Nancy told about wanting to sell her bookshop, and after we met him, we were the first people he told about the opportunity. For us, the passion was there instantly. It's been a lifelong dream of mine to own an independent bookshop. After analyzing the numbers and doing the research, we decided to add a number of things."

Effective July 1, Quercus is moving its North American sales and distribution services to Hachette Book Group, which will also provide office space for Quercus's five employees in the U.S. The move away from Random House Publisher Services is a result of the recent acquisition of Quercus by Hachette U.K.

''We would like to thank Random House Publisher Services for all their hard work and commitment over the last two years helping to launch Quercus in North America so successfully," said Richard Green, Quercus U.S. publishing director. "We now look forward to further developing our publishing plans and growing the business with the help and support of HBG."

Todd McGarity, v-p, distribution sales & services for Hachette, noted that the publisher is "very excited to welcome Quercus to HBG, and look forward to being part of their growing North American business."

Although reading is still a significant part of many children's lives, achievement among older teens has stagnated, according to "Children, Teens, and Reading," a new report from Common Sense Media that gathers many disparate studies on children's reading rates and achievement.

The report found that reading rates drop precipitously from childhood to the tween and teenage years: "One study documents a drop from 48% of 6- to 8-year-olds down to 24% of 15- to 17-year-olds who are daily readers; another shows a drop from 53% of 9-year-olds to 19% of 17-year-olds. According to government studies, since 1984, the percent of 13-year-olds who are weekly readers went down from 70% to 53%, and the percent of 17-year-olds who are weekly readers went from 64% to 40%. The percent of 17-year-olds who never or hardly ever read tripled during this period, from 9% to 27%." A gender gap also exists, with girls reading for pleasure an average of 10 minutes more per day than boys.

Jim Steyer, CEO and founder of Common Sense Media, told NPR's Weekend Edition that the impact of technology on children's lives has been substantial: "First of all, most children now have access to e-readers, or other smart electronic devices like phones and tablets. And they're spending time on that. Numerous reports show the increasing use of new technology platforms by kids. It just strikes me as extremely logical that that's a big factor."

Parents can do a lot to promote reading, Steyer added: "Kids with parents who read, who buy or take books out of the library for their kids, and who then set time aside in their kids' daily schedule for reading, tend to read the most."

On a more positive note, the Sunday Times reported that at the end of last year, "the youth research company Voxburner found that 62% of 16- to 24-year-olds prefer print books to e-books--far ahead of their desire for the material form of movies (48%) and CDs (32%). Their reasons include: 'I like to hold the product' (51%); 'I am not restricted to a particular device' (20%); and 'I can easily share it' (10%)."

Two management team members at U.K. bookstore chain Waterstones have left the company as a result of what managing director James Daunt termed a "company decision because the chain had 'substantially changed' since the duo were first employed," the Bookseller reported. Waterstones' publicity efforts will now be handled in a less centralized form.

Fiona Allen, head of public relations and brand communications; and Jon Howells, public relations and brand communications manager," both joined Waterstones in 2006.

"We have become a much simpler business and also a business that is running itself as efficiently as it possibly can," said Daunt. "Unfortunately that also means a business which is more streamlined. They [Howells and Allen] were both exceptionally good at their jobs but they were employed in an era when Waterstones was different but we have substantially changed."

Sometimes the titles that excite booksellers the most are authors' follow-ups and/or new directions, titles that will draw a larger audience.

David Mitchell's latest novel, The Bone Clocks (Random House, Sept.), has been described as his most Cloud Atlas-like work since that book was published 10 years ago. Jenn Northington at Word Bookstores in Brooklyn and Jersey City loved it. "Quite frankly, I'm having trouble reading anything else afterward," she said. In Northern California, Sheryl Cotleur from Copperfield's--another Mitchell fan--called the 640-page book "epic. It opens in 1984, goes through 2040 and touches on every major cultural issue." The Bone Clocks is about a secret war between a cult of soul-decanters and the small group of vigilantes who try to take them down. Michele Filgate at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn said reading it made her think of "Nick Harkaway, Neil Gaiman and David Mitchell" all rolled into one. "It's a read you shouldn't miss," said Annie Philbrick at Bank Square Books in Mystic, Conn., who added that although some characters from Cloud Atlas appear in the book, not having read the previous book did not stop her from being enthralled by Mitchell's latest. "I couldn't stop thinking of the ending." she said.

Known best for The Crimson Petal and the White and Under the Skin (recent film adaptation with Scarlett Johansson), Michel Faber's new novel, The Book of Strange New Things (Hogarth, Oct.), was 10 years in the making. It's about a missionary who travels to another planet with his Bible--a "book of strange new things" to the natives there--leaving his wife behind on Earth as it is about to face multiple disasters. "It had shades of The Sparrow, which is one of my favorite books," said Cathy Langer from the Tattered Cover in Denver.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf, Sept.) is also set in a dystopian future, where a traveling Shakespeare troupe roams the wasteland. A darling of the independent booksellers for her first three novels published by Unbridled Books, Filgate thinks this might be Mandel's "breakout book."

Even before she won the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead, Marilynne Robinson was at the top of the indie bookseller author pantheon. In Lila (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Oct.), Robinson returns to the fictional town of Gilead for a story about an abandoned girl raised by a drifter who marries a local minister amid much controversy. "Marilynne Robinson's writing is just so unbelievable--how well she crafts sentences," Philbrick said.

Also on Philbrick's radar is Chris Bohjalian's Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (Doubleday, July), told in the voice of a teen who becomes homeless when her parents are killed in a cataclysmic nuclear power plant accident caused by her father's drunkenness.

The title borrows the phrase used to usher out children during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Philbrick said the "emotionally haunting" Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands is "one of Bohjalian's best."

At Politics and Prose in Washington D.C., Mark LaFramboise declared Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Knopf, Aug.) to be his favorite read of the season so far. Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish) lives in Tasmania, a setting that figures into the background of the character in his new book, a surgeon celebrated as a hero for his command of POWs in the savage Japanese Thai-Burma Death Railway labor camp in 1943. "The story itself is riveting enough," said LaFramboise. But, he added, Flanagan's style of framing the story back and forth in time and perspective enriches this book, both brutal and beautiful. "I'm hoping that this is the one that really gets him the audience he deserves," said LaFramboise.

Sarah Waters's new novel is The Paying Guests (Riverhead, Sept.); it's set in post-WWI London, where a young woman and her mother take in lodgers. The daughter is a Sapphic suffragette, explained Langer; "a couple moves in and you know things are going to get ugly, but you don't know where they are going to go." It's been five years since Waters, known for The Little Stranger and Fingersmith, released a new book.

Laila Lalami's previous award-winning novels--Secret Son and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, both published by Algonquin--put her first book with Pantheon, The Moor's Account, at the top of the list of anticipated fall releases for Paul Yamazaki at City Lights in San Francisco.

Lalami, now at the University of California at Riverside, was born in Morocco. The Moor's Account is the imagined memoir of a 16th-century Moroccan slave that paints an illuminating picture of exploration in the New World.

With a more contemporary setting, Tigerman by Nick Harkaway (Knopf, July) is about a British army sergeant exhausted by tours in Afghanistan who takes what he thinks is a ceremonial post on the island of Mancreu. There, the sergeant meets a street kid obsessed with comics and for whom he might actually become a hero as he combats the escalating violence around them. While Angelmaker was Harkaway's spy novel about a son looking up to his father, the tagline claims Tigerman is a superhero book about a father figure looking after his son. "It's a real step forward for his writing and style," said Northington. "Everyone should find a galley of it."

Caitlin Moran--called by author Peggy Orenstein "so fabulous, so funny, so freshly feminist" for her nonfiction How to Be a Woman--ventures into fiction with How to Build a Girl (Harper, Sept.) "Imagine The Bell Jar written by Rizzo from Grease," Filgate read from the galley. "That sells it for me."

Yamazaki's interest in The Silent History (FSG, paperback original, June) was sparked by editor Sean McDonald. The novel began as an iPhone/iPad collective writing experiment by former McSweeney's editor Eli Horowitz with coauthors Matthew Derby and Kevin Moffett. Told through the brief reports from teachers, doctors, parents, profiteers and others, The Silent History is a literary thriller about a mysterious epidemic that renders children unable to comprehend language but gives them new communication skills. --Bridget Kinsella

Our coverage of BEA Buzz Books continues throughout the week; Part 1 is here.

Copperfield's in Petaluma, Calif, had a fabulous time with Fancy Nancy illustrator Robin Preiss Glasser this past Saturday. The store hosted a Father Daughter Tea & Flower Girl Practice Party, which featured dozens of little girls in full dress, a lot of bemused dads in the usual black t-shirts and the irrepressible Ms. Glasser. The event might have been complicated by the presence--outside the store and closing the entire block--of an American Graffiti car show (the movie was filmed in Petaluma), except for three things: 1) Dads like classic cars; 2) Glasser is a huge classic car buff; and 3) She hijacked a car as they were beginning their mile-long cruise through town, and rode off into the sunset with a slightly bewildered driver.

Authors James Patterson and Walter Isaacson are featured speakers at next week's BookExpo America conference program in New York City.

On Wednesday, May 28, James Patterson will be interviewed by Al Roker from NBC's Today Show about his $1 million independent bookstore campaign. Several well-known indie booksellers will join him on stage for the discussion.

Isaacson will be interviewed by Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy., on Friday, May 30. Isaacson's next book is The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (S&S, October).

Jennifer Gonzalez will fill the open role of v-p, adult merchandise sales at Macmillan Publishers that was formerly held by Steve Kleckner. Gonzalez retains her current role as v-p, children's sales, and her new title will be v-p, merchandise and children's sales. Prior to joining Macmillan in 2012, she was director of sales, mass merchants at Random House.

At Macmillan Children's Publishing Group, Jill Freshney has been promoted to the newly-created position of senior executive managing editor, where she will oversee managing editorial and copy editing, both in-house and freelance. Freshney has been with Macmillan for more than six years. She will report directly to Angus Killick, v-p, associate publisher.

The Devil's Workshop by Alex Grecian (Putnam), the latest in the Scotland Yard's Murder Squad series. Grecian, author of the graphic novel series Proof, got help from comic book illustrator friends to create this trailer.

Today on Fresh Air: Edward St. Aubyn, author of Lost for Words: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26, 9780374280291).

---

Tomorrow morning on Morning Joe: Matt Berman, author of JFK Jr., George, & Me: A Memoir (Gallery, $26, 9781451697018).

---

Tomorrow on the Wendy Williams Show: Terry Crews, author of Manhood: How to Be a Better Man--or Just Live with One (Zinc Ink, $25, 9780804178051).

---

Tomorrow on Access Hollywood Live: Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi, author of Baby Bumps: From Party Girl to Proud Mama, and All the Messy Milestones Along the Way (Running Press, $22, 9780762451623).

---

Tomorrow night on the Daily Show: Timothy Geithner, author of Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises (Crown, $35, 9780804138598).

The first full trailer has been released for the seventh and final season of True Blood, based on novel series by Charlaine Harris featuring Sookie Stackhouse. Entertainment Weekly reported that the "new footage shows the townspeople of Bon Temps turning against Sookie Stackhouse as a group of rabid, Hep-V vampires wreak havoc on everyone living and undead."

Disney offered a first look at its live-action version of the fairytale Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Lily James, Cate Blanchett and Richard Madden. Deadline.com reported that the teaser "is all prisms and Disney-fied musical flourishes, capped off with a metaphorical butterfly." The movie is set for release March 13, 2015.

Edward St. Aubyn won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for his novel Lost for Words, a satire of literary awards, the Guardian reported. At the Hay Festival May 24, he will be presented with a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig--to be named after his winning novel--the Everyman's Library edition of P.G. Wodehouse and a selection of champagne.

Calling himself "delighted and grateful," St. Aubyn said, "The only thing I was sure of when I was writing this satire on literary prizes was that it wouldn't win any prizes. I was wrong. I had overlooked the one prize with a sense of humor."

When Novella Carpenter was 36, her father went missing. It turned out to be a false alarm, but the threat of losing him helped Novella realize that, if she was ever to get to know George Carpenter, she might be running out of time, since their relationship had been stuck somewhere between uneasy and estranged for years. Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild charts her journey home.

After a romantic meeting in 1969 San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, her parents embarked on an idealistic European tour before settling on a farm in Idaho in "voluntary poverty." But the marriage ended when Novella and her sister were five and seven, and their mother moved them to Washington State; Novella didn't see much of her father after that. Now, three decades later, she has a small urban farm in Oakland, Calif., which she documented in her memoir Farm City. When she and her boyfriend, Bill, decide to try to get pregnant, she wonders about her own genetic legacy. Breeding ducks, chickens and milk goats has taught her the importance of the stock line. In working to become a parent herself, after the scare of George going missing, she goes in search of her father, hoping to build the relationship they never had.

George is still scraping by near the Idaho farm where Novella was born. He's a regular backwoods curmudgeon, making a meager living by logging and cutting firewood and sharing his cabin with wild animals. She hopes they'll go fly-fishing, re-creating the romance of A River Runs Through It. Maybe they'll forage for wild foods or he'll teach her how to fell a tree perfectly. Instead, he rants about the devils that possess the old family farm and exhibits previously unnoticed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (the legacy of his service in the Korean War). Novella is disturbed, angered all over again at what she sees as his abandonment, and concerned about the genes she'll pass on to a child, if she ever succeeds in getting pregnant.

Gone Feral is reflective, as Novella ponders the paradoxes of her upbringing--for example, the liberal hippie value system (hers and her mother's) that rejects her father the mountain man--and wonders what it is she really wants for her own child. Traveling through the country and her own past teaches her about herself, her origins, and how to build a future that includes father as well as child. --Julia Jenkins

Shelf Talker: Back-to-basics urban farmer Novella Carpenter investigates family in her second contemplative memoir.