DittoDitto, an independent bookstore featuring new and used books, will open this July in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood. Model D reported that owner Maia Asshaq co-founded DittoDitto in 2013 as a small publishing and distribution house, where, with graphic designer Andrea Farhat, she has been making books. She also started the Detroit Art Book Fair, a small press book fair now in its second year. Asshaq previously ran the store at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Model D noted that the opportunity for a storefront "came out of a conversation with Wade Kergan, proprietor of Corktown's Hello Records. It was Kergan's recommendation that pushed Asshaq to pursue the location that shares the same building as Hello." Asshaq commented: "I like that it's a low-key location. If you're shopping for books and records, you want a comfortable setting, somewhere to browse and hang out."

DittoDitto will be located at 1464 Gratiot Ave., Detroit, Mich. 48207; info@dittoditto.org.

Enigma Bookstore, which opened less than a year ago in Astoria, N.Y., plans to close next month and is searching for a new location. On its Facebook page yesterday, Enigma posted: "Due to extensive disagreements with our landlord, we could not come to a resolution. Enigma will have to close and relocate to another place. This may take some time. In the interim, we will offer ordering of discounted books and deliveries until we can find a new spot to set up shop. Please continue to stay with us as we are not closing just finding a new home."

On Twitter, Enigma wrote: "We will remain open until sometime in June. The date will be posted. Until then, buy books."

Effective July 1, Jeff Deutsch is the new director of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, Chicago, Ill. He has been director of stores for the Stanford Bookstore Group since 2012 and earlier led the Cal Student Store at the University of California, Berkeley.

Deutsch succeeds Jack Cella, who retired in October 2013, after serving as general manager of the Co-op for 43 years. Cella oversaw the Co-op's move from its original home at 5757 S. University Ave. to a new, larger space at McGiffert House, 5751 S. Woodlawn. The Co-op also owns 57th Street Books.

"There are very few stores in the world that do what we do," Deutsch said of the Co-op. "The pull of being at a store that sells primarily serious books is really strong." He added that he hopes "the membership will give me ideas and feedback, and be a part of making the store a success."

Harry Davis, chair of the Co-op's board of directors and professor of creative management at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said, "Jeff has a genuine love for books, and I think that will further the mission of the bookstore. He loved this bookstore before he had any idea he would be able to lead it. For him, this is one of the truly great academic bookstores in the country, and he's coming here with a real sense of appreciation of its history, but also with ideas for how it can become a more important part of this community."

Simon & Schuster's Atria Publishing Group and United Talent Agency have founded Keywords Press, an imprint that will publish books by Internet entertainers, the New York Times reported. The focus is on YouTube stars, and already Keywords has signed deals with Shane Dawson, Justine Ezarik (aka iJustine), Connor Franta, Joey Graceffa and Shay Butler, creator of the ShayTards, who together have, the Times said, "about 20 million YouTube subscribers and have posted videos generating two billion views."

Atria president and publisher Judith Curr said that Keywords will publish six to 10 titles a year, ranging from "serious to comedic, fiction to nonfiction, practical advice to personal memoir. Not to be too grand about it, but books are coming to YouTube for the first time. It gives us access to a whole new talent pool."

Most Keywords books will be crowdsourced, and the publishing process should be much faster than for traditional books.

Asked about her book, future author Ezarik said, "I have so many random, behind-the-scenes stories to tell, and I really want it to be inspirational. But I also want to know what my fans want my book to be like." She added that she hopes the book will be successful enough to turn into a movie or TV series.

Chipotle's new "Cultivating Thought" author series, which was unveiled last week, has been criticized for omitting Latinos. Jacket Copy reported that an "influential group of people has taken offense--the Latino literati, who quickly pointed out that the company (whose full name, after all, is Chipotle Mexican Grill) had failed to include a single Mexican, Mexican American or otherwise Latino writer in the 10 authors and storytellers asked to participate."

Writers Lisa Alvarez and Alex Espinoza have created a Facebook page called "Cultivating Invisibility: Chipotle's Missing Mexicans," Jacket Copy noted, adding that a number of Latino writers and readers "are posting pictures of their own cups with stories written on them."

Amazon released its fourth annual list of the most well-read cities in the U.S., which was determined by compiling sales data of all book, magazine and newspaper sales in both print and Kindle format from April 2013 to April 2014, on a per capita basis in cities with more than 100,000 residents. This year's top 20:

Bruce Miller (c.), co-owner of Miller Trade Book Marketing and editor of Curiosity's Cats: Writers on Research (Minnesota Historical Society Press), engaged in what he described as "a lively discussion" with contributors Steve Yates and Bruce White at an event last week hosted by Women & Children First bookstore, Chicago, Ill.

Congratulations to Island Books, owned by Judy Crosby, which has won the Women Owned Business of the Year by the Newport County Chamber of Commerce as part of the 2014 Excellence in Business Awards! Island Book has stores in Middletown and Newport, R.I.

Libraries Now: A Day in the Life, a short documentary by Julie Dressner and Jesse Hicks, explores a day in the life of New York City's public libraries and "reveals just how important the modern library is for millions of people."

Effective June 16, Phil Budnick will become director of field and wholesaler sales for Penguin's adult hardcover division. Budnick has been editorial director of Plume Books.

Budnick began his career as a bookseller at the old Booksellers Cleveland. He then became a field sales rep for Penguin before moving to New York as a national account manager for warehouse clubs. He then took over the Borders account and joined Plume after Borders closed in 2011.

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Michelle Fadlalla has been promoted to v-p, director of education and library marketing, at Simon & Schuster. She has worked for the company for 15 years. In 2005, she was named director of education and library marketing for the children's books division. In 2009, her role expanded to take on those responsibilities for adult books, too.

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Saleem Dhamee has been promoted to senior client liaison manager at the Chicago Distribution Center, a division of the University of Chicago Press. He has been international sales manager at the press for the last seven years.

An exclusive first look: Mary Kubica's debut, The Good Girl (Harlequin Mira), a twisty, suspenseful thriller.

Scanning the lists for BEA, several booksellers noted an uptick in hot books for middle-grade readers, a group that sometimes gets overshadowed by the media-darling young adult category.

At McNally Jackson in New York City, Cristin Stickles named Greenglass House by Kate Milford, illustrated by Jamie Zollars, her favorite middle-grade novel of the year. In it, the adopted son of an innkeeper thinks he is going to have a quiet winter when strange guests with mysterious ties to Greenglass House keep showing up. "The opening reminded me so much of [Ellen Raskin's] The Westing Game, which was a huge staff favorite," Stickles said.

Newbery Honor winner Jennifer Holm's The Fourteenth Goldfish (Random House, Aug.) was at the top of Robert McDonald's middle-grade list at The Book Stall at Chestnut Court in Winnetka, Ill. Eleven-year-old Ellie is taken by surprise when her cranky scientist grandfather discovers a way to make himself younger and suddenly becomes part of her world; he then needs her scientific help to get back to his own age. McDonald said this comical story illuminates as much about ageism as it entertains.

Summer Laurie at Books Inc. in San Francisco will be giving The Glass Sentence (Viking, June), a debut novel by S.E. Grove, to middle-grade readers who really want to dive into a story. "It's pretty weighty [500 pages] for a first one, but I think it's got the chops," Laurie said. The first volume in the Mapmakers trilogy is set on a alternate Earth where the Great Disruption of 1799 has shifted time and geography. When her uncle disappears, 13-year-old Sophia embarks on a journey to find him and recover her parents trapped in another time. Laurie said Phillip Pullman readers will love this combination of magic and science.

Another middle-grade novel on Laurie's radar is Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms by Katherine Rundell (S&S, Aug.), the author of Rooftoppers. The Zimbabwe-born, English-educated Rundell writes in Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms about a girl raised on a Zimbabwe farm--who has never cut her hair or worn shoes--who is sent to an English boarding school. "There's something about her writing that is a little raw and a little different," said Laurie.

Suzanna Hermans at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, N.Y., recommends the second novel by Eric Kahn Gale, The Zoo at the Edge of the World (Balzer + Bray, Aug.)--a "fun, fantastical adventure story." And speaking of zoos, Hermans also likes a "delightful" first book in a new graphic series, The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents Macbeth by Ian Lendler, illustrated by Zack Giallongo (First Second, Sept.). When the zoo closes, the animals take to the stage. "It's hilarious, wonderful and a great introduction to Shakespeare," Hermans said. In the second book, the animals enact Romeo and Juliet.

Hermans also praised Holly Black's The Darkest Part of the Forest (Little, Brown, Jan.) even though she is not a big fan of fairy stories. "If Holly Black writes it, I'll read it," she said. "It's a mesmerizing, modern fairy story."

The first book in a new steampunk trilogy by Alan Gratz, The League of Seven (Starscape, Aug.), began as a list by the author of all the things his 10-year-old character would think are cool in 1870s America--from airships to secret societies and robots. "He's a great writer for engaging reluctant readers," said McDonald at The Book Stall. On the funny side, McDonald anticipates The Return to Planet Tad (HarperCollins, Sept.), the second book by Tim Carvell, head writer on The Daily Show.

In nonfiction, Cece Bell is getting a lot of buzz for El Deafo (Amulet, Sept.), her graphic memoir about losing her hearing and how she coped with the trials of wearing a "Phonic Ear" device--by becoming "El Deafo, Listener for All." For older middle grade and teen readers, Hermans recommended Breaking Free: True Stories of Girls Who Escaped Modern Slavery by Abby Sher (Barron's, June). "I like to see Barron's branching out to older readers," Hermans added. Moving into young adult titles, Hermans said she is happy to see a slight increase in narrative nonfiction like Positive by Paige Rawl (HarperCollins, Aug.), the memoir of a 19-year-old college student who was bullied in high school for being born with HIV.

When it comes to YA fiction, once again Algonquin is getting high marks for all of its new titles from its relatively new Young Readers imprint. McDonald particularly loved Jackaby by William Ritter (Sept.), a debut that features a spirited female Watson-like narrator who works with a gifted Holmes-like investigator of the supernatural. "It's hard to believe it wasn't written in the 1870s," said McDonald; he pointed out that Jackaby also has some Harry Potter-esque qualities.

Even before HarperCollins acquired Harlequin, booksellers noticed that books in its teen line were certainly not the tame Harlequin romances of yore. "They are doing a really good job of finding good writers," said McDonald, especially in realistic YA fiction, a la John Green. In Let's Get Lost by Adi Alsaid (July) four teens encounter the same girl, on a road trip to Alaska; she helps change their lives. Another Harlequin Teen stand-out for Laurie at Books Inc. is Lies We Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley (Sept.). Set in Virginia in 1959, it's told in the alternating points of view of a white girl whose newspaperman father is vehemently opposed to school integration and a black girl who is facing prejudice head-on. "When I first read the premise I thought, you are going to throw sexuality in with race relations? But strangely, it works," Laurie said. "And the two voices are just so fresh."

Several booksellers named I'll Give You the Sun (Dial, Sept.) by Jandy Nelson as a hot buzz book. It's been a while since Nelson's debut book, The Sky Is Everywhere, and this one is told from the alternating points of view of twins--a boy who knows he is gay and loves to paint and his daredevil sister, who is drawn to sculpture--and how secrets and betrayal come between them. "I think it's an award winner," said Kathleen Caldwell from a Great Good Place for Books in Oakland.

Caldwell and Stickles are both fans of Isla and the Happily Ever After (Dutton, Aug.) by former bookseller and librarian Stephanie Perkins, a romantic novel set in New York and Paris. "It's been such a long wait for this one," said Stickles, "And I haven't minded at all because Stephanie is so amazing." Stickles also liked Meg Wolitzer's venture in YA, Belzhar (Penguin, Sept.), which she called "stunning."

Many are anxious to see if Chris Weitz (known for directing films About a Boy and The Golden Compass) will successfully make the transition to author with his debut YA novel, The Young World (Little, Brown, July), a dystopian tale in which a mysterious illness has wiped out the adults, and the young rule.

Little Pickle Press has launched a new YA imprint called Relish Media, which will publish its first novel next year. Breath to Breath, by graphic novelist Craig Lew, is based on the inspirational true story of William Lewis, a sexually and emotionally abused San Francisco youth who became a healer.

And Candlewick has rounded up some of the hottest YA writers around (including Chris Barton, Ellen Hopkins and A.S. King) for a collection of interconnected pieces: One Death, Nine Stories (Aug.), edited by Marc Aronson and Charles R. Smith. At the other end of the spectrum, for the youngest, Candlewick is publishing Quest, Aaron Becker's second wordless picture book, proving that sometimes no words can create the loudest buzz. --Bridget Kinsella

This is the final installment of our #BEA14 buzz books; check out Part 1: Debut Fiction, Part 2: Fiction Follow-ups and Part 3: Nonfiction & Indie Press Gems.

Tomorrow on NPR's Morning Edition: Sue Conley and Peggy Smith, authors of Cowgirl Creamery Cooks (Chronicle Books, $35, 9781452111636).

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Tomorrow on Ellen: Diane Keaton, author of Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty (Random House, $26, 9780812994261).

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Tomorrow on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews: Matt Berman, author of JFK Jr., George, & Me: A Memoir (Gallery, $26, 9781451697018).

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Tomorrow on the Talk: Arianna Huffington, author of Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (Harmony, $26, 9780804140843).

Quvenzhané Wallis (Annie remake, to be released December 19), will star in an adaptation of Holly Goldberg Sloan's novel Counting by 7s, Indiewire reported. The project, which is currently in development, was set up by the Mazur/Kaplan Company, co-owned by Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books, with stores in south Florida, Westhampton Beach, N.Y., and the Cayman Islands.

"If you, at the very least, have a passing interest in the Beat Generation, then you will definitely get a kick out of this oddball short film from 1959 called Pull My Daisy," Indiewire observed in showcasing the project shot by legendary photographer Robert Frank, directed by Alfred Leslie and adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation.

Kerouac provides improvised narration to accompany performances by, among others, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, artists Larry Rivers and Alice Neel, musician David Amram, actors Richard Bellamy and Delphine Seyrig and dancer Sally Gross.

In 1996, the Library of Congress selected Pull My Daisy for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 this weekend from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's website.

Saturday, May 24
7 p.m. Claude A. Piantadosi, author of Mankind Beyond Earth: The History, Science, and Future of Human Space Exploration (Columbia University Press, $35, 9780231162425). (Re-airs Sunday at 1:15 p.m. and Monday at 1:15 a.m.)

7:15 p.m. Lynne Cheney, author of James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (Viking, $36, 9780670025190). (Re-airs Sunday at 11 a.m. and Monday at 8:30 p.m.)

8:15 p.m. Glenn Greenwald, author of No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (Metropolitan Books, $27, 9781627790734).

9:30 p.m. Margaret Humphreys, author of Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War (Johns Hopkins University Press, $34.95, 9781421409993). (Re-airs Sunday at 1 p.m. and Monday at 1 a.m.)

10 p.m. Jo Becker, author of Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality (Penguin Press, $29.95, 9781594204449). (Re-airs Sunday at 9 p.m. and Monday at 12 a.m. and 3 a.m.)

11 p.m. Matthew Kroenig, author of A Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat (Palgrave Macmillan, $28, 9781137279538). (Re-airs Sunday at 3:15 p.m.)


Sunday, May 25
1:30 p.m. Maurice Wallace, author of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Duke University Press, $27.95, 9780822350859). (Re-airs Monday at 1:30 a.m.)

1:45 p.m. James Salzman, author of Drinking Water: A History (Overlook, $16.95, 9781468307115). (Re-airs Monday at 1:45 a.m.)

5:30 p.m. Steven Pressfield, author of The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War (Sentinel, $29.95, 9781595230911), at Diesel, A Bookstore in Santa Monica, Calif.

6:30 p.m. Matt Taibbi, author of The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (Spiegel & Grau, $27, 9780812993424).

8 p.m. Robert Bryce, author of Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong (PublicAffairs, $27.99, 9781610392051).

10 p.m. Christopher Buckley, author of But Enough About You: Essays (Simon & Schuster, $27.50, 9781476749518).

11 p.m. Austin Sarat, author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty (Stanford Law Books, $24, 9780804789165).

Winners of the 2013 Nebula Awards, sponsored by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, are:

Novel: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book: Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson (Grand Central)
Novella: "The Weight of the Sunrise" by Vylar Kaftan (Asimov's 2/13)
Novellete: "The Waiting Stars" by Aliette de Bodard (The Other Half of the Sky)
Short Story: "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachel Swirsky (Apex 3/13)
Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation: Gravity
Damon Knight Grand Master Award: Samuel R. Delany  
Special Honoree: Frank M. Robinson
Kevin O'Donnell Jr. Service to SFWA Award: Michael Armstrong

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Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy has won the $50,000 George Washington Book Prize for The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (Yale University Press).

The prize recognizes the year's best new books on early American history, especially books that are written for a broad audience, and is sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington's Mount Vernon.

The Washington Prize jury praised The Men Who Lost America as "ground-breaking" and "a major contribution to the history of the American Revolution."

Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, May 27:

Ghost Ship by Clive Cussler and Graham Brown (Putnam, $28.95, 9780399167317) is book 10 of the Numa Files.

Suspicion by Joseph Finder (Dutton, $27.95, 9780525954606) follows a father who accepts a suspicious loan to pay for his daughter's private school.

The Given by Vicki Pettersson (Harper Voyager, $14.99, 9780062066206) is the final novel in the Celestial Blues series.

Skin Game by Jim Butcher (Roc, $27.95, 9780451464392) is book 15 of the Dresden Files.

City of Heavenly Fire by Cassandra Clare (Margaret K. McElderry, $24.99, 9781442416895) continues the Mortal Instruments series.

The World According to Bob: The Further Adventures of One Man and His Streetwise Cat by James Bowen (Thomas Dunne, $24.99, 9781250046321) follows a musician and his cat.

Summer Food: New Summer Classics by Paul Lowe, Nina Dreyer Hensley and Jim Hensley (Weldon Owen, $32.50, 9781616288235) includes 90 summer recipes.

"If we can't publish and read Ulysses, then what is the use of anything?" With this introductory hyperbole, Kevin Birmingham kicks off his remarkable first book--and then proves his case. The Most Dangerous Book is striking not only for its intricate recounting of the arduous path Joyce's groundbreaking book followed to legal publication, but also for its history of the founding of Modernism and its literary biography of a giant in 20th-century literature. Birmingham, a Harvard lecturer in history and literature, has managed to write a history that reads like a Dickens novel, telling a story of individual courage amid social disruption, a world where one dedicated writer takes on the machinery of centuries of rigid convention and censorship with the help of an equally dedicated network of admirers and fellow artists... and wins.

Birmingham's story of Ulysses begins in 1904 when 22-year-old James Joyce and his new wife, Nora, finally left the decay, corruption, brothels and pubs of Dublin, Ireland. Joyce's earthy and unconventional first fictional works, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, found no conventional publishers until Ezra Pound championed them to the London avant-garde magazine The Egoist. A decade later, Joyce began Ulysses, his groundbreaking masterpiece of a day in the lives of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom.

With well-researched detail, Birmingham describes the destitute, alcoholic and sickly Joyce who fought off repeated bouts of sight-threatening iritis while filling scraps of paper with snippets of the words, phrases and structural outlines that gradually built his epic novel. As Birmingham portrays it, "Ulysses was a procession of drafts, a sedimentary novel that gained its mass one grain at a time." Despite setbacks with his first two books (as Pound reminded him, "How many intelligent people do you think there are in England and America?"), Joyce kept writing and finally finished the new novel in 1922.

Like his other work, Ulysses ran first in magazines, so before the whole book could even begin to alarm the censors, its notoriety already preceded it. Birmingham carefully chronicles Joyce's 20 years of censorship before Random House founder Bennett Cerf and New York lawyer Morris Ernst finally took on the U.S. government in a 1933 precedent-setting case: The United States of America v. One Book Called Ulysses.

Cerf's and Ernst's success was built on the backs of many others, including brave magazine publishers Harriet Weaver (The Egoist) and Margaret Anderson (The Little Review), loyal bookseller Sylvia Beach (the first publisher of the complete Ulysses), writers Hemingway and Eliot, and financial backer John Quinn (a New York lawyer). They're all here as Birmingham carefully details a hard-fought but conclusive victory against oppression. This victory proclaimed "there was no absolute authority, no singular vision for our culture, no monolithic ideas towering over us." Given the current political milieu, it is a victory of which we should be strongly reminded. --Bruce Jacobs

Shelf Talker: This biography of a book covers the history of Modernism, James Joyce and the writing and censorship of the 20th-century masterpiece Ulysses.