Skylight Books, Los Angeles, Calif., is opening a second store, in the Eagle Rock neighborhood. The L.A. Daily News reported that the original store, "known for its eclectic selection of books and well-attended live events, will remain open at its longtime Los Feliz location, which also includes its nearby Arts Annex for movie, music, photography art and graphic novel selections."

Skylight Books' second location, in L.A.'s Eagle Rock neighborhood, will open this fall.

The bookseller posted on social media: "We just signed a lease on this lovely space at 1958 Colorado Blvd., and hope to open this fall. It's nearly 6,000 square feet and will have room for a cafe. Don't worry--we're not leaving Los Feliz. This location will be in addition to our current home, where we'll be celebrating 30 years this fall."

Mary Williams, Skylight's general manager, explained: "We're so excited to be expanding to Eagle Rock. The response since we announced this morning has been overwhelming in the best way--we can't wait to open and meet our new community. It's a great neighborhood--like in Los Feliz, there are a lot of independent shops and restaurants already there, so we know the locals support and value their small businesses.

"And most of all, I think that what we have to offer, curation-wise, is a good fit for Eagle Rock. We'll be bringing all the literary fiction, great nonfiction, graphic novels, and books on the arts that people are coming to us for in Los Feliz. And with the extra space, we're going to increase our kids' book selection, too, since there are so many young families in the area."

Prologue Bookshop in Columbus, Ohio celebrated its grand opening at a new location last Thursday with the assistance of a line of more than 100 people, who passed the final books hand-to-hand between the old store at 841 N. High Street and the new space at 787 N. High Street. 

The bookstore posted on Facebook Friday: "Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who came out to be part of our human book chain yesterday ahead of our grand opening! We are continually blown away by the support of our community. We couldn't be where we are without all of you." 

Owner Dan Brewster told WOSU he was pleased with the community turnout: "Everybody seemed to really have a great time, and I'm so happy that people were able to come out. We had great weather for it." He noted that staying in the city's Short North neighborhood was a key factor in his decision, noting that the old location "was a great space. We had really great, great neighbors here and a really great part of High Street. And yeah, we're just excited to move into a bigger and better and more vibrant area."

In addition to increased inventory, the new store will feature expanded events and other programming. "We have a great event area in the store, including a stage," Brewster had said earlier. "We're also going to have an improved book club experience and a reading area upstairs."  

Brewster added that Prologue Bookshop is committed to the Short North and his team is excited to expand the shop's imprint in the area, noting that the shop's growth demonstrates how readers continue to show up for indie bookstores and the importance of a thriving book ecosystem. 

"We feel that this is one of the best areas for independent retail in the city," he said. "We have a lot of great neighbors and our community supports us through events we do, coming to book clubs and just hanging around the store. We're happy to stick around."

A romance-focused bookstore called Forbidden Fiction Bookshop has opened on a limited basis in Oceanside, Calif., FOX5 San Diego reported. 

The bookstore made its debut at 528 S. Coast Hwy. on Saturday, March 28. While Forbidden Fiction sells an assortment of romance titles, owner Samantha Matouzzi places a major emphasis on the dark romance sub-genre and on independent authors. 

"I'm a dark romance girly, and so every time I go to romance stores, it's hard finding dark romance," Matouzzi told FOX5 San Diego.

Matouzzi described the opening on March 28 as "phase one" of the bookstore's opening, with "phase two" coming on Independent Bookstore Day, April 25. Phase two will include the unveiling of an additional room in the bookstore called the Red Room, which will feature more inventory.

She noted that the response to the bookstore has been very strong. "Once I started posting more, it was weird, like just blew up," Matouzzi said. "I've never had that experience, and so it's just like, oh my gosh, this is great. It actually made me feel like, wow, I'm doing the right thing."

Sweet Reads Society, a romance-focused bookstore and bakery, opened last month in Newton Falls, Ohio, WKBN27 reported.

Located at 2010 Milton Blvd., Suite C1, Sweet Reads sells a variety of romance titles along with bookish gifts and accessories. The bakery side of the business focuses on stuffed cookies while also serving coffee and dirty sodas, which are sodas mixed with cream and other flavorings.

Co-owner Katie Butcher held a grand opening for the bookstore on March 28. She and her team have also held author signings and blind book roulettes, with book club meetings and other events coming later this month. 

Before opening Sweet Reads Society, Butcher started out selling cookies at a farm stand last fall. 

"We were just ready to expand, and I think we just really wanted to open up a bookstore in Newton Falls--I felt it was missing something," Butcher told WKBN27.

Jean Marie Kelly

Jean Marie Kelly, affiliate publisher, Harper360, will retire on May 1 after more than 24 years with HarperCollins. She has been a key part of the Harper360 program since its launch in 2012, introducing American readers to the variety of titles published by HarperCollins companies in the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and other countries. Before leading Harper360 in the U.S., she spent nearly a decade as a marketing director for several HarperCollins imprints, including Harper, Collins, and William Morrow.

Emily Gerbner has been promoted to affiliate publisher, Harper360. She most recently served as associate director, a role she assumed in early 2025, when she led the 360's shift to a rapid publishing model. She joined Harper360 in 2018 as digital marketing manager and expanded the program's digital reach and was instrumental in developing the digital-to-print publishing approach that has become integral to 360's strategy.

Bookmarks, Winston-Salem, N.C., hosted author, podcaster, and Duke University professor Kate Bowler (l.) for the launch of her book Joyful, Anyway (Dial Press). She was in conversation with Winston-Salem's own Virginia Evans, author of The Correspondent, in front of a sold-out crowd of 675 readers. Bookmarks' event coordinator Becca Naylor said, "Both authors brought some much needed light this week, and we were honored to help share Kate's message of finding joy when happiness feels out of reach." (photo courtesy of Bookmarks and MJS Live Productions)

Carmichael's Bookstore, Louisville, Ky., shared a pic of its confidential sales floor display, noting: "Pssst. Wanna know a secret? Check out our display at Bardstown Road that features books and sidelines all about secrets shhhhhh."

Michelle Forde has joined the future of agency as campaign manager (contract).

These Fragments I Have Shored: A Memoir by Jason Irwin (Apprentice House Press).

Today:
Good Morning America: Jennie Garth, author of I Choose Me: Chasing Joy, Finding Purpose & Embracing Reinvention (Park Row, $32.50, 9780778305637). She will also appear on Today and Live with Kelly and Mark.

The View: Lena Dunham, author of Famesick: A Memoir (Random House, $32, 9780593129326).

Here & Now: Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Small Town Girls: A Writer's Memoir (Knopf, $28, 9780593804933).

Fresh Air: Namwali Serpell, author of On Morrison (Hogarth, $32, 9780593732915). 

Sherri Shepherd Show: Iyanla Vanzant, author of Spiritual Hygiene: A Practical Path for Clean Living, Inner Authority, and Divine Freedom (Atria, $29, 9781668214121).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Emma Grede, author of Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life (Avid Reader Press, $30, 9781668085486).

Today: Ina Garten, author of Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir (Crown, $22, 9780593800027). She will also appear on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Also on Today: Sheinelle Jones, author of Through Mom's Eyes: Simple Wisdom From Mothers Who Raised Extraordinary Humans (Putnam, $29, 9780593719336).

Drew Barrymore Show: Sabrina Rudin, author of Healthy with a Side of Happy: 100 Plant-Based Recipes to Feed Your Family (Union Square & Co., $35, 9781454956587).

Tamron Hall: Arthur C. Brooks, author of The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness (Portfolio, $30, 9780593545423).

Kelly Clarkson Show: Danielle Kartes, author of My Very First Baking Book (Sourcebooks Explore, $17.99, 9781464233098).

Sasha Pieterse (Pretty Little Liars) is launching a production company, Mother Bare Productions, and its first project will be a movie adaptation of novelist Sherrilyn Kenyon's upcoming urban fantasy book series Infernal Affairs, Deadline reported. Pieterse will star in and produce the movie. Cory Todd Hughes and Adrian Speckert are adapting the urban fantasy story. 

Kenyon has sold more than 70 million books, including her novel series Dark Hunter, Chronicles of Nick, Deadman's Cross, and The League. The first installment of her new Infernal Affairs series is Hell to Pay, which will be released later this month, with Hell's Half Acre due in June, and a third title coming later.

Infernal Affairs "follows the 'dangerously seductive' Lucian 'Luke' Teivel, Lucifer's son, who is banished to Earth to work for a secret task force that polices supernatural crime. He fights the threats alongside his guarded new partner, Detective Sorcha O'Malley, in Savannah, Georgia, and along the way 'they uncover a conspiracy that could ignite a war between Heaven and Hell, while a forbidden attraction grows between them,' " Deadline wrote. 

"When I first read Hell to Pay, what stopped me wasn't the mythology or the world-building, though both are extraordinary," Pieterse said. "It was Sorcha. Here is a woman who has been quietly exiled to the margins of her own career, reassigned to a unit that the rest of law enforcement treats like a punchline, carrying a past she refuses to explain and a talent she's still learning to trust. And yet she walks into Infernal Affairs on her first day and doesn't flinch. Not at the colleagues, not at the cases, and certainly not at a six-foot-something prince of Hell who becomes her partner. She holds her ground with wit and composure while her entire understanding of the world is being rewritten around her."

Sean McMeekin has won the 22nd annual Hayek Book Prize for his book To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism (Basic Books). He will receive a $100,000 award and deliver the annual Hayek Lecture in New York City on June 4.

Chair of the jury John Tierney said, "Dr. McMeekin's superb scholarship shows how socialism has failed horrendously every time it has been imposed, just as Hayek predicted. The book draws on new evidence to present a chilling chronicle of the Left's unrelenting willingness to use coercion and violence against its enemies. Given the newfound enthusiasm for socialism, censorship and other authoritarian measures in the West, the book's lessons could not be more timely."

The other finalists were:
Phil Gramm and Don Boudreaux, authors of The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism (Rowman & Littlefield)
Sean McMeekin, author of To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism (Basic Books)
Pablo A. Peña, author of Human Capital for Humans: An Accessible Introduction to the Economic Science of People (University of Chicago Press)
Brian Potter, author of The Origins of Efficiency (Stripe Press)
George Selgin, author of False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947 (University of Chicago Press)
Nicholas Wade, author of The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations (Harper)

Ann Patchett's 10th novel, the exceptional Whistler, ponders the persistence of childhood trauma and of even short-lived bonds.

Daphne Fuller, 53, teaches English at a New York City girls' prep school. She's touring the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her husband, Jonathan, when he notices an older man following them. They're astonished to discover it's her stepfather: Eddie Triplett was (briefly) her mother's second husband when Daphne was nine years old. Daphne starts weeping, indicating a traumatic backstory--which unfolds at just the right pace.

At 76, Eddie works as a book editor. When Daphne agrees to accompany him to his Yale roommate's 50th wedding anniversary party, Eddie introduces her proudly as his daughter. Theirs is a warm relationship of easy conversations. But the detritus of the past must be dealt with (for Jonathan, too, who's clearing his late mother's home), so Daphne unpacks it for her sister, Leda, who happens to be a therapist. Third-person "Interstitial" sections recount the events of January 18-19, 1980. Abigail, the girls' mother, was at the hospital with Leda, whose appendix had burst. On their way home, Eddie and Daphne drove to a raspberry farm to look at the stars but veered off the road and were trapped in the car overnight.

While pinned in his seat, an injured Eddie recounted for Daphne the storyline of a manuscript memoir he'd read that day by a Wyoming woman thrown from her horse, Whistler, during a storm. She lay with a broken ankle for three days being visited by the spirits of the dead before she thought of whistling for her remarkable horse, who came back to rescue her. The reassuring message resonates for them that night and into the future: there's always somewhere to turn; no one is alone in this life; even the dead--such as Daphne's father and Jonathan's first wife--live on in memory and objects.

Patchett (Tom Lake; These Precious Days; The Dutch House) is an expert on blended families and their secrets. The bittersweet tone is perfectly judged (viz. the irony of Daphne's second stepfather, Lucas, preaching positivity as a self-help author but being mired in pessimism by his 90s). Daphne's banter with her loved ones is a delight. The plot whisks along, its satisfying full circle returning to the Met, and incorporates a clever metanarrative twist. Whistler is quiet but surprising, witty yet heartrending. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck

Shelf Talker: Ann Patchett is a master on the subject of family dysfunction, and her 10th novel, a stepdaughter-stepfather love story, is as wise as ever on secrets, traumatic memories, and storytelling.