For this longtime book world reporter, the New England Independent Booksellers Association Spring Forum, held last Wednesday and Thursday in Danvers, Mass., was familiar--a well-run and focused show featuring many wonderful authors and independent booksellers with the added benefit of an emphasis on sidelines--but also unlike any industry gathering I'd ever been to because for the first time I was also there as an author. 

First, a show roundup: More than 120 booksellers attended the Spring Forum, which was highlighted by the many authors in attendance, including R.F. Kuang, who was the featured speaker at the Thursday Author Keynote breakfast and whose new novel is Taipei Story, and Isaac Fitzgerald and Namwali Serpell, whose new books are American Rambler and On Morrison, respectively, in conversation at Wednesday's Author Keynote luncheon. Not surprisingly, many more authors were at the author reception late Wednesday afternoon, and, of course, the rep pick session Wednesday afternoon included discussions of highlights of the lists.

The Spring Forum also emphasized sidelines. Trudi Bartow, sales director of the Unemployed Philosophers Guild, long a favorite sidelines company among booksellers, led the session More Than Books: Make Your Sidelines Work Harder. Before an enthusiastic SRO crowd, she pointed out such basics as the ideal price point for a sideline ($19.99); where to place stickers, a very popular category (near the point of sale but not at it since people need time to browse through them); and the most popular sideline (stationery). She was so entertaining and informative that one question from the audience was a simple, "Have you auditioned yet for SNL?" (She wrote about sidelines for Shelf Awareness in January and will do more with us in the future.)

On Thursday, some 30 sidelines vendors exhibited their wares from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. "We've had nothing but fantastic feedback from the vendors about their piece of the show," said NEIBA executive director Beth Ineson, noting that the sidelines emphasis was "a bookseller request" and was something "everyone seemed to find useful." NEIBA is considering offering more sidelines programming next year.

On the personal side, the Spring Forum marked my first appearance as an author--Left Field Publishing is bringing out my novel Fortune and Glass on September 1. Left Field, which was launched last year by Len Vlahos and Kristen Gilligan, sponsored a coffee break Wednesday afternoon that featured me at a table signing ARCs of the book.

Debut author signing an ARC for Casey Robinson of the Silver Unicorn Bookstore, Acton, Mass.

So there were several milestones common to authors, but uncommon to me:

ARC First Contact. When I arrived at the show and went to the registration desk, NEIBA staff said that ARCs had arrived and in fact were in three boxes behind the desk. A moment later, I was holding an ARC of my book, the first time I'd seen it. Authors often say the initial sight of an ARC or a finished copy of a book they've worked on so long and so hard is a special moment. That was the case for me.

The Elevator Pitch. Of course, a frequent question was "what's the book about?" I refrained from channeling my late father and saying, "About 400 pages." For the first time I listened to featured authors discuss their books with a new appreciation and attentiveness. In contrast to my attempts, their book descriptions were so polished, concise, and intriguing. Happily I did pick up some pointers.

Signing Language. What to write to people who wanted an inscription in the ARC I handed them? I did a little research at home before the Spring Forum looking at books authors had inscribed to me. Among my favorites:

"Despite the fact that this is a book you didn't buy, I hope it's one you will keep in your collection... P.S. Buy one of my new ones." From the late Olivia Goldsmith in a copy of The First Wives' Club

"A pleasure to sign a book you bought!" From T. Jefferson Parker in Pacific Beat

"It's a crime if you don't read this book--and come on down to Miami. After the storm!" From Edna Buchanan in Contents Under Pressure

"Some good ideas." From Kelly Link in Get in Trouble.

Many authors simply signed their names, but this was often understandable, as with Sophia Loren at the pub party for Sophia Loren's Recipes & Memories.

At the Spring Forum, I tried to be creative, especially with people I knew well, but often wrote simply, "Hope you enjoy this!" My personal favorite was something I decided on in advance. Kate Layte of Papercuts Bookshop, Boston, Mass., was the first in line, so I wrote: "This is the first book I've ever signed as an author." Lucky Kate...

My first signing was unexpectedly memorialized: NEIBA's weekly newsletter, which came out Thursday morning, featured photos from the Spring Forum. The third one showed me signing an ARC for Casey Robinson of the Silver Unicorn Bookstore, Acton, Mass. Wow. Many thanks to Beth Ineson and to Beth Wagner, the photographer! --John Mutter

Judith Curr, president and publisher of the HarperOne Group at HarperCollins, is retiring, effective May 29.

Judith Curr

"This decision comes after eight years of leadership with HarperCollins and a distinguished career in publishing spanning decades," HarperCollins president and CEO Brian Murray said in an announcement to staff. "Since joining HarperCollins in 2018, Judith has been an extraordinary force. With remarkable creativity, vision, and passion, she has grown the publishing group, championed diverse voices, and expanded our reach in meaningful ways.

"Among her many accomplishments, Judith launched the HarperVia imprint in 2019 to bring international titles to a World English audience. In 2021, she secured the landmark deal making HarperCollins the official publisher of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s archives--one of the most historically significant publishing agreements in recent memory. Under her stewardship, the HarperOne Group grew revenue 45% and increased title count for both Amistad and Spanish-language titles."

Curr led the group when it published bestsellers that include Charlie Mackesy's The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse; Viola Davis's Finding Me; Curtis Jackson's Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter; Father James Martin's A Work in Progress; Lionel Richie's Truly; and titles from Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV.

Before joining HarperCollins in 2018, Curr was at Simon & Schuster for 18 years, beginning as president and publisher of Pocket Books in 1999, becoming founding publisher of Atria Books in 2002, and then becoming president and publisher of the Atria Publishing Group. During her time at S&S she helped Rhonda Byrne's The Secret become a worldwide phenomenon and also boosted the careers of Fredrik Backman, Colleen Hoover, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Jodi Picoult, and Jennifer Weiner.

Before that she was editor-in-chief and publisher at Ballantine Books and earlier worked in publishing in Australia for 17 years.

Enchanted Pages Bookstore hosted its grand opening celebration last Saturday at 1108 8th St. in Wichita Falls, Tex. KFDX reported that the festivities "attracted a big crowd on Saturday, with a line wrapped around the building. Readers browsed the selection the new bookstore has to offer while enjoying tasty treats from local vendor Chicka D's Coffee, who offered a custom menu of bookish drinks and snacks for the event."

Co-owner Hunter Lopez said they opened the store after seeing readers had limited local options to find their favorite genre: "It's pretty crazy. I mean, to see the turnout especially, the smile on my wife's face. I'm a bit of an emotional person, so it tugs on my heart."

After the celebration, Enchanted Pages, which is described as "the perfect spot for a cozy place to shop, read, or craft" and features a cozy reading lounge, posted on Facebook: "598 people showed up to our grand opening yesterday. I truly have no words... thank you from the bottom of my heart. Yesterday was a DREAM come true. We had people start lining up as early as 7 a.m., you all stood in the cold for HOURS and still came in with so much love and kindness for our team. It meant everything to us!! We are so honored to be a part of the bookish community in Wichita Falls.

"Thank you to Chicka D's Coffee for taking the time to make a delicious bookish menu, coming to set up and the huge support from everyone on their team. Thank you to Partied by Sujei for the beautiful balloons! And thank you to Tiffany Fleeks Photography & Co. for coming out to capture the day for us!"

Ada's Technical Books in Seattle, Wash., will close on June 6 after 16 years in business, and its three Fuel Coffee locations have been put up for sale. In a message to customers, owner Danielle Hulton wrote that the decision is a personal one: "I am currently in a season of life where I need to prioritize spending more time with my family and pursuing new career goals. After many months of trying to transition Ada's to new ownership, it has become clear that closing is the most viable path forward. While this wasn't my initial plan, I recognize that Ada's was a very specific dream of mine; it feels right to make room for something entirely new in this space."

Noting that Ada's hopes "to go out on a high note and celebrate this community," Hulton shared information about upcoming changes, deadlines, sales, and events, as well as Independent Bookstore Day on April 25 ("Seattle Bookstore Day--come out and celebrate with us!"). 
 
"I feel incredibly privileged to have done this work for the past 16 years," she added. "Ada's started as a dream of something that 'should' exist in Seattle, and I am so proud to have created a technical space that is both beautiful and welcoming to all. The team I've worked with over the years has been remarkably talented, and you, our customers, have been curious, dedicated, and supportive. This chapter of my life is one I will always look back on with immense fondness."

Hulton told the Capitol Hill Seattle blog that the decision to shutter Ada's and sell off the Fuel Coffee locations is "not a statement of how things are going right now on 15th [Ave. E]."

Danielle and David Hulton, who purchased the former home of Horizon Books and redeveloped it to house Ada's, still own the property, Capitol Hill Seattle noted, adding that while the three Fuel locations they lease are for sale, the 15th Ave. E coworking space will continue to operate.

Desmond Morris, an English zoologist "who used observation, logic and insight to contend in his immensely popular 1967 book, The Naked Ape, that humanity, stripped of civilized veneer, is just another species of ape," died April 19, the New York Times reported. He was 98. In addition to writing more than four dozen books and 50 scientific papers, Morris presented 700 TV episodes, using "observational powers that he had honed as a zookeeper to study the ways of humans as well as those of animals." 

The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal sold more than 20 million copies and was translated into 23 languages. It argued that ancient genes, shared with apes, shape human behavior. Morris "offered new interpretations of basic human functions like sleeping, fighting, mating and child-rearing. He noted that humans had evolved not only the biggest brains among primates but also the biggest penises, compared to body size. He said this was one of many sexual adaptations that keep couples sufficiently interested to stay together," the Times wrote.

"To make sex sexier," he said.

When readers objected to some of his claims, Morris responded that The Naked Ape was "deliberately insulting." As he observed in the book, "Our climb to the top has been a get-rich-quick story, and like all nouveaux riches, we are very sensitive about our background. We are also in constant danger of betraying it."

Although critics challenged some of his theories about apes and humans, the field gained increased credibility in 1971 when Jane Goodall published In the Shadow of Man. Since then, "social biology, the explication of behavior in an evolutionary context, has grown in importance, even as debates over interpretations have flared," the Times noted. 

"If I am honest, it is a struggle I have never fully resolved, the 'ham' and the academic in me doing battle with one another, with first one, then the other, getting the upper hand," Morris wrote in Animal Days (1979), one of three memoirs.

His many books include The Human Zoo (1969); Patterns of Reproductive Behavior (1970); Intimate Behaviour (1971); Amazing Baby: The Amazing Story of the First Two Years of Life (2008); The Naked Man (2008); Postures: Body Language in Art (2019); The British Surrealists (2022); and 101 Surrealists (2024)

As a child, Morris acquired an interest in art after using a great-grandfather's microscope and set of slides, which inspired him to draw and paint patterns based on the shapes of microorganisms. By the early 1950s, he was selling his surrealist paintings in London and Belgium and had directed two surrealist films.

Morris's first job after attending the University of Oxford was hosting Zoo Time, a Granada Television series on animals in the London Zoo. He became curator of mammals at the Zoo in 1959. During the 1960s, he wrote several nature books, including three with his wife, Ramona (Baulch) Morris.

Desmond Morris spent four weeks writing The Naked Ape, "racing to pay for a new house," the Times noted, adding that "as huge profits almost immediately materialized, he moved to the Mediterranean island nation of Malta in 1968, in part to avoid British taxes.... When the money ran out, Dr. Morris returned to Oxford to do more research.... He churned out book after book, many of which were very popular--not least his quasi-scholarly guided tours, one for each sex, to the erogenous precincts of the human body." Other titles dealt with dogs, cats, horses, and soccer players. At 90, he was still exploring the art world with The Lives of the Surrealists (2018).

Musician and disabilities advocate Gaelynn Lea launched her memoir, It Wasn't Meant to be Perfect (Algonquin Books), at Teatro Zuccone in Duluth, Minn. A conversation with local music promoter Walt Dizzo (l.) and PW Midwest correspondent Claire Kirch (center) preceded a performance by Lea before a packed house. Zenith Bookstore, the vendor for the event, sold out of the 71 copies they brought. (Photo: Karen Sunderman)

"Submit a joke. Get social fame!" That's the sign on the Joke Library Box at Housing Works Bookstore in New York City, which has been celebrating 30 Days of Laughter in April by asking customers to submit their best jokes. The bookseller shared some favorites in an Instagram post, adding:

"Join us at the Bookstore this Friday night for a comedy show that'll blow away the winter blues for good! This star-studded line up includes some of NYC's favorite comedians whose work has been featured by SNL, A24, HBO, and more. Hosted by @jakewcornell, this is a night you won't want to miss!!

"Tickets are selling fast and include 2 drink tickets, plus 100% of proceeds go towards the Housing Works mission. Doors open at 6:15 for a 7pm show! We can't wait to see you there!"

"Congratulations to this couple who just got engaged and had a shoot here!!" Northport Books in Northport, N.Y., noted. "The soon to be bride is an avid reader and English teacher--we could not be more thrilled for her and her soon to be groom! They purchased Happily Ever After Playlist by Abby Jimenez! So on theme!!"

"We had a spring glow up, thanks to Katie!! @wanderingnotlostco," 2 Dandelions Bookshop in Brighton, Mich., posted on Instagram. 

At Sourcebooks:

Alexis Banyon has been promoted to associate publisher, custom & proprietary.

Robin Wane has joined the company as publicity & marketing manager, nonfiction.

Alexandra Derdall has been promoted to assistant director of digital marketing, special projects.

Madison Nankervis has been promoted to assistant director of marketing & brand development, romance.

Katie Stutz has been promoted to assistant director of marketing, romance.

Emma Bagnall has been promoted to digital marketing coordinator.

Tiffany Schultz has been promoted to senior advertising marketing manager.

Hartley Christensen has been promoted to senior marketing & publicity associate, Sourcebooks Landmark.

Kate Riley has been promoted to marketing & publicity associate, Sourcebooks Landmark.

Kate Riley has been promoted to marketing & publicity associate, Sourcebooks Landmark.

Corrin Bronersky has been promoted to publishing and marketing associate, retail marketing & creative services.

Morgan Pfeiffer Amico has been promoted to sales associate.

Zoya Boskovic has been promoted to senior digital marketing specialist, special projects.

Cecilia Petee has been promoted to assistant sales manager, custom.

Keldyn Miller has been promoted to sales associate, mass merchandise.

Tomorrow:
Today: Percival Everett, author of James: A Novel (Vintage, $20, 9780593686867).

Tina Gharavi's Virginia Woolf's Night and Day will have its world premiere at SXSW London in June as the opening film. Deadline reported that the project is adapted by Gharavi, with screenwriter Justine Waddell, from Woolf's 1919 novel "revolving around the life of Katharine Hilbery, a high-born young woman who challenges the patriarchal society of the time to pursue her love of astronomy and life on her own terms."

Haley Bennett stars as Hilbery, joining a cast that includes Jack Whitehall, Jennifer Saunders, Lily Allen, Sally Phillips, and Misia Butler. 

Winners have been selected for the 2026 Oregon Book Awards, sponsored by Literary Arts in Portland:

Ken Kesey Award for Fiction: Ling Ling Huang for Immaculate Conception: A Novel (Dutton Books)
Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry: Jennifer Perrine for Beautiful Outlaw (Kelsey Street Press)
Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction: Leah Sottile for Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age (Grand Central Publishing)
Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction: Judith Barrington for Virginia's Apple: Collected Memoirs (Oregon State University Press)
Leslie Bradshaw Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Literature: Rosanne Parry for A Wolf Called Fire (Greenwillow Books)
Eloise Jarvis McGraw Award for Children's Literature: Michelle Sumovich for I Have Three Cats... (Dial Books)
Graphic Literature: David F. Walker for Big Jim and the White Boy (Ten Speed Graphic)

In addition, the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, in recognition of outstanding, long-term support of Oregon's literary community, went to Willamette Writers of Portland, Ore.

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The winners of the 76th annual Hillman Prizes for Journalism, sponsored by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, include, in the book category, The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

photo: Winky Lewis

Bonnie Friedman is the author of Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life, named one of the Essential Books for Writers by the Center for Fiction and Poets & Writers. She is also the author of the memoirs The Thief of Happiness and Surrendering Oz, a finalist for the PEN Award in the Art of the Essay. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Ploughshares, and numerous other literary journals, and she has been named a notable essayist four times in The Best American Essays. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Dartmouth, New York University, and the University of North Texas. Don't Stop (Europa, April 21, 2026), her first novel, is an erotically charged story about ambition, desire, and the dangerous pursuit of self-knowledge.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Don't Stop is about a brilliant 41-year-old scholar whose sexual obsession threatens to unravel her carefully built life.

On your nightstand now:

My nightstand is for books I've read and want to keep close, like inspiring friends. All the following are openhearted, original, and constructed of sentences strong as granite: Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark; Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel; Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr; The Diaries of Franz Kafka (translated by Ross Benjamin). This last, chock-full of Kafka's surprisingly bon vivant Prague evenings and nights, lets you see Kafka training himself to describe how people actually look and behave in life and also how to make use in his stories of the logic of dreams.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales for Children, originally published in 1907, made my sister and me howl with joy. We used to borrow the book constantly from the Francis Martin Library. My mother had the idea that each of her four children should memorize one of the long and comically horrific poems, which had titles such as "Henry King, Who chewed bits of String and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies." My sister memorized "Rebecca, who slammed doors for fun and perished miserably." I can still chant my way through "Jim, Who ran away from His Nurse and Was Eaten by a Lion." About once a year, given enough wine at a dinner party, I will stand up and declaim.

Your top five authors:

E.M. Forster, who grew on me over time. Such well-constructed plots and humane charm! I still read A Room with a View every summer. I know it is July when Lucy Honeychurch is plunging into the field of violets.

Hilde Bruch, who pioneered the understanding of anorexic girls, and had herself escaped a repressive regime. She was one of the first psychological writers I read, and she opened up a world of significance.

Ottessa Moshfegh. I didn't want to like her. I revere her. Brilliant, funny, perverse, with an extraordinarily sharp eye for the details of contemporary life. Fearless.

Edna O'Brien for the Country Girls trilogy and A Fanatic Heart. Details from "The Love Object" still return to me decades after I read it. A pin from a man's new shirt left on a windowsill and the ashes from his cigar collected in an empty lozenge box and helplessly, ludicrously cherished; the beloved's wife glimpsed at a party. The writing is precise and piercing as that shirt pin, if that pin were a knife.

The James Joyce of Dubliners, even if he completed the collection at the age of only 25. I love the way he decenters the stories, the way he takes Anton Chekhov a step further. Also, he makes you feel like you're allowed to acknowledge what you see in peripheral vision.

Book you've faked reading:

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I did a junior high book report on it, cribbing from the back of a crummy encyclopedia my mother bought at the A&P, which had novel summaries at the end. I was worried that I wouldn't fool the teacher and worried that I would. Whenever I read the first paragraph of David Copperfield, it mixes with the cheap glue scent from that encyclopedia and fills me with despair that I will ever make a decent job of anything in my life.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Judith Rossner is a shockingly good novelist and has constructed a book with great psychological insight about shame and the desire for oblivion. Rossner was a literary novelist, divorced, who needed to support her children and herself. She used all her gifts to write this critically underrated if extravagantly well-selling book.

Book you've bought for the cover:

None. I just don't! (Or, at least I think I don't!) That said, who could resist the cover of Just Kids by Patti Smith? Those two photo-booth faces, she glamorously sullen as a Sex Pistols performer, he looking angelic and stewed.

Book you hid from your parents:

Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. My mother was given this glorious trashy read while she was in the hospital, and I rendezvoused with it every afternoon when I was about 13, fascinated and plagued by the sensations it aroused. At some point it disappeared from our bookshelves and was never ever mentioned by my mother or me.

Book that changed your life:

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. It made me an essayist for two decades, before I returned to my first love, fiction.

Favorite line from a book:

"People who have shelved their feelings, or their capacity for trust, always feel not quite real." --Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales.

Five books you'll never part with:

Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Colette's The Shackle. Impossible to part from them because they half-live inside me and also because they half-invented me. Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, with its brilliant evocation of the internal life. I recall reading it at college while drinking cups of French vanilla-flavored instant coffee from a tin, and feeling that I made more and more sense. Others had thoughts that moved the erratic ways mine did. Woolf was my religion for many, many years. Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus: The Great Gatsby comes to Newark, N.J.

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

Reading Turgenev by William Trevor. Set in a rural town in Ireland, it concerns a shy young woman who is bullied and scanted--and then encounters a man from her past who cherishes her for who she is. Trevor writes crisply disciplined prose whose scenes linger in the mind. He is an ultimate master.

In the playfully self-referential picture book The Greatest Bedtime Story Ever by author and illustrator Jessie Sima (Not Quite Narwhal; Harriet Gets Carried Away), a friendly yet prideful elf describes to readers how they crafted a literary masterpiece that charmed a grumpy dragon to sleep.

The elf greets readers before the title page: "OH, HELLO THERE! It's wonderful to see a friendly face" and continues invitingly, "make yourself comfortable. I have just the tale for you. Ahem." It all began "on an evening stroll" in search of a perfect spot to compose a story. However, "inspiration was nowhere to be found," and the dejected elf mopes inside a fairy ring, unaware of the chatting mermaids, singing family of griffins, and fishing frog person in a yellow rain slicker nearby. When a sound escapes from a cave the elf had never noticed before, they wander among "damp, twisting tunnels" to find the source. There, the elf stumbles upon a very sleepy dragon who says that only two things can make it doze off: "a little bedtime snack" or "THE GREATEST BEDTIME STORY EVER." The elf (who would prefer not to be a snack) writes a "hilarious... profoundly moving... informative... dazzling" and "suspenseful" tale. When the dragon drifts into a "deep.../ slumber," the elf sneaks out--only to realize they accidentally left the book behind. ("How could I deprive the world of my finest work?!") The decision to return and save the manuscript seals their fate, partially evidenced by a wordless double-page spread of the elf staring down the dragon's gaping, toothy maw.

The elf--surrounded by darkness and perched on a log near a roaring fire--periodically interrupts their narration to boast about the story being told. The elf's dramatic hubris is farcical and repeated references to "THE GREATEST BEDTIME STORY EVER" add to the absurdity. Sima uses luxurious saturated purple hues to evoke a cavernous darkness and luminous golds to add emphasis and humor: as the elf reads to the dragon, light flows from the book and illuminates the dragon's exaggerated reactions to the "shocking... whimsical" tale. The digitally created illustrations hint at the story's conclusion, such as including tiny skulls and bones littering the ground around the dragon's nest. Sima deftly develops a nuanced yet extremely accessible adventure where the child-coded dragon holds the power and the young reader is in on the joke. --Kieran Slattery, freelance reviewer, teacher, co-creator of Gender Inclusive Classrooms

Shelf Talker: This funny and self-referential greatest story ever plays with picture book conventions and gives young readers an enjoyable twist.