For a special issue next Monday about Independent Bookstore Day (April 25), Shelf Awareness is seeking information from booksellers about plans to celebrate. Tell us about your related displays, events, promotions, passport programs, and more. Please send information to extra@shelf-awareness.com by the end of this week. Thank you!

Decoy Bookstore recently opened its first brick-and-mortar store at 32 South Main St., Suite 8, in North East, Md., but owner Elisabeth Balog "promised she would continue to operate her pop up shops at events across Cecil County," Cecil Whig reported. 

Located inside West Street Village Shopping Center (former Shoppes of Londonshire), Decoy was welcomed to its new space with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Cecil County executive Adam Streight, councilwoman Dawn Branch, Jessica Parks with the Chamber of Commerce, and Christie Griest with Cecil County Tourism.

Balog said she named the store as an homage to the county's history of duck hunting and decoy carving. Decoy Bookstore describes itself as a locally owned bookshop "selling new books as well as gifts and accessories. We focus on nature-based books to reflect our location at the top of the Chesapeake Bay but carry fiction and nonfiction books for all ages! Our logo was born out of a desire to reflect our hunting heritage in our family and in our gorgeous, waterfront location. With five local rivers, numerous ponds, and the Susquehanna Flats, an important part of the Atlantic Flyway, bird-hunting is of particular importance in our area."

Pages & Perks Bookstore & More, "a family-friendly bookstore with events, desserts, mocktails, beer and wine," is opening this summer at 914 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. St. South in St. Petersburg, Fla., I Love the Burg reported. Pages and Perks is in the process of renovations and design inside the 1,600-square-foot space. As the bookstore prepares, it will continue to host pop-ups at various St. Pete events and festivals. 

Kate Johnson, owner with her husband, Ben Johnson, said the bookstore will carry everything from young adult and children's books to graphic novels, sci-fi, thrillers, horror, fantasy, and adult romance. In addition, the store will host events and offer a range of desserts and mocktails by Curious Elixirs, as well as an assortment of wines and local beer. 

The emphasis will be on the mocktails, "as they seek to curate a family-friendly space. In fact, they will be setting up a dedicated children's section just for little eyeballs, as they make a place welcoming to adults and children alike," I Love the Burg noted.

The owners envision a space where locals can linger: "Pages and Perks isn't being designed as a place where you run in, grab a book, and leave. If that's your style, we won't hold it against you, but Pages and Perks is prepared to offer you so much more than just a transaction. It will be a welcoming space where we encourage you to hang out, get to know the owners and the community. In a world that's becoming more digital, the ability to sit down with a book and escape with us for a little while is a much-needed break."

Silver Sprocket, "a beloved comics shop and indie publisher in San Francisco's Mission District," closed its Valencia St. storefront on Tuesday due to mounting financial losses. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that for nearly a decade, the shop "has served as more than a bookstore, functioning as a gallery, event space and creative hub for independent cartoonists and zine-makers. Known for championing artist-owned, experimental and politically engaged work, it became a gathering place for the Bay Area's DIY comics community."

In an Instagram post last weekend, owner and publisher Avi Ehrlich wrote, in part: "The unfortunate reality is that even with the positive response to our membership drive, difficult staff cuts, and every other action we could think of, the store continues to lose money each month. To offset the drop in sales over the past three years, I have been supporting the store by taking on personal debt. Personal debt has never been sustainable, and I'm well past the end of the road for what I can take on.

"While there were challenges, the store was generally breaking even until 2023. It must be said that I was running this store from a place of deep passion, but not from experience, or expertise in retail. While this may have worked out for a business with wider margins, the factors familiar to all of us experiencing a changing San Francisco had an outsize impact. The drop in foot-traffic, lower sales at all businesses on our part of Valencia Street, fewer tourists, rising expenses, and the general economic uncertainty impacting people's spending made it impossible for the retail store to sustain itself."

Ehrlich added that the store's "amazing staff is very suddenly finding themselves out of work. Our managers Josh and Sol, along with part-timers Parker and Chrissy, have been the absolute best collaborators I could have ever hoped for in this undertaking going above and beyond in being dedicated, diligent, hardworking, kind, and passionate about all aspects of the operation. Working with them has been an honor and delight."

Looking to the future, Ehrlich noted that the store will continue with its pop-ups events and collaborations, but for now are pausing to recover from the financial stress the shop's problems generated. Silver Sprocket's publishing arm will also continue, having recently signed a new distribution partnership with PGW/Ingram for distribution to resume releasing books this summer after a pause earlier this year.

"The past nine years of a Silver Sprocket storefront has truly been the dream. We've been able to champion our favorite indie comics, worked with hundreds of creators, hosted countless community events, provided space, resources, and a platform for artists within this loving and creative Bay Area community and far beyond," Ehrlich wrote.

Jeff Martin, co-founder of Magic City Books in Tulsa, Okla., is moving from the city and will be changing his role at the bookstore. Owned by the nonprofit Tulsa Literary Coalition, Magic City Books was launched in 2017 by Martin, founder of Booksmart Tulsa, and former Tulsa City librarian Cindy Hulsey, who died in 2018. Martin remains president of TLC, which he co-founded with Hulsey in 2015.

In a message posted on social media, Martin wrote: "It's bittersweet news to share, but my wife and I will soon be relocating to Seattle for a new opportunity (day job) and to be closer to her family. This journey over the past 17 years from Booksmart Tulsa (our first grassroots org) to Magic City Books has exceeded my wildest expectations and dreams. 

"Please know that I would only consider this move knowing the bookstore and organization were/are in a thriving and stable place with wonderful folks at the helm (board, staff, donors, volunteers). I plan to stay on as president and nearly as involved in programming, marketing, and overall creative guidance as I've always been. I plan to be back many times each year for events, meetings, etc.

"Back in 2018 when we unexpectedly lost our co-founder, Cindy Hulsey, we all understood that life can change in an instant. And since that challenging time, with far more ups than downs, I've strived (with the help of so many) to make a place that would carry on should I ever get hit by a bus or struck by lightning. We've achieved that and I'm so confident that our best days remain in the future.

"Magic City Books is my proudest achievement and so very precious to me. Thank you for all of the support and enthusiasm over these many years. As a nonprofit bookshop we don't have an owner yet so many of you feel a passionate ownership of this special thing and what it represents. I only ask that you take good care of it and each other. If you do, the rest will take care of itself." 

Applications have opened for the Susan Kamil Emerging Writers Prize, administered by the Book Industry Charitable Foundation. Five aspiring writer-booksellers or creator-comic retailers will each receive $10,000 to focus on a full-length manuscript. The application period for the final year of the prize runs through April 22. 

Any writer working on a full-length manuscript, graphic novel, or comic who is currently employed at a physical book or comic store in the U.S. and has been for a minimum of three months is eligible. Click here to learn more about eligibility and to apply. 

The prize was established by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and bestselling author Charles Duhigg and his wife, Liz Alter, a professor of biology at California State University Monterey Bay. Kamil was executive v-p and publisher of Random House when she died in 2019. 

This year's panel of judges includes Emma Aprile, a copy editor and a part-time bookseller at Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville, Ky.; Gayle Brandeis, author of nine books and co-owner of Secret World Books in Highland Park, Ill.; Cal Crosby, owner of The King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, Utah; Jeanne Joesten, a retired bookseller at Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, Mich., who is still the frontlist university press buyer; Erika Mantz, Binc's communication coordinator; and Christie Roehl, a longtime bookseller who currently works for the nonprofit SME and volunteers on the Binc Program Committee.

At Annie Bloom's Books in Portland, Ore., Ashley K. Stoyanov Ojeda (front, center) and Mirtle Peña-Calderón (front, left) celebrated the launch of The Book of Awesome Latinas: Inspiring Stories and Bios of Hispanic and Latin Women Throughout History (Books That Save Lives).

Congratulations to the Bookstore in Lenox, Mass., which will celebrate its 50th anniversary April 1 with an all-day open house, featuring food and drink, invited speakers, an open mic event, and more to mark Matt Tannenbaum's half-century at the helm.
    
Tannenbaum purchased the store from founder David Silverstein on April 1, 1976. Operating under its motto, "Serving the community since last Tuesday," the Bookstore will actually have been "serving the community" for 2,608 Tuesdays on its birthday. 

The Bookstore has hosted hundreds of poetry readings and book launches, sometimes partnering with its neighbors the Lenox Library, Ventfort Hall, Shakespeare & Company, and Edith Wharton's The Mount. It was also featured in the documentary Hello, Bookstore. 
     
Tannenbaum noted that the bookshop's "actual origin, in Stockbridge, in the mid-to-late 1960s, had ties with the late Alice Brock, who had gained fame through Arlo Guthrie's anti-war ballad 'Alice's Restaurant.' It was Alice's mother who found David Silverstein a place to live, and her father who loaned him several hundred dollars to start the Bookstore.

"The circle is made complete by an exhibition of some of Alice's art currently on view at the Shade Gallery at The Bookstore which opened late last fall and will continue into the spring season."

The Shade Gallery had its own beginning the year that Tannenbaum bought the store, 1976, the same year that Alice moved her restaurant from Stockbridge to Lenox, to a location now occupied by the Apple Tree Inn.

In 2015, just prior to his 40th anniversary, Tannenbaum added Get Lit wine bar. Eschewing the once popular trend of serving coffee in a bookshop, he opted for a different kind of congeniality.

After 50 years, Tannenbaum said he has no retirement plans, though a succession plan is in the works, with one of his daughters, Shawnee, beginning to take on more responsibility in the running of the business. Her children, Siena and Desmond, are already regular fixtures in the shop, just as Shawnee and her sister Sophie were a generation ago.

"Hello spring! So lovely to throw these French doors open to greet you!" the Book & Cover in Chattanooga, Tenn., posted on Instagram. 

" 'Daffodils, that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty.' --William Shakespeare." That was the timely spring message on the chalkboard in front of Buffalo Books & Coffee in Buffalo, Minn. 

Today:
All Things Considered: Sen. Cory Booker, author of Stand (St. Martin's Press, $29, 9781250436733).

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

Trainspotting the Musical, a stage musical version of Irvine Welsh's 1993 novel Trainspotting, will begin performances July 15 at Theatre Royal Haymarket, with opening night set for July 22. Playbill reported that the production will star Robbie Scott in the role immortalized by Ewan McGregor in the 1996 film adaptation.

Welsh is adapting the story as the musical's book writer, and the score will feature some of the songs from the film's soundtrack, along with "original confrontational and celebratory songs" written by Welsh and dance music pioneer Stephen McGuinness, aka Steve Mac, Playbill noted. Caroline Jay Ranger conceived the project and is directing.

The production features choreography by Christina Andrea; music supervision, orchestrations, and music direction by Stuart Morley; set and costume design by Colin Richmond; video design by Douglas O'Connell; lighting design by Ian Scott; and sound design by Rory Madden for Sonalyst. Additional casting will be announced. 

This Is About an Alligator and Nothing Else by Anna Dempsey won the inaugural £7,500 (about $10,040) Hilary Mantel Prize for Fiction, which was launched last September by AM Heath, the late Booker Prize-winning author's literary agency, along with publisher John Murray, the Bookseller reported. Uduak-Abasi Ekong was named runner-up for A Kind of Resurrection and will receive £2,500 (about $3,345). Dempsey also has been given a place on an Arvon residential writing course and Ekong a place on an Arvon masterclass.

Bill Hamilton, Mantel's agent at AM Heath, said: "The submissions were read by an enthusiastic team of readers from AM Heath and John Murray. The closer we got to a manageable number to recommend to the judges, the bigger the contrasts in the imagination and style and voices of the writers: settings from all around the world, everything from satire to the supernatural, from contemporary to ancient myth. It has been a remarkable testimony to the invention and fluency of aspiring writers of all kinds, and we are delighted to have found our terrific winner and runner-up amongst them."

Judge Nicholas Pearson, Mantel's editor of 18 years, commented: "The first sentence of This Is About an Alligator and Nothing Else immediately makes you sit up and listen. Anna Dempsey gives powerful and mesmeric voice to a 12-year-old girl living with her father on the edge of the Everglades, and all five judges agreed that she should be our winner.

"We were also absorbed by the early chapters of our runner-up, Uduak-Abasi Ekong, whose novel is an atmospheric and seductive ghost story set in modern Lagos. Throughout her career, Hilary Mantel cared deeply for novelists making their first steps, and I feel sure she would have wanted to support these two exceptional writers."

photo: Sammie Martin

Alice Martin is a fiction writer from North Carolina. She received her Ph.D. in literature from Rutgers University and now teaches fiction writing and American literature at Western Carolina University. She lives near Asheville, N.C., with her husband, son, clingy cat, and too many typewriters. Westward Women (St. Martin's Press, March 10, 2026) is her debut novel, part fever dream and part dystopian road trip.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

A literary, feminist thriller set in an alternate 1973, Westward Women is Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven meets Emma Cline's The Girls.

On your nightstand now:

I'm in the middle of finding some tuning-fork texts for my next writing project. So, right now I've got a treasure trove of stories about cult mentalities, complicated female friendships, and intimate possession. The pile currently consists of Sara Gran's Come Closer, Tessa Fontaine's The Red Grove, and Dizz Tate's Brutes.

Favorite book when you were a child:

It's probably a cliché given that my name is Alice, but I've always loved Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. In retrospect, these books were definitely gateway horror texts for me, filled with uncanny alternate universes and subtly threatening companions. I delighted--and delight, still!--in the strangeness of these books, in the way they center the surreal nature of girlhood, and the way they invite readers to try to make sense of nonsense.

Your top five authors:

I'm very aware of the fact that this list changes weekly. But, today:

Margaret Atwood for the way she captures the often unsettling experience of being a woman.

Karen Russell for the way she depicts both the disturbing and wondrous nature of our world, making the familiar unfamiliar all over again.

Carmen Maria Machado for her skilled embrace of embodiment.

Emily Dickinson, to feed my little 19th-century-loving heart and for the way she delights in the process of writing.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah for making me fall in love with the short story form again and for the intensity with which he renders his speculative (and not so speculative...) worlds.

Book you've faked reading:

I'm ashamed to even be admitting here that I haven't read this book, but I've faked having read Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca more times than I can count. This is a book I know I'd love, and one that feels so central to my writerly DNA that to admit I haven't read it feels like admitting I don't actually know how to write the kinds of books I publish. I'll read it one day... soon... I promise.

Book you're an evangelist for:

I love Rebekah Bergman's The Museum of Human History (and actually wrote a rave review of it for Shelf Awareness!). Bergman has such a talent for creating a wistful, haunting, and yet intimate atmosphere in this book. And I'm a sucker for any kind of retold fairy tale, especially one where the author manages to ground the story's surreality in the emotional depths of complex relationships. Bergman hits all those sweet spots while also including the random things I have a strange, specific affinity for: entomology, cults, and road trips.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties still has, I think, one of the best covers of all time. A startling image. A simple design. A fascinating interpretation of the title. I teach it in my college class about book publishing, and I'm always impressed, anew, with how people are drawn in by its promise of fun only to find themselves distressed by the way it threatens to choke.

Book you hid from your parents:

I can't remember which ones, exactly, but there were a number of Tamora Pierce books I hid from my parents. Silly, in retrospect, because those books aren't actually all that racy and because my parents are incredibly open-minded and easygoing people. They never would have been upset at me for reading books that included s-e-x. But, when you're a young reader encountering physical intimacy written down in black-and-white for the first time, there's something fun about hiding it.

Book that changed your life:

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. I was already a big Atwood fan, had already fallen in love with the way she played with narrative structure in The Blind Assassin and the way she captured the intensity and brutality of female friendship in Cat's Eye. But Oryx and Crake was the book of hers I read and thought, "Whoa, you can do that in fiction?" After that book, I never tried to temper or manage the "weirdness" in what I wrote. Now I knew I wasn't the only one drawn to that weirdness, and I certainly wasn't the only one who realized that writing about our world required us to acknowledge the weirdness in it.

Favorite line from a book:

I'm a sucker for first lines. I even used to compete in first-lines-of-literature contests (yes, really). I love how first lines are so full of promise and mystery, how they set the tone for everything after, but also how you aren't quite sure what's going to come next. One of my favorites is the opening line to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow: "A screaming comes across the sky." In context, it's referring to a rocket. But it's a great opening to a book because it works so well without context. It's as if the world itself has ruptured and is letting out the sound we all feel but can't make, like the moment in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway when everyone freezes and simultaneously looks up at the plane passing overhead. It's what we've decided, collectively, is unspeakable made, for a second, recognizable.

Five books you'll never part with:

I like how this question is different from "what are your five favorite books." Those change all the time. But the books I always want on hand have more to do with nostalgia and with what has made me, me. Those books are Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (for the reasons stated above), Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (also discussed above), Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (for comfort and laughs), Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend (to remind me why I write about female friendships), and Louisa May Alcott's Work (to remind me why I love studying and teaching 19th-century American literature).

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

"The first time" effect has lessened for me over the years. When I think about that "wow, I'll never feel like this again" moment, I tend to think of reading in my teenage years. I think of how I felt when I read Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty the first time. I was obsessed with that book all through middle and high school. It was a book I stayed up late reading, that enchanted me. Now, I realize it foretold my interest in the 19th century, in stories about the intensity of female friendships, in alternate worlds. Rather than reading a certain book for the first time again, I'd want to recapture that moment, what it felt like to discover the absolute exhilaration and pure pleasure of reading.

A gateway book that made you like a genre you normally don't read:

I'm typically not a big nonfiction reader. But Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger was a gateway narrative nonfiction book for me. I love the portrait Bissinger paints of a crumbling but still pulsatingly alive Americana town via a cast of incredibly complex characters. Devastating and beautiful. Beautiful in its devastation.

Comedy adventure meets queer cozy romantasy in the immensely enjoyable, constantly funny, and friendship-filled The Last Best Quest Ever by F.T. Lukens (Love at Second Sight), about an adventurer who lied about her accomplishments and must now achieve the "nearly impossible" to save her brother's life.

Decorated quester "Ellinore the Brave" (17, fair-skinned) is ready to retire. She's earned enough gold to buy her parents a house and knows she needs to quit while she's ahead--she doesn't want to push her luck with the whole "hero" charade. If she keeps adventuring, someone might find out she has completed her quests in unorthodox ways: instead of taming the fearsome mountain ancients plaguing a village, she simply rehomed the fire salamanders who were "causing [the] ruckus"; the tale about her vanquishing a golden dragon at 13 years old should really be about how she befriended the dragon (Dave) and paid him to stop terrorizing the populace. But retirement is postponed when Ellinore's wily yet reckless twin brother, Zig, wagers his heart on Ellinore killing the fabled, god-like Elder Beast.

Zig demands to go questing with Ellinore; the pair is also joined by Ellinore's rival, Princet Aven (18, fair-skinned), and two adoring fans: the "absolutely too bubbly" Farrah (Aven's "golden-brown"-skinned teen cousin) and "mage who needs to focus," Rylan (brown-skinned teen bard). Ellinore, to maintain her archetypical persona, chooses the "riskier" paths en route to the beast. Her decisions unsurprisingly land the party in near-death incidents with mythical monsters, magical earthquakes, a haunted forest, and one particularly haughty lord. These setbacks, plus lying to the "unfairly attractive" Aven, send Ellinore spiraling to the conclusion that the real Ellinore can't save anyone.

The Last Best Quest Ever is a droll high-stakes fantasy, a touching found family story, and a satisfyingly slow-burn rivals-to-lovers romance. Ellinore's fear of being discovered a fraud and her budding relationship with Aven complicate her obstacle-ridden journey toward freeing her true self. This cleverly parallels the heavy burden of expectation on Aven, last in line to the throne, who longs to shed their "Pointless Princet" nickname and prove their worth. Lukens packs the D&D-reminiscent journey with excellent, stress-relieving humor--"I wasn't writhing.... I was merely rolling in the dirt"--including a self-proclaimed "delight" of a dragon ("Sir, you are a dragon. You're very conspicuous."... "I could wear a hat."). Lukens delivers a thoroughly entertaining escape that beautifully illustrates the boons of leaning on loved ones. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer

Shelf Talker: A famed adventurer who lied about her feats accepts a death-defying quest to fell a god-like beast in this highly entertaining YA cozy romantasy adventure.