"I want every single person to know that they have a space there and that they belong there, and I feel grateful to be able to be in a position where I can do all of this because of the generosity of the community. I truly feel like when you support your community, your community supports you.... I know I have to make a living to be able to support myself and to keep the store going, but I truly am about the community. As long as I have a place to sleep, food to eat, and the store's lights are on, I'm doing great.... 

"I've lived here my whole life, but I've never met more amazing people than I have through having the bookstore. I've made so many friends and amazing connections in the community, because readers are truly some of the best people--people that just want to learn and expand their knowledge or just escape the world that we currently live in."

Johns Hopkins University Press executive director Barbara Kline Pope will retire February 1. She joined the press in 2017 and since her arrival has, the press said, "steered Hopkins Press, the nation's first university press, through a complex era for academic publishing characterized by industrywide consolidation, shrinking higher education budgets, and the challenges and opportunities associated with the growth of artificial intelligence."

Barbara Kline Pope

Hopkins publishes 120 journals and manages membership for 27 scholarly and professional associations and societies; publishes 120 new books a year and has a backlist of 3,500 titles; distributes books for 18 university presses; and is home to Project MUSE, the massive online scholarship collection that is the leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content.

Pope said, "It's been a privilege to have led such a historic press at a university that has one eye toward that history but another one toward deep and creative innovation. There's an energy and culture here that allows each of us to reach higher. Cultivating that culture at the Press and creating an inclusive environment for all our staff that focuses on learning and on honoring others' dignity has been one of the greatest joys of my career."

Johns Hopkins University president Ron Daniels and interim provost Lainie Rutkow wrote, "Barbara has led the Press with vision, passion, and profound dedication to the cause of scholarly publishing. Throughout the last nine years, Barbara's tenure at the helm of JHUP has truly embodied the Hopkins ethos of bringing the benefits of discovery to the world."

Earlier Pope worked for 34 years at the National Academies Press, the publishing program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, serving as its executive director from 1997 to 2017 and steering its traditional print model through an era of digital innovation. She also has served as president of the Association of University Presses and on the management board at MIT Press.

To Be Read, a new and used bookstore in Greenville, S.C., will host a grand opening celebration for its physical storefront this weekend, August 14-15, at 1256 Pendleton Street, "tucked inside Saltbox in the Village, one of Greenville's most popular commercial areas known for its art businesses," the Post and Courier reported.

"More people need to read," said owner Jen Ostafinski. "We need more bookstores." She moved to Greenville from Chicago several years ago, knowing no one and with few connections, because the city was centrally located and business friendly. 

Her goal from the beginning was to open a bookstore, but it took some work to get there. She started with a mobile book truck that she set up at popular locations like Gather GVL and Swamp Rabbit Cafe, the Post and Courier noted. The bricks-and-mortar in West Greenville is an extension of the book truck, which she will continue to operate for the time being. 

To Be Read offers books and reading-related items. Ostafinski said she wants to curate the selection based on customers' interests, so she encouraged people to request books they'd like to see. The store will also offer a trade-in program.

"Everybody's looking for community, and I feel like bookstores, coffee shops, those third spaces that we lost during Covid, people are kind of wanting that again," she added.

Red Hook Books opened last month at 123 Coffey St. in Brooklyn, N.Y. The Star-Revue reported that co-owners Tanya Chernyak, a former Scholastic book designer, and her husband, Patrick Preziosi, a small press and consignment manager at McNally Jackson, "live in the neighborhood and have always dreamt of opening a bookshop, so when the right space on Coffey Street became available, they jumped on the opportunity."

In addition to offering a mix of new and used books, the owners are hoping the shop will be a "third space" for the community to gather, create art, and discuss books. Their aim is to make the space a neighborhood "living room," available to the community for any clubs and events.

Preziosi, who curates the book selection, prioritizes working with local publishers, including Brooklyn's Archipelago Books. "As for book selection, a lot of it is sourced from my own collection, as well as that of similarly minded friends," he said, "but I'm also inspired by people's curiosity and openness." 

Chernyak is focusing on programming for the shop, including Coptic book-binding classes (the earliest style of bookbinding from Egypt) and book clubs.

The store will also host a Crafty Happy Hour with Good Crafternoon, a creative educational organization run by Red Hook resident Jessie Wayburn. Chernyak is also planning to launch a Plein Air Club this fall where participants will paint around the neighborhood.

Firefly & Fox will move to a new location this fall.

Firefly & Fox in Norfolk, Ontario, Canada, is closing its current location tomorrow, August 15, in advance of moving to a new home, Norfolk Today reported.

Currently residing at 13 Norfolk St., Firefly & Fox will be moving to a new, larger home in downtown Norfolk later this fall. Owner Catherine Wiebe has arranged a series of pop-up appearances between August 15 and the new location's opening, which is tentatively scheduled for mid-October.

The first pop-up appearance will begin Monday at a local cafe; later appearances will include stops at a language and speech clinic as well as an art studio. The pop-ups will feature a curated cross-section of the bookstore's inventory, and customers will be able to pick up special orders.

In late June, the bookstore's previous landlord informed Wiebe that Firefly & Fox needed to vacate its current space by September 1, she told Norfolk Today. While it came as a surprise to Wiebe and her team, they chose to embrace the opportunity to enter a new chapter and grow the bookstore.

Wiebe decided to open an independent bookstore after a chain bookstore closed, leaving the community without a bookstore. Firefly & Fox opened in 2021 and sells general-interest titles for all ages, with an emphasis on children's books and literary fiction, as well as local and Canadian authors.

The exact location of the store's new home, and an official opening date, will be announced in the weeks ahead.

Johanna Fernández, a Dominican American historian "whose authoritative book about the Young Lords helped revive the legacy of that leftist collective, a revolutionary Latino counterpart to the Black Panthers," died on July 30, the New York Times reported. She was 55. Fernández graduated from Brown University in 1992 with a bachelor's degree in English and American civilization, then earned an M.A. in 1996, an M.Phil. in 1999, and a Ph.D. in 2004, all in history from Columbia University.

An associate professor of history at Baruch College, she "was unaware of the Young Lords until her junior year at Brown, when she took a class that covered the radical group and was angered that it had been effectively erased from public memory," the Times noted.

"I'd say that the children of migrants--especially from Latin America--connect more than anyone else with the history of the Young Lords," she said in a 2020 interview with CounterPunch. "Because you wake up and all you see is death and abandoned buildings and you start believing what people and the media say about you.... Then to see your own people take it and shred it and fight it in the streets--that's freedom on a profound personal level."

The Young Lords began as a Chicago street gang "and expanded to New York City in 1969," the Times wrote. "They were a confrontational, anticapitalist collective of Hispanic--mostly Puerto Rican--and Black activists who sought solutions to the deplorable conditions of neighborhoods like the South Bronx and Spanish Harlem." Their history was the subject of Fernández's Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, which she completed in 2004 and later expanded into the book.

"She interviewed me three times over 15 years," journalist Juan González, a founder of the group's New York branch, said. "At first, she didn't know a lot, but she was determined to speak to everyone. She spoke to a lot of people who weren't speaking to each other because of past conflicts."

Her research was impeded by the supposed inaccessibility of extensive surveillance files, more than 500 boxes' worth, that had been accumulated by the New York Police Department's secretive special services division from 1954 to 1972, but in 2014, a significant portion of the records resurfaced during an inventory of a Queens warehouse. The files told the story of "thousands of people and organizations in New York City who fought to make the city more just and democratic and were systematically obstructed by the police," Fernández said in a 2016 interview with the Times.

She used information gleaned from the files in her book, The Young Lords: A Radical History (2020), which won the 2021 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.

As a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh from 2005 to 2006, Fernández grew interested in prison abolition and the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and radio journalist then on death row. She told CounterPunch that visiting Abu-Jamal and other men on death row "transformed me, because you get a sense of a whole country of human beings who've been thrown away."

She wrote and produced Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2010), a documentary about his case; edited a book of his prison writings that was published in 2015; and brought a trove of his papers to a permanent archive at Brown in 2024.

An exhibition about the Latino civil rights movement of the 1960s, which she organized with Felipe Hinojosa of Baylor University, "was scheduled to open last year in Washington under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. But it was shelved after conservative commentators and members of Congress criticized a previous Smithsonian show about Latino history as Marxist," the Times noted. With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the project was revived in June at the Shed in Manhattan as an outdoor exhibition called "Latinx Freedom." It will be on display through this Sunday, August 16, before touring to several American cities.

"She was such a joy--a relentless hard worker who was never satisfied with one answer," Hinojosa. "She took great offense at the kind of anti-Latino sentiment that exists in this country and worked as hard as she could to make people understand the gifts that Latinos bring to the United States."

"Summer is still in full swing, but don't forget, summer reading is due September 1st!" Gramercy Books in Bexley, Ohio, posted on Instagram. "You just have a few weeks to complete your challenge and turn it in for a chance to win some Gramercy giftcards!"

The two most popular books in July at Reading Group Choices were A Founding Mother by Stephanie Dray & Laura Kamoie (Morrow Paperbacks) and Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims by Kate Washington (Beacon Press).

"It's okay to cry over fictional characters. We understand." That was the sidewalk chalkboard message in front of Bookends in North Myrtle Beach, S.C., which noted: "What fictional character has made you cry? My first book sob was for Old Yeller... and then came Beth in Little Women. There have been many more tears shed over fictional characters since!"

"Looking for a great new mystery book? Come to our air conditioned crime fiction oasis just past the hell pit entrance on Warren St., the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City posted on Instagram.

Today:
Science Friday: Deb Haaland, author of A Voice Like Mine: A Memoir (Holt, $28.99, 9781250434227).

Fresh Air repeat: Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown Paperbacks, $21.99, 9780316492928).

Disney Live Action is developing a feature adaptation of The Dallergut Dream Department Store, the fantasy bestseller from Korean author Miye Lee, Deadline reported. Patrick Ness (A Monster Calls, Chaos Walking) will adapt the screenplay. Executive v-p of production Jessica Virtue is overseeing the project for Disney Live Action.

The first installment in a trilogy, the novel "follows Penny, who has just landed her dream job--selling dreams to customers at the legendary Dallergut Dream Department Store. But when strange, dangerous things begin to happen to the sleeping clientele, Penny must uncover the mystery before the nightmare spreads beyond the store," Deadline noted. A #1 bestseller in Korea, Lee's novel has sold more than two million copies in more than 20 territories.

When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift has won the £2,026 (about $2,735) Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel published in the U.K. last year. According to the Guardian, the winning novel "follows two women across half a century in a near-future Britain.... Their separate journeys eventually converge in 2070."

Chair of judges Andrew M. Butler called When There Are Wolves Again "a story of environmental change and possible recovery."

Describing the winner as an "ambitious study in the power of long-term hope in the face of climate breakdown," Tom Hunter, the award's director, added: "Science fiction at its most powerful is often not about predicting the future but showing us that no one future has to be inevitable."

(photo: Cade Twilley)

Seven Machina Rasmussen was created in a lab from the remnants of a crashed UFO in an audacious attempt to create the world's gayest computer. Government officials claimed under duress that she is an astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. Rasmussen also writes science fiction under the pen name C.M. Fields, with recent works appearing in Clarkesworld, Diabolical Plots, and Neon Hemlock. She haunts the Internet as @toomanyspectra, and blurry images of her corporeal form occasionally manifest in Brooklyn. Her debut nonfiction is Cloudy with a Chance of Starships: How the Drake Equation Reveals the Odds of Life in the Cosmos (Princeton University Press, August 4, 2026).

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Are we alone in the universe? Princeton University Press asked astronomy's gayest and most terminally online autist to find out.

On your nightstand now:

Books that live on my nightstand, in my bed, and wedged between the box frame and the wall. Which ones am I actually actively reading? I'll never tell.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
A Larger Reality, collection of essays and poetry by Ursula K. Le Guin and commentary from scholars
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector (translated by Katrina Dodson)
Entangled States by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair
The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey
Work to Do by Jules Wernersbach

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Chronicles of Narnia! I would read all seven books back-to-back over and over again. I still have the omnibus, which has a million water stains because I would read it in the bathtub. I was just so completely pulled into the storytelling. In my fiction, I'm always trying to re-create that complete absorption that captivated me as a child. And when I was very little, I loved Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland so much that I had the entire book memorized. My mom would take me and my book to parties and amaze people with her toddler who could read.

Your top five authors:

N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy and short story collection, How Long 'Til Black Future Month, I consider to be some of the best science fiction of the decade. Dan Simmons wrote my favorite sci-fi series, the Hyperion Cantos. That's my gold standard of world-building. Jeff VanderMeer (the Southern Reach series) writes the weirdest, most brain-melting prose I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness) is the intellectual equivalent of staring at the sun (incomparably brilliant). Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series taught the power of committing to an absolutely insane premise so hard that it permanently alters the brain chemistry of gay people around the world.

Book you've faked reading:

This is really terrible of me, but I've never read Contact by Carl Sagan. I've never even seen the movie. I have read several books by Sagan, I've met Jill Tarter (on whom the book is based), and I like to think I'm in the top 100 people the government would abduct to Area 51 to attempt first contact, but I have not read Contact. This is my cross to bear.

Book you're an evangelist for:

I am the #1 fan of the Soviet dystopian novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. We may have inspired both Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. It was the first book the Soviet Union banned as an act of censorship, so in 1924 it was smuggled to the United States and published there. It was only unbanned in the Soviet Union in 1988. I have TWO tattoos about We: one is of the antihero, I-330, and the other is the words NO FINAL REVOLUTION from my elbow to my wrist.

Book you've bought for the cover:

A novella called The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi. I saw a signed copy at Wondercon 2024 and the cover absolutely blew me away. It's a great read too!

Book you hid from your parents:

I'm not sure how this happened but when I was 11, my grandmother passed away and I inherited her Nora Roberts collection. So before I ever took what passed for sex ed in my hometown I was reading '90s/'00s bodice rippers like The Calhoun Women series and Carolina Moon. This probably had no effect on my psychosexual development or romantic expectations.

Book that changed your life:

Okay, this is genuinely a crazy story. In high school I wanted to be a band director, but an internship at a local elementary school convinced me that I was not cut out to teach public school. So around graduation I quit my music major and had absolutely not the slightest clue what to do with my life anymore. But one day my parents went to the Sears at the mall for car tires and left me to wander around by myself. I walked into the Borders and saw a book on the front table called The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. I cannot tell you why I, a C student, decided to pick up a book about astrophysics. But I did. And you know what. It was written so accessibly that it convinced me in one afternoon that I could be an astrophysicist. And the rest is history.

Favorite line from a book:

In my humble opinion, the single greatest line ever penned is this one by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "The ships hung in the air in much the same way that bricks don't." Brilliant. The pinnacle of literature. Imagine having the audacity to craft such a bold simile. This sentence alone makes Adams one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time.

Five books you'll never part with:

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (signed in 2018)
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (my high school copy)
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Bradley W. Carroll and Dale A. Ostlie
Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin

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

The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. Absolute banger. Insert 100 fire emojis here. It's got festering lifelong thirst for revenge. It's got lesbians. It's got the most elaborate fantasy economics system I've ever read in my life. The prose alone makes me shake my fist at the heavens and rend my clothes. Every time I think about Dickinson's descriptions of scenery I want to chew on batteries. Seth if you are reading this, please take all the time you need to perfect Book Four. Also please come to my biweekly art salon here in Bushwick.

Your favorite bookstore:

Great question. The answer is Hive Mind Books here in Brooklyn. Hive Mind is a queer independent bookstore where I spend 90% of my productive hours. It is staffed by the nicest people in the universe. It is sunny and full of plants and always smells like espresso and fresh paper. The sticker collection is unparalleled. Plus they adopted my Labubu when he fell off my bag. Shout-out to barista, bookseller, and queer icon Rain, who (ironically?) is god's brightest ray of sunshine.

Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, August 18:

Delusional by James Patterson and James O. Born (Little, Brown, $30, 978-0316569835) is the 18th Michael Bennett thriller. 

Brain Damage by Freida McFadden (Poisoned Pen Press, $32.99, 9781464290817) is a psychological thriller about a doctor who loses her memory after being shot in the head.

The Book of Chuck by LaToya Watkins (Tiny Reparations Books, $30, 9780593854549) follows four generations of a Texas family with an inherited curse.

The Calamities by Chuck Wendig (Del Rey, $32, 9798217091812) is the first book in the Fiends dark fantasy series. 

That Night by Gillian McAllister (Morrow, $30, 9780063497122) follows siblings who cover up an accidental death while on vacation.

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Durán (Avid Reader Press/S&S, $30, 9781668221402) reveals the rise of tech-authoritarianism and digital feudalism championed by the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism by Jared Huffman (W.W. Norton, $28.99, 9781324130482) exposes a religious extremist movement working to destroy democracy.

Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail by Earl Swift (Mariner, $32, 9780063265431) tracks the author's experiences on the Appalachian Trail and his proximity to a murder of two hikers in 1990.

Spy Grandma by Celina Frenn, illus. by Lucas Elliott (Aladdin, $13.99, 9781665959636) is a middle-grade graphic novel in which two kids are forced to stay with their grandmother for the summer and discover she's a retired spy reentering the world of espionage.

One Person by Wee Hae-June, illus. by Yael Frankel (Blue Dot, $19.95, 9781736226421) is a picture book that highlights the importance of kindness.

Palestine: A Primer by Rashid Khalidi (Godwin Books, $25.99, 9781250376046) is an illustrated YA guide to Palestine.

Small-Batch Breads: 50 Recipes for Loaves, Buns, and Flatbreads Made with One Cup of Flour by Rebecca Eisenberg (Ten Speed Press, $32, 9780593837726) is by the creator of The Practical Kitchen.

Paperbacks:
What Happened Yesterday by Matt Sturniolo (Brightray Publishing, $21.99, 9781956464610).

Back for Blood: Never Whistle at Night Part II, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (Vintage, $20, 9798217007622).

I Punched an Alien and Now We're in Couples Therapy by Kimberly Lemming (Berkley, $20, 9780593818657).

Something About September: A Cozy Fall Romance by Julia McKay (Putnam, $20, 9798217180080).

Infidelity, missing persons, drugs, mental health conditions, and murder: these are just a few of the hallmarks of small-town, rural America. That's what one might conclude, at any rate, based on works such as David Lynch's cinema classic Blue Velvet and West of Loveland, the fourth installment in the series of Grouse County novels by Tom Drury (The Driftless Area; Pacific). The underbelly of the town in Drury's story may not be as seedy as the one in Lynch's film, but in its quiet way, this work exposes tensions in a Midwestern community where anonymity is impossible, secrets are common knowledge, and resentments are barely concealed beneath the diaphanous surface of neighborliness.

It all starts with a gun. Rocky is 15. His parents abandoned him to become watchmakers in Europe, leaving his aunt Helen as his guardian. The locals consider Rocky odd, in part because of his "runaway parents and a lisp," and for other supposedly effeminate traits such as crossing his legs "like a girl." As the novel opens, Rocky and Helen are driving home from an unsuccessful pheasant hunt. Helen asks Rocky to pull over when she sees a revolver by the side of the road. She brings it home "so that [they] can dispose of it in a way that nobody gets hurt."

Readers can find out for themselves whether, in true Chekhovian fashion, the gun introduced at the start of the novel eventually goes off. But West of Loveland is much more than that. The gun's discovery is only the first of many incidents involving the narrative's enormous cast, among them the town sheriff; his wife, an amateur photographer who has an affair with a club owner; her ex-husband, a 70-year-old man who has been "a thief, a plumber, a carpenter, a hauler of heavy things, a thief again"; a lounge hostess who did television ads long ago and one day disappeared; a pastor who feels helpless over her inability to comfort the townsfolk; and a man who knows something about the gun but must spend time in a facility for psychiatric evaluation.

West of Loveland is the type of gentle novel that is a series of quiet confrontations rather than dramatic clashes. To Drury's credit, the book is not bucolic but rather a perceptive, unsentimental portrait of middle American life. That's the hallmark of an empathetic writer with a lot to say. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

Shelf Talker: Tom Drury's West of Loveland, the fourth in his series of Grouse County novels, is a quiet story of infidelity, surface tensions, and even murder among the residents of a small Midwestern town.