Libro.fm will soon offer e-books in addition to audiobooks, giving independent bookstores more ways to sell digital books. The expansion comes after years of bookseller feedback, the company said, and booksellers will be the first group to have access to e-books on Libro.fm, providing critical input on final adjustments before a wider launch. 

E-books and audiobooks will be in the same Libro.fm app on iOS and Android, and readers will be able to navigate between the two. With LibroSync, readers who have bought both the audiobook and e-book versions of a title will be able to toggle between them or follow the text while listening. Libro.fm credits will be able to be used for audiobooks or e-books, which can be purchased individually, too. Booksellers will also receive hundreds of e-book ARCs every month in addition to advance audiobook copies, and Libro.fm members will have access to exclusive e-book offers.

Lee Hooyboer, Libro.fm senior manager of bookseller partnerships, said, "Especially over the past few years, we've seen how readers want to divest from Amazon. They want to support their indie because they recognize how important these third places are for their community. And now they can support them all the more with e-books on Libro. These dollars will make a huge difference."

Mark Pearson, Libro.fm co-founder and CEO, said, "Since co-founding Libro, I've always imagined us offering more than audiobooks, and e-books are a natural next step. We've built an audiobook platform that booksellers are proud to recommend to customers, and they've regularly asked us to do the same for e-books. As a 100% employee-owned company with no outside investors, we consider booksellers to be our investors. Their input guides every decision we make."

All My Friends Books held a ribbon cutting and grand opening celebration on July 30 for its second store, at 3 E. Genesee St. in Skaneateles, N.Y. The bookseller opened its first location last year on Main St. in Cortland. 

"Skaneateles, you really showed up," co-owner Haley Flannery posted on social media. "We're still riding the high from our opening weekend. Thank you to everyone who came to the ribbon cutting, brought friends, shared the news, and welcomed us so warmly to town. And, because yesterday happened to be my birthday, I have to say... seeing this much excitement and love for our new store was a pretty incredible birthday present. We're so happy to be here."

In June, Flannery told the Cortland Standard that the second location and expansion were possible because of the reliable staff and the immensely positive community response All My Friends Books had received in Cortland. That support, combined with the connections she has made with other community agencies, inspired the confidence to expand operations into a new market.

"I'm most excited to bring to Skaneateles the same spirit we've brought to Cortland," she said. "Which is to share books in community with other readers, to spread joy through reading and to really spark discovery with our curated selection. It's been wonderful to do that here and I'm excited to do that with a new customer base."

Books & Mortar in Grand Rapids, Mich., which was set to close permanently this month, will reopen thanks to community support, MLive reported. Last month, store owner Jenny Kinne announced that August 1 would be the 10-year-old bookstore's last regular day in business, saying at the time that she was "completely burned out" and "deeply exhausted." In the wake of the announcement, some community members reached out about the possibility of buying the bookstore and reopening its doors later this year.

While she was unable to provide details just yet, Kinne wrote in an update posted July 30: "We won't be able to share full details until August, but please hang tight. Something beautiful is coming. In the meantime, Books & Mortar's current booksellers will be continuing offerings such as Sapphic Book Club through Many Hands Community Bookstore.

"All of this is such a testament to Books & Mortar's community of love and support. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Grand Rapids. Happy to say that this isn't a goodbye. It's a see you soon. Our little neighborhood shop may just find its next chapter."

Jonathan Shotwell and Christopher Roe founded Books & Mortar in 2016. Kinne worked there as a bookseller before buying the store in 2018, and in 2021, she purchased a building and moved the bookstore across the street.

Leigh Haber is joining Sourcebooks in the newly created role of v-p, executive director of communications and special projects, effective September 1. In that position, she will lead the company's external corporate communications, including engagement with the media and key partners such as Penguin Random House. She will also oversee special projects, serve on the editorial acquisitions board and leadership committee, and contribute strategic thinking across brands, imprints, and philanthropic initiatives. She will also continue to write independently about books and interview authors across a variety of platforms, including her own Substack.

Leigh Haber

Haber has a strong background as a publicity executive and editor, and for 10 years she headed book coverage at O, the Oprah Magazine and later at Oprah Daily, while also heading Oprah's Book Club. More recently, she has written about books for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, and has conducted author interviews for Substack's The Ink. Over the past year, she has also served as a part-time consultant to Sourcebooks, advising on strategic communications, publicity, and editorial matters.

She has long championed writers, shaped conversations around books, and connected authors with audiences. She has worked with such authors as Alice Walker, Al Gore, Steve Martin, Bill Maher, Candace Bushnell, Percival Everett, and Terry Gross, among others.

Sourcebooks CEO and publisher Dominique Raccah called Haber "a force: smart, fearless, deeply connected to writers, and endlessly curious about what makes readers care. She brings extraordinary editorial judgment, communications savvy, and the kind of big-picture thinking that turns good ideas into meaningful impact. She has already made us better, and I'm thrilled that she's stepping into this larger role to help shape what Sourcebooks does next."

Haber said, "When I first met Dominique a year and a half ago, I was dazzled by her energy, boundless business acumen, and clear brilliance. I am in awe of the team she has assembled and the dynamic company they have built, where transparency and daily learning are paramount. I couldn't be more excited to take on this new challenge."

Barnes & Noble in Caspar, Wyo.

Barnes & Noble is opening three new stores this week: in Commack, N.Y., on Wednesday, August 5; and in Livingston, N.J., and Caspar, Wyo., today, Friday, August 7.

The store in Commack, N.Y., will span more than 10,000 square feet and will reside in the Veterans Memorial Plaza shopping center at 58 Veterans Memorial Hwy. It replaces a B&N location that closed in the area in 2024. Jen Calonita, author of Isle of Ever (Sourcebooks Young Readers), will cut the ribbon on August 5 and sign copies of her book; Sarah Beth Durst, author of Sea of Charms (Bramble), will also be on hand Wednesday for a signing. 

The Livingston store, at 530 W. Mt. Pleasant Ave. in the Livingston Shopping Center, replaces a B&N that closed two weeks ago in the Livingston Mall. The new 25,000-square-foot store includes a B&N Cafe. The store will open to the public at 9 a.m. Friday. There will be an appearance by the costumed character the Cat in the Hat, who will also feature in a special storytime over the weekend.

The new 14,000-square-foot bookstore in Casper, Wyo., is located at 600 Newport Rd., next to Marshall's in the newly constructed Blackmore Marketplace. The store is celebrating its grand opening today with author Craig Johnson cutting the ribbon and signing copies of his newest Longmire novel, The Brothers McKay (Viking).

B&N has opened 10 stores in New York over the last three years and will open another four in the state before the end of the year. The Livingston B&N is the first to open in N.J. in 2026; another will open in Wayne, N.J., in the months ahead. This marks the second B&N to open in Wyoming, joining the store in Frontier Plaza, Cheyenne. The company plans to open 60 stores in 2026.

Ursula Hegi, "a novelist who drew on her childhood in post-World War II Germany to write searing books about silence, community, and historical memory," including the bestselling Stones from the River, died on July 27, the New York Times reported. She was 80. Born in the western half of occupied Germany just after WWII, she immigrated to the U.S. after high school and became an American citizen, though her native country served as the wellspring for much of her writing.

Ursula Hego (photo: Gordon Gagliano)

She was best known for a cycle of four novels, set during the first half of the 20th century, that take place in the fictional German town of Burgdorf. Beginning with Floating in My Mother's Palm (1990), the quartet explored the ways in which the people of the town both acknowledge and ignore the dark passage of history around them. Burgdorf, she wrote, was the sort of provincial locale where life "happened slower and later than in most other places." 

"Hegi's genius lies in her ability to recreate the Nazi era without ever calling up its nomenclature," Barbara Finkelstein wrote in a Chicago Tribune review. "There is not a word in here about gas chambers, Gestapo agents or Jews."

Hegi's second Burgdorf novel, Stones from the River (1994), launched with a modest original print run of 25,000, but in 1997 Oprah Winfrey chose it for her year-old Oprah's Book Club, driving the book onto bestseller lists and prompting the publisher to print 1.5 million hardcover copies and 500,000 paperbacks. The other books in the Burgdorf Cycle are The Vision of Emma Blau and Children and Fire.

Stones from the River revolves around Trudi Montag, a dwarf who is "both an outcast and a fixture of town life, an indispensable gossip and fixer," the Times noted, adding: "In Ms. Hegi's hands, Trudi becomes a sharp lens for examining the ways in which Burgdorf--and Germany writ large--responds to the Nazi era."

Hegi contended she did not set out to write books of politics or ideas, describing such an approach as propaganda, not literature. "We can't have the fiction be a mouthpiece for our ideas," she told the journal Focus on Literatur (now Focus on German Studies) in 1996. "If I really want to make a point--if I want to write about an idea--I do that in nonfiction and I come straight forward and say it."

In addition to her nine novels, Hegi wrote two books of short stories, a children's book, and a nonfiction work, Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America (1997), for which she interviewed hundreds of German Americans who had been born around the Nazi era, as she had.

Her honors include the Italian Grinzane Cavour prize for best foreign fiction, an NEA Fellowship, and a PEN/Faulkner Award, along with five PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards. She served as a juror for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle, and taught writing at institutions including Stony Brook Southampton, Barnard College, the University of California at Irvine, and Bread Loaf, as well as Eastern Washington University earlier in her career.

In interviews, she spoke "about the extensive historical research she did for each novel, building what she called the scaffolding of her literary world. But she emphasized the importance of turning that research into compelling prose," the Times noted.

"If you want to look at fiction as the building, I had the building but I also had the scaffolding that helped me to build this building," she told Focus on Literatur. "And if we were to leave the scaffolding on the building it would be very ugly. So it was a real challenge and took a lot of revisions to massage the research into the text."

Book cover designer Jared Bartman, who designed the cover for Jacqueline Harpman's We Were Forbidden (Transit Books), discussed the art and business of book cover design at the recently opened River City Reading Room in Peoria, Ill.

Magnolia & Main Bookshop in Ridgeway, Va., shared pics of the shop's creative take on literally advertising a half-off sale, with "HA OF BOO" on one side and "LF F KS" on the other. 

"We are so honored to have the winning dress from @madisonreadingproject's Read(y) to Wear in our window this month!! Stop by to check it out in person at Ink & Ivy Book Boutique!" Ink & Ivy Book Boutique in Madison, Wis., posted on Instagram.

"We are open!! Come hang out!!" Lost & Bound Bookstore in Oklahoma City, Okla., posted.

At HarperCollins Focus:

Kevin Smith has been promoted to v-p of publicity.

Sicily Lippincott has been promoted to v-p of marketing.

---

Kaila Mundell-Hill has been promoted to associate publicist at Berkley Books.

Today:
Fresh Air broadcasts a 1997 interview with Monty Roberts, author of The Man Who Listens to Horses: The Story of a Real-Life Horse Whisperer (Ballantine, $20, 9780345510457). Roberts died last Friday at age 91.

Netflix has begun development on a film adaptation of Deep End, the bestselling New Adult romance novel from Ali Hazelwood (The Love Hypothesis), "after locking down rights in a major pre-empt prior to publication, " Deadline reported. Published in 2025 by Berkley, Deep End "centers on the steamy college romance between a competitive diver and an ace swimmer jumping into forbidden waters."

Laura Kosann is writing the script, with Shawn Levy and Dan Levine set to produce via 21 Laps, alongside Alex Cooper and Matt Kaplan from Unwell Productions. Hazelwood will exec produce, along with Matthew Janzen for Unwell Productions, with Emily Morris and Emily Feher overseeing for 21 Laps.

"News of the feature adaptation underscores Netflix's commitment to the BookTok space, and to the red-hot New Adult space, in particular," Deadline wrote. "The streamer has won over New Adult authors who have seen book sales bolstered by adaptation buzz, as in the case of People We Meet on Vacation, an adaptation of Emily Henry's bestselling romance released earlier this year."

The shortlist in six categories has been released for the 2026 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for U.K. Nature Writing, which celebrates nature, conservation, and environmental writing, spotlighting "the growing genre of nature writing and inspire readers to connect more deeply with the natural world." Check out the shortlisted titles here.  

Winners will be named at an awards ceremony on September 17. In addition to the six individual category winners, two titles will be honored as the overall winners: one for adult writing and one for children's writing. These will be chosen from the respective category winners and will be celebrated as the Wainwright Prize Book of the Year and the Wainwright Children's Prize Book of the Year. Both overall winners will receive £2,500 (about $3,365), with the remaining category winners each awarded £500 (about $670).

Of this year's shortlist, Wainwright Prize ambassador and 2026 host, Henry Bird, said: "Each of the categories for this year's Wainwright Prize reflects the remarkable breadth of stories and ideas explored through environmental literature. Over the past few weeks of reading, I've traversed bogs and scaled treetops, been transported thousands of years into the past and generations ahead to the future, felt pangs of despair at what this world has lost and glimmers of hope at what it stands to gain. With the natural world in crisis, I'd go so far as to say that we need these books, now more than ever."

photo: Sean Kara

Emily Doyle is the author of the short story collection Please Don't Touch the Body (Bloomsbury, July 14), which was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Literary Hub, the Chicago Review of Books, and Debutiful. Her work has appeared in publications such as Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, and the Sun, and she has received support from the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Abraham Lincoln Polonsky Endowment, and the Bergman Estate. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Please Don't Touch the Body is a collection of genre-bending stories about what's simultaneously wonderful and fucked up about being a woman.

On your nightstand now:

On Morrison, Namwali Serpell's excellent book analyzing Toni Morrison's genius; Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky's engrossing science fiction novel about whether humanity can overcome its tendency to destroy itself through infighting (we'll see what happens--I'm only halfway through); and The Flayed Man, the terrifying and entertaining debut vampire novel from my friend Chloe Lauter.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I must cheat and choose two books: Beverly Cleary's Beezus and Ramona, following a pair of wacky sisters' suburban misadventures, and C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, about the journey of four siblings through a magical land. I'll never forget the breathlessness with which I first read the wardrobe scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when the kids transition from their war-torn world to the fantastical Narnia. As the love child of the distinct sensibilities of Cleary and Lewis, I think it makes sense that my work straddles the everyday and the wondrous.

Your top five authors:

Nothing surprising here, but: Claire Keegan, N.K. Jemisin, Madeline Miller, Toni Morrison, and E.M. Forster. Titans, all.

Book you've faked reading:

As an undergraduate English major at U.C. Berkeley, I was assigned many a novel by William Faulkner and finished not one. For the first half of every book, I would find his writing mesmerizing, and then what I saw as the deep nihilism at the heart of his stories would begin to demoralize me, and finally at around the 75% mark I couldn't bring myself to turn another page.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It's one of those books I think almost anyone would love--accessible, propulsive, heartrending, and stylistically adventurous.

Book you've bought for the cover:

As a teen, I was addicted to Barnes & Noble's collected works series, which were enormous, thin-paged tomes and, for that reason, uncomfortable to actually read. The collected works of Edgar Allan Poe stands out in my memory--black pleather with a faux-gold design of a raven. Perfect.

Book you hid from your parents:

I never had to hide any books from my parents because, for some reason, books almost entirely escaped the purview of their religiously fueled censorship. My dad even bought me a copy of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange when I was 13, the one with the cover of a face on fire. He was reluctant about that one, but after I assured him that it was free of inappropriate content (a statement we both must have known to be a lie), he bought it for me. My parents let me have my books.

Book that changed your life:

Throughout my preteen years, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë was for me the thing--and it didn't change me entirely for the better, by the way. For a long time I thought Catherine and Heathcliff were the height of romance. Now I understand they were the height of codependence.

Favorite line from a book:

I'm fascinated by this line from Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis: "Was he an animal if music could captivate him so?" It's a question that turns in on itself, emphasizing the protagonist's loneliness just when he believes he is connecting with others, tempting the reader to answer no in one moment and yes in the next, and bringing to mind the inherent difficulties we humans face when we root our humanity in a disavowal of our animality.

Five books you'll never part with:

R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries, Alice Munro's Runaway, N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, E.M. Forster's Maurice, and Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties. All precisely but, in important ways, wonkily written--my favorite.

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

Susanna Clarke's Piranesi because it gave me the same feeling that I got when I first read Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe--that goose-pimply feeling of being enchanted by another world. What a difficult and magnificent thing for a writer to do for an adult reader. Clarke cast a powerful spell when she wrote that book.

An author whose next book you're eagerly awaiting:

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. As he's proven through his painfully perceptive books, Friday Black and Chain-Gang All-Stars, Adjei-Brenyah sees systems and people with a clarity that frightens and fascinates. Everyone should be studying his work. I think he's one of the most exciting authors alive today, and I look forward to what he publishes next.

Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, August 11:

Under the Falls: A Novel by Richard Russo (Knopf, $30, 9780593805107) follows a man's tumultuous return to his small town after fleeing 18 years prior.

The Secrets We Hide by Karin Slaughter (Morrow, $32, 9780063458789) is book two in the North Falls thriller series.

Sunrise: A Novel by Téa Obreht (Random House, $29, 9781984855534) explores a ghost town in the Wyoming mountains through three characters across 100 years.

The True Meaning of Love: A Novel by Danielle Steel (Delacorte, $29, 9780593973141) follows six Ukrainians during the 2022 Russian invasion.

You'll Love It Here: A Novel by Natalie Sue (Morrow, $28, 9780063320437) focuses on a woman who becomes the reluctant super of her apartment building after her landlady has an accident.

Shy by Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton, illus. by Eva Byrne (Abrams books for Young Readers, $17.99, 9781419763205) is a picture book featuring a timid pup who learns the power of music.

Hollow Magic by Mars Lauderbaugh (Feiwel and Friends, $18.99, 9781250344809) is a young adult graphic novel about a 17-year-old witch raised in the world of the fey.

What to Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking: Make It Fast by Caroline Chambers (Union Square & Co., $35, 9781454963264) provides 100 dinner recipes that require fewer than 30 minutes of prep time.

A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving: Lessons on Love, Care, and Survival: A Memoir by Virginia Eubanks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $32, 9780374611798) is a memoir about caregiving and collateral PTSD.

Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit by Sam Roberts (Bloomsbury, $29, 9781639733651) is written by a New York Times obituarist.

Coffee Shop at Home: The Ultimate Guide to Making Your Favorite Coffee Drinks by Katerina Diaz (Clarkson Potter, $24.99, 9798217035106) includes 60 recipes for making fancy coffee at home.

Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals about Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well by Daniel E. Lieberman (Knopf, $35, 9780593537992) uses evolutionary biology to investigate modern diets. 

Paperbacks:
World's Okayest Oracle (Reluctantly) Seeks Demon by Olivia Dade (Berkley, $20, 9780593818220).

A Summer of Stars by Liana Cincotti (Forever, $18.99, 9781538779279).

Bonfire and Bliss Bookstore by Brittanée Nicole (Putnam, $20, 9798217180219).

On November 23, 2022, 77-year-old retired chemist David Perry died in a hospital bed installed in his bungalow in Norwich, England, nine days after receiving a diagnosis of metastatic esophageal cancer. Death of an Ordinary Man is his daughter-in-law novelist Sarah Perry's frank, compassionate account of those final days, her first work of nonfiction and a moving meditation on death and life.

Perry (The Essex Serpent; Melmoth) wastes no time setting the stage for David's demise. She describes an afternoon tea date at which she waited with her husband, Robert, David's only child. She observed, as David approached, that "there was death in his gait, in his grim and concentrated stare, in the dense grey pallor on his cheek." He was "more or less a dead man," she concluded. David's feeling "in a muddle" and difficulty swallowing soon led to a blood test, an endoscopy, and a biopsy that confirmed advanced cancer, a diagnosis that her self-effacing father-in-law accepted with equanimity.

David spent much of his married life caring for a wife disabled by rheumatoid arthritis; she predeceased him by 10 years. He enjoyed stamp collecting, sudoku, and gardening, and was a faithful parishioner at his local Baptist church. But it immediately became clear to Perry and Robert that his precipitous decline would rob him irrevocably of those modest pleasures. Even as Perry bluntly confessed her fear that she wouldn't be up to the demands of caregiving, she and Robert proved more than equal to that challenge. They also had the aid of National Health Service doctors and hospice caregivers, who occasionally became the targets of her anger and frustration, but who, for the most part, performed their jobs with competence, empathy, and grace.

Perry's writing has an unassuming lyricism that makes even the hardest moments of this story resonate. Her expertly modulated prose mirrors the compression of David's final days. Most striking are a collection of recurring images--red geraniums that improbably flowered well into the fall, the red numbers on the clock radio in David's bedroom, and parrots on the wallpaper--that take on a revelatory quality and serve as reminders that life persists even in the face of impending death.

Perry's opportunity to be intimate with David's dying brings with it not merely a deeper understanding of death but an appreciation of the preciousness of the life that precedes it: "Now I understand there are no ordinary lives--that every death is the end of a single event in time's history: an event so improbable it represents a miracle, and irreplaceable in every particular." Death of an Ordinary Man is not an easy book, but it's an undeniably important one: brave, candid, and above all, painfully beautiful. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: Sarah Perry's first full-length nonfiction work recounts her father-in-law's final days and movingly explores the border between life and death.