"I'm sometimes very frustrated at our industry, probably more than ever now, but there are no days when I don't think that what we do is important. There are no days that I don't think about what life would look like if we didn't have bookstores like mine.

"Human connection is so important for us. We are meant for connection. And that's what bookselling is, that's what books are. They are connection. And I think that's what a bookstore is. The connection you get from a bookstore, even if you don't know anyone there, is so important. And that's why we do it. Bookselling is a labor of love."

Lovestruck in Seattle in progress.

Lovestruck in Seattle, a romance-focused bookstore in Seattle, Wash., will host a grand-opening celebration this Sunday, July 13, Secret Seattle reported.

The store will carry a variety of romance titles, along with gifts, apparel, and other nonbook items from sister shop Palm Creative. The bookstore's first home, at 12315 Lake City Way N.E. in Seattle's Lake City neighborhood, will be a temporary one, with Lovestruck in Seattle hoping to move into a permanent space after October.

The opening celebration will run from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. on Sunday, and will feature snacks, refreshments, and free bookmarks and stickers with each purchase. The first 25 people will receive a free tote bag, and any customers who shop at Lovestruck in Seattle through the rest of July can enter to win a giveaway.

Owner Ryan Billingsley

Dad Suggests Books children's bookstore made its debut last month at 2526 E. Mission Blvd., Suite 110, in Fayetteville, Ark. Owner Ryan Billingsley posted on Instagram at the time: "We quietly and secretly opened the doors to our new bookstore today! Thanks to everyone who stopped by to make the day very special. There were a few squeals of joy from kids--and one even said this is my new happy place. So really what more could you ask for?"

Billingsley, a father who has been operating an online site recommending books for kids for seven years, told the Fayetteville Observer, "We have two kids and we've always had a ton of books and games in the home. Before becoming a bookseller, I was a middle school teacher in Lincoln. In 2018 I started a website called DadSuggests.com to write about the books and board games that our family enjoyed."

Billingsley added that he started the project because he was having a hard time finding the books he and his family enjoyed, noting: "After writing about books and games for many years, we opened up a very small store in 2022 to kind of test the waters with a children's bookshop curated with the stuff we enjoy. Many people that discovered our small shop would offer us very encouraging and kind feedback about the type of book selection we were curating--and this year we decided to jump in head first by building an exciting flagship location in East Fayetteville."

In addition to books and games, the new shop also includes a reading room and other little nooks for kids to enjoy books on site, including "a special door" for kids to explore, the Observer wrote.

"From the very beginning I knew that we needed to have a special door," Billingsley said. "Maybe a wardrobe like in the Chronicles of Narnia, maybe a special wall like platform 9 and three quarters, maybe even just a secret bookshelf. I knew a children's bookshop needed a special door to take kids from one place to another--a place that gets their imaginations fired up. And what ended up being a perfect fit for us was a round, green door inspired by The Shire. I consider The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to be some of the very best examples of human imagination, and the perfect amount of geeky for a store called Dad Suggests Books.

"The Shire also perfectly exudes the type of cozy atmosphere we wanted for a quiet reading room--complete with nooks to discover and plenty of books to read with your kids. The reading room is full of books that aren't even for sale, because we want to encourage families to find a comfortable place to sit and read together."

An integral part of New York University's Summer Publishing Institute is visiting independent bookstores in New York City. This year, four students wrote about their impressions of bookstores they visited, which they kindly have shared with Shelf Awareness. On Wednesday, we published Mallory Stock's report on The Ripped Bodice. Yesterday featured Alison Keiser's report on Greenlight Bookstore. Today we have Brianna Angeliz's report on The Strand. On Monday, we'll run another bookstore report.

Kat Pongrace (l.) and Walker Iversen speak with NYU Summer Publishing Institute students. (photos: Brianna Angeliz)

On a blazing hot day, my peers and I from the 2025 cohort of NYU's Summer Publishing Institute walked over to The Strand Book Store and were given a tour by Walker Iversen, events director, and Kat Pongrace, marketing director.

Even before we set foot inside, we had the opportunity to browse through carts of marked-down books. Once inside, we were met with tables of BookTok and staff picks. Everywhere you looked, reading recommendations were coming to life. My personal favorite was the "Blind Book Date" table, where titles were wrapped in white paper with a few handwritten clues--a fun way to read for book enthusiasts and new readers alike.

Kat began by telling us about the store's legacy: "The Strand first opened in 1927 on Fourth Avenue's Book Row, which had 48 used bookstores," she said. "We're the only one that survived, and we moved to this current location in the 1950s." Kat added that they've hosted "almost 100 events in just under two years"--from small gatherings to large public signings and readings.

We went upstairs for the rare book collection tour. On our way upstairs, we passed author signatures--including unexpected gems like Julia Fox and Sofia Coppola. The Strand is a magnet for cultural figures: Olivia Rodrigo, Bella Hadid, and Harry Styles, among many, many others, have stopped by.

The rare book room attracts a range of customers. "Rare book dealers come here from all over the world," Walker told us. The most impressive offering: a $120,000 edition of Ulysses by James Joyce that was illustrated and signed by Henri Matisse. The rare book room is popular in other ways: some couples host weddings in it.

Our tour extended through the Strand's internal workings: the offices, production department, web team, and meeting room. They ship six days a week from a warehouse stocked with books a decade, a century, and even more than 100 years old.

The Strand is one of the epicenters of pop culture in media and film. The bookstore has been rented for shows like Saturday Night Live and The Good Wife. The store itself has appeared in various productions, including Six Degrees of Separation, Tick, Tick... Boom!, and Netflix's Dash & Lily. "Any time you see a New York set with books, odds are those books came from us," Kat shared, explaining that they supply props to shows like Saturday Night Live, sometimes with just 24 hours' notice.

After our q&a session, our cohort was left to shop. I caught up with some of my peers to hear what they think about the Strand. Josie: "Despite my impulse to avoid what people like, I see why people like the Strand." Leo: "Coming from a family business, seeing another one thrive like this is super amazing. The owner had a vision, and the team here has kept it alive." Zoe: "Moments like these--when indie bookstores hold onto and seal who they are as a brand--it's really powerful. It's about building an inclusive brand, not just selling books."

I also asked a few Strand members what their favorite books are and what they love about working at the Strand. William: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Honor and Graalube both emphasized what makes the Strand such a special place to work: "It's the people we work with. We all get along and share a love of books, film, and music." This sense of connection and brand building is what makes the Strand what it is today. And the store keeps expanding, recently opening a location at Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side (in a former Shakespeare & Co. store). The Strand also continues to operate a store on Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side, as well as the Central Park kiosks (weather permitting), which date back to the 1960s. The Strand is more than a bookstore. It's a culture icon, a creative hub, and a thriving community/archive of stories, from the people who walk through the doors to the books on the shelves.

Brianna Angeliz enjoys Muay Thai and watching dramedies. With faith and a whole lot of love, she wants to continue to uplift those in the digital media industry, specifically regarding holistic wellness. Brianna lives in Woodbridge, N.J., with her family.

The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance posted an update yesterday on how some of the North Carolina bookstores in the path of tropical storm Chantal had fared:

"The Regulator in Durham, Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, and Bookmarks in Winston-Salem were among the stores who reported back that their stores and their staff were not harmed, though at Quail Ridge Books, one bookseller who lived closer to Chapel Hill and the Eno River was affected by bridge closures caused by flooding.

"Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill was without power, internet, or phones the following day. They opened despite these challenges and guided customers to books with flashlights. At McIntyre's Books in Fearrington, a funnel cloud sighting in the area set off phone alerts to seek shelter. The staff shuttled customers into the basement until they received an official 'all clear.' In one of the worst hit areas, Southern Pines, The Country Bookshop dealt with some leaks and road closures but considered themselves lucky that it was not worse."

Bob Ditter, longtime sales rep and co-owner of Towne Center Books, Pleasanton, Calif., died on July 5 as a result of a heart attack.

Towne Center Books noted that "Bob was a long-time book person. He loved sharing stories and meeting buyers, booksellers, authors, and publishers during his 40+ years as a publisher's rep. Those experiences fuel many conversations at our bookstore to this day.

"He and his wife, Judy [Wheeler], bought Towne Center Books in 1998. Many know that Saturday was Bob and Judy's 'date night' at the store. They enjoyed spending time together talking about books with anyone who ventured into the store. Bob enjoyed discussing books with friends, family and customers, sharing favorite passages and recommending new and old titles. While sharing a book, he may have slipped a sports comment, fishing story or even a grandchild anecdote into the conversation.

"He would meet you as you walked in the door with a 'have you heard about this [insert book]' and then he would start telling his stories. If you needed a history book (or even if you didn't), you left the store a little more knowledgeable (and more likely than not with a book) after talking with Bob."

The store is putting together a special display of Bob's picks, which should be completed by tomorrow, Saturday, July 12. All are welcome to visit, share a memory, or add a comment to the store's journal.

On Wednesday, Shelf Awareness sent our new Kids & YA Pre-Order E-Blast to more than 200,000 of the country's best book readers. The e-blast went to 228,552 customers of 53 participating independent bookstores.

The mailing features four upcoming titles selected by Shelf Awareness editors and three advertised titles, one of which is a sponsored feature. Customers can buy these books via "pre-order" buttons that lead directly to the purchase page for the title on each sending store's website. A key feature is that bookstore partners can easily change title selections to best reflect the tastes of their customers and can customize the mailing with links, images, and promotional copy of their own.

The pre-order e-blasts are sent the second Wednesday of each month; the next will go out on August 13. This is a free service for indies. Stores interested in learning more can visit our program registration page or contact our partner program team via e-mail.

Ad spots are also available in the Kids & YA Pre-Order E-Blast. For more information contact sales@shelf-awareness.com for details.

For a sample of the July Kids & YA Pre-Order E-Blast, see this one from Breakwater Books, Guilford, Conn.

The titles highlighted in the pre-order e-blast were:

The Book of Dust: The Rose Field by Phillip Pullman (Knopf Books for Young Readers)
Scarlet Morning by ND Stevenson (Quill Tree Books)
Aggie and the Ghost by Matthew Forsythe (Paula Wiseman)
The Executioners Three by Susan Dennard (Tor Teen)

Members of the Minnesota literary community welcomed Cindy Burnett, host of the Thoughts from a Page podcast, to the Twin Cities.

Pictured: (l.-r., front) Kara Thom, Ellie Temple, Tasha Coryell, Lorna Landvik, Sarah Stonich, Sheila O'Connor, Tony Halleen, Priscilla Paton, Nicole Kronzer, Ashley Shelby; (middle) Pamela Klinger-Horn, Shannon Olson, Anika Fajardo, Katie Terhune; (back row) Joan Klinger-Horn, Molly Beth Griffin, Laurie Sigel, Trisha Speed Saskin, Emma Nadler, Curtis Sittenfeld, Lin Salisbury, Rima Parikh, Cindy Burnett, Loretta Elsworth, Angie Ross, Kristi Belcamino, Holly Schellbach, Judity Kisner, Ann Woodbeck, Nigar Alum, Erin O. White, Julie Schumacher, and Mary Webber O'Malley

The two most popular books in June at Reading Group Choices were The Witchstone by Henry H. Neff (Blackstone Publishing) and The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez (Ecco).

"We lose ourselves in books (and we find ourselves there, too)." That was the sidewalk chalkboard message in front of Anthology for Books, Geneseo, Ill., which noted: "Get lost in a good book. Chances are, you'll find yourself there, too!"

At Ingram Publisher Services:

Devyn Nance has been promoted to senior manager of digital marketing.

Giuliana Caranante is joining the company as director of marketing and e-commerce. She was most recently director of marketing and publicity at Quarto and before that held various marketing leadership roles at Hachette Book Group.

The Worst Day: A Plane Crash, A Train Wreck, and Remarkable Acts of Heroism in Washington, D.C. by Bruce Goldfarb (Steerforth Press).

Today:
Fresh Air: Danzy Senna, author of Colored Television: A Novel (Riverhead, $18, 9780593544389).

Actress Greta Lee (Past Lives, Russian Doll) will make her film directorial debut at Searchlight with The Eyes Are the Best Part, based on Monika Kim's bestselling novel. Lee is writing the script, with Matt Jackson and Joanna Lee producing through Jackson Pictures, Lulu Wang through Local Time and Dani Melia. Kim will exec produce.

Daniel Yu, senior v-p of production, and creative executive Taylor Friedman will be overseeing the project for Searchlight Pictures, reporting to co-heads of production and development DanTram Nguyen and Katie Goodson-Thomas. 

Dobby Gibson has won the 2025 Four Quartets Prize for his poem "Hold Everything" from the collection Hold Everything (Graywolf Press). Sponsored by the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, the prize celebrates the multipart poem and is awarded for a unified and complete sequence of poems published in the U.S. in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book.

Judges also selected CAConrad, for Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books), and Morgan Võ, for "To Market" from The Selkie (The Song Cave) as finalists.

Gibson receives $20,000, and each finalist receives $1,000.

---

As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us by Sarah Hurwitz (HarperOne) has been selected as the Summer 2025 Natan Notable Book, sponsored by Natan and the Jewish Book Council and highlighting nonfiction books that "promise to catalyze conversations aligned with the themes of Natan's grantmaking: reinventing Jewish life and community for the twenty-first century, shifting notions of individual and collective Jewish identity, the history and future of Israel, understanding and confronting contemporary forms of antisemitism, and the evolving relationship between Israel and world Jewry." The author receives $5,000 and promotional support.

photo: Cirsty Burton

Benedict Nguyễn  is a dancer and gym buff. Between pistol squats and muscle-ups, she works as a creative producer in live performance. She's written for the Baffler, BOMB, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Vanity Fair, the Brooklyn Rail, the Margins, and other publications. In 2022, she published nasty notes, a redacted e-mail zine on freelance labor. Hot Girls with Balls (Catapult, July 1, 2025) is her debut novel, an outrageous and deeply serious satire about two star indoor volleyball players who juggle unspoken jealousies in their off-court romance ahead of their rival teams' first rematch in a year.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Friends to lovers/secret enemies; volleyball; jealousy; dyke dolls in the straight boys club; horny, hateful, hilarious discourse; literary grumpy sunshine; Six and Green summer.

On your nightstand now:

Tiny books! Tiny, tiny books! Some of these recents could be called novellas, but what are labels anyway? There's Vera Blossom's resounding and humorous essay collection How to Fuck Like a Girl and Katie Yee's wryly contemplative debut novel, Maggie; or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. I don't know how Omar El Akkad wrote the sharply constructed essay collection One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This in such a short timeline but we applaud it for every reason. In poetry, there's Tramaine Suubi's stellar debut collection, Phases, structured around the moon, and Zefyr Lisowski's dazzling and dizzying (both compliments) Girl Work.

Katie Kitamura's Audition and Michael Amherst's The Boyhood of Cain paint such vivid character studies and they're tiny books! Must mention Andrea Abreu's Dogs of Summer and Natasha Brown's Assembly and Henry Hoke's Open Throat and the new re-issue of Elaine Kraf's 1979 The Princess of 72nd Street. Just finished Sebastian Castillo's Fresh, Green Life, which meditates on yearning for an old crush (totally unrelatable, btw) and that uneasy commitment to a life of ideas with humor, depth, and fewer than 150 pages. Tiny books, big punches!

Favorite book when you were a child:

Juniper by Monica Furlong follows a young teenage witch assuming her powers, which, of course, go beyond magic!

Your top five authors:

I could never! But this year in "would drop everything to read the next" presents at least two contenders. First, Anelise Chen's memoir Clam Down. Her debut novel, So Many Olympic Exertions, was infectiously curious about not just human physicality but will and spirit too. I promise I read about other kinds of character journeys; I'm just on a theme right now! Also, Susan Choi's Flashlight! Has anyone captured the embarrassment of young adulthood better than Choi in My Education?

Book you've faked reading:

I would never! If such a book exists, my having faked it has also been wiped from the hard drive. Truly can't wait to read XYZ! ;)

Book you're an evangelist for:

For the past couple years, Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson has been a consistent rec. Refracting the way the novel as a whole treats its titular subject matter with its protagonist's view of herself and her life is must-discuss literature.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The new collection by Clarice Lispector, Covert Joy, is glossy all over and incidentally, the work's translator, Katrina Dodson, is also very glamorous!

Book that changed your life:

Monique Truong's The Book of Salt and all of its beautifully fraught character dynamics.

Favorite line from a book:

Recently, from Harron Walker's essay collection Aggregated Discontent: "You can't shatter a glass ceiling if you're afraid of a little blood." Smash! Via a speculative reread that aligns Anne Hathaway's characters in The Devil Wears Prada and The Intern in the same narrative arc, Walker pillories white girlboss feminism with delicious disdain. This tour de force of an essay is discomfitingly uncanny and, of course, hilarious.

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

If one could retcon books into the past, teenage me would've appreciated all the wisdom in Jeanne Thornton's A/S/L on womanhood and friendship and the Internet back then! Adult me loves it too, of course!

Hell is a campus. Or at least, the lower circles are, as Cambridge student Alice Law discovers when she makes the decision to journey into the underworld to retrieve the soul of her academic adviser after an unfortunate accident, and finds it a mirror of the world she descended from. Appropriately, acclaimed fantasy author R.F. Kuang's Katabasis is named for the ancient Greek term for a journey into the underworld. Her dark academia fantasy interrogates themes of loss, grief, and human nature in its refracted version of Cambridge University where Analytical Magick is a field that allows those able to master mathematics, logic, linguistics, and philosophy to bend the rules of reality.

Alice Law's dream has been to dominate that field; the only person who could stand in her way is Peter Murdoch, her adviser's other graduate student. They have been pitted against each other from the beginning as the two potentially brightest students of their cohort, so when he tags along at the last moment as she prepares for her descent into Hell, she does not know what to think. But while they both are at the top of their class, bright, full of promise, and exceptionally well trained, nothing could have prepared them for the reality of the shifting landscape where they now are reliant on each other to survive. Hell is both crueler and kinder than they could have expected, and navigating the terrain that no chart or sojourner's account has ever fully managed to map forces them to pull out their darkest secrets and lay them bare before each other. Their journey pushes them further than they could have anticipated and teaches them more than they could have imagined about life itself. They learn what it might mean not only to choose a life that is about more than surviving, but also to find one's true friends in an environment that celebrates solitude and an imitation of asceticism as a marker of one's potential for success.

Kuang's hellscape is dark, gory, and brutal, but more ruthless is the mirror she holds up to institutional norms and structures that will feel all too familiar to those in the know. As Kuang (Yellowface; Babel) reveals abusive relationships and the glorification of poverty wages and overwork, she does not hold back from depicting a reality that is sometimes even more horrifying than the carnage of Hell itself. With enthralling prose that makes it impossible to put down, Katabasis is a timeless fantasy that explores what it might mean to travel through death to discover the meaning of life. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: R.F. Kuang's dark academia fantasy epic takes readers to Hell and back in an unforgettable journey.