"We had no prior notice and learned about it at the same time as everybody else did. Orders are pouring in."

Aided by many volunteers, on Sunday, December 28, Rakestraw Books, Danville, Calif., moved about six blocks to a space that's 40% larger and in a busy neighborhood center anchored by a Trader Joe's, with a post office and Starbucks next door and a high school across the street. Already owner Michael Barnard sounded pleased with the move, saying, "There's lots more parking and visibility, and we've already seen maybe 40% new faces."

At 2,000 square feet, with 1,700 square feet of retail space, the new location is much lighter and airier than the old one, which Barnard said was "cut into alcoves. Now every section has room for people and room to turn around in. The store shows better even with same books and fixtures as in the old store. It looks like we have more inventory, and it already feels that more's going on."

Barnard added that the larger space will allow the store to hold events accommodating up to 150 people. Because of that, the store plans to upgrade its sound and public address system. "Now people might be 50 feet from author speaking, so it's nice to make it easier to hear," Barnard said. Rakestraw will use some of its grant from James Patterson for the equipment.

Because of the high school across the street, the store plans also to expand teen offerings, including graphic novels and science fiction, and will try to do more programs with the school.

The move was exceptionally fast, in part because volunteers flooded the store. "We packed the store entirely in 90 minutes, and it was almost hard to work because so many people were helping," Barnard said. "All the furniture and books were in the new space by noon. And everything was in place and on the shelves by five." Noting that some of the volunteers did painting, attached shelves to the walls and alphabetized books, among other tasks, he added, "It's very affirming when the store means that much to people." (The move, however, of back-room operations and the computer system took much of last week.)

Rakestraw has experience moving: only two years ago, it moved next door. This time, the new owner of the store's building wanted to redevelop the property and "asked if we'd consider moving," Barnard said. "It was one of those things: we could do it now with his help or do it later on our own."

As if the smooth move to a better location weren't enough of a treat, Barnard reported that Rakestraw had a "terrific holiday season, up significantly over last year and the year before." He called December "probably the busiest December in 10 years."

Rakestraw's new address is 3 Railroad Ave., Danville, Calif. 94526. The phone number remains 925-837-7337.

Creekside Coffee Bar & Bookstore, Skaneateles, N.Y., which has had new owners for the past seven months, closed abruptly on January 1, Syracuse.com reported. A sign on Creekside's door says, "Business is closed. Sorry for the inconvenience." Owners Adam and Ksenia Tontarski, who bought the store from founder Erika Davis last year, did not comment on the closing, and Adam Tontarski told the Skaneateles Journal not to talk with anyone about the closing. Former employees were surprised by the closing, and one said the owners had called operating the store "too much of a financial burden."

The Tontarskis bought the store last May and closed its temporarily. In July, the store reopened with increased book inventory, new equipment and a wider selection of food and drink. At the time, the Tontarskis called owning a bookstore "a dream come true."

When Davis founded Creekside in December 2004, it consisted of separate Creekside Books and Creekside Coffee operations that were next to each other. In 2012, they merged in the coffee space.

Calling it "a very difficult and personally emotional decision," Todd Hulbert, owner of Finally Found Books, Auburn, Wash., has put the store up for sale, he wrote in an e-mail to customers and others.

Hulbert called the last three years "the most enjoyable and challenging of my life. First to build the store from the ashes of others that had closed, then to move it to its current location, and finally to have built it into a profitable and viable business that will serve our community for years to come....

"This is a wonderful opportunity for the right person. Someone who loves books, people, and has a desire to own their own business. A new owner that has the drive to continue building a world class bookstore and take it to the next level. If you or anyone you know has a serious interest (and please be sure it is sincere), please contact me or stop by the store to talk about this rare chance to take over a turnkey, profitable bookstore."

In early 2012, Hulbert bought Baker Street Books in Black Diamond, Wash., closed it to install new shelving, reconfigure the store and absorb some 100,000 volumes he had in storage. In July, he reopened the store as Finally Found Books. In September 2013, Finally Found Books moved to Auburn because sales were too low in Black Diamond. The store sells new and used titles.

Hulbert may be reached at 253-246-7376 or todd@finallyfoundbooks.com.

William Morrow is launching a line of "eminent nonfiction and literary fiction" that will "investigate, inform, entertain, and inspire conversation, highlighting both established bestselling authors as well as introducing talented new voices." The line should begin publishing in spring 2016.

Although the line has no name yet, Morrow has hired Geoff Shandler to be v-p, editorial director, of the nonfiction side, effective today.

Shandler was formerly editorial director of the adult trade division of Little, Brown, and was earlier editor in chief there. Before that, he helped start up PublicAffairs, and he began his career at Random House.

Among authors Shandler has edited are Ben Bradlee, Jr., James Bradley, Robert Dallek, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mary Gabriel, Malcolm Gladwell, John le Carré, Marcus Luttrell, James Andrew Miller, Dana Priest, Charlie Savage, Bob Spitz, John Paul Stevens, Jake Tapper, Evan Thomas, Chuck Todd and Luis Alberto Urrea.

Irish bookseller John McNamee, who was president of the European Booksellers Federation (now the European & International Booksellers Federation) from 2005 to April of 2014, died January 4, the Bookseller reported. The announcement was made by EIBF co-presidents Kyra Dreher, Fabian Paagman and Jean-Luc Treutenaere. Expressing "deep sorrow," they said McNamee "won the admiration and respect of everyone with whom he worked" and was "an indefatigable champion of bookselling and the promotion of reading."
 
Booksellers Association CEO Tim Godfray said McNamee "made a massive contribution to the work of bookselling. He was president of the European Booksellers Federation for over eight years, he had been chair of the BA's Irish Branch and served on its executive committee for very many years, supporting passionately trade initiatives like World Book Day, Books Are My Bag and Book Tokens. And John had also been on the BA Council, representing tirelessly the Irish book trade. Recently he fought vigorously plans by the Irish Government to attempt to centralize the purchasing of library books."

Leigh Burmesch's video, "An Indie Bookseller in Amazon Territory," profiles Tom Nissley, owner of Phinney Books, Seattle, Wash. "If you thought about the typical characteristics of an independent bookstore owner, you probably wouldn't guess that they used to work for the biggest, and most frequently controversial online bookseller on the planet," she wrote at Flip the Media.

A memorial event honoring Mark Strand, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former Poet Laureate, who died on November 29, 2014, will be held at 5 p.m. on Sunday, January 18, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters auditorium, at 632 W. 156th Street in New York City. The event is free and open to the public; tickets or reservations are not needed.

Participants in the memorial include family members, U.S. Poets Laureate Charles Simic and Charles Wright, actor Mary Louise Parker, painter William H. Bailey, composer and pianist John Musto, playwright John Guarre and novelist Francine Prose, and others.

Sponsors are the Academy of American Poets, the Writing Program of the Columbia University School of the Arts, Alfred A. Knopf, the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center; the Poetry and Literature Center of the Library of Congress, the Poetry Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, Poets & Writers and Poets House.

Jessica Strand, daughter of the poet, said, "My thought about this memorial is you get a sense of who my father was." It will offer intimate recollections of Strand as well as readings of his poetry, slides of his artwork, and performances of his favorite music (including piano pieces by Brahms, Kern and Hayden).

Kate Burke has been promoted to director of publicity, Lifelong Books. She has been associate director of publicity for Da Capo Press and Lifelong Books. She will continue to handle campaigns for select Da Capo titles not in the Lifelong area. She joined Perseus from Harper Business in 2001.

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Rebekah Anderson has joined Sasquatch Books as director of marketing. She was formerly supervisor of customer engagement at Puget Sound Energy and has nearly 20 years of experience in sales and marketing, including stints at Time Inc. and Lonely Planet Books. Her first job after college was as a sales and marketing assistant for Sasquatch Books. She's also a founding member and board member of LitCrawl Seattle.

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Steve Sunu has joined Dark Horse as publicity coordinator. He has been an editor at Comic Book Resources for the past five years and earlier was a bookseller at Borders and the Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass. He began his career as a staff writer for Wizard magazine.

Russian Tattoo: A Memoir by Elena Gorokhova (Simon & Schuster), a book trailer that features F. Murray Abraham and Alan Alda.

Portlandia's fifth season launches Thursday with a full-episode look back at how Women & Women First booksellers Toni (Carrie Brownstein) and Candace (Fred Armisen) first met "in 1991, when both worked in New York as high-powered executives for, respectively, the bookstore chains B. Dalton and Crown Books," the Oregonian reported.
 
When their companies merge, "the sexist pig of a boss pits Toni and Candace against each other to run the 'Chick Lit' department. After various Mean Girl competitive dirty tricks, and a hilarious dance-off, they both realize the boss has no intention of giving any woman the job. They hear about a bookstore in Portland, leave NYC behind, and so the Women & Women First legend is born."

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In related news, Portland's In Other Words, "the real Northeast Portland feminist community center and bookstore where Portlandia films its Women & Women First scenes," will stay open at least until December 2015, thanks to a November effort during which "an Indiegogo fundraising campaign helped raise about $15,000, and new volunteers and board members became involved," the Oregonian wrote.

Today on Fresh Air: George Pelecanos, author of The Martini Shot: A Novella and Stories (Little, Brown, $25, 9780316284370).

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Today on CNBC's Squawk Box: Nicholas Carlson, author of Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! (Twelve, $30, 9781455556618). He'll also be on Morning Joe tomorrow morning.

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Tomorrow morning on CBS This Morning: Patton Oswalt, author of Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film (Scribner, $25, 9781451673210).

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Tomorrow on CNBC's Power Lunch: Carla A. Harris, author of Strategize to Win: The New Way to Start Out, Step Up, or Start Over in Your Career (Hudson Street Press, $25.95, 9781594633058).

"I've been writing forever," said Sarah Gerard, writer for Bomb magazine, former bookseller at McNally Jackson Books in New York City and author of the novel Binary Star, set to be published by Two Dollar Radio on January 13. "I got really serious about writing in college as an undergrad. But I began writing as a little kid, when we had our first home computer. I started writing little stories and stuff, just putting words together."

Binary Star is about a young woman in her last semester of college who is struggling with anorexia and a difficult long-distance relationship. Her boyfriend is himself struggling with alcoholism, and after school finishes the pair decides to go on a cross-country road trip. On their journey, they discover the notion of veg-anarchism--a blend of anarchist philosophy with the belief that all living things should be free of oppression--and begin planning a radical political action.

Originally from the Tampa Bay, Fla., area, Gerard has an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School, which she earned while working full-time at McNally Jackson. Binary Star grew out of Gerard's New School thesis. That version of the book, though, was very, very different from what will be published next week; virtually all that remains is the title and the use of a binary star as a central metaphor.

When she began rewriting Binary Star after finishing graduate school, Gerard, herself an anorexia survivor, thought about turning it into a memoir. It did not take her long to decide that the story had to be fiction. The finished novel is full of things that happened in Gerard's life, but they've been focused through the lens of a fictional character. She explained: "I wanted instead to give into the velocity of emotion, which felt exciting and gave me confidence."

For a long time, Gerard said, she'd been hesitant to write about the struggles she has had with anorexia and food. That began to change after publishing an essay in the New York Times in 2012 about an injury she sustained while recovering from anorexia.

"It brought a lot of attention to my writing and, in a way, granted me permission to write about the kinds of struggles I've had with food," she said. "I think women writers struggle with this often, the feeling that we need to be granted permission to tell our own stories. That our experiences, especially those considered feminine, like an obsession with thinness, are cliche and so not valuable.... When women tell our own stories, we empower ourselves by exposing the structures that perpetuate the systems of our oppression."

Asked about authors who have been important for her, Gerard laughed. "Yeah, all of them," she said. But among her favorite authors and biggest influences, Gerard did point to Clarice Lispector, Lydia Davis, Italo Calvino and Cormac McCarthy. "Any writer that breaks with convention is inspiring to me," Gerard said.

Last fall, Gerard started a Kickstarter campaign to raise $8,500 to fund an author tour for Binary Star, a campaign that exceeded its goal by nearly $700. Gerard will be hosting a mixer for her Kickstarter backers on January 12 at McNally Jackson, and will do her first official reading of the tour on January 15 at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn, N.Y. The tour will continue through April and include stops at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, Calif., Powell's Books in Portland, Ore., Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Mich., and many other indies across the country.

Gerard is already thinking about what to do next. She's been polishing essays that she's been working on for some time, collecting her short stories and has begun "dreaming up a new novel." With a laugh, she added, "I've got too many plans for what to do next." --Alex Mutter

Robert Weil, editor-in-chief and publishing director at Liveright, a division of Norton, has won the 2015 Friedrich Ulfers Prize, awarded annually to a publisher, writer, critic, translator or scholar who has championed the advancement of German-language literature in the United States. The prize is awarded by Deutsches Haus at New York University and endowed with a $5,000 grant by Friedrich Ulfers, an associate professor of German at NYU.

Weil has edited many literary translations of German writers, including multiple volumes by Joseph Roth, as well as works by Heinrich Böll, Wolfgang Koeppen, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Werfel, Fred Wander, Franz Kafka and Clemens J. Setz; nonfiction by Rüdiger Safranski and Alice Miller; poetry by Bertolt Brecht; and fairytales from the Brothers Grimm. Born in New York City, Weil was raised by a German-born father and a German-born mother who grew up in Sweden. He has lectured in the U.S. and Germany.

The prize will be awarded at the opening ceremony of the 2015 Festival Neue Literatur, which will be held in New York City February 19-22.

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Winners have been named in the five Costa Book Awards categories. Each author receives £5,000 (about $7,635) and is now eligible for the £30,000 ($45,810) Costa Book of the Year prize, which will be announced January 27. This year's Costa category winners are:

Novel: How to Be Both by Ali Smith
First novel: Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey
Biography: H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Poetry: My Family and Other Superheroes by Jonathan Edwards
Children's: Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders

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Shortlists have been announced for the Paddy Power Political Book Awards 2015, the Bookseller reported. The winner of the political book of the year prize receives £10,000 (about $15,260), with £3,000 (about $4,581) prize going to the winner of the debut political book of the year category. Other awards will be given for biography, polemic, political history and political fiction, practical politics, satire & humor, and international affairs. Winners will be named January 28.

In The Conversation: A Revolutionary Plan for End-of-Life Care, Angelo Volandes, a medical doctor for decades, focuses on the extensive, intensive, intrusive medical interventions that patients routinely receive at the end of life, many of which extend life by a matter of hours or days or not at all, while decreasing its quality substantially. He earnestly argues that every patient should be offered the option to choose among three broad categories of care: life-prolonging, limited medical and comfort care--in other words, the choice between quantity and quality of life. The Conversation advocates for all patients and families to receive information about what end of life care looks like within these three categories, and firmly states the importance of patients, families and medical professionals having what he calls the Conversation about end-of-life wishes openly and often.

To make these points, Volandes describes his upbringing as the child of Greek immigrants and the impact it has had on his life: from his start as a student of Socrates and a Greek diner cook, his stint as a philosophy major and then his work as a medical practitioner, he has been interested in what good life (and good death) are. Appropriately, Volandes neither attempts nor claims to be impersonal or unemotional about this charged topic; rather, he brings his personal and professional experiences as well as research to his impassioned argument.

The majority of the book is devoted to stories of patients, families and circumstances--and Volandes's own attempts, good and bad, at approaching the Conversation. With names changed, these are real-life anecdotes of choices made with more or less preparation and knowledge of what a decision will entail, or what an incapacitated patient would have wanted. The last quarter of the book is composed of several appendices and a lengthy, narrative notes section, all of which provides substantive hands-on advice aimed variously at the patient, or the patient's spouse or children. The Conversation is a how-to manual, enlivened by engaging--if occasionally painful--true stories. Volandes makes his points succinctly and convincingly and offers readers the tools to make change within their own lives. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: A physician's fervent quest for better information about medical options for patients nearing their end, and the steps necessary to make those choices clear.