Richard Watson

"Confusing the future of bookshops with the future of books is a rookie mistake. I made the mistake myself with public libraries until I suddenly realized it was what was inside the libraries that really mattered. This includes books, of course, but there were also people and people are conduits of history, knowledge and skills, which transfers into physical happenings and events. Good bookshops, like good public libraries, are where people that want to escape the frantic pace of modern life can go for some quiet contemplation. They are somewhere that people can go to escape the torrent of digital distraction too.

"Bookshops and pubs, together with post offices and schools, are the four pillars upon which a local community is built and to my mind no fragile friendship built online can compete."

The Politics & Prose coffee house is reopening with a new name next Thursday, April 14, after a 10-week closure for renovations. The Den will operated by Matt Carr, who founded the nearby market and eatery Little Red Fox with his wife, Jena. The Den will have expanded seating, improved furnishings and lighting, and a new menu created by Carr that includes dinner items as well as wine and craft beer. The menu will continue to include coffee, freshly baked pastries, tartines, soups and cheese and charcuterie boards, plus a new dessert, Pie Fries.

Each month the Den will feature a cookbook from P&P, with a dish on the menu selected from the cookbook. The Den also will offer tie-ins to author talks in the bookstore with literary and food-themed menu items as well as special activities. Upcoming examples: an addition to the menu for Mother's Day Brunch on May 8, and crimson drinks and food for author Justin Cronin's appearance on May 25, a tribute to his popular vampire novels.

This is the first major renovation of the coffee house since it was created in 1993. P&P owners Bradley Graham and Lissa Muscatine worked with local architect Mark McInturff on the design, making sure, the store said, "that the renovated space would retain the casual atmosphere and cozy feel that many in the neighborhood have enjoyed over the years."

"We couldn't be more excited by the renewal of the coffeehouse and its transformation into a warm, bright gathering place with great food and drink for the community," Muscatine said. "And we're thrilled to be partnering with Matt Carr, who not only brings his exceptional culinary talent and creativity to the Den, but also a passion for community-building and customer service. Together with Matt we look forward to providing a popular destination that reflects the synergy between the bookstore and the coffeehouse."

Carr called the Den "a unique opportunity to expand our creativity within a neighborhood we love and call home. Brad and Lissa have been so supportive of Little Red Fox since day one that we couldn't have been more thrilled when they asked us to collaborate. Food, booze, coffee and books--what could be better?"

Amazon "will soon sell a higher-end Kindle with a rechargeable protective case for extended battery life," the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the matter who said the removable cover will allow the Kindle to be thinner than earlier versions. In addition, a separate Kindle case with a battery that can be charged using solar power is also under development, according to another source, though it is unlikely to be released in the immediate future.

On Twitter Monday, CEO Jeff Bezos teased an upcoming "all-new, top of the line Kindle" and said the company would reveal details next week.

The new Kindle and case are code-named "Whiskey" and "Soda," respectively, and the solar-powered case is known internally as "Sunkiss" among engineers at Lab126, Amazon's Silicon Valley hardware development unit, WSJ noted.

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In a 4,000-plus-word letter to shareholders (available in full from Forbes), besides trumpeting the company's growth and future projects, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos offered "a word about corporate cultures," something for which the company has been criticized, particularly last year in a New York Times feature. It's also a subject he didn't comment on publicly in all the discussion at the time.

"For better or for worse, [corporate cultures] are enduring, stable, hard to change," Bezos wrote. "They can be a source of advantage or disadvantage. You can write down your corporate culture, but when you do so, you're discovering it, uncovering it--not creating it. It is created slowly over time by the people and by events--by the stories of past success and failure that become a deep part of the company lore. If it's a distinctive culture, it will fit certain people like a custom-made glove. The reason cultures are so stable in time is because people self-select. Someone energized by competitive zeal may select and be happy in one culture, while someone who loves to pioneer and invent may choose another. The world, thankfully, is full of many high-performing, highly distinctive corporate cultures. We never claim that our approach is the right one--just that it's ours--and over the last two decades, we've collected a large group of like-minded people. Folks who find our approach energizing and meaningful."

He then added, "I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there."

From there, he went on to discuss, in great detail, Amazon's risky successes--particularly "the three big offerings," Amazon Prime, Marketplace and cloud web services--and lauded the company's size, which "enables us to build services for customers that we could otherwise never even contemplate. But also, if we're not vigilant and thoughtful, size could slow us down and diminish our inventiveness."

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Amazon is expanding its Prime Free Same-Day Delivery to several more metropolitan areas, including Charlotte, Cincinnati, Fresno, Louisville, Milwaukee, Nashville, Raleigh, Richmond, Sacramento, Stockton and Tucson, as well as new areas in central New Jersey, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles and San Diego. These additions bring the total number of metro areas in the U.S. now served by Prime Free Same-Day Delivery to 27, accounting for more than 1,000 cities and towns.

Bookstore chain WH Smith "is fitting 100 of its U.K. branches with digital display screens in a bid to modernize its shop fronts," the Bookseller reported. The company will use 55-inch LCD display screens "to market the stationery and bookseller's goods and services, as well as provide third party national, regional and local advertising."

"The outdoor advertising industry has accepted digital display advertising as the way forward and retailers on the high street are now realizing their real estate is also the perfect platform for digital out of home marketing," said Ian Sanders, group commercial development director at WH Smith, adding that the initiative "will give our stores both advertising and communication standout, whilst monetizing our windows with complete compliance and control."

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Over the weekend, Waterstones opened Harpenden Books, "the third shop in the company's portfolio to be named after the town it is based," part of a plan initially announced by Waterstones in 2014 to open "quintessentially local bookshop" locations.

Waterstones managing director James Daunt commented: "We are delighted to bring back to Harpenden a proper bookshop. It builds on the great success we have had with Southwold Books in Suffolk and The Rye Bookshop in Kent, towns which had also lost their shops. We are very proud of these local bookshops which, whilst a lot smaller than a standard Waterstones, are exceptionally attractive and well stocked."

Gary Pulsifer

Gary Pulsifer, who founded Arcadia Books in 1996 and "was a pioneering publisher of literary fiction, much of it in translation," died March 25, the Guardian reported. He was 59. Pulsifer was active on the boards of small publishers (Maia, Gay Men's Press), charities (Book Trade Charity and English PEN), major institutions (London Arts literature panel, Arts Council translation advisory group) and the Independent Publishers' Group, the Guardian wrote. He won the IPG diversity award twice and was named Sunday Times small publisher of the year in 2006.

Pulsifer was dismissed from his role at Arcadia Books in 2014, the Bookseller noted. Arcadia publisher Piers Russell-Cobb said: "I will remember always our happy times in London, Frankfurt or Transylvania. Gary brought thoughtfulness; insight, warmth and humor to all the occasions we were together and to the list as a whole. Arcadia's people and our authors, their agents and colleagues will miss his passions, intelligence and humor."

Karen Sullivan, publisher at Orenda Books, told the Bookseller that Pulsifer "was the most wonderful man, a true inspiration and friend to me. My mentor. I am devastated. He should be remembered for his gifts and his amazing friendship, sense of humor and, of course, massive contribution both to independent publishing and translated literature."

"Sorry, Fabio: The Koch sisters are the new heartthrobs of sensuous fiction," O, The Oprah Magazine noted in profiling Bea and Leah Koch, who recently opened their "new frisky-fiction bookstore, the Ripped Bodice," in Culver City, Calif.

The bookshop's shelves are filled with "everything from rock 'n' roll bad boys brought down by love to Regency-era parties gone terribly awry," said Bea Koch. "Romance is incredible because it can make you laugh, make you sigh, and make you cry. It's so much more than a turn-on." O, The Oprah Magazine featured "3 swoon-inducing titles handpicked by the Koch sisters."

Posted on Twitter yesterday by London independent bookseller Dulwich Books:

"Our country of the month is Austria! Underrated novelists and fascinating history. Particularly from @PushkinPress"

Nora Heneghan has joined Rizzoli International Publications as publicist. She was formerly with Macmillan, where she oversaw 34 journals, including Nature. Before that, she worked in marketing at the Drake Hotel in Chicago.

The Haters by Jesse Andrews (Amulet Books), from the author of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

Tomorrow:
Bloomberg Surveillance: Steve Case, author of The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future (Simon & Schuster, $26.95, 9781501132582). He will also appear on Fox Business's Mornings with Maria.

Tavis: Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, $27.95, 9780674660342).

Steve Harvey Show: DeVon Franklin and Meagan Good, authors of The Wait: A Powerful Practice for Finding the Love of Your Life and the Life You Love (Howard Books, $24, 9781501105296).

Wendy Williams: Tavis Smiley, author of The Covenant with Black America: Ten Years Later (Smiley Books, $15.99, 9781401951498).

Daily Show: Juan Williams, author of We the People: The Modern-Day Figures Who Have Reshaped and Affirmed the Founding Fathers' Vision of America (Crown, $30, 9780307952042).

Oscar Isaac is in talks to co-star with Natalie Portman in Paramount's adaptation of Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, Variety reported. Alex Garland (Ex Machina) is writing and directing. The cast also includes Gina Rodriguez and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Scott Rudin is producing.

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Working Title has acquired film rights to Delia Ephron's upcoming novel Siracusa (Blue Rider Press, July), which the author will adapt and Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Me & Earl & the Dying Girl) will direct, Deadline reported.

James Hannaham won the $15,000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Delicious Foods (Little, Brown), which judge Molly McCloskey praised as "an outraged exploration of where we have come from and where we are now. The slippage between history and the present, between the tragic and the comic, and between the real and the surreal, makes for a discomfiting and extremely important book." Judge Abby Frucht said the winning title "represents today's American fiction at its most vital, impactful, and original." And judge Sergio Troncoso called it "a standout work of fiction that will surely expand a reader's empathy for the struggles of a variety of groups and individuals freeing themselves from modern enslavement."

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Author Meg Rosoff won the five million Swedish kronor (about $614,030) Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which is given annually to authors, illustrators, oral storytellers and reading promoters "to promote interest in children's and young adult literature." She will be honored May 30 in a ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall.

In praising this year's winner, the jury's citation noted: "Meg Rosoff's young adult novels speak to the emotions as well as the intellect. In sparkling prose, she writes about the search for meaning and identity in a peculiar and bizarre world. Her brave and humorous stories are one-of-a-kind. She leaves no reader unmoved."

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The shortlist for the 2015 Reading the West Book Awards, sponsored by the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association, is:

Adult Fiction
Black River by S.M. Hulse (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Red Lightning by Laura Pritchett (Counterpoint)
Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf (Knopf)
Into the Savage Country by Shannon Burke (Pantheon)
Night at the Fiestas: Stories by Kirstin Valdez Quade (Norton)

Adult Nonfiction
The Maverick Cookbook: Iconic Recipes & Tales from New Mexico by Lynn Cline (Leaf Storm Press)
The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer: The True Story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Thom Hatch (St. Martin's)
The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey by Rinker Buck (S&S)
Ladies of the Canyons: A League of Extraordinary Women and Their Adventures in the American Southwest by Lesley Poling-Kempes (University of Arizona Press)
All the Wild that Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West by David Gessner (Norton)

Children's
In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse by Joseph Marshall, illustrated by James Mark Yellowhawk (Abrams Books for Young Readers)
Burn Girl by Mandy Mikulencak (Albert Whitman/AW Teen)
Look Both Ways in the Barrio Blanco by Judith Robbins Rose (Candlewick)
A Series of Small Maneuvers by Eliot Treichel (Ooligan Press at Portland State University)
In the Canyon by Liz Garton Scanlon, illustrated by Ashley Wolff (Beach Lane Books)

photo: Edmond Lee

Lynne Kutsukake is a third generation Japanese Canadian. She earned a master's degree in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto and has lived and studied in Japan. For many years, she worked as a librarian at the University of Toronto, specializing in Japanese materials. Her short fiction has appeared in Grain, Prairie Fire, the Dalhousie Review, the Windsor Review and Ricepaper. In 2010, she was a finalist for the Journey Prize, awarded for best Canadian short story by an emerging writer. Her debut novel, The Translation of Love, is published by Doubleday (April 5, 2016).

On your nightstand now:

My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. I am a devoted fan, and when I learned that Strout had a new novel, I rushed out to buy it. Janice Nimura's nonfiction work, Daughters of the Samurai, promises to be fascinating reading and covers a topic I am deeply interested in. It's about five young Japanese girls who were sent by the Japanese government in 1871 to study in America. Other books in the queue are A Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin, City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg and There's Something I Want You to Do by Charles Baxter.

Favorite book when you were a child:

C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I really wanted a hidden door at the back of my own closet that would lead to a secret world.

Your top five authors:

For the beauty and precision of their sentences and for their remarkable ability to penetrate the human heart: Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, Virginia Woolf, Tanizaki Junichiro.

Book you've faked reading:

Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. There was a time in my life when it seemed that everyone around me had read it and loved it and couldn't stop talking about Jo and all the March sisters. But I just couldn't get into it.

Book you're an evangelist for:

The Laws of Evening by Mary Yukari Waters. The stories in this lovely collection are all set in Japan. Each one is a gem, filled with tenderness and quiet insight.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I love all the covers on the Haruki Murakami novels. They capture the quirky, off-kilter weirdness of the fictional worlds Murakami is so great at creating. 

Book you hid from your parents:

Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls. How embarrassing.

Book that changed your life:

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. It made me realize that this was the literary world I had been seeking, one in which the people looked like me.

Favorite line from a book:

The final sentence in "The Dead" from James Joyce's Dubliners: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." It's a perfect story, filled with perfect sentences. Whenever I read that last sentence, the whole world goes still.

Five books you'll never part with:

Only five? Impossible to choose, I want to keep them all! Anyway, here's a start: A Gesture Life by Chang-Rae Lee, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud.

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

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. From its magical opening sentence, this work cast a hypnotic spell over me. I would like to be held in its thrall once again, just like the first time.

It was just a few weeks earlier that 11-year-old Annabelle McBride was hungering for change. She felt like excitement waited for her "like an uncut cake." But now, everything's a terrible mess, and she wishes the blue-eyed, blonde-haired Betty Glengarry had never moved to Wolf Hollow that fateful fall of 1943. From the very beginning, readers of Wolf Hollow will feel the chill this "dark-hearted" 14-year-old bully brings to a close-knit farming community in rural Pennsylvania, foreshadowing "that terrible November."

When a rock, thrown from a nearby hill, blinds her friend Ruth in one eye, Annabelle is sure it must have been Betty's doing. After all, Betty has beaten her with a stick, crushed a bird's neck in front of her and rigged a sharpened wire across a footpath to harm unwary passers-by. But Betty says she saw Toby throw the rock. Toby is a tall, solitary World War I vet who roams the hills of Wolf Hollow with three guns strapped to his back, taking photographs. Annabelle knows Toby couldn't have thrown the rock--Toby is enigmatic, but she believes he's a good man. He once even carried her home on his back when she sprained her ankle. Rumors are spreading that Toby had aimed the rock at Mr. Ansel, a German, because if anyone would throw a rock at a German, it would be a World War I vet. And people say there's evidence, too: a photograph Toby took of the scene where Ruth was hurt.

While Annabelle worries about Toby being falsely accused and Betty getting off scot-free, things take an even darker turn. Betty disappears and is nowhere to be found. Of course, the citizens of Wolf Hollow blame Toby for this, too. As Annabelle's mother says, "Toby looks like a villain, whether he is or not." Annabelle courageously steps up and takes action. But the more she tries to protect Toby and stop the mounting madness, the more she is "jumping around like a blind frog." The more tangled her web of lies, the more trapped Toby is. The suspense builds unbearably.

There's hardly a child alive who hasn't experienced the horror and sense of helplessness that takes over when obvious lies are told and, worse, believed by others. Lauren Wolk's nuanced and nerve-wracking middle-grade debut takes a close, dark look at how dangerous it is to make assumptions of guilt or innocence based on appearances--and how telling the truth and standing up against injustice are essential, even if the wrongs are not always righted. Annabelle is a likable, engaging character, and readers will enjoy lively descriptions of her farm chores as well as her honest pleasure in the "small, unbottled genies" that are her younger brothers. Wolk has a clean and poetic way with words and her story is finely crafted, haunting and unlikely to be forgotten. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Shelf Talker: When a dark-hearted girl moves to Wolf Hollow in the fall of 1943, the rural Pennsylvania community is forever changed.