The Red Door Books & Art opened earlier this month in the historic Sellers Building at 1616 Jordan Drive in Saxapahaw, N.C. The shop, owned by Glenn, Sandy and Orin Shepherd, carries a variety of new and used books, gift items as well as artwork, art prints, pottery and jewelry created by local artists. Once the back room and courtyard areas are complete, the Red Door will offer a range of programs and events. including art classes, live painting, local meeting space, local music, open mic, local comedy and more.

The owners said that customer and community reaction to the new bookstore has been "incredibly positive, with a strong small town spirit and many residents have expressed the same sentiment--that the Red Door is 'exactly what Saxapahaw needs,' filling in a niche that helps to complete the village, along with the many other excellent businesses and organizations."

In 2015, audiobook sales rose 20.7%, to $1.77 billion, according to the Audio Publishers Association's annual sales survey. Unit sales also grew, rising 24.1%, and the number of titles published in audio rose 37.1%, to 35,574, continuing a steady increase in the last five years from a base of 7,237 in 2011.

Among other finding of the survey, conducted by Management, Practice, digital download sales continue to rise faster than any other audio format, growing more than 34% in both sales and units. Adult titles still dominate audiobooks, accounting for 90.4% of audiobook sales. Fiction accounts for 76.3% of audiobooks sold. Some 96.3% of audiobooks sold are unabridged.

The abridged version of this information: the average audiobook sold today is a digitally downloaded, unabridged adult fiction title.

Barnes & Noble is launching its inaugural B-Fest, a three-day teen book festival that will take place at all B&N stores June 10-12 and feature hundreds of authors of teen books. Writers scheduled to participate include Jay Asher, Jesse Andrews, Nicola Yoon, Rick Yancey and Christopher Paolini.

B-Fest will also feature events and activities for teens, including a story development workshop, cosplay, trivia and interactive games. Teens will get access to free content, including chapter samplers, a cover reveal and more, while supplies last. In addition, one Trivia Blast winner per store will be added to Penguin Teen's Advance Reader's Copy mailing list for one year.

Mary Amicucci, B&N's chief merchandising officer, said B-Fest "is all about delivering an authentic book festival experience to teens that will bring the exciting worlds of writing and publishing to life. Best of all, B-Fest will bring an unprecedented number of authors of teen books to Barnes & Noble stores to engage their fans across the country."

Bonnier Publishing has launched Bonnier Publishing Australia "in a bid to expand further into the Australian and New Zealand markets," the Bookseller reported. The new division includes Five Mile Press and Echo Publishing.

Bonnier Group CEO Richard Johnson said the move "gives us the platform to deliver our ambitious plans for the Australian and New Zealand markets, which will ultimately see our division in Australia double in size, mirroring what we have achieved in the U.K. in the last two years. We intend to invest heavily to achieve that goal.

Bonnier Publishing, owned by Sweden's Bonnier Group, also has major book operations in Scandinavia; Germany, including Ullstein, Piper and Carlsen; and in the U.S., mainly Weldon Owen.

Congratulations to Philly AIDS Thrift, owner since 2014 of Giovanni's Room--now known as Philly AIDS Thrift@Giovanni's Room--which has received a $10,000 business award from the Independence Business Alliance: Greater Philadelphia's LGBT Chamber of Commerce, according to Philly Voice.

Philly AIDS Thrift board president Michael Byrne said that the money will be put toward the store's website, QueerBooks.com. "We see that has a lot of potential to really expand and grow and increase revenue for the store. So, what we're going to do is redesign the site and do some work on it, and make it fresh and modern and user-friendly. And we'll look into search engine optimization research, so that when people search we show up."

Roy DeLaMar, a Philly AIDS Thrift board member, added: "I feel there are still a lot of people who still don't have access to a gay bookstore--the few that are left--or a lot of people aren't comfortable walking into Barnes & Noble, walking into this big gay and lesbian section. We've gotten orders from all over the world--an order from every continent. There are a lot of people from beyond our borders who need this service and, for whatever reason, feel more comfortable doing it online or don't have an option but to support online."

Founded in 1973, Giovanni's Room is one of the oldest LGBT bookstores in the country and was long owned by Ed Hermance.

Franny Billingsley (photo: Richard Pettengill)

Effective today, Franny Billingsley, the award-winning author of Well Wished, Big Bad Bunny, The Folk Keeper and Chime (a 2011 National Book Award Finalist in Young People's Literature), is reprising her role as children's manager of 57th Street Books in Chicago's Hyde Park. Billingsley, who held the position through most of the 1990s, left in 1999 to pursue writing full-time with considerable success.

She "found, however, that she missed her tribe of booksellers and readers that comprise the 57th Street Books community," the bookstore noted. "Franny is thrilled to be returning to children's bookselling and feels especially lucky to have landed once again at the Seminary Co-op Bookstores, adding that of the many bookstores she's seen, they are the best. She will be honored at the Children's Book Fair 30th Anniversary Gala on Monday, June 6, 2016 at the Hyde Park Bank Building."

GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human by Thomas Thwaites (Princeton Architectural Press).

Tomorrow:
Diane Rehm: Governor John Hickenlooper, co-author of The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics (Penguin Press, $30, 9781101981672).

Live with Kelly: Joel Fuhrman, author of The End of Heart Disease: The Eat to Live Plan to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease (HarperOne, $28.99, 9780062249357).

Access Hollywood: Andi Dorfman, author of It's Not Okay: Turning Heartbreak into Happily Never After (Gallery, $25, 9781501132469). She will also appear on the Insider and Extra.

Daily Show: Corey Pegues, author of Once a Cop: The Street, the Law, Two Worlds, One Man (Atria, $26, 9781501110498).

Nightly Show: Arianna Huffington, author of The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time (Harmony, $26, 9781101904008).

Late Night with Seth Meyers: Marcia Clark, author of Blood Defense (Thomas & Mercer, $15.95, 9781503954007).

Also on Late Night: Noah Hawley, author of Before the Fall (Grand Central, $26, 9781455561780).

A new trailer is out for Indignation, the Philip Roth adaptation marking producer/writer James Schamus's debut as director, Deadline reported. The film, which stars Logan Lerman (Fury, The Perks of Being a Wallflower), Sarah Gadon (The Amazing Spider-Man 2; A Royal Night Out) and Tracy Letts (The Big Short), will be released July 29 in New York and Los Angeles, with a rollout through August to follow.

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A lush poster has been released for Justin Chadwick's Tulip Fever, based on Deborah Moggach's novel and starring Dane DeHaan, Christoph Waltz and Alicia Vikander, Indiewire reported. Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay. Tulip Fever will be released in theaters on July 15.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev has won the 2016 RSL Ondaatje Prize, which has an award of £10,000 (about $14,585) and honors "a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place." The book was published in the U.S. by PublicAffairs.

Kate Adie, one of the judges, called Pomerantsev's book "an exuberant exposure of greed and corruption in modern Russia. The grotesque pursuit of money is conveyed in glittering, trenchant prose, as is a country where gangsters rule and the river of tainted money flows easily to London."

Another judge, Moniza Alvi, said Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible "holds a mirror to Putin's Russia and reflects back the bleakness of a dystopian vision. Written with rare stylistic wit and brilliance, as well as heart, this is an essential as well as a captivating read--a warning, and, implicitly, a prayer for our times."

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Clare Harvey won the £1,000 (about $1,460) Romantic Novelists' Association's Joan Hessayon Award for new writers for her novel The Gunner Girl, the Bookseller reported. RNA chair Eileen Ramsay said the book "is a worthy winner; beautifully written, incredibly well-researched and with a 'can't put this down' quality."

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A shortlist of eight books has been released for the of £2,000 (about $2,920) Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, which "aims to honor the craft of translation, and to recognize its cultural importance." The winner will be named June 11. This year's shortlisted titles are:

Paul Vincent and John Irons for 100 Dutch-Language Poems
John Cullen for Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation
Stephen Pearl for Ivan Goncharov's The Same Old Story
Don Bartlett for Karl Ove Knausgaard's Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle
Shaun Whiteside for Charles Lewinsky's Melnitz
Lola M. Rogers for Sofi Oksanen's When the Doves Disappeared
Philip Roughton for Jón Kalman Stefánsson's The Heart of Man
Lisa C. Hayden for Eugene Vodolazkin's Laurus

Kass (left) on stage with the Carpe Diem String Quartet

Linda Kass, author of the new novel Tasa's Song, teamed up with violinist Charles Wetherbee and the Carpe Diem String Quartet to create a series of original compositions based on the book that Wetherbee and the Carpe Diem String Quartet performed this past weekend for the first time, during their season finale performances at the McConnell Arts Center in Worthington, Ohio. More than 500 people attended the programs, which featured readings by Kass interspersed with the compositions. Kass also gave a brief introductory reading so that audience members who had not read the book could follow along.

Published on May 3 by She Writes Press, Tasa's Song is a historical drama spanning the years 1933-1947. Inspired by the author's family history, the novel follows a young Jewish girl named Tasa. During her childhood in eastern Poland, Tasa dreams of becoming a world-renowned violinist, but as Europe descends into the madness of World War II, Tasa's story becomes one of physical and spiritual survival.

"The powerlessness of people facing any kind of persecution is more visible through the eyes of a child," said Kass. "It really illustrates how people lived through war, how lives are shaped by the brutality they lived in."

Despite calling herself a relatively "late bloomer" with regards to fiction, Kass has an extensive background as a journalist writing for Time and the Detroit Free Press. The decision to start writing fiction, she explained, grew out of a family history project she undertook prior to her parents' 60th wedding anniversary. She accumulated a great deal of material about the family's history but was unsure what to do with it until a friend and writing mentor suggested she tried turning it into fiction. Over the next several years, that idea stuck with her and gradually turned into Tasa's Song.

"The trigger for this book was my family's history," said Kass. "I had parents with accents and a mother who survived that period and came to this country after the war. It was always in my mind."

Kass, who lives in Columbus, Ohio, has known Charles Wetherbee for a long time through her work with the Columbus Symphony. Music permeates Tasa's Song, weaving in and out of the narrative, and about a year ago Kass had the idea of collaborating with Wetherbee and his quartet. She showed Wetherbee the manuscript to Tasa's Song and proposed the idea of doing something together. Recalled Kass: "he loved the idea." --Alex Mutter

It would be easy to compare Kim Addonizio's memoir Bukowski in a Sundress with the writings of Anne Lamott or the humor of Amy Schumer, or to match her to, as she writes, " 'Walt Whitman in a sparkly tutu,' or possibly 'Emily Dickinson with a strap-on' " but that would not do justice to Addonizio and her quirky, irreverent, incredibly funny writing. In these short essays about her personal and writing life, Addonizio (The Palace of Illusions) takes aim primarily at herself. She brings humor to middle age, life as a writer with a certain level of achievement, her drinking and drug use, many one-night stands, her marriages that have failed and falling in love with a younger man.

In "How to Succeed in Po Biz," she writes, "Many are they who harbor the burning desire to become successful poets and rise to the top of their profession. To see one's name on the cover of a slender paperback, to have tens and perhaps even dozens of readers, to ascend to a lecture podium in a modest-size auditorium after being introduced by a less successful poet, who is unsure of the pronunciation of your name--these are heady rewards. And beyond these lie the true grail: generous grants, an endowed chair at a university, the big money that will allow you to write and remodel your kitchen while freeing you from reading the incoherent ramblings of inferior wannabees. How can you realize your dreams? Follow this step-by-step advice." What follows pokes fun at the recognition process in writing, and will ring glaringly true for anyone who has submitted his or her work for publication.

In the essay "A Word of It," she gives a shout-out to her father, who turned her on to the power of poetry and words when he gave her a copy of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In "Flu Shot," she ponders the twists of life for her mother, a former tennis champion, who's in an assisted-living facility and needs help with all aspects of daily care.

Throughout, Addonizio doesn't shy away from swearing and discussing her vices, her desire for love or just a good sexual encounter. Yet, unlike many memoirs that cover similar topics, she writes with a tone and attitude that leaves the reader wanting just a tiny bit more, kind of like the vodka and lemonade she's fond of imbibing. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Shelf Talker: A successful poet pokes fun at herself and the writing process in 26 essays that are equal parts funny and tender.

The bestselling self-published books last week as compiled by IndieReader.com:

1. Mister O by Lauren Blakely
2. The Winslow Brothers Boxed Set by Katy Regnery
3. Getting His Way (Sapphire Falls Book Seven) by Erin Nicholas
4. Honor Me (Men of Inked Book 6) by Chelle Bliss
5. Stuck-Up Suit by Vi Keeland and Penelope Ward
6. The Sheik's Captured Princess (The Samara Royal Family Series Book 4) by Elizabeth Lennox
7. The Templar’s Relic (A James Acton Thriller Book 4) by J. Robert Kennedy
8. Midnight Star (Vampire Girl Volume 2) by Karpov Kinrade
9. Hetch by River Savage
10. Crave Me (The Good Ol' Boys Volume 4) by M. Robinson

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]