The following is from an open letter called "What will the new era of bookselling look like" by Christine Onorati, owner of WORD bookstores, Brooklyn, N.Y., and Jersey City, N.J., and posted on Melville House's MobyLives:

Christine Onorati, WORD Bookstores

"I believe that we are at a crossroads in our industry, and, for the first time, I'm genuinely worried for our future. I think that we need to start brainstorming new business models and figuring out how to make the retail equation work in our favor so that we can stay afloat. Many of us will not make it; Amazon bookstores, online competition, skyrocketing rents, increased minimum wage, lack of young booksellers who choose this industry as a viable career--I could go on and on....

"But is this doom-and-gloom outlook making me cower in fear and hide? No. Quite to the contrary, I'm constantly looking at new ways to sell books. I'm expanding my footprint in Brooklyn. I'm joining the board of the American Booksellers Association. I'm sending staff to all corners of New York and New Jersey to sell books and partner with new entities to make my WORD bookstores' brand more visible and viable. I'm writing this personal letter to reassert my values as a business owner and reconfirm our mission. Because we aren't just selling widgets. We are helping foster important dialogue about where we are in the world and how we got here. Providing books that help reinforce diversity and reminding ourselves that marginalized voices need an outlet....

"Someone recently equated what I do to farm-to-table dining, and at first I didn't see the connection. A book is a book, there is no quality difference that I can tout. I think that comparison works only when you look at the chain of how we get that final product. Meaning: you can buy a cheap book on Amazon or at Walmart, sure. But if everyone is doing that, what's left? Where does that chain include the knowledgeable indie booksellers who put the right books in customers' hands, or the booksellers who champion authors who don't have high Amazon rankings and therefore don't get a coveted face-out location next to the blenders and Jenny McCarthy books? Or what about the displays in our stores for Black Lives Matter or our poetry recommendations or our knowledge of kids' books featuring brown characters? Where will those live in this new world? The answer is that they won't: there will be no room for this kind of personalized book service. And as a result, what's being published will inevitably change...

"I'm going to focus on the people who have supported us throughout the years, who come to my stores to talk to other book lovers, talk to my wildly intelligent and knowledgeable staff, feel comfort that they are in a place where people like the same things they do. Those who take chances on the books they might not know anything about but whose descriptions on a staff pick display they love, or those who attend events and preorder signed copies and who tweet about the great afternoon they spent in one of my stores. I want to figure out how, together, we can do more great things and how their support will allow us at WORD, and like-minded independent booksellers, to continue to expand our horizons and bring the community what it wants and needs. We have some ideas in mind and we'll be rolling them out in the coming months. We're talking about paid memberships, loyalty programs, focused programming, live streams....

"I'd love to hear from you (christine@wordbookstores.com), hear your ideas on everything I just rambled about and anything you think could make us stronger and better and more surefooted on the obviously treacherous ground of this industry."

Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma has been named editor of the New York Review of Books. He succeeds the late Robert B. Silvers, who died in March and was, with the late Barbara Epstein, a founding editor of the publication. Buruma, who has been a regular contributor to NYRB since 1985, has also written for numerous other publications. His books include Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love; War and Year Zero: A History of 1945; and Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance. He is currently the Paul W. Williams Professor of Democracy, Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College.

"I've known Ian since 1985 and know that his long association with the Review will ensure that the values and editorial direction of the Review will be upheld," said NYRB publisher Rea Hederman. "Ian's long relationship with both founding editors will preserve the editorial quality and independence for which the review has been known since its first issue in 1963."

Don Linn

Don Linn has joined Unicorn Publishing Group--an independent publisher of fine art monographs, catalogues and social, military and cultural history titles--as a full partner. He will be based in the company's new office in Chicago "to drive the business forward in the U.S. and Canada," according to the company. Linn, who has extensive publishing, sales and distribution experience, was owner/CEO of Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, which he sold to Perseus in 2006, and director for Chicago University Press Distribution Centre.

"This is a tremendous opportunity for us to expand in North America and beyond," said UPG chairman Lord Strathcarron. "Don has a wonderful track record and we welcome him into the Group most enthusiastically."

Linn commented: "Unicorn has experienced outstanding growth because of its extraordinary team who are not only talented and energetic professionals but also great people to work with. I'm proud to be a part of the group and look forward to expanding UPG's publishing program."

Françoise Nyssen

Françoise Nyssen, CEO of French publisher Actes Sud, has been appointed culture minister in Prime Minister Edouard Philippe's new government, the Bookseller reported, cautioning that the appointment could be only provisional if newly elected President Emmanuel Macron's "party La République En Marche! does not win a majority in the parliamentary elections" scheduled for June 11 and 18. Actes Sud received the Bookseller Adult Trade Publisher Award at the London Book Fair in 2016.

Marie Sellier, president of Société des Gens de Lettres, said, "Françoise is strongminded, frank, enthusiastic and passionate about what she does. I do not believe she will sweep issues under the carpet, and am confident she will tackle the problem of authors' pensions with energy."

Baker & Taylor and Simon & Schuster India have entered a distribution agreement for Baker & Taylor's Global Publishers Services (GPS), which specializes in supporting client publishers with international sales, marketing, and supply chain and digital-to-print services. Effective May 1, GPS began to locally stock titles for distribution into the marketplace, including to key online retailers.

"With Simon & Schuster India, our publishers will receive the level of attention needed to develop their titles in a market as critical and complex as India," said Chitra Bopardikar, B&T v-p & general manager. Sharad Mohan, GPS regional manager in Delhi who will manage the local relationship, added that S&S India is "a strong fit for GPS due to our shared commitment to the market."

Rahul Srivastava, managing director, S&S India commented: "We are really excited for the opportunity to work with Baker & Taylor's Global Publishers Services. They have a broad range of high-quality titles and we look forward to providing world class services for their client publishers. Chitra & Sharad are talented and experienced professionals who understand the market, and so we look forward to working together to grow their business in India."

Jean Fritz, the award-winning author "whose work helped transform historical biographies for children from leaden recitals of battles and dates into warm, human narratives full of quirks and crotchets and satisfyingly strange facts," died May 14, the New York Times reported. She was 101. The author of more than four dozen books, Fritz "was known in particular for her biographies of many of the signal figures of 18th- and 19th-century American history."

Her books include And Then What Happened, Paul Revere?; Why Don't You Get a Horse, Sam Adams?; Where Was Patrick Henry on the 29th of May?; Will You Sign Here, John Hancock?; Can't You Make Them Behave, King George?; Shh! We're Writing the Constitution; Who's That Stepping on Plymouth Rock?; and Traitor: The Case of Benedict Arnold.

Fritz's Homesick: My Own Story won a National Book Award and was named a Newbery Honor Book. Her other honors include the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal and the National Humanities Medal, presented in 2003 by President George W. Bush. "Her work, nearly all published by G.P. Putnam's Sons or its imprints, was illustrated over the years by some of the foremost children's-book artists of the 20th century, among them Trina Schart Hyman, Margot Tomes and Tomie de Paola," the Times wrote.

Events coordinator Daley Farr and bookstore manager Hans Weyandt of Milkweed Books celebrate Mai Der Vang's Afterland with Graywolf Press at the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul, Minn. The noncirculating library is home to the Twin Cities Hmong Archives and features collections of political, historical and literary books. Mai Der read from her Whitman Award-winning collection before engaging in an onstage q&a with fellow Hmong writer Mai Neng Moua, author of The Bride Price (MNHS). Photo: Marisa Atkinson, Graywolf Press

"Always looking out for you," Curious Iguana bookstore, Frederick, Md., posted this week on its Facebook page, along with a pic of the latest Sidewalk chalkboard offering: "Hey you. Come closer, closer, closer. Phew! It's lucky this sign was here--you almost walked past a bookstore."

Nissa Bagelman has joined Como Sales as Mid-Atlantic sales rep. Her territory is all of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

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At Workman Publishing:

Cheryl Clayton has joined the digital operations department as senior manager, digital operations. She was formerly metadata operations manager at Norton.

Vanessa Karalis has been promoted to assistant manager, sales operations.

Kayla Burson has been hired as assistant manager of mail order, specialty wholesale, and online retail. She formerly worked in the special markets department at Penguin Random House.
 
Zelina Bennett has joined the company as a digital marketing coordinator for the Workman imprint.

Mary Rose Amoresano has been named the mass market sales assistant. She was formerly an intern at the Artisan imprint.

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Kathleen Miller has been hired as special markets assistant at Chronicle Books. Previously she was an editorial intern.

The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome by Man Martin (Unbridled Books).

Its infectious energy is one of New York City's major attractions, but if you tire of the restless throngs, it's surprisingly easy to find some quieter corners. Happily, many of the city's oases are also among its most beautiful spots. Here are five places to visit in New York for those seeking some solitude.

photo: Jessica Chun

Central Park's Conservatory Garden
Step through the Vanderbilt Gate at Fifth Avenue and 105th Street to find a six-acre sanctuary with three stylized gardens, allées, formal lawns and several secluded seating areas. Beautiful year-round, the garden is at its most vibrant in spring, when dozens of pink crabapple trees burst into bloom and tulips of every hue light up the landscape. The central geyser fountain in front of a wrought-iron wisteria pergola in the Italian garden is a popular photography backdrop for wedding couples.

New York Public Library
Any book lover would be remiss to not visit the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room of the New York Public Library. Named after the founder of Reader's Digest magazine, this warm, tranquil room is surrounded by thirteen wall murals by New York artist Richard Haas, depicting buildings associated with magazine publishing in New York. Relax here, enjoy the silence and peruse current unbound issues of 68 popular periodicals or some 22 domestic and foreign newspapers.

Wave Hill
A short trip to Wave Hill in the Bronx leads to 28 acres of calm beauty on an estate featuring lawns, exuberant flower gardens, an herb garden, greenhouses, woodlands and sweeping views across the Hudson River to the New Jersey Palisades. The house and grounds are open to the public and concerts are sometimes held in the grand Armor Hall. The adjoining Riverdale Park offers woodland and paths along the river.

photo: Jessica Chun

The Met Cloisters
The Cloisters, New York's mock-medieval castle on a high hill overlooking the Hudson River is a wonderful escape indoors and out. Step back in time among the medieval sculptures, paintings, and tapestries in the hushed galleries and then stroll the Trie Cloister garden, taken from a French convent, and the Cuxa Cloister garden, with its central fountain and pink columns carved in the twelfth century.

Noguchi Museum
Isamu Noguchi designed this intimate, reflective museum complex that bears his name in Long Island City, Queens. It comprises an open-air sculpture garden ensconced within a building that houses ten airy galleries, displaying what the sculptor considered definitive examples of his work. For ultimate serenity, the celebrated Japanese garden here is beyond compare.

The first clip is out for You Were Never Really Here, based on the 2013 novella by Jonathan Ames. IndieWire noted that Lynne Ramsay's sex trafficking thriller "is one of the 19 films competing for the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival." Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov and Alessandro Nivola, the movie "features a score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, who collaborated with Ramsay in her 2011 thriller/drama We Need to Talk About Kevin."

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A new trailer has been released for Lionsgate's upcoming drama The Glass Castle, adapted from Jeanette Walls's 2005 bestselling memoir, IndieWire reported. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, the film stars Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Naomi Watts, Max Greenfield and Ella Anderson. It opens August 11

"They did a spectacular job bringing to life a complicated story, there's so many nuances," Walls told People. "I wanted Brie Larson to play this role even before I knew who she was. She understands how to be strong and vulnerable at the same time, how you can fight and be scared at the same time."

The Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators announced winners of the 2017 Crystal Kite Awards, a peer-voted honor bestowed for excellence in children's books in 15 U.S. and international regions.

"The SCBWI is happy to recognize these fifteen outstanding books, selected by our community of authors and artists, and congratulate their talented creators," said executive director Lin Oliver. "The Crystal Kite awards provide an opportunity for both bestsellers and hidden gems to be acknowledged, and brought forward to find their way into the hands of appreciative readers."

This year's Crystal Kite regional division winners are:

Atlantic: I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark by Debbie Levy
Australia/N.Z.: Smile Cry by Tania McCartney & Jess Racklyeft
California/Hawaii: Antsy Ansel: Ansel Adams, a Life in Nature by Cynthia Jenson-Elliott & Christy Hale
Canada: Dot to Dot in the Sky, Stories of the Aurora by Joan Marie Galat
Internationals Other: El jardín mágico by Carme Lemniscates
Mid South: Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys
Middle East/India/Asia: Somewhere Among by Annie Donwerth-Chikamatsu
Midwest: The Quickest Kid in Clarksville by Pat Zietlow Miller (& Frank Morrison)
New England: Fearless Flyer: Ruth Law and Her Flying Machine by Heather Lang (& Raul Colon)
New York: Saving Kate's Flowers by Cindy Sommer (& Laurie Allen Klein)
Southeast: Wish by Barbara O'Connor
Southwest: Space Boy and the Space Pirate by Dian Curtis Regan
Texas/Oklahoma: Tiny Stitches: The Life of Medical Pioneer Vivien Thoms by Gwendolyn Hooks
U.K./Ireland: More of Me by Kathryn Evans
West: The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle by Janet Fox

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Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Baby won this year's Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, given to a book that best "captures the comic spirit" of the legendary author, the Guardian reported. The winner receives a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année, a complete set of the Everyman Wodehouse collection and a locally-bred Gloucestershire Old Spot pig named after the winning novel.

"It was the pretty clear winner," said judge and publisher David Campbell, adding that Bridget Jones's Baby was "probably her funniest book" and "laugh-out-loud funny."

Fielding, who said she intended to boast about winning the prize "as long as possible to anyone who will listen," will be presented with her award at the Hay festival later this month.

photo: Bartosz Potocki

Lisa Ko is the author of The Leavers (Algonquin, May 2, 2017), which won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Apogee Journal, Narrative, One Teen Story, Brooklyn Review and elsewhere. Born in Queens, N.Y., and raised in New Jersey, Ko now lives in Brooklyn.

On your nightstand now:

Kia Corthron's The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, Tim Murphy's Christodora and Ann Patchett's Commonwealth. I love big, beautifully written novels with multiple interconnected storylines and characters, novels that are sprawling in terms of time, theme and place. These all fit the bill for sure.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I devoured piles of 1970s YA novels from my town library by authors like Sandra Scoppettone, Marilyn Singer, Paula Danziger and Norma Klein. The main characters were teenage girls living in Manhattan and experimenting with drinking and sex. They were totally fascinating to me.

Your top five authors:

Toni Morrison, Junot Díaz, Kiese Laymon, Louise Erdrich and James Baldwin.

Book you've faked reading:

Anna Karenina. And Middlemarch.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. I loved it, but it's so polarizing.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Tanwi Nandini Islam's Bright Lines--those colors, that bicycle!

Book you hid from your parents:

Edie: American Girl, a biography of '60s Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick. In junior high I would read it over and over again. For the drugs, parties and excellent miniskirts.

Book that changed your life:

Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club came out when I was 14. Before that, I'd never read a single thing that even remotely approximated my Chinese American family's experiences, though the novel's characters were actually nothing like my family. I'd been writing stories since I was five years old, but reading Tan made me realize that I could write characters that were Asian, and that not all characters in books were white. That paperback copy of The Joy Luck Club got passed around from my mom to me, to my aunt, to our family friends, to their daughters--that's how starved we all were for representation.

Favorite line from a book:

"You your best thing, Sethe. You are." --Beloved by Toni Morrison

Five books you'll never part with:

Edward P. Jones's Lost in the City
Alice Munro's Open Secrets
Octavia Butler's Kindred
Junot Díaz's Drown
Frank Conroy's Stop-Time

All books which were pivotal in me becoming a writer.

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

I crave that manic, breathless rush I felt when I first tore through Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels.

Cardiac surgeons are rock stars of the medical world. They're able to save patients given up for dead, literally grasping life and death in the palm of their hand. British surgeon and artificial heart pioneer Stephen Westaby's Open Heart is a thrilling memoir of some of his most challenging cases--both extraordinary successes and tragic failures. He passionately advocates for advances in technology that will extend the lives of many patients, short of a heart transplant.

Each case is more astonishing than the next. He describes high-risk surgery for an aortic stenosis that threatened to cost a pregnant woman both her life and that of her unborn child. He also recounts how pure chance allowed him to save a heart attack victim in cardiogenic shock from certain death. But for all the compassion Westaby demonstrates for desperate adults in the end stage of heart failure or struggling infants in surgery for complex congenital anomalies, he understands the need to maintain the "psychology of detachment" that enables him to keep a cool head and a steady hand in the operating theater.

Westaby is proud of his role in advancing cardiac surgery technology in the United Kingdom. A trachea replacement stent bears his name, and he was the first surgeon to use the Jarvik 2000 heart pump in Great Britain. In detailing these efforts, he spares no criticism of Britain's National Health Service. He accuses the NHS of placing its desire to maintain a monopoly over the field of conventional heart transplants ahead of progress in pursuing lifesaving technology, which forces him to pursue most of the funding for his research from private charities. "What matters in the NHS is keeping down costs," he writes. "Death is cheap."

Westaby's prose is clipped and direct, as if he dictated these reminiscences with the adrenaline rush of a challenging surgery still pulsing through him. Although the book contains an informative glossary, only readers conversant with the anatomy of the cardiovascular system will be able to visualize the accounts of his surgical exploits with ease. That complexity doesn't detract from the propulsive quality of these stories, all of which include an intensely human dimension and occasional feats--like late-night international flights of essential medical equipment--that lift them into the thriller category.

As Westaby approaches age 70, the physically and emotionally demanding surgical career that took him "everywhere from Tehran to Toronto" has ended, not because of any loss of nerve, but instead by impairment from overuse of his ability to grasp surgical instruments. In his long surgical tenure, he's left behind an impressive legacy, one that transcends the gratitude of the patients whose lives were saved by his talent. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: British cardiac surgeon Stephen Westaby delivers dramatic stories from a long career at the leading edge of his demanding profession.

What would we have been writing about a century ago if Shelf Awareness was covering the annual spring booksellers convention? Thankfully, we have the New York TimesMachine, so I could just travel back to find out.

1906: "The sixth annual dinner of the American Booksellers Association, held at the Aldine Clubs's rooms, 111 Fifth Avenue, last night, was a notable gathering of those who toil in the making, producing, and vending of books."

1907: "For the first time in more than twenty years there is an increase in the number of booksellers. The increase is not local to any section of the country. This condition may be credited chiefly to the efforts of two book trade organizations--the American Booksellers Association and the American Publishers Association--to maintain equable retail prices."

1908: "At their eighth annual convention, held this week at the Victoria Hotel, there were enough delegates--some seventy or more--from different parts of the country to give to this meeting of the American Booksellers Association something of a representative character."

While demand for books was on a par with prior years, there had been decreasing profits, chiefly because fiction published "at a nominal price of $1.50 or more was sold by the department stores and others, to whom the sale of books was merely a side issue, at prices on which there was scarcely any profit. The remedy for this appeared to the members to be along the lines suggested by the Publishers' Association last year--the publication of books at net prices from which no departure would be allowed among individual dealers."

1909: "About 400 members of the American Booksellers Association attended their annual dinner in the Hotel Astor last night, and afterward heard speeches.... The souvenirs were books by each of the writers that spoke, and a little bottle of sherry labeled 'Tono Bungay,' after H.G. Wells's book of that name."

1910: "Prof. Harry A. Franck of the Technical High School of Springfield, Mass., told the members of the American Booksellers Association at their dinner in the Hotel Astor last night how he journeyed as a vagabond around the world a few years ago, starting without a cent in his pocket and encircling the globe without begging."

1911: In a discussion titled "How to Increase the Volume of Your Book Business," F.L. Reed of Grosset & Dunlap Company said, "I would suggest a series of educational advertisements to be run in the daily papers, telling the people how much enjoyment there is to be found in the society of books, what books mean to the home, and how many phases of life which touch upon the experience of each individual are depicted in books."

1912: Speeches and education sessions included "Juvenile Readers as an Asset"; "Bookseller and Public"; "Fewer Books and Better"; and "The Publishers' Advertising Man."

1913: In a presentation titled "More Steps Forward," William Arnold of the Syndicate Trading Co. and the H.B. Claflin Co. "put forward a suggestion that must have seemed revolutionary in the trade, and spirited discussion ensued. The suggestion was that booksellers should have the privilege of returning to the publisher or jobber any copies of a book on hand after one year, receiving a credit check for 90% of the purchase price."

Program from the 1914 American Booksellers Association banquet (via)

1914: "Eighty-seven percent of the reading public is unable to get the new books as published, despite its desire for them, according to a report made to the American Booksellers Association yesterday at the Hotel Astor by Richard B.G. Gardner of the Publishers Co-operative Bureau; and despite the recent added facilities of cheap transportation through the parcel post, a mere 17% of the booksellers' market is being served.... The formation of a single organization including all the booksellers of the country to prevent price-cutting without conflicting with the trust laws was strongly urged."

1915: Fred Melcher, who sells books in Indianapolis, "told at some length how the booksellers out there had got the idea of making the bookshops a sort of public institution." Melcher said: "The booksellers in Indianapolis have the highest ideals, and they get their clerks together and discuss literature and the business end of it and the plots of books. The bookstore, more than any other line of business, can become a part of the community spirit."

1916: For its first convention outside New York, the ABA met in Chicago. The session, "Some Mistakes of Booksellers," was presented by David Koeller, Jr., who advocated modern business methods: "Efficiency counts in every business but the book business. We are not credited with having much sense or ability; if we had, I guess we would be making money instead of working for glory and the little crumbs the big fish overlook."

1917: In a piece headlined "War Lifts Literary Taste," the Times reported that "because the war has created a demand for more serious literature," booksellers were urged by ABA president Ward Macauley "to stimulate the sale of books that offer authoritative information upon the issues involved in the struggle. Mr. Macauley pointed out that what was needed most was selective literature. The public, he said, was no longer in the mood to be merely amused and entertained, but wanted knowledge."

And now, we return you to your regularly scheduled 21st century BookExpo, soon to be in progress.