Leadership changes have been announced for Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, S.C. Longtime executive director Betsy Teter will be scaling back her duties and turning over day-to-day management of the Hub City Writers Project to Anne Waters and Meg Reid.

In a letter announcing to changes, Teter, who will retain the title of editor/director of development, said that Hub City Bookshop manager Waters will assume the additional title of director of operations, while Reid, "who helped make us a nationally significant publisher," will become director of Hub City Press and Programs.

"Hub City has become too important to writers and to the community of Spartanburg to barrel forward without a plan for its future leadership," Teter wrote. "As I began to think about the next phase of my life, I knew clearly that the people who should lead Hub City are already working here. Anne and Meg each have four years of passionate service and a wonderful vision for this organization. They need new challenges and opportunities."

She added: "Don't call me retired. Don't even call me semi-retired. I consider myself quasi-employed. But starting next month, John and I will be spending more time outdoors—on mountains, on bike trails, on rivers. Our plan for the next phase of our life together is Planet Earth."

Literarity Book Shop, featuring "new, used, rare and unusual titles," is opening today in El Paso, Tex., at 5411 N. Mesa in the Peppertree Square shopping center. Owners Bill and Mary Anna Clark describe Literarity as a place "for both serious bibliophiles and casual readers," El Paso Inc. reported.

"Everything is going to be eclectic, and everything is going to constantly change," Bill Clark said, noting that the 6,000 books in the 1,100-square-foot retail space are only the tip of their inventory iceberg. "Some people have questioned our business sense and even our sanity. They question the viability of a bookstore like this. However, a far greater number of people say they can't wait to get in."

Comparing the shop's ambiance with the slow-food movement, he noted: "We want this to be a peaceful browsing experience."

Duende District Bookstore, an intersectional, multicultural bookstore in Washington, D.C., will have two pop-up events this month: the first is a three-week run inside La Mano Coffee Bar, an independent coffee bar and bakery in D.C.'s Takoma neighborhood, from July 11-23, while the second will be a pop-up presence at the Smithsonian's first Asian American Literature Festival from July 27-29.

Angela Maria Spring, owner of Duende District Bookstore, said that the La Mano pop-up shop offers her the chance try something new and get an idea of whether that neighborhood would be a good one for a bricks-and-mortar location. Spring, who previously worked at Politics & Prose in D.C., also happens to know the owner of La Mano, Javier Rivas, who ran the cafe Modern Times that for several years operated inside of P&P. The inventory at the La Mano pop-up shop will feature a selection of board books and picture books, along with fiction, poetry, memoir and essay collections, graphic novels, and some music and cookbooks. At the Smithsonian festival, meanwhile, the focus will be on children's books written by people of color, with a smattering of fiction, poetry and memoir.

Spring founded Duende District earlier this year with a mission to celebrate books by and about people of color and to create an empowering, inclusive bookstore. The store made its debut as a pop-up shop at the Artomatic arts festival in D.C. in March, and in May Spring and her colleagues raised nearly $11,000 through a successful Kickstarter campaign. In June, the store had events at the D.C. Public Schools' Family Literacy Festival and the Columbia Heights Day Festival, and on June 23 kicked off an online interview series called Duende District Conversations.

Paul Gregory, former president and COO of Parragon, has been appointed CEO of Igloo Books Group by parent company Bonnier Publishing U.K., the Bookseller reported. Currently managing director at children's book publisher Hometown World, Gregory spent 20 years in various senior roles in the Parragon group. He will join Igloo Books effective September 11.

"When I took on the task of finding a new CEO for Igloo, for me there was only one man for the job: Paul Gregory," said Bonnier Publishing U.K. CEO Perminder Mann. "With his phenomenal track record, knowledge and experience, Paul commands huge respect within our industry. He stands head and shoulders above every other candidate. I am beyond thrilled he has agreed to join Bonnier Publishing at this very exciting time of expansion and positive change."

Gregory said the division he will head "has so much global potential. The team is very strong, and I'm looking forward to leading the business to unprecedented new heights."

John Styring, who founded Igloo Books in 2004, remained the publisher's CEO until last August, when he stepped down and was replaced by Dan Shepherd, who left the position in May when Bonnier Publishing consolidated its U.K. divisions under Mann, the Bookseller wrote.

Heathcote Williams, the "radical poet, playwright, actor and polymathic English genius," died July 1, the Guardian reported. He was 75. Williams "was the author of many polemical poems, written over four decades in a unique documentary style. They included works about the devastation being wrought on the natural environment--Sacred Elephant, Whale Nation and Falling for a Dolphin--and Autogeddon, a grim and majestic attack on the car."

Williams wrote several successful stage plays and appeared in several films, often in cameo roles. He was also an accomplished painter and sculptor, as well as "an impressive conjuror and a member of the Magic Circle," the Guardian wrote, adding that he "retained his principled fury to the end. In 2016 he published Boris Johnson: The Blond Beast of Brexit--A Study in Depravity, an excoriating attack reprising the foreign secretary's lies, evasion and adultery, sold as a pamphlet from the London Review of Books bookshop. Another work, Royal Babylon, lambasted the Queen." Williams's last volume of poetry, American Porn, was about U.S. President Trump.

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British crime writer Helen Cadbury, whose debut novel To Catch a Rabbit was published in 2013 and was a joint winner of the Northern Crime Award, has died, the Bookseller reported. She was 52. Cadbury's second book in the series, Bones in the Nest, followed in July 2015, with one more volume and a poetry collection still to be published.

Susie Dunlop, publishing director at Allison & Busby, said: "We are all devastated at the tragic news of Helen's death.... We are so proud to publish her first two books in the Sean Denton series, and will be publishing the third in September this year, with a launch in York in Helen's memory."

Cadbury's agent, Laura Longrigg, said: "Helen was a superb writer, a natural communicator, an all-round amazing person whose death has left us bereft. We loved working with her and the publication of the third Sean Denton novel, a collection of poetry, and the promotion in her home town of York this September, will give us all the chance to celebrate and remember her."

Sheppard and Cascone at Let's Play Books in Emmaus, Pa.

Gina Cascone and Bryony "Bree" Williams Sheppard, the mother-daughter writing team behind the picture book Around the World Right Now (Sleeping Bear Press, illustrated by Olivia Beckman), have embarked on a summer-long tour of at least 75 bricks-and-mortar bookstores. The duo will be on the road until August, with Sheppard's two children in tow. They have already visited several independent bookstores in New Jersey, including Watchung Booksellers in Montclair and [words] Bookstore in Maplewood, and planned visits include stops at stores in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Vermont and New Hampshire.

Around the World Right Now is a travelogue of the world's 24 time zones, highlighting different peoples and cultures in each time zone. It marks the first picture book for Cascone, who has written some 30 other books, and is Sheppard's debut. Cascone used to own Wit & Wisdom, an independent bookstore with her husband, literary agent Roger Williams, while Sheppard is an educator. According to Cascone, Around the World Right Now grew out of her granddaughter's "unrelenting curiosity" about the world. The duo will be writing about their trip on their blog.

Congratulations to Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass., voted the best bookstore of Boston in Boston magazine's readers' poll.

Shamanic Healing: Traditional Medicine for the Modern World by Itzhak Beery (Destiny Books).

After "a grueling five-year court battle," Warner Bros. and the estate of author J.R.R. Tolkien have settled an $80 million rights dispute over The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Deadline reported. The Tolkien estate and HarperCollins filed the lawsuit in November 2012 against the studio, its subsidiary New Line and Rings' Hobbit rightsholder the Saul Zaentz Co., Middle Earth enterprises division, claiming copyright infringement and breach of contract over video games, online slot machines and other digital merchandising.

In a joint statement, both parties said they "are pleased that they have amicably resolved this matter and look forward to working together in the future."

"The Complaint, the Warner Amended Counterclaim, and the Zaentz Amended Counterclaim are dismissed in their entirety with prejudice as to all parties thereto... and no Party is entitled to recover any fees or costs," according to a filing in federal court made by the lawyers for both sides last week.

Today:
CBS This Morning: Mandy Len Catron, author of How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays (Simon & Schuster, $26, 9781501137440).

Tonight Show repeat: Andy Cohen, author of Superficial: More Adventures from the Andy Cohen Diaries (St. Martin's Griffin, $16.99, 9781250145710).

Tomorrow:
NPR's All Things Considered: Ann Beattie, author of The Accomplished Guest: Stories (Scribner, $26, 9781501111389).

Late Night with Seth Meyers repeat: Chris Hayes, author of A Colony in a Nation (Norton, $26.95, 9780393254228).

HBO Films has put in development The Color of Cola, based on Stephanie Capparell's nonfiction book, The Real Pepsi Challenge, which explores "how Pepsi broke racial barriers in 1940s America," Deadline reported. Mitchell Kapner (Oz the Great and Powerful) will write the adaptation. Mark Landsman, Michael Karbelnikoff and Peter Kline executive produce. Capparell is also co-author of Shackleton's Way and an editor and writer for the Wall Street Journal.

On Independence Day, winners were unveiled for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance 2017 Southern Book Prize (formerly the SIBA Book Award). This year features an expanded list of categories, inspired by the tastes and inclinations of Southern readers. Nominated by booksellers and their customers, vetted by bookstores and selected by a jury of Southern booksellers, these are the books Southern bookstores were most passionate about, and inspired the most "you've got to read this" and "handsell" moments, SIBA noted. The 2017 Southern Book Prize winners are:

Fiction
Coming of age: Commonwealth by Ann Patchett (Harper)
Family life: A Lowcountry Christmas by Mary Alice Monroe (Gallery Books)
Historical: Chasing the North Star by Robert Morgan (Algonquin)
Literary: Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks (Hub City Press)
Mystery & detective: The Kept Woman by Karin Slaughter (Morrow)
Southern stories & stories by Southerners: The Whole Town's Talking by Fannie Flagg (Random House)
Thriller: Redemption Road by John Hart (Thomas Dunne Books)
Juvenile: Lily and Dunkin by Donna Gephart (Delacorte Press)

Nonfiction
Biography, autobiography & memoir: The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham (Milkweed)
Cooking: Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South by Vivian Howard (Little Brown and Company)
Creative Nonfiction: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family & Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance (Harper)

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The short story "The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away" by Bushra al-Fadil of Sudan has won the Caine Prize for African Writing. Al-Fadil receives £7,000 (about $9,040) and translator Max Shmookler receives £3,000 (about $3,875).

Chair of judges Nii Ayikwei Parkes said that the story "explores through metaphor and an altered, inventive mode of perception--including, for the first time in the Caine Prize, illustration--the allure of, and relentless threats to freedom. Rooted in a mix of classical traditions as well as the vernacular contexts of its location, Bushra al-Fadil's 'The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away' is at once a very modern exploration of how assaulted from all sides and unsupported by those we would turn to for solace we can became mentally exiled in our own lands, edging in to a fantasy existence where we seek to cling to a sort of freedom until ultimately we slip into physical exile." The story was first published in The Book of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction, published last year in the U.K. by Comma Press.

Bushra al-Fadil, who holds a Ph.D. in Russian language and literature, is a Sudanese writer living in Saudi Arabia. His most recent collection, Above a City's Sky, was published in 2012.

photo: Manal al-Sharif

Manal al-Sharif was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in 1979. In 2011, she was imprisoned for driving a car and charged with "driving while female." The mother of two sons, she now lives in Australia and is a leading women's rights activist and the author of Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening (Simon & Schuster, June 13, 2017). In 2012, al-Sharif was awarded the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent at the Oslo Freedom Forum and Time named her one of its "100 Most Influential People in the World."

On your nightstand now:

The War on Women by Sue Lloyd-Roberts. Sitting next to it is Yassmin's Story by Yassmin Abdel-Magied, the Sudanese Australian mechanical engineer. And next to both of them is Pippi Longstocking.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Five Adventurers mystery series by Mahmoud Salem. I loved it because the characters, the heroes, were children my own age. They helped solve crimes and catch outlaws, and I remember being so captivated by the stories that I often imagined myself with them. I even wrote my own Five Adventurers stories.

Your top five authors:

It's difficult for me to name my five favorite authors because, to me, having a top author means having read all of his or her books and that is rare. In fact, I have only read (and re-read) one author's entire canon: Ghazi al-Gosaibi, the Saudi minister, ambassador, poet and writer.

In addition to his works, some other extraordinary books by extraordinary authors include Elif Shafak's The Forty Rules of Love; Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; Mona Eltahawy's Headscarves and Hymens; Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame; and Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In.

Book you've faked reading:

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I had wanted to read it for a while, and when I finally got to it, I was discouraged by a number of text-fillers. The ideas of what contribute to success in the book are unlike any other book you might read about the same subject. But, in my opinion, these ideas could have been illustrated with less jargon. I had to skip through chapters looking for the main points.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Anything written by Ghazi al-Gosaibi. Although he was a high-profile Saudi politician, most of his books were banned for his explicit language and political views. The clerics in Saudi hated him, and whatever wasn't banned was heavily edited.

Growing up, I was lucky to be part of an underground group that exchanged his smuggled books--and whenever I traveled outside Saudi, I always make sure to smuggle a new one back in. His novels are the most captivating books I have ever read, and his poetry, articles and autobiography are also wonderful. When he passed away, everyone was in a deep shock: the stream where we quenched our thirst had stopped.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I never fall for a book cover. Any book I buy, I carefully research ahead of time, asking my bookworm friends for recommendations. I scan the book's table of contents before I read the introduction and first paragraph from each chapter. I then randomly open to a page and read it, and if I can reflect on that page--if it makes sense to me--I know the book is worth my time and money.

Book you hid from your parents:

Growing up in a very conservative society, I hid A LOT of my books from my parents. As a child, I liked romance novels--but, of course, they were banned in Saudi Arabia. I had to wait until we visited my mother's family in Egypt to read them and other banned books, and I would then smuggle them home. Because Egypt had much looser restrictions on books, I loved traveling there (and elsewhere) because it meant I could read more. And I could choose what I wanted to read, not just what was approved and available to us, as was the case at home.

Book that changed your life:

I won't say my life was changed by one single book--it's unfair to the rest. Every great book is a life-changing experience. For me, with every book I read I live another life.

Favorite line from a book:

From Ghazi al-Gosaibi's banned political novel The Apartment of Liberty: "My problem is not forgetting, my real problem is having an excess memory." This quote means so much to me, I included it at the beginning of my memoir. I also love Richard Peck's "I read because one life is not enough."

Five books you'll never part with:

As you might guess, I'll never part with anything written by Ghazi al-Gosaibi or with my childhood copy of The Five Adventurers. I also love Stolen Lives by Malika Oufkir--I couldn't eat or sleep or do anything until I finished it. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho are also important to me.

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

All my childhood books, especially Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Growing up, I always wanted to be Josephine March.

Book you'd most like to see written:

If all history books can be rewritten to include both sides of the story, the world would be a better place. We need to stop experiencing history from only the perspective of the victor. We need to read--and feel--what it is like to be on the defeated side.

With big smiles plastered on their faces, an apple and a pear invite the reader into Adam Rex's (School's First Day of School) Nothing Rhymes with Orange, asking who "wouldn't travel anywhere/ to get an apple or a pear?" As the page turns, more happy, anthropomorphized fruits join in on the fun: a banana surfs by, waving at a plum and a Speedo-clad peach ("And if a chum hands you a plum, be fair and share that tasty treat!/ Hit the beach in your cabana/ with a peach or a banana.").

"Hey, are you guys going to need me for this book?" asks the orange from the corner of the page, "[j]ust wanted you to know I'm available in case something comes up." The grapes in their capes swoop past the orange to join the dancing "healthy happy colorful and cute" fruit.

Knowing full well that nothing rhymes with him, the orange sulks as the pages become more and more packed. A "lychee" joins the cast, rhyming with "peachy" and, eventually, "Friedrich Nietzsche" ("FRUCHT!"). The scheme stretches the terminal and internal rhymes, becoming ever more forced in an attempt to fit in all the fruit: "If a pear gets lost at night/ and meets a wolf, who takes a bite,/ then does that pear become a pearwolf when the moon is full and bright?/ Will the apple have to grapple with this pear with fangs and hair?"

At this point, the jealous, lonely and frustrated orange has had it ("This book's sorta gone off the rails. I'm glad I'm not a part of it."). But when a grape in a cape flies by and ties the pearwolf to a chair, the morose orange moans, "[o]h, who am I kidding... this book is amazing. Happens every time... me and kumquat: always ignored." Grumpy and left out, the orange skulks onto an empty page to mope--where the apple finds him. It turns out that "the fruit are feeling rotten, 'cause there's someone they've forgotten./ It's the orange./ He's really smorange./ There's no one quite as smorange as orange."

Rex's photo collage illustrations are bold and silly, all the fruits bursting with personality as they ride skateboards, wear suits, sit on antelopes and march to the beat of their own rhyme. The poor orange is a sympathetic character, and the illustration of his eventual inclusion is an ending readers are sure to visit time and again. Whether read aloud or solo, the bright illustrations, funny rhymes and happy ending make this a thoroughly enjoyable story. And what does "smorange" mean? Take the journey with the orange to find out. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Shelf Talker: An orange feels left out of the fruit party because nothing rhymes with him in Adam Rex's playful and sweet Nothing Rhymes with Orange.

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

1. The Knocked Up Plan by Lauren Blakely
2. Tycoon by Katy Evans
3. Black and Green by C.L. Stone
4. Stay by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy
5. Shopping for an Heir by Julia Kent
6. Magic After Dark by Various
7. The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins
8. Protecting Her by Kira Blakely
9. Wicked Paradise by Tia Lewis
10. Country Nights by Winter Renshaw

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]