Tomorrow Busboys and Poets, the Washington, D.C., area restaurant, bookstore and events space that aims to inspire social change, is officially opening its seventh location, in the Anacostia area of Washington. The predominantly African-American area has been "underserved for many years," owner Andy Shallal told DCist.

The new Busboys and Poets will be located in a building owned by the Far Southeast Family Strengthening Collaborative, a nonprofit that supports families and children in Ward 8, an area that has many fewer restaurants and other services than the rest of the District of Columbia. "People live here and raise families here and there's a fair amount of disposable income, but they can't spend it here because there's not a lot of services to spend it on," Shallal added. Busboys and Poets will work with the Collaborative on some leadership and culinary programs.

With 7,000 square feet of space, this is the fourth-largest Busboys and Poets location. Shallal said he is "scouting other sites in Howard County, Md., and Fairfax County, Va.," DCist noted.

Blue Manatee children's bookstore, Cincinnati, Ohio, which changed ownership in January, will reopen April 2 as the Blue Manatee Literacy Project, "a nonprofit organization aimed at boosting local children's reading skills," WCPO reported, adding that the store will still have "many of the staff members that regulars at the Oakley bookstore know and love."

"The vibe of the space will be the same. It's going to be this great hub for parents and children to come into, shop for books, find gifts, come to author signings. But there's this whole bigger mission, this whole bigger drive," said Amanda Kranias, one of two directors overseeing the project.

The team behind the nonprofit calls that mission "curated literacy," according to co-director Kevin Kushman, who added that the idea is to connect books and experiences for children between the ages of four and eight who are at risk of falling behind in reading. For every book that someone buys at Blue Manatee, the nonprofit will donate another book to a needy student. Instruction and mentoring will also be provided.

"Allowing them to grow into their skills so they're as proficient as possible once they get to school age," said Kushman, who had proposed transforming the store into a nonprofit to former owners Dr. John Hutton and Sandra Gross. They loved the idea.

"Blue Manatee's really being reimagined," Kushman noted. "You're supporting literacy as soon as you enter the store."

Kranias and Kushman did not know each other until Hutton introduced them and suggested they should work together, WCPO reported. Along with members of the nonprofit's board of directors, they are seeking the community's "unbridled enthusiasm" for the new mission, whether helping with governance, programs or money.

"When people come in, they will feel like, 'oh great--we're in the Blue Manatee! It's still here!' " Kranias said. "But at the same time, 'we've done something good today.' "

Last October, Rebecca Fitting and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, co-owners of Greenlight Bookstores in Brooklyn, N.Y., opened a new store called Yours Truly, Brooklyn, next door to Greenlight's Fort Greene location. The 300-square-foot store sells exclusively gift and non-book items, with the majority of the inventory devoted to stationery.

For a long time, Bagnulo and Fitting explained, they'd wanted to expand the sideline offerings in their Fort Greene store, but that would have necessitated cutting back on books, which they were reluctant to do. Before last year, they had actually had no plans to open a gift and stationery store, and were in fact looking forward to having no new projects for a while. But they happened to hold the lease to the space adjacent to their Fort Greene store, and an opportunity presented itself when that subletter left. Faced with the choice of either finding a new subletter or doing something themselves, they decided to do make use of the space.

"By opening the stationery store next door, we got to have our cake and it eat too," said Fitting. "We expanded our gift and non-book offerings without sacrificing any of our book space."

In August 2018, Fitting and Bagnulo hired Mei Hyler as manager and buyer of Yours Truly, Brooklyn. Prior to joining the team, Hyler had nearly two decades' worth of experience in retail. Her first day of work, in fact, was attending a major gift show, and at that point the space that would eventually house Yours Truly had not yet been fully vacated. "When I came on board, the space was entirely raw," Hyler recalled. "I had the privilege to be here from the ground up."

Hyler said that she wants customers to think of Yours Truly as a place where any lover of stationery can find things they would fall in love with, and a place where anyone can feel comfortable asking questions. She also makes an effort to carry things that could be used in daily life, for school, work, passion projects or hobbies. Hyler added: "I don't want it to feel exclusive. I want it to be a very accessible place."

Since the store's soft opening in October, Hyler has been experimenting with the product mix and seeing what sorts of things customers prefer. She pointed to the French brand Papier Tigre as a store staple, along with Rifle Paper Co. and Original Crown Mill stationery distributed by OrangeArt. Blackwing Pencils are popular, too. As for children's sidelines, Hyler said that Ooly is appealing to adults but also suitable for children. Other popular lines include TinyBee Cards, Quick Brown Fox Letterpress and Frog & Toad Press.

Hyler said she's been surprised by how well calligraphy materials are selling. When the store first opened, she said, everyone thought they were taking a chance on the calligraphy materials. Instead, they've been popular from the get-go.

Fitting said that while Hyler handles the day-to-day buying for Yours Truly, she oversees the inventory across both Greenlight and Yours Truly, so she can ensure that there's no overlapping merchandise. The stores carry some similar items, and sometimes the same lines, but never the exact same products. The goal, she said, is for the stores to complement but not compete with each other.

Fitting reported that Yours Truly has been "incredibly well received," and that she and Bagnulo "couldn't be happier." She added that it's been "very charming" to see customers who didn't know that Greenlight and Yours Truly are affiliated get protective of Greenlight. She said: "It feels really nice to be so well looked out for by our customers." --Alex Mutter

Canadian writer Patrick Lane, "whose award-winning poetry was celebrated for its beautiful writing and deft examination of the human condition," died March 7, CBC News reported. He was 79. Lane published more than 20 poetry collections, as well as novels and works of nonfiction.

Lane's first collection, Letters from a Savage Mind (1966), was followed by books such as Separations (1969), Beware the Months of Fire (1974) and Poems, New and Selected, which won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry in 1978. Other books include Winter and Mortal Remains, which were consecutively shortlisted for Governor General's Literary Awards; and Too Spare, Too Fierce, winner of the 1995 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. With his wife, Lorna Crozier, a fellow Governor General's Literary Award recipient, he published the collection No Longer Two People.

Red Dog, Red Dog, Lane's 2009 novel, was longlisted for the Giller Prize. His memoir There Is a Season received the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence and B.C. Award for Canadian Nonfiction. Most recently, he published The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane and his second novel, Deep River Night.

McClelland & Stewart, Lane's publisher, posted on Facebook: "We are deeply saddened by the passing of beloved writer Patrick Lane. Patrick will be remembered as a writer of enormous empathy and humanity, and we are fortunate to be able to continue to learn from him through his beautiful and wise books."

From his poem "Living in a Phantom Hut":

Those mountains I wandered through when I was young.
There was need for a small fire in the night. Still,
I wept back then for what could not be undone.
Old misfortunes can bring a man peace.
My face reveals my face, my hands my hands.
There is nowhere I can go where I haven't been.
When I hold the brush to my ear I hear the moon.

Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, N.H., hosted a standing-room-only crowd for Eleanor Dunfey-Freiberger, author of Counter Culture: Clams, Convents, and a Circle of Global Citizens (Peter E. Randall Publisher).

Women & Children First in Chicago, Ill., is turning 40 later this month and will kick off its birthday celebrations with an event on Sunday, March 24, that will bring together current co-owners Lynn Mooney and Sarah Hollenbeck with founders Ann Christopherson and Linda Bubon. The group will take part in a panel discussion and will present the store's Top 10 Bestsellers of All Time, while reminiscing about how each title wound up on the list. Customers can look forward to "nostalgia, laughter, and a bubbly toast will be served!"

Newly opened Cream & Amber bookstore and tap house, Hopkins, Minn., shared a photo of its sidewalk chalkboard on Facebook, noting: "Winter storm coming? Snow problem for us! Open 11am-9pm today." One side reads: "More snow = more time to hibernate with a good book." The other side: "Books & beer are our winter coping methods. Join us."

Susan Fissell has joined the Simon & Schuster special markets team as national accounts sales manager. She was previously the director of special markets at Hachette Book Group.

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At Chronicle Books:

Samantha Steele has been promoted to national accounts manager. Previously she was sales manager.

Morgan Amer has been promoted to sales manager. Previously she was associate sales manager.

Kathleen Miller has been promoted to associate sales manager. Previously she was sales coordinator.

Honoring the Enemy: A Captain Peter Wake Novel by Robert N. Macomber (Naval Institute Press).

Today:
Fresh Air: Barbara Brown Taylor, author of Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others (HarperOne, $25.99, 9780062406569).

Daily Show: Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Back Bay, $16.99, 9780316471916).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Andrew Rannells, author of Too Much Is Not Enough: A Memoir of Fumbling Toward Adulthood (Crown Archetype, $26, 9780525574859).

Wendy Williams: Hoda Kotb, author of You Are My Happy (HarperCollins, $18.99, 9780062887894).

The highly anticipated publication next fall of The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, will include a launch event featuring a live interview with author Margaret Atwood that will be broadcast globally to more than 1,000 cinemas. Deadline reported that Margaret Atwood: Live in Cinemas, presented September 10 as a live-stream in some venues and tape-delayed in others, "will originate from London's National Theatre, where BBC journalist Samira Ahmed will interview the author about her career and her reasons for returning to the Handmaid story after 34 years."

Expressing delight that the novel's launch event will take place worldwide, Atwood said, "I can't be in all the places at once in my analogue body, but I look forward to being with so many readers via the big screen."

Produced by Fane Productions, the event will be broadcast to U.S. theaters the same day via Fathom Event's Digital Broadcast Network and will be presented in partnership with the human rights group Equality Now.

Margaret Atwood: Live in Cinemas will also be broadcast to theaters in the U.K. and Canada, with delayed screenings planned for Australia and New Zealand. Executive producer is David Sabel.

Our friends at AudioFile Magazine highlight the Audie Awards gala and winners. Enjoy!

All photos: Max Flatow

The 2019 Audie Awards Gala, hosted by Tan France, Queer Eye fashion expert, dazzled a capacity crowd of publishers, authors, and audiobook narrators last week. Sponsored by the Audio Publishers Association, the event celebrated the best audiobooks of 2018 in 24 categories, including Audiobook of the Year, which was chosen by a judging panel consisting of Ron Charles, book critic for the Washington Post; Linda Holmes, host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour; and Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation. The award, recognizing a title that, through quality and influence, stands as a benchmark of excellence for the audiobook industry, went to Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone, narrated by Bahni Turpin and published by Macmillan Audio.

Ron Charles's praise of Turpin's narration highlights the appeal of the audiobook format. He said, "There's something magical about the timbre of Turpin's voice that's perfectly tuned to the fantastical nature of this novel. I felt transported into the world of Children of Blood and Bone. Turpin's superb accents allow us to visualize each character distinctly. Her dramatic pacing builds suspense and then explodes in moments of crisis. When she cries out in agony or despair, I pretty much stopped breathing. This is world-building entirely through the spoken word and the audiobook succeeds on the power of Turpin's dramatic performance."

Julia Whelan and Edoardo Ballerini

Among other winners, narrators Julia Whelan and Edoardo Ballerini were honored in the Best Female and Best Male narrator categories. Whelan won for her performance of Tara Westover's Educated (Penguin Random House Audio), which also won in the Best Autobiography/Memoir category. Ballerini took the honor with Dean Koontz's Watchers (Brilliance Publishing), a title that also might have contended in the Thriller category, but the Thriller/Suspense Audie went to Crimson Lake by Candace Fox and narrated by Euan Morton (Macmillan Audio). In the Mystery category, the winner was Elizabeth George's The Punishment She Deserves (Penguin Random House Audio), narrated by multiple Audie winner Simon Vance.

British narrators and producers were brought into the limelight with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Hexagonal Phase by Eoin Colfer and Douglas Adams (Penguin Random House UK Audio), which took the Science Fiction Audie. The Hitchhiker's series--Tertiary, Quandary, and Quintessential Phases--were all Audie winners in 2006 and 2007. Should the collaborators go for Heptagonal?

British publisher Big Finish Productions took home the Audie for Audio Drama with The Martian Invasion of Earth by H.G. Wells, dramatized by Nicholas Briggs. U.K. productions from Audible Studios took the Faith-Based Fiction & Non-Fiction Audie with The Man on the Mountaintop by Susan Trott as well as the win in Literary Fiction for Bleak House by Charles Dickens, narrated by Miriam Margolyes. The Perfectionists, written and narrated by Simon Winchester (HarperAudio), won the Non-Fiction Audie. English author Lucy Strange won the Narration by Author category with The Secret of Nightingale Wood (Scholastic Audio). The Fiction category was captured by Australian author Heather Morris and British narrator Richard Armitage for The Tattooist of Auschwitz (HarperAudio).

Odyssey Award winner Sadie by Courtney Summers, performed by a full cast, led the young people's categories, taking the Young Adult Audie. Jason Reynolds's Sunny, narrated by Guy Lockard (Simon & Schuster Audio), took home the Middle Grade Audie, and Live Oak Media's multi-voice performance of Before She Was Harriet by Lesa Cline-Ransome was the Young Listeners winner.

The finalists for the 31st annual Publishing Triangle Awards, honoring the best LGBTQ fiction, nonfiction and poetry published in 2018, have been announced and may be seen here. Winners will be celebrated April 25 at a ceremony in New York City.

In addition, Jaime Manrique has won the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is a Colombian-born novelist, poet, essayist, and translator who writes both in English and Spanish and whose work has been translated into 15 languages. Among his publications in English are five novels: Colombian Gold, Latin Moon in Manhattan, Twilight at the Equator, Our Lives Are the Rivers, and Cervantes Street. He has also published the memoir Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. Manrique's selected poems were published in Spanish in 2016.

He has won Colombia's National Poetry Award, a 2007 International Latino Book Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has taught at Columbia University's MFA program in creative writing and is currently a distinguished lecturer in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at the City College of New York. Manrique's sixth novel, Like This Afternoon, will be published in June by Kaylie Jones Books/Akashic Books. He has another new novel in the works, entitled The Rooster from Aracataca.

Julian Randall has won the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, the prize for an LGBTQ writer who has published at least one book but not more than two. Randall is a fellow of Cave Canem, Callaloo, BOAAT and the Watering Holes. His poetry has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and Poetry and anthologized in Bettering American Poetry, Nepantla, and Furious Flower. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Ole Miss. His first book, Refuse (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry.

Paul Willis has won the Publishing Triangle's Leadership Award, recognizing "contributions to LGBTQ literature by those who are not primarily writers, such as editors, agents, librarians, and institutions." In 2003, Willis established the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans, which has grown into an internationally recognized event that brings together LGBTQ publishers, writers, and readers from the U.S. and abroad. Under Willis's direction, the festival now includes annual contests in short story, poetry, and playwriting, as well as an emerging writer award. In addition, he integrated Saints and Sinners with the larger Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, and serves as the executive director of both these festivals.

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The shortlist for the 2019 Stella Prize, which honors the best fiction and nonfiction by Australian women, is:

Little Gods by Jenny Ackland
The Bridge by Enza Gandolfo
Pink Mountain on Locust Island by Jamie Marina Lau
The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie
Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko
Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin

The winner will be announced on April 9.

Seattle area booksellers (l.-r.) Kim Hooyboer, Third Place Books; James Crossley, Madison Books; Huntsberger; Sam Kaas, Third Place Books; Emma Nichols, Elliott Bay Book Co.

Kristianne Huntsberger is Shelf Awareness's partnership program manager. She is currently reading her way through David Bowie's list of 100 influential books and is talking about them on the podcast BowieBookClub. Kristianne will be the first to admit she's not a bit KonMari about books; she'll soon be able to build a fort in her living room.

On your nightstand now:

In lieu of a nightstand, the titles scattered around the house are As Lie Is to Grin by Simeon Marsalis, which was recommended by my local bookseller; Silence by John Cage because it is next up for the Bowie Book Club podcast; and Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, which my partner and I just started reading out loud.

Favorite book when you were a child:

A few years ago, I tracked down the Maurice Sendak illustrated copy of George Macdonald's The Light Princess. I loved that book and Oscar Wilde's collection of tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales. Apparently, fairy tales that made me cry were my big thing.

Your top five authors:

Rebecca Solnit, Annie Dillard, bell hooks, Pico Iyer and Italo Calvino.

Book you've faked reading:

It wasn't an intentional lie, but I may've let people believe I'd read Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It came up recently when my sister said it is to her what Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is to me--the book she reads most frequently. I've admitted the lie and now have a copy on deck.

Book you're an evangelist for:

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris. Get on board now so you can be ready for the second volume!

Book you've bought for the cover:

A 1969 book club edition of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin with this great ink-and-watercolor illustration that looked a lot like the copy I loved as a kid. The very day I bought it we found out that Le Guin had died.  

Book you hid from your parents:

I didn't hide the book itself, but I did hide the meaning of Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey when I was in love with it as a teenager and beginning to favor science over religion.

Book that changed your life:

Though I'm sure a lot of it has or could be disproved, the revisionist history and mythology of Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade was like a paradigm meteor when I was young. It not only shaped my current feminism, it also helped inform my graduate school research.

Favorite line from a book:

"There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men." --Ch. 87, The Grand Armada, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.

Five books you'll never part with:

Stories from the Nerve Bible by Laurie Anderson. Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, though I've been reading it for years and I'm still only on Vol. 4. Nostalgically, I've got to keep the copy of Moby-Dick I got from a swap meet when I was a teenager and then filled with embarrassing marginalia. I'll also keep the copy of Burmese Folktales by Maung Htin Aung that I picked up when I lived in Myanmar because I believe it's still not in print in the United States. And the Kate Beaton collection Never Learn Anything from History because sometimes you've just got to laugh your head off.

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

V. by Thomas Pynchon because I'm certain that reading it as a teenager means I missed a ton of what was going on.

Suggestions on a good book to read out loud?

My family always read aloud and I've kept the habit. A strong character and engaging voice are crucial for read-aloud success. Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt was my first Graham Greene ever, so I was unaware how anomalous its snarky hilarity was. Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis was another fun read and my partner and I just finished The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, which is totally engrossing.

Myla Goldberg (Bee Season) goads readers at the outset of her fourth novel, "Feast your eyes, America," in the enthralling, jaded voice of Samantha Preston. Daughter of the acclaimed and controversial mid-century street photographer Lillian Preston, Samantha is the only one who can provide the necessary context for her mother's posthumous retrospective. But as the subject of Lillian's most scandalous series, she's rather conflicted about filling the role of curator.

Constructed as a gallery catalogue, yet notably without photos, Feast Your Eyes is a marvelous feat of the imagination. Goldberg cites inspiration from Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Vivian Maier, Sally Mann and many others as she reveals the impeccable artistic eye of a fictional single mother with a camera. Still processing the residual trauma of her childhood notoriety, Samantha expounds on photos like Hot dog vendor on Fifty-third Street, New York, 1955: "Funny how Lillian's title neglects to mention that it's the stretch of sidewalk in front of the Museum of Modern Art...." MoMA was showcasing photography at the time to an enormous audience while Preston's work languished in a smaller show downtown.

Samantha is not alone, however, in remembering Lillian, whose friends and lovers contribute letters and interviews to the narrative constructed around some 118 pieces. A punk musician supplies a preface that sketches the reverberations of the photographer's work into later decades. Lillian's diary entries lend insight into the frozen moments of her complicated life, but it is her daughter's perspective that reigns most poignantly throughout the novel.

"Photographs have an annoying habit of corroding whatever real memories you have of a moment until the photo is all that's left," Samantha writes about Samantha's tattoo, Brooklyn, 1959. Featuring the girl in nothing but her underpants, this picture is the first in a series deemed obscene by community guidelines. An ensuing court case would be appealed on grounds of civil liberties, sending the tiny Preston family into turmoil for the rest of their lives.

Goldberg conjures unseen photographs with astounding skill, describing a body of work that captures Lillian's era as readily as it speaks to the author's own. Art can be a dangerous endeavor for creator and viewer alike; the greater the response, the more effective the piece. Feast Your Eyes inhabits this tension with immense grace and empathy, challenging the perennial urge to stifle what doesn't conform to a given community's standards.

The consistently ambitious Goldberg has once again delivered a remarkable piece of literature. Feast your eyes, indeed; there is much to digest. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

Shelf Talker: Myla Goldberg's fourth novel is not to be missed as it sifts through a disruptive body of work by an innovative mid-century photographer and mother.

The bestselling Libro.fm audiobooks at independent bookstore locations during January:

Fiction
1. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (Penguin Random House Audio)
2. Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (Penguin Random House Audio)
3. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (HighBridge)
4. There There by Tommy Orange (Penguin Random House Audio)
5. Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield and Juliet Stevenson (Simon & Schuster Audio)
6. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (Penguin Random House Audio)
7. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides (Macmillan Audio)
8. On the Come Up by Angie Thomas (HarperCollins)
9. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (Penguin Random House Audio)
10. Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins)

Nonfiction    
1. Becoming by Michelle Obama (Penguin Random House Audio)
2. Educated by Tara Westover (Penguin Random House Audio)
3. The Library Book by Susan Orlean (Simon & Schuster Audio)
4. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou (Penguin Random House Audio)
5. Calypso by David Sedaris (Hachette Audio)
6. Maid by Stephanie Land (Hachette Audio)
7. The Threat by Andrew G. McCabe (Macmillan Audio)
8. Inheritance by Dani Shapiro (Penguin Random House Audio)
9. Dare to Lead by Brené Brown (Penguin Random House Audio)
10. Heavy by Kiese Laymon (Simon & Schuster Audio)