Harvest Moon Books opened on Small Business Saturday at 3123 Central Ave NE in the historic Nob Hill neighborhood of Albuquerque, N.Mex. The Daily Lobo reported that the bookshop is "tucked in the corner of the newly opened Little Bear and Stuff Retail Collaborative" and "sells a variety of titles, both new and used, with a focus on people of color and indigenous and queer authors."

Robin Babb at Harvest Moon Books

"Honestly, at this point, it's been a lot of like, 'What do I want to read?' Which, I know at a certain point will probably become a bad idea," owner and writer Robin Babb said regarding her inventory choices. "I write about New Mexico a lot but have ended up writing quite a bit about indigenous issues, the pueblos and the Navajo Nation. And kind of just incidentally because of my interest, (I) ended up buying a lot of books by and about indigenous people."

Babb added that her goal "is, frankly, just to see if I can make the writing career plus the bookselling career work simultaneously. If I can do both of them at once, I would be glad.... No part of me wants to corner the market. The more [bookstores] the better. If you are considering opening a bookstore, I know it sounds crazy, but do it."

Although opening a bookstore had been on her mind for years, Babb had not found the time to pursue it, but the retail collaborative "makes it a lot easier." She noted that the collaborative gave her the opportunity to pursue a bookstore with relatively low financial risk, since all the vendors share expenses. "I think (the retail collaborative is) definitely being billed as a very new trendy thing, but it kind of resembles an old consignment store," Babb said. "It's basically the same thing. It's a lot of vendors selling out of one space together."

Babb told the Albuquerque Journal: "I know first-hand the ability of books to change lives.... I'm biased, but I think print media is having a bit of a resurgence. I think people are really interested in being able to hold things in their hands again."

Ellen Plumb's City Bookstore in Emporia, Kan., which opened in 2016 and relocated across the street a year later, will close early next year. In an announcement posted on Facebook "with much sadness," owner Marcia Lawrence said the bookshop will close January 31, adding: "I am truly grateful for all you book lovers who have made the bookshop a comfortable, interesting, and safe 'third place.' Because I am unable to find an affordable and appropriate permanent location for the bookshop, it must close. I hope with all my heart that someone will step up to keep a bookstore in our town. Thank you from my heart for your patronage these past three-plus years."

Charley Rejsek

Charley Rejsek has been named general manager of BookPeople, Austin, Tex., effective next Monday, December 16.

Rejsek started as a bookseller at Barnes & Noble in 1998, rising to national business development manager before leaving the company in 2016. Since then, she has produced events across Texas for nonprofit news organization the Texas Tribune, and coordinated speaker book signings at the annual Texas Tribune Festival. She has also been involved with the Texas Book Festival since 2007 as a volunteer, serving on author selection committees, and as a staff member, coordinating volunteers and logistics.

Rejsek replaces Elizabeth Jordan, who in September announced that she was resigning as BookPeople CEO to become general manager of Nowhere Bookshop, the new store being opened by author Jenny Lawson in San Antonio.

Paul Bogaards

Congratulations to the always amusing and energetic Paul Bogaards, who has been promoted to deputy publisher, executive director of marketing and publicity, Knopf and Pantheon. He has been executive director of publicity, Knopf and Pantheon, and will now assume responsibility of overseeing marketing for Knopf and Pantheon while continuing to serve as group spokesperson and lead publicity liaison.

In an announcing his promotion, Tony Chirico, president, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, commented in part: "There is no one more qualified or more accomplished to direct our marketing and publicity activities than Paul. A member of the Knopf publicity department for 30 years and its head since 1998, Paul has long played an invaluable role in the books we acquire and how we publish them. He is creative, decisive, and strategic, and leads our forward communications with a zeal and passion for authors and their books that has yielded enormous and lasting results... Paul's unrivaled skill in connecting books with readers has resulted in hundreds of bestsellers and scores of appreciative authors, including U.S. Presidents, Supreme Court Justices and British Prime Ministers; Nobel, Pulitzer, and National Book Award winners; million-copy-selling writers and debut novelists. He has brought our books to the attention of millions of readers and has taught several generations of publicists to do the same. Indeed, mentoring colleagues and recruiting talent remain two of his strongest attributes....

"Finally, and probably most important, Paul recognizes that the work we do on behalf of authors, agents, booksellers, and readers is constantly evolving. He is always assessing what works and what doesn't, and is constantly asking 'How can we help?' and 'What can we do better?' And after 30 years on the job, he does it all with brio, good humor, and a sense of mission and optimism."

Sir Michael Howard, who was "the most influential British military historian of his generation" and "left a mark on public and professional debate in Britain and internationally," died November 30, the Guardian reported. He was 97. Howard "enjoyed a unique combination of beliefs, skills and, as he freely admitted, luck. The unifying theme of all his work was the placing of military history and strategic thought in the broadest social and political context."

Describing him as "the epitome of respectability, even grandeur," the Guardian wrote that Howard was a Guards officer, member of the Athenaeum, regius professor, author of official histories of the Second World War, and recipient of honors including the Military Cross, a knighthood (1986), CH (2002) and OM (2005). "Yet he also had a non-conformist streak, reflected in his support throughout the cold war years for tempering nuclear deterrence with moderation and for practical measures of arms control. Nonconformism also infused other aspects of his life."

Howard's many books include The Franco-Prussian War (1961), The Coldstream Guards 1920-1946 (1951, co-authored with John Sparrow), Disengagement in Europe (1958); an authoritative translation of Carl von Clausewitz's On War (with Peter Paret, 1976), War in European History (1976), War and the Liberal Conscience (1978), The Lessons of History (1991) and Strategic Deception (1990), a volume of the official history of British Intelligence in World War II.

After his "retirement" in 1993, Howard "continued to be intellectually active," the Guardian noted. "He produced a short book, The Invention of Peace (2000), full of pithy scepticism about propositions that history had ended," as well as his memoir Captain Professor (2006), "a frank account of his full, productive and fortunate life."

Last Thursday, the American Booksellers Association's e-newsletter edition of the Indie Next List for December was delivered to more than half a million of the country's best book readers. The newsletter was sent to customers of 150 independent bookstores, with a combined total of 625,047 subscribers.

The e-newsletter, powered by Shelf Awareness, features all of the month's Indie Next List titles, with bookseller quotes and "buy now" buttons that lead directly to the purchase page for the title on the sending store's website. The newsletter, which is branded with each store's logo, also includes an interview (from Bookselling This Week) with the author whose book was chosen by booksellers as the number-one Indie Next List pick for the month, in this case Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin (FSG Originals).

For a sample of the December newsletter, see this one from WORD Bookstores, Brooklyn, N.Y., and Jersey City, N.J.

"We have a window decorating contest in our town," Page 158 Books, Wake Forest, N.C., noted in sharing a photo of its front window display. "Our talented employee Leeann Tedder worked magic to create this beautiful winter book theme!"

Three staff changes, including two promotions and a new hire, have been announced by New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul.

Tina Jordan, who joined the Review as a preview editor in 2018, will become the new deputy editor; and David Kelly, who has been with the Book Review since 1985, is taking on the new role of managing editor. Elisabeth Egan will be joining the publication as a preview editor after filling in for Gal Beckerman, who is on book leave.

Today:
Fresh Air: Peter Bergen, author of Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos (Penguin Press, $30, 9780525522416).

Tomorrow:
The Real: Michael Eric Dyson, author of Jay-Z: Made in America (St. Martin's Press, $25.99, 9781250230966).

The View: Lupita Nyong'o, author of Sulwe (Simon & Schuster, $17.99, 9781534425361). She will also appear on the Daily Show.

Late Show with Stephen Colbert: Samantha Power, author of The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir (Dey Street Books, $29.99, 9780062820693).

Lily James (Downton Abbey, Baby Driver) will star in The Pursuit of Love, a BBC One adaptation of Nancy Mitford's classic novel, written and directed by Emily Mortimer. Deadline reported that a three-part series has been ordered from BBC Studios-backed Moonage Pictures and Open Book.

Mortimer is currently writing a reboot of the popular British legal drama Rumpole of the Bailey, based on the book series by her father, John Mortimer. Commissioned by Charlotte Moore, director of BBC Content, and Piers Wenger, controller of BBC Drama, The Pursuit of Love will be produced by Rhonda Smith.

The shortlist has been unveiled for the £10,000 (about $13,160) Portico Prize for Literature, which recognizes "outstanding literature that best evokes the spirit of the North." The winner will be announced January 23 at a ceremony in Manchester. This year's shortlisted titles are:

Saltwater by Jessica Andrews
Ironopolis by Glen James Brown
The Mating Habits of Stags by Ray Robinson
Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile by Adelle Stripe
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness by Graham Caveney
Under the Rock: The Poetry of a Place by Benjamin Myers

In the "track changes" function of a word processing program, the "all markup" option preserves all deletions, additions, rewrites for the life of the document--although the last editor ultimately chooses what to accept and reject in the final version. Palestinian Israeli Sayed Kashua, who lives in St. Louis, Mo., ingeniously, affectingly employs this function in his intriguing fourth novel of the same name, Track Changes, in which he uses an Arab Palestinian family-in-crisis to question and challenge the veracity of telling one's own stories. Matching Kashua's trilingual dexterity (he writes predominantly in Hebrew, additionally narrates in Arabic and English), Mitch Ginsburg returns for a second adept translation partnership, following Kashua's Second Person Singular, winner of the 2011 Bernstein Prize.

Kashua's unnamed narrator's life is complicated. He used to be a Jerusalem newspaper editor, but now he's living solo in an Illinois grad school dorm room, separated from his wife and their three children, although he seems to be the kids' primary caregiver. He's written 30 books, but none of them bear his name. He's authored other people's memoirs--with varying degrees of accuracy, embellishment, even all-out fiction--but he hasn't worked since his family escaped the growing violence in Israel two years ago, to follow an academic position offered to his wife.

Fourteen years have passed since he's seen his parents and siblings, but his estranged father finally sent him a Skype message two days ago from his hospital bed, calling him home to Tira in Palestine. The narrator left the village in disgrace on his wedding day, when his father whispered to him that "he would never know love and asked not to see him until the day he dies." Death is now imminent, and father and son have secrets to reveal, memories to bare, bonds hopefully to reconnect. At the crux of their cleaving is the narrator's less-than-a-page long, written-in-an-hour, published-in-a-student-journal, 15-year-old short story that demands final reckoning.

That Kashua's protagonist is a nameless "I" who shares considerable biographical overlaps--a Tira hometown, immigration timing and circumstances, career history, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign landing, psychotherapist wife, their teenage daughter and two younger sons--suggests, perhaps even implies, the so-called truth of Kashua's first-person fiction. Yet his character, whose job is to transcribe others' memories onto the page, repeatedly reveals his elisions from and additions to strangers' memoirs-for-hire, often inserting his own memories as their own, thereby erasing his life in scattered pieces. The narrator's confessions are hardly reliable, making every level of his storytelling suspect, which Kashua further visually underscores by "track changes"-style crossed-out text. For savvy, curious readers, that interplay of parsing fact and fiction proves to be a lively, interactive experience. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Shelf Talker: Sayed Kashua's fourth novel, Track Changes, weaves together an Arab Palestinian family-in-crisis narrative with an ingenious exploration challenging the expectations of reliable storytelling.

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

1. The Elf on the Shelf by Carol V. Aebersold and Chanda B. Bell
2. The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim
3. Lethal Balance by Cherise Sinclair
4. Night's Reckoning by Elizabeth Hunter
5. Enemies by Tijan
6. In the Unlikely Event by L.J. Shen
7. The Lineup by Meghan Quinn
8. The Virgin Gift by Lauren Blakely
9. From Doctor to Patient by Diva Nagula
10. My Big Fat Fake Wedding by Lauren Landish

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]