Erica Atkins

Erica Atkins, owner of Birdsong Books, Locust Grove, Ga., was murdered last weekend, WSB-TV reported. The Putnam County Sheriff's Office said deputies recovered her body on Sunday afternoon from Cedar Creek. Romero Johnson, an employee of the bookstore and, according to Atkins's family, a former boyfriend, has been arrested in connection with her death. He is facing charges of kidnapping and murder.

The Atkins family told WSB-TV that Johnson had worked with Atkins over the weekend at a pop-up bookshop, just hours before she was killed.

"I'm really going to miss her," said Jasmine Atkins, her daughter. "Your mother is the first person you look at when you come into this world. The person that's holding you. That first heartbeat you feel other than your own. My mother was everything to me."

Outside Birdsong Books, which Atkins opened about a year ago, people dropped off flowers in her remembrance.

"It was shocking and extremely, extremely painful," said Phillip Robinson, Atkins's brother. He also spoke about her love of reading: "She grew up loving to read, an avid reader. She would spend hours when we were kids reading aloud."

"I just keep thinking about her," said Shanna Amoah, a friend of Atkins. "It just floored me. Basically, it floored me beyond measure. I was just completely devastated.... Erica was a busy woman. She was committed to helping her community. She donated books--donated her time. In fact, she came last year to my summer camp and read to my kids--donated her time there. Erica was just a pillar in our community."

The Henry County Chamber of Commerce posted on Facebook: "We are saddened by the tragic news of Dr. Erica Atkins, owner of Birdsong Books. Her passing is a tremendous loss to the Henry County Chamber of Commerce family and to the business community as a whole. Birdsong Books, owned by Dr. Atkins, was named 2022 Microbusiness of the Year by the Chamber in February. Dr. Atkins was a 2023 appointee to the Convention & Visitors Bureau or Visit Henry County, Ga., board of directors. As a business and community leader and a friend, she will be sorely missed."

Bookshop.org plans to add audiobooks and e-books to its offerings in the U.K. as well as develop a mobile app for customers, allowing U.K. indie booksellers to offer those products for the first time. The organization is planning to launch a private beta version of the service in late 2023, followed by a full launch in 2024. More than 550 independent booksellers in the U.K. use Bookshop.

Bookshop said also that it has completed a $1.8 million angel fundraising round that is aiding the effort. As with printed book sales, U.K. booksellers will be able to keep the full profit margin on any e-books or audiobooks they sell, while all other sales will generate 10% for the profit pool that is shared among all participating bookstores.

Nicole Vanderbilt, managing director of Bookshop.org UK, said: "Independent bookshops in the U.K. have never had access to this market before, so Bookshop.org is proud to offer a great alternative for anyone who wants to purchase (and enjoy) e-books and audiobooks and support independent bookshops at the same time. One of our goals is to ensure indie bookshops thrive in the age of e-commerce, and creating new revenue streams for bookshops, while providing a viable alternative to Amazon, is precisely how we want to achieve this."

Andy Rossiter, owner of Rossiter Books and past president of the Booksellers Association of the U.K. and Ireland, said: "This market has been completely dominated by Amazon for years so to have it opened up to independent bookshops by a completely trusted partner is fantastic news. Hundreds of independents have already built a strong relationship with Bookshop.org, so together I'm certain that the offering will be intelligently tailored towards what our customers are looking for and will be a tremendous benefit to independent booksellers."

In the U.S., Bookshop partners with Libro.fm to offer audiobooks and is building a platform to allow stores to sell e-books, which CEO Andy Hunter said, it hopes to launch in beta by the end of the year. He added that Bookshop plans to integrate with IndieCommerce and Bookmanager to let stores using those platforms sell e-books, too.

Big congratulations to Jim Milliot, editorial director of Publishers Weekly, who is receiving the Sally Dedecker Award for Lifetime Service from the Book Industry Study Group. He will be presented with the award at BISG's annual meeting on April 28 in New York City.

BISG cited Milliot for his "decades-long commitment to reporting on the book industry, both in its best moments and many of its most challenging. His leadership at Publishers Weekly has helped inform the industry at a time of continued change in the size, shape, and competitive nature of the business."

He began his career at Simba Information, where he wrote BP Report ("On the Business of Publishing") newsletter and edited the Educational Marketer and IDP Report newsletters. In 1993, he joined PW as business editor and soon became news editor. In 2010, he was named co-editorial director, and became editorial director four years later.

BISG noted that Milliot has been involved in the organization in various ways, starting with statistics committee, and writing commentary for a number of BISG Trends reports. Working with Bowker, he edited several editions of U.S. Demographics & Buying Behaviors Book Consumer Annual Review, which analyzed buying trends in the early e-book days, and was a regular contributor to the Veronis Suhler Communications Forecast and The Library and Book Trade Almanac. From 2014 to 2018, he served on the board of directors of the Independent Book Publishers Association.

Several of us at Shelf Awareness have had the pleasure of working with Jim, one of the nicest, most knowledgeable and hard-working journalists in the book business. Cheers!

The Owl Library and Book Store, a general-interest bookstore with community reading and study areas, has opened in Marathon, Fla., the Keys Weekly reported.

Owners Alexia and Joshua Mann opened the bookstore last month. Located at 11400 Overseas Hwy., the shop has a wide inventory of new and used titles, along with some first editions and rare books. There is an emphasis on local history and authors, and the shop has a "borrow one, bring one," section where customers can exchange books. The rare book nook, meanwhile, features everything from "illuminated manuscript pages to cookbooks from the 1800s," Alexia Mann told the Weekly.

In addition to the study area, there is a children's reading corner and a separate space for events and meetings. The owners' event plans include book clubs, game nights and more. Customers can purchase coffee or tea, and there are lockers that community members can rent to store things like games, snacks and books.

Mann said owning a bookstore of her own has been a dream since she was a child, and she can't "remember a time in my life that I did not have a book in my hand. We always had books growing up."

Bookselling Ireland and Publishing Ireland hosted the Irish Book Trade Conference February 27-28 in Cork, the first time since 2008 that the event has taken place outside Dublin. A key element of this year's conference was the launch of Bookselling Ireland's new manifesto, which provided a detailed account of the associations' key aims, intentions and views in relation to the bookselling industry in Ireland today, and public policy relating to it.

The manifesto outlines the important cultural and economic contributions made by the Irish bookselling industry, and calls on policymakers to:

• Ensure the Free School Book Scheme takes full account of the complexity of the supply chain to achieve its desired outcomes
• Consider the effects on communities across Ireland if bookshops were to close as a result of being excluded from school books supply
• Make the €20 million (about $21.4 million) School Library Book Grant an annual commitment.
• Request that the Arts Council establishes a ringfenced fund to support bookshop events with Irish writers, and for a portion of this to be dedicated for Irish-language bookshop events.
• Ensure that libraries each have a ringfenced budget to procure books of local interest from local bookshops.
• Invest in public transport to encourage easier access to town centers, and capital allowances for retailers investing in energy use reduction measures.

"We were delighted to be able to bring the Irish Book Trade Conference to Cork this year and to have the opportunity to meet and network once again with our colleagues from many areas of the book trade in Ireland, as well as offering some resources to our members to help ensure a successful year," said Aoife Roantree, chair of Bookselling Ireland. "The conference also gave us the ideal platform to launch our new manifesto, which outlines the important contribution that bookselling makes to Irish society and Ireland's economy, as well as highlighting a range of policy recommendations to further bolster the industry."

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BookPeople, the Australian booksellers association, has released Towards a Sustainable Bookselling Future, a report that discusses the issue of environmental sustainability and bookselling, placing it within the context of the broader book industry. BookPeople noted that it is a "snapshot of where we are currently, and provides practical and peer advice on what can be worked on immediately to improve the environmental footprint of bookselling. It is intended to contribute to a conversation about larger and more radical changes within the book industry."

According to BookPeople, the paper:

• Gives a contemporary snapshot of booksellers' best practice along with the challenges they face in becoming more environmentally conscious.
• Delves into publishing and the supply chain and shows how choices upstream affect the environmental credentials of the product booksellers receive, and what some publishers and printers in Australia are doing to change their practices.
• Will help BookPeople and other industry bodies set targets and measures for emissions reduction and environmental sustainability.
• Gives practical advice to booksellers so they can implement change.
• Makes recommendations for industry, research and government based on what has been learned.

BookPeople CEO Robbie Egan observed: "A lot of work has gone into this, and thanks go to author Angela Meyer for her excellent work. Please access the report, use it as a baseline for where we are, and consider what we might be doing to be more sustainable as businesses and as actors in the miracle that is our life-producing environment. I hope it serves as a trigger for thinking about better ways to do what we've always done, and for completely blue-sky bonkers thinking about what might be. I'm interested to hear it all." --Robert Gray

Southern Living magazine, as part of its the South's Best awards, named Square Books, Oxford, Miss., as the South's Best Bookstore in Mississippi, noting: "The heartbeat of Oxford can be found among the shelves inside Square Books--and its three companion stores (one for kids, one for rare finds, and another for home and lifestyle titles) all located on the city square.... Square Books is a cozy maze of literature with an impressive selection of signed and collectible books, literary fiction, and Southern fiction. Climb the narrow staircase to find even more volumes, plus a teeny-tiny coffee bar and doors leading to a balcony overlooking the courthouse. It's the perfect place to take your newest title for a spin on a breezy afternoon.

"If you need any further indication of the store's impact on the state, consider that founder and owner Richard Howorth was twice voted mayor of Oxford. The Oxford native and his wife Lisa opened Square Books in 1979 after spending two years as apprentices at Georgetown's Savile Book Shop.... Over the years, Square Books has grown exponentially. Folks come from all over the country to buy tomes from the sacred shelves of its four distinct locations. The little independent bookstore that could has made quite the name for itself, while somehow managing to remain true to its roots. And now that Richard and Lisa's son Beckett has taken over Rare Square, we're looking forward to many storied years ahead from this beloved multigenerational family business."

At Little, Brown, Spark, Voracious and Mulholland Books:

Liz Garriga has been promoted to senior director of publicity.

Juliana Horbachevsky has been promoted to director of publicity, Spark/Voracious.

Katherine Akey has been promoted to senior marketing manager.

Kini Allen has been promoted to senior digital ad manager.

Alyssa Persons has been promoted to senior publicity manager.

Gabrielle Leporati has been promoted to publicist.

At Home with the Prairie Dog: The Story of a Keystone Species by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, photographs by William Muñoz (Web of Life Children's Books).

Today:
Fresh Air: Sally Adee, author of We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds (Hachette Books, $30, 9780306826627).

Tomorrow:
CBS Mornings: Colin Kaepernick and Eve L. Ewing, authors of Colin Kaepernick: Change the Game (Graphix, $14.99, 9781338789652).

Today Show: Karan Gokani, author of Hoppers: The Cookbook: Recipes, Memories and Inspiration from Sri Lankan Homes, Streets and Beyond (Quadrille Publishing, $42, 9781787138704).

Good Morning America: Robin Arzón, author of Strong Baby (Little, Brown, $18.99, 9780316493826).

Hulu will not be moving ahead with The Devil in the White City, the long-gestating adaptation of Erik Larson’s 2003 historical nonfiction book. Deadline reported that Keanu Reeves originally was attached to star but exited in October, and director Todd Field left soon after. An effort was made to replace them, with offers that ultimately did not pan out.

The eight-episode series was targeted for a 2024 launch, with production not expected to commence until this year, Deadline noted. From ABC Signature in Association with Paramount Television Studios, The Devil in the White City was set to be executive produced by Martin Scorsese, Rick Yorn, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Davisson, Stacey Sher, Sam Shaw, Lila Byock and Mark Lafferty. ABC Signature remains committed to the project and hopes to find a new home.

Finalists have been selected for the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The  winner, who receives $15,000, will be named in early April, while the remaining four finalists each get $5,000. All five authors--along with this year's PEN/Faulkner Literary Champion--will be honored on May 11 at the PEN/Faulkner Award Celebration in Washington, D.C. This year's finalists are:

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (MCD) 
Fruiting Bodies by Kathryn Harlan (Norton) 
The Islands by Dionne Irving (Catapult) 
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell (Pantheon).

"With settings that range from Jamaica to Boston to postwar France to realms of the uncanny, this year's finalists manage to make even familiar worlds feel mysteriously new," said PEN/Faulkner Awards committee chair Louis Bayard. "Whether writing in the long or short form, they offer us the gift of deeply examined humanity, as well as definitive evidence that American fiction has lost none of its power to enchant and illuminate."

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Finalists have been named for the $35,000 Aspen Words Literary Prize, sponsored by the Aspen Institute and given to "a work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture." The winner will be announced on April 19. The finalists:

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz (Flatiron)
Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah (Algonquin)
The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai (Viking)
The Consequences: Stories by Manuel Muñoz (Graywolf Press)
All This Could Be Different: A Novel by Sarah Thankam Mathews (Viking)

photo: Su Evers

Lucy Jane Bledsoe lives in northern California and has published two collections of stories and seven novels, as well as a number of books for young people, including No Stopping Us Now. She has been awarded a California Arts Council Fellowship, two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships and an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award, among others. Bledsoe loves teaching workshops, cooking, traveling anywhere, basketball, doing anything outside and telling stories. Her most recent novel, Tell the Rest (Akashic, March 7, 2023), is a story of survivors of conversion therapy.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

When Delia's rage from a traumatic teenage experience catches up to her, everything unravels--until a reunion with a fellow survivor charts her new course.

On your nightstand now:

The joys of persistent insomnia include all the books you get to read in the middle of the night. I just finished Sarah Moss's magnificent Ghost Wall, which has the most satisfying and atypical (for contemporary fiction) ending. I'm about to dive into NoViolet Bulawayo's Glory,having loved her first novel. And since I'm referencing insomnia, still sitting on my bedstand, though finished, is Leila Mottley's Nightcrawling, which is gripping.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I have no idea why, but I found Jean de Brunhoff's Babar the Elephant utterly magical. If I reread it now, I'd probably be embarrassed to be admitting this. Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking was the bomb--so few books back then celebrated bad girls. And I remember getting busted for reading Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre under the covers with a flashlight.

Your top five authors:

You know this is an impossible question! So I'll answer it fast and not sweat over all the authors I'm leaving out. Toni Morrison. Willa Cather. Alice Munro. James Baldwin. Ruth Ozeki.

Book you've faked reading:

Hasn't everyone faked-read Moby-Dick? Even the people who wax eloquent about its brilliance sound like they're faking. No hate mail, please.

Book you're an evangelist for:

My favorite books to proselytize are usually ones that no one has heard about. The following aren't so much in that category, and yet I love and talk about both of them a lot. First, Women Talking by Miriam Toews--because of the way it pretty much invents the beginning of political science all over again and from a woman's perspective. It's just been made into a movie, so lots of people will discover it. But do read the book. I also want to mention Kirstin Valdez Quade's The Five Wounds. It's such a rich and far-reaching novel about, well, everything. Both books have deep spiritual underpinnings, which I love.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I've probably done this more times than I like to admit. Covers, first sentences, first paragraphs: it seems shallow to judge on them, and yet most readers do, so I just accept how important they are. Who's not swayed by beautiful covers? Jackie Kay's Trumpet has had a couple of different beguiling covers, and the novel more than lives up to the images.

Book you hid from your parents:

This is a fun question! Definitely The Hite Report. Also Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. Judy Grahn's long poem, "Edward the Dyke." I also remember sneaking a copy of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall into the house. Years later, after my mom died, I found a copy of that classic among her books--not my copy but her own copy. Published in 1928, it was a historical read for both of us, but I'm curious why she had a copy.

Book that changed your life:

Rachel Carson's books changed all of our lives. I'm enormously grateful for her brilliance and courage. Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, which I read as a teenager, blew my mind by showing me you could write great literature about the Oregon coast--instead of about people drinking cocktails in Manhattan. Plus, Kesey nailed the setting and characters. (I've used a quote from that book as the epigraph in Tell the Rest.) Then, in college, Adrienne Rich's Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying became my bible, and I still prize its amazing truth-telling.

Favorite line from a book:

Can I name three?

The aforementioned Kesey quote: "Where whoever had hanged the arm from its pole had made certain that it was as much a gesture of grim and humorous defiance as the old house; where whoever had taken the trouble to swing the arm out into sight of the road had also taken trouble to tie down all the fingers but the middle finger, leaving that rigid and universal sentiment lifted with unmistakable scorn to all that came past."

In the short novel Ghost Wall, also mentioned above, Sarah Moss controls the tension so beautifully that this line, not anything special by itself, lands with the perfect emotional effect: "They wanted to kill me at sunset."

But maybe my all-time favorite line, which is featured in and pretty much states the theme of my novel A Thin Bright Line, is from Willa Cather's Lucy Gayheart: "Suddenly something flashed into her mind, so clear that it must have come from without, from the breathless quiet. What if--what if Life itself were the sweetheart?"

Wait, there's a fourth. I think it's the title of an essay--not exactly a line, but Audre Lorde's assertion: "Poetry is not a luxury."

Five books you'll never part with:

My first edition copy of Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark.

My dad's set of all of Charles Dickens's novels.

My great-grandfather's The Complete Dramatic and Poetical Works of William Shakespeare (published in 1878).

After that, I'll keep as many books as my walls will fit.

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

The amazing thing about rereading a book is that sometimes you don't even recognize the book on the second read. At different phases in life, different sentences and scenes jump out. Parts that seemed brilliant seem dull--and vice versa.

I'm going to say Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. I haven't reread it in years, but I remember exactly where I was when I first read it and what a revelation her writing and characters were to me.

Books you wish you could have mentioned in the questions above:

Linda Hogan's People of the Whale. Louise Erdrich's Night Watchman. Andrea Barrett's The Voyage of the Narwhal. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah. Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Deborah Eisenberg's Your Duck Is My Duck. Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding. Karen Joy Fowler's Booth.

A Sky Full of Song explores a lesser-known Jewish immigration experience in an introspective, compassionate story set in the North Dakota prairie in 1905. Susan Lynn Meyer (Black Radishes; New Shoes) positions the power of family identity against the allure of assimilation for a child who misses the best of home but finds much to love about the new "big and lonesome" land.

Shoshi Rozumny, her sisters and her mother flee escalating antisemitism in Liubashevka, Ukraine, and join her father and older brother, Anshel, who "rushed to leave for America" three years earlier, when faced with Anshel's conscription into the tsar's army. In "Nordakota," the Rozumny family joins homesteaders who have claimed free land--available "even for Jews"--and are working to "prove it up." Shoshi is awed by the landscapes, especially moved by birds migrating overhead, and humbled by the "enormous sky... deep with clouds, dizzyingly vast." School offers 11-year-old Shoshi an opportunity to make friends, but "trying to be like the others didn't keep the kids at school from thinking that [she] was different. Strange. Wrong." Shoshi and sister Libke, 14, are repeatedly othered and verbally harassed for being Jewish, including use of ethnic slurs; Shoshi is physically assaulted. Shoshi loves her family deeply, and wonders if they "should try to blend in a little more.... To keep bad things from happening." Learning to play her father's fiddle offers Shoshi an escape, and a harrowing incident during a whiteout storm teaches Shoshi that Judaism is both part of her proud past and important to her new beginning.

Meyer's contemplative first-person narration allows readers to share Shoshi's newcomer experience, including the joys and difficulties it entails. This character-driven storyline shines in descriptive passages, particularly where Shoshi wanders the prairie or practices the fiddle. "I played faster, harder, my heart grieving, my heart rejoicing. There--now!--was the gladness, the exultation, the yearning." Yiddish peppers the family's dialogue, and the suggestion is that the Rozumnys exclusively speak the language at home. A note references the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Dakota people displaced by it; references to Native Americans in the text offer an empathetic, modern perspective. A Sky Full of Song is reminiscent of Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter and would pair nicely with Linda Sue Park's Prairie Lotus to offer another perspective on culturally nondominant settlers.

A Sky Full of Song is a thoughtful piece of middle-grade historical fiction featuring a sympathetic protagonist from an underrepresented community participating in late westward expansion. --Kit Ballenger, youth librarian, Help Your Shelf

Shelf Talker: A Jewish girl faces hostility from peers in addition to the hardships of homesteading in a thoughtful, lyrical story set in early-20th-century North Dakota.

The bestselling Libro.fm audiobooks at independent bookstores during February:

Fiction
1. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Penguin Random House Audio)
2. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (Penguin Random House Audio)
3. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperAudio)
4. Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson (HarperAudio)
5. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (HarperAudio)
6. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal (HarperAudio)
7. I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai (Penguin Random House Audio)
8. Ship Wrecked by Olivia Dade (HarperAudio)
9. Maame by Jessica George (Macmillan Audio)
10. A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (HarperAudio)

Nonfiction
1. Spare by Prince Harry (Penguin Random House Audio)
2. Finding Me by Viola Davis (HarperAudio)
3. I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy (Simon & Schuster Audio)
4. Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Tantor Media)
5. The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama (Penguin Random House Audio)
6. You Just Need to Lose Weight by Aubrey Gordon (Beacon Press)
7. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Penguin Random House Audio)
8. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Tantor Media)
9. An Immense World by Ed Yong (Penguin Random House Audio)
10. The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale (Tantor Media)