Tomorrow Bookstore, a new and used bookstore with titles for children, teens, and adults, is opening April 15 in Indianapolis, Ind.

Located at 882 Massachusetts Ave., the store will sell a wide range of fiction and nonfiction titles, along with local art and Indianapolis merchandise. Owners Julia Breakey and Jake Budler, who live in the city's Near Eastside, plan to curate an inventory focused on "human-centric global stories." They also intend to make Tomorrow Bookstore a literary hub with events such as readings, signings and book clubs.

Earlier this year, Breakey and Budler raised $30,000 from more than 65 investors via the crowd investment platform Mainvest.

Arcadia Publishing has bought Applewood Books, which specializes in reissuing original versions of historical books for American cultural travelers. Phil Zuckerman, who founded Applewood Books in 1976, will join Arcadia and continue as Applewood's publisher.

Applewood has more than 2,500 titles in print, including The American Frugal Housewife by Lydia Maria Child, George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior by George Washington, and the forthcoming Great Law of Peace by the Haudenosaunee peoples. Its imprints include Grab a Pencil Press, Benna Books, and CurlyQ Press. The company has partnered with various organizations throughout the years such as Preservation Society of Newport County, L.L. Bean, Apple, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, Octavia Books, the Winterthur Museum, and Disney. In 2021, Arcadia purchased Commonwealth Editions, an imprint of Applewood.

Zuckerman said, "Whenever I have thought about a future home for Applewood, I always believed that Arcadia would be that perfect place. For many decades, I have admired their brilliant publishing model and the wonderful people who work there."

Arcadia CEO Brittain Phillips said, "Applewood's extraordinary catalog will enhance Arcadia's ability to deliver on our mission: to connect people with their past, with their communities, and with one another. Across decades, Phil Zuckerman and his team have taken a thoughtful and innovative approach to building the Applewood list, and the result is a beloved, vibrant brand. At Arcadia, we strive to be a destination for publishers like Applewood, and we're eager to continue its long tradition."

Theresa Woodward, owner of CatTale's Books and Gifts in Brainerd, Minn., since November 2016, is selling the new and used bookstore to longtime customer and former baker Annie Woog, the Brainerd Dispatch reported.

Woodward, who was also a loyal customer before buying the bookstore from previous owner Wendy Rosnau, is moving to St. Genevieve, Mo., in the hopes that the warmer weather will help alleviate some of the symptoms of her arthritis and fibromyalgia. Woog had been looking to open a business of her own in downtown Brainerd, and the two eventually got to talking.

"Once we figured it out then everything was like rapid fire," Woog told the Dispatch.

Woog will officially take over the bookstore in May. In addition to books, it sells puzzles, toys, jewelry, cards, clothing and other gifts for all ages. The shop is "expansive and cozy," and in 2018 Woodward expanded the bookstore into an adjacent space that was once a bike shop. During the pandemic, Woodward delivered books to customers' porches and even "made exchanges in grocery store parking lots."

She said it was a "little heartbreaking" to be moving on from the bookstore and her customers, but added that it was the "right time, absolutely." And once she's settled in Missouri, she plans to open a sister store.

Woog, meanwhile, said she has no intention of "messing with perfection." She is an artist, and will bring that talent to things like window displays and decorations, but otherwise wants to keep CatTale's "the same beloved bookstore that it's always been."

YA author Julie Anne Peters died on March 21 after a long illness. She was 71.

Peters was "the award-winning and trailblazing author of more than a dozen books for young readers," publisher Little, Brown Books for Young Readers said. "Her acclaimed young adult novels were some of the first to feature the universal truths and particular challenges of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender teens."

LBBYR president and publisher Megan Tingley added: "Julie's books are a lifeline for so many readers. It is sad and ironic to me that her novels have been the frequent target of book banning when her stories are needed now more than ever. Her compassionate and unflinching depictions of teens struggling with sexual orientation, gender identity, depression, divorce, bullying, and suicide have elicited thousands of letters from readers saying, 'Your book saved my life.' "

Peters was a teacher and computer systems engineer before publishing her first book, The Stinky Sneakers Contest, illustrated by Cat Bowman Smith, in 1992. This was followed by several humorous middle-grade novels, until Julie wrote her first fiction for young adults, Define "Normal".

At the urging of her editor Megan Tingley, Julie started writing YA fiction featuring LGBTQ+ characters, beginning with the publication of Keeping You a Secret, a love story of two teenage girls, which was published in 2003 and was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She went on to write many more critically acclaimed and award-winning novels, including Luna, a YA novel about a transgender teen's struggle for self-identity and acceptance, which was a National Book Award Finalist. Her books have been published in numerous countries, including Korea, China, Croatia, Germany, France, Italy, Indonesia, Turkey, and Brazil and have sold more than a million copies.

The New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association hosted its popular Publicity Speed Dating event last week. Some 70 booksellers and publishers got together at the Gotham Comedy Club in New York City to book author events.

Blue Willow Bookshop, Houston, Tex., tweeted: "We just don't believe in 'too many books.' "

In the St. Martin's Publishing Group:

Katie Bassel has been promoted to assistant director of publicity.

Meghan Harrington has been promoted to publicity manager.

Allison Ziegler has been promoted to assistant director, marketing.

Michelle Cashman has been promoted to assistant director, marketing.

Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing by Dionne Ford (Bold Type Books).

Today:
NPR's Here & Now: Porter Halyburton, author of Reflections on Captivity: A Tapestry of Stories by a Vietnam War POW (Naval Institute Press, $21.95, 9781682478257).

Tomorrow:
CBS Mornings: Angie Thomas, author of Nic Blake and the Remarkables: The Manifestor Prophecy (Balzer + Bray, $19.99, 9780063225138).

Austin Butler (Elvis) will star in City on Fire, a film adaptation of Don Winslow's 2022 novel from Sony 3000 Pictures. Deadline reported that the project marks Butler's first film as producer, alongside David Heyman and Shane Salerno, and the "studio has made this a high priority and will be meeting with writers and filmmakers immediately." Elizabeth Gabler and Marisa Paiva are overseeing for the studio. City on Fire is the first installment in a trilogy that will include City of Dreams, to be released April 18 by HarperCollins.

"We are elated that venerable producer David Heyman, alongside Austin Butler, will join forces with Shane Salerno to make Don Winslow's spectacular trilogy, starting with City on Fire," said Gabler. "Don is an iconic novelist and a true master of the genre of suspenseful crime fiction and has created one of the most memorable modern-day heroes in Danny Ryan, the complex and compelling protagonist of this trilogy.  It is a dream come true to envision Austin, with his uniquely brilliant and charismatic talent, bringing this character and story to cinematic life."

Winslow added: "Like so many people around the world, I was amazed by Austin Butler's Oscar-nominated performance in Elvis. I've had a number of conversations with Austin about this trilogy that I've been working on for almost 30 years of my life, and I have been deeply impressed by his commitment to playing Danny Ryan as well as his passion to also produce the three films with David and Shane and Elizabeth and Marisa."

Katherine Rundell's Super-Infinite and Osman Yousefzada's The Go Between won the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, the Bookseller reported. They will share the £2,500 (about $3,085) prize, sponsored by the Biographer's Club. 

The judges described Rundell's biography of English poet John Donne as "playful, heartfelt and elegant," while praising Yousefzada's book, which explores the author's upbringing in a devout, patriarchal Pakistani family, as a "masterful evocation of the unknowing but ever watchful child's eye view of the world."

How do you solve a problem like Roman Polanski? This is how Claire Dederer (Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning) distills the conundrum in the dauntless, cannily reasoned and barn-burning Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma: "Polanski made Chinatown, often called one of the greatest films of all time. Polanski drugged and anally raped thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey. There the facts sit, unreconcilable. How would I maintain myself between these contradictions?"

It's not lost on Dederer that the question has long been percolating: people can just as easily (and did, and do) ask how it is possible to appreciate the work of the virulently antisemitic but irrefutably brilliant German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883). With a historian's commitment to taking the long view and with fire under her feet from the #MeToo movement, she makes a thoroughgoing inquiry into the vexing question of how to reconcile bad people with their good art.

Dederer considers the work and controversial remarks and behaviors of a good dozen artistic luminaries. She revisits, with some trepidation, two canonized works that, since her initial encounter, have come to be commonly viewed as morally sketchy: Woody Allen's Manhattan and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, both of which are centered on a sexual relationship between a female minor and a decades-older male. And yet Dederer would caution against presuming an allegiance between, say, a male author and a predatory male protagonist: "Did [Nabokov] feel the things Humbert felt, think the things Humbert thought?" And should this matter when assessing Nabokov's art?

Dederer's feminism won't allow an essentialist view that monstrousness is exclusively the province of men, but the research she does, as into Doris Lessing, Joni Mitchell, and Sylvia Plath, all of whom in one way or another relinquished a child or two, uncovers a double standard: "This is what female monstrousness looks like: abandoning the kids. Always."

As for the question that launches her book: it doesn't give everything away to say that Dederer has come to see that asking "What do we do with the art of monstrous men?" is the narrowing of the more foundational question "What do we do about the monstrous people we love?" Monsters isn't just the book that art-loving feminists have been waiting for; it's the book that anyone determined to live an intentional life owes it to themselves to read. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Shelf Talker: In this dauntless, cannily reasoned and barn-burning inquiry, Claire Dederer asks: Is it okay to hate the artist but love the art?

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

1. The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance by Simone and Malcolm Collins
2. Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves
3. The Girl in the Woods (Misted Pines Series Book 2) by Kristen Ashley
4. Right Man, Right Time by Meghan Quinn
5. Things We Hide from the Light by Lucy Score
6. The Inmate by Freida McFadden
7. Things We Never Got Over by Lucy Score
8. Highest Bidder by Sara Cate
9. Champagne Venom by Nicole Fox
10. Between Commitment and Betrayal by Shain Rose

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]