In May, bookstore sales rose 6%, to $650 million, compared to May 2022, according to preliminary Census Bureau estimates, the fourth monthly gain for bookstore sales this year. By comparison to pre-pandemic times, bookstore sales in May were down 5.1% from May 2019. For the first five months of the year, bookstore sales are up 8.3%, to $3.3 billion, compared to the first five months of 2022.

Total retail sales in May rose 3.2%, to $725.2 billion, compared to May 2022. For the year to date, total retail sales climbed 3.6%, to 3,337 billion, compared to the first five months of 2022.

Note: under Census Bureau definitions, the bookstore category consists of "establishments primarily engaged in retailing new books." The Bureau also added this unusual caution concerning the effect of Covid-19: "The Census Bureau continues to monitor response and data quality and has determined that estimates in this release meet publication standards."

Several top editors at Penguin Random House are leaving the company as part of a series of buyouts and layoffs at the largest book publisher in the U.S. The New York Times reported that the shift "marks a changing of the guard, especially at the storied imprint Knopf, as editors and other staff members with many decades of experience departed."

At Knopf, those taking buyouts include Kathy Hourigan, who started at the publisher in 1963 and worked with Robert A. Caro for decades; Vicky Wilson, who edited Anne Rice and celebrated 50 years with the company last year; and Jonathan Segal, who edited seven books that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. At Viking, the editors Wendy Wolf, Paul Slovak, and Rick Kot also took buyouts.

Those laid off included staff members in a variety of areas, including publicity, editorial, and sales. Daniel Halpern, the founder of Ecco Press, who moved to Knopf two years ago, was let go. The Times noted that "about 60 people were affected by the layoffs, according to employees with knowledge of the situation who were not authorized to speak publicly."

In an e-mail to staff members on Tuesday morning, PRH CEO Nihar Malaviya wrote that the book market had faced significant cost increases "across the board," a trend that was expected to continue, along with inflation. "I'm sad to share the news that yesterday some of our colleagues across the company were informed that their roles will be eliminated," Malaviya added. "We long sought to avoid these actions, but unfortunately could not do so."

Buyouts at Penguin Random House were offered to employees aged 60 and older who had been with the company for at least 15 years.

Michelle Pierce, who purchased Lido Village Books in Newport Beach, Calif., in 2020, opened her second store, Malibu Village Books, at 3822 Cross Creek Road #23359, earlier this year, the Malibu Times reported, noting that the new bookstore sits right beside Malibu Lagoon.

"We're a little out of the way, but once you turn the corner, it just felt so quiet and intimate down here, which I think is so important for a bookstore," said Pierce. "People will see our sign from the roadway, and we had quite a few people who would turn around to come see us.... It's been really fun to open up my own, and design all these bookshelves. So all these bookshelves, space, [and] the design was something that I got to do, which was really lovely."

When she returned to California four years ago, Pierce was looking for bookstores to buy. After launching Lido Village Books three years ago, she was encouraged by a visitor to that bookshop to consider opening a store in Malibu. 

"They gave me a call and said, 'Hey, Malibu really needs a bookstore, we don't have anything like this, we love what you do out here--we love the essence of it--would you be interested,' " Pierce said, adding that after seeing the location she knew she had to open a store there.

"Every wall and corner of this small, yet spacious, bookstore has books filled from top to bottom. From fiction to young adult to children's books and more, Malibu Village Books offers a variety of book options for everyone in the family and friend group," the Malibu Times wrote. 

Although Malibu Village Books officially opened in February, it wasn't until early March that the store started settling in with the community. "It's been fun connecting with different people. We call it like a general bookstore--we carry children's books, nonfiction, fiction, design, and more," Pierce said. "It's been fun to dive into the community and see what it is they like and want. I curate every book in here and sort of hand-pick every book, but it's also fun to hear what the community wants and find those books and bring them in."

She added: "I feel honored; it's kind of surreal, I always thought I had a bookstore. I never thought I'd have two bookstores--I feel very honored and very joyous. The drive is long because I go back and forth between Newport and Malibu, but the moment I get past Santa Monica, there's a moment of peace of having the ocean right there, it just feels so peaceful and lovely."

Diana Dominguez

Más Libritos, a Latina-owned, intersectional feminist bookstore in Springdale, Ark., held a grand opening celebration on July 15.

Owner Diana Dominguez created Más Libritos as a pop-up shop before finding a permanent space earlier this year within a Latina-owned restaurant called Bites & Bowls, which was expanding. The grand-opening festivities on Saturday coincided with the restaurant's five-year anniversary, and the celebration included a ribbon cutting, a mariachi band, a piñata, cheesecake, and more.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone that came by this weekend to celebrate us and Bites & Bowls' five year anniversary," Dominguez wrote on Facebook. "We were soooo overwhelmed by the amount of love and support we received that day, and we think it really speaks to how special of a community we have around us that is uplifting and supporting both of our businesses. Thank you for loving on us and celebrating us!"

Más Libritos carries titles, in both English and Spanish, for all ages and across all genres, with an emphasis on BIPOC authors and illustrators.

Stephen M. Silverman, reporter and historian of popular culture, died on July 6 at age 71.

He was the New York Post's chief entertainment correspondent for years and a founding editor of people.com. He contributed to publications in the U.S. and abroad, and taught journalism at Columbia University. Among his more than a dozen books are David Lean; The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America; and The Amusement Park: 900 Years of Thrills and Spills, and the Dreamers and Schemers Who Built Them. There will be a celebration of his life this fall after the September 19 publication of his last work, Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy (Black Dog & Leventhal). He is survived by a niece and many devoted friends. Memorial gifts in his name can be sent to PEN America.

Pilsen Community Books in Chicago, Ill., hosted Jeremy Bushnell, author of the gender-bending supernatural mystery Relentless Melt (Melville House), for a reading and discussion, along with local authors Martin Seay (The Mirror Thief), Maryse Meijer (Rag), and Logan Berry (Casket Flare). Pictured: Bushnell with store owner Katharine Solheim. (photo: Crystal Olesh)

Wild Geese Bookshop, Franklin, Ind., is hosting its first Summer Camp for Grown-ups "with author events, quirky gatherings and so many books." The camp will be held July 19-21.

"I loved the idea of adults being able to set aside a few days in the summer to do something fun and restorative," owner Tiffany Phillips told the Daily Journal. "We've tried to spread it out. There's a little bit of something for everyone's interests. And we'll have some gathering time to reach other readers. I think it's hard for people to meet friends as adults, so that will be good."

The idea for Summer Camp for Grown-Ups "was born out of a need to fill one of the bleakest times of year for retailers," the Daily Journal noted, adding that in Phillips's experience, mid-July tended to be a dead period for shops such as hers, and competition from the county fair didn't help.

"The fair week is typically very slow for retail. And I understand; the fair takes priority for a lot of reasons. But we were trying to think about ways to bring literary tourism to Franklin, and ways to create business as well during a very slow season," she said.

The bookshop had done something similar in February with a three-day readers' retreat. Summer Camp for Grown-Ups extends the idea further. Phillips has invited a diverse group of writers to visit, speak about their books, and meet their fans. In addition, there's Page You're Proud Of, a quiet writing session at Coffeehouse Five aimed at cultivating creativity and giving people space to make headway on their own writing. Bookseller and writer Lyndsie Manusos will be available to guide people and answer questions.

"Dive into a great book" was the seasonally apt message on the chalkboard at Avid Bookshop, Athens, Ga., which noted on Facebook: "Summer is a great time to take a dive into a new book--whether it's a book that you've been meaning to read for years or a beach read for vacation. Ask us for recommendations for your next summer read! Plus, have you ever wondered about the artist behind some of our amazing chalkboards? Avid Bookshop's operations manager, Luis Correa, is that extraordinary artist. We secretly snapped this picture last week as he worked on his latest creation. We are so lucky to have such an incredible artist here at Avid."

The two most popular books in June at Reading Group Choices were The House of Lincoln by Nancy Horan (Sourcebooks Landmark) and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa (Harper Perennial).

Jews in the Garden: A Holocaust Survivor, the Fate of His Family, and the Secret History of Poland in World War II by Judy Rakowsky (Sourcebooks).

Today:
Fresh Air: Alden Wicker, author of To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick--and How We Can Fight Back (Putnam, $29, 9780593422618).

Tomorrow:
CBS Mornings: Briana Scurry, co-author of My Greatest Save: The Brave, Barrier-Breaking Journey of a World Champion Goalkeeper (Abrams, $17, 9781419766602).

Good Morning America: Mary Giuliani, author of How to Lose Friends and Influence No One (Golden Notebook Press, $20, 9780967554136).

After the success of the Indian version of John le Carré's The Night Manager, the Ink Factory is planning further Indian adaptations of novels. Variety reported that the Hindi-language series, which was created and directed by Sandeep Modi and featured a cast led by Anil Kapoor and Aditya Roy Kapur, "emerged as the most watched series ever across all Hotstar specials on Indian streamer Disney+ Hotstar." The Night Manager was co-produced by Banijay Asia.

"We are in the process of adapting one, which is in a relatively late stage of adaptation, and one, which is at an early stage. We're very keen to bring more le Carré to India," said the Ink Factory executive producer Tessa Inkelaar. 

The titles have not been revealed yet. Simon Cornwell, co-founder and co-CEO of the Ink Factory, said, "We've found an approach to telling the story, which is really fresh and really contemporary, and it brings something very special. There are many ways in which the Indian adaptation of The Night Manager moved beyond the original show, and Sandeep explored areas that we hadn't explored or hadn't figured out in the English-language series. And that was a thrilling process. It's something we can push even further. This one particular story really takes wing, because it's reset in India, on the fringes of India. It's a very powerful piece of storytelling.... Part of our bigger ambition is to find stories that we can tell in India that speak to people all around the world."

Modi added: "The trick to any story, whether it is Aarya or The Night Manager, is to see how do you take a story, a structure, like a seed that you plant in the Indian soil and see how it grows by itself. How do you make it feel like this story belongs to the land? That was the biggest challenge. And we took the longest time to arrive at the basis of the adaptation, the cultural nuance and the emotional nuances."

Elizabeth Crook is receiving the 2023 Texas Writer Award, which honors "a Texas author who has made significant contributions to the literary arts."

Crook is the author of six novels, including The Which Way Tree, The Night Journal, which received the Spur Award from Western Writers of America, and Monday, Monday, winner of the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her latest novel, The Madstone, will be published by Little, Brown in November.

The award will be presented on November 11 during the Texas Book Festival.

photo: Carson Ellis

Jon Klassen grew up in Niagara Falls, Canada, and now lives in Los Angeles, Calif. He is the author and illustrator of books that include I Want My Hat Back and This Is Not My Hat, for which he won the Caldecott Medal. Two of his picture books have been named Caldecott Honor books: Sam and Dave Dig a Hole and Extra Yarn (winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award), both by Mac Barnett. The Skull, written and illustrated by Klassen, was recently published by Candlewick Press.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

A girl named Otilla runs away from home in the night and finds an old house in the woods with a skull living in it. 

On your nightstand now:

Life's Work by David Milch--Milch wrote and created NYPD Blue (which I haven't really watched) and Deadwood (which I've rewatched many, many times). His memoir was written while he was in the middle stages of Alzheimer's, and it's really something to hear someone that good tell you about his crazy life while it's slipping away from him.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Sam and the Firefly by P.D. Eastman--the story is fine, but the art and the mood of it is what really sticks with me. The illustrations in The Skull actually owe a lot to this book. The graphite over a dull teal with a few highlights is lifted directly from it. 

Your top five authors:

I'd like to suggest a change of category, if you're interested. I'd like to submit my top 10 visual artists in place of my top five writers. I'm an illustrator also, after all, and this applies just as much, if not more, to my work. And a lot of my bookshelf is books about these people, anyway.

Okay: top 10 visual artists (in no particular order):

Horace Pippin, Charles Burchfield, Saimaiyu Akesuk, Edward Hopper, Parr, David Milne, Enzo Mari, Kenojuak Ashevak, Agnes Martin, Pierre Bonnard.

Book you've faked reading:

The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands. My brain plays this super fun trick on me where it's extremely interested in physics, and then opens some hidden trap door to immediately forget everything I try to learn about it.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Carson Ellis gave me this book a few years ago. I'd never read Denis Johnson before, but after reading this book, I tried to read everything he'd written--Train Dreams is still my favorite, though. It's about a man in railroad-building times who begins the book by doing something terrible, and then kind of wonders about his capacity for terrible things for the rest of his life.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston. This was a lucky break. I have certainly bought books for their covers besides this one, and never actually started to read them, but I started to read this one and it grabbed me and didn't let go. It was a very big discovery.

Book you hid from your parents:

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus: Cartoons from Playboy (1971). I found this in my dad's childhood bedroom, where all the books in his parents' house were kept. His old picture books were there, too, which is where I found a lot of my lifelong favorites, but then one day I also found this one. I had a few short days with it before I was found out. 

Book that changed your life:

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. In 11th grade, we had a literature teacher who would go away every summer to some remote place, get horribly sick there, and then be absent most of the school year, recovering from that illness. But he set up a reading list and Waiting for Godot was on it. I had liked reading plays just fine before, but the first lines of this one... just the stage-setting into the first words they say to each other... just the very first page... I remember staring at it, and then looking around the class like an alien had just showed up in the room with the key to everything.

Favorite line from a book:

Then I crawled into the log/ with the moon just beginning/ to forgive me. --From The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems from the Swampy Cree Indians, gathered and translated by Howard A. Norman

This is the end of a short, translated Cree poem about wishing to grow old, and the wish coming true, and then immediately dying of old age. The other poems in the book are often funny, and this idea is funny, too, but the last line always chokes me up anyway. I found this poem/book through Michael Dumontier's blog (Stoppingoffplace), which was a formative discovery of its own.

Five books you'll never part with:

The Miner's Pale Children by W.S. Merwin: I only got into Merwin right after he died and I read about his life. At first, I only read his poems, but then I read a short story called "Tergvinder's Stone" that really knocked me out, and it was from this book, which has many many other stories that also knocked me out. Whenever I'm reading it, I'm vaguely sure it's my favorite book.

The Native Trees of Canada by Leanne Shapton: This was the first book of Leanne's I saw, and I found it when I was going through an especially big bout of homesickness for Canada, and it helped. Her ideas of what books can be about are as impressive as her execution of them. A huge inspiration. 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson: It's honestly a toss-up on which Shirley Jackson to put in here. But something about her writing a child instead of an adult puts this one over the top. Maybe the writer I wish the most that I could write like. 

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy: I don't remember a lot of the particulars. I remember moments, and I remember crying and being exhausted and very grateful. That's how you feel with a lot of his books, but the feeling was the biggest with this one.

Fortunately by Remy Charlip: The coolest guy to ever do it. I don't know if I have a favorite of his, but this one has everything he did so well. Whenever I stress out about making picture books and see one of his, it's like he's tussling my hair and saying, "Relax, this can be very very fun."

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

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. This book is like a beautiful old car that, when you first get into it, you look around and admire it--how perfectly constructed it is--and then the driver says "now watch what it can do" and you fly off into outer space or something. It was so amazing reading a calmly told story of a calm life in a calm house and, at the same time, feeling like the G-forces of it were pushing my cheeks back against my face. You probably only get to feel that the first time.

This exuberant, action-packed YA fantasy graphic novel adds an inventive culinary twist to a magical boarding-school story.

The land of Gourmand "is full of monsters," most of whom "would just as soon eat you as look at you." Hana Ozawa is determined to become a warrior chef--one of Gourmand's "greatest protectors... and its most talented culinary expert." Hana and her best friend, Bobby Binh, follow their dreams to the Gourmand Academy of Culinary Combat, where students learn how to battle monsters and then turn them into five-star meals. Unfortunately, being a warrior chef isn't just about combat and cooking; Hana also must contend with an enigmatic mentor, a bully from her past, and a distractingly attractive rival student.

Author Jordan Alsaqa and illustrator Vivian Truong (The Awakening Storm) celebrate the culinary traditions of immigrant communities through Hana and Bobby, whose parents immigrated to Gourmand from the island countries of Hidaki and Trang, respectively. Gourmand Academy is inhabited by a diverse cast of characters with differing skin tones and body types who create fantastical meals inspired by real cuisine, such as the Trangese banh mì and "kraken pho" or Hidakan "basilisk ramen in a shoyu-style broth." Cooking with Monsters also explores the real-life prejudice experienced by children of immigrants through its fantasy setting: another student accuses Hana and Bobby of just "fill[ing] out a quota." However, it is made clear that Hana succeeds as a chef not despite but because of her heritage--she cooks recipes inspired by her grandmother and "all the things she taught me."

Truong's dynamic manga-inspired art brings excitement to both fight scenes and those featuring characters cooking up delectable dishes. Her striking portrayals of different monster species can be menacing, humorous, or adorable and are as distinct as any Pokémon creature. Alsaqa and Truong depict the world of Gourmand as joyfully queer normative. Hana and her classmates are not presumed to be straight or cisgender by default, and embody a range of gender identities and sexualities. Hana's biggest competitor in her quest to become "the best warrior chef ever" is Olivia--"the coolest girl in school"--who confusingly makes Hana "feel all fluttery and happy inside." The rivals-to-lovers romance between Hana and Olivia is a tantalizing slow-burn that will leave readers eager for a sequel.

Cooking with Monsters is a delightful concoction of imaginative worldbuilding, thrilling action, and endearing characters. Fans of shōnen manga series like Naruto and My Hero Academia and magical school stories should enjoy this rollicking graphic novel. --Alanna Felton, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: Teenagers learn how to fight monsters and then cook them into delicious meals in this kinetic YA fantasy graphic novel.