Natisha Asbell, owner and founder of the monthly book and self-care subscription service Authentic Books, is planning to open a bricks-and-mortar store in Orlando, Fla., this fall, Your Community Paper reported.

Natisha Asbell

Asbell has found a space at 1815 N. Orange Ave. in Orlando's Ivanhoe neighborhood and is looking to have the bookstore open in early October. She's launched a crowdfunding campaign with I Fund Women to help her offset the opening costs, which has raised over $3,100 so far. When it opens, it will be Orlando's first BIPOC woman-owned bookstore.

As a bricks-and-mortar store, Authentic Books will carry a wide selection of contemporary fiction and nonfiction along with plenty of self-care products sourced from other small businesses around the U.S. Asbell also plans to offer a gift box-building service for customers, and she wants to host author readings, book clubs, candle-making classes, and more.

Asbell will continue to offer the Authentic Books subscription service, which has more than 600 monthly subscribers, and she noted on Facebook that the new physical space will allow her to grow that service even further. 5% of the subscriptions' profits go toward supporting children's education and literacy projects.

Books & Sundry, Plymouth, Mass., is closing. The store posted on social media: "We've made the difficult decision to close the bookshop. We've loved getting to know the community of readers in Plymouth and all around and appreciate all our customers. Come say goodbye and grab a book--they're 40% off! Stay tuned for more info as we transition to an online and pop up model of business."

Founded two years ago by Glenda Richards, the store offered new books, classics and signed first editions as well as bookish accessories, including stationery, writing instruments, games, puzzles, and other gifts. It was located in Harbourtown, a new development overlooking Plymouth Harbor.

B&N's interim location in Lehigh Valley Mall.

The Barnes & Noble store at the Lehigh Valley Mall in Whitehall, Pa., has been closed temporarily while undergoing a complete renovation, but a temporary store will open elsewhere in the mall on August 23, the Morning Call reported. B&N expects to reopen its original store, which launched in 2007 in the mall's Lifestyle Center, in spring 2024. 

"The appetite this community has for books is no more apparent than in the aisles of our old Lehigh Valley Mall store, well-loved and shopworn in the 16 years since we first opened our doors," said Amy Fitzgerald, v-p of stores for B&N. "With this renovation we transform the bookstore with a warm and inviting new store design, along with a revamped B&N Café. Dramatic as this change will be, our focus remains the time-tested formula of well stocked bookstores staffed by excellent booksellers."

Christopher Lee Carduff

Christopher Lee Carduff, books editor of the Wall Street Journal and an esteemed editor, died on August 14 from complications related to a sudden brain bleed and blood clot. He was 66.

After many years in bookselling, he attended the Radcliffe (now Columbia) Publishing Course, then started a career in book publishing that included positions at Addison-Wesley, the New Criterion magazine, Houghton Mifflin, Counterpoint Press, and David R. Godine Publishers. An expert on the work of John Updike, he was a trustee for the John H. Updike Literary Trust. As the publishing consultant to the Trust, he edited Updike's Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism, Always Looking: Essays on Art, Collected Stories, and Selected Poems, as well as multiple collections of Updike's novels. He also recently oversaw a forthcoming collection of his letters. He was also the estate-appointed editor of posthumous works by Maeve Brennan, Penelope Fitzgerald, Daniel Fuchs, and William Maxwell.

From 2006 to 2017, Carduff was an editor and publishing consultant at the Library of America, overseeing the publication of American classics. He conceived and supervised multivolume editions of the collected works of many writers, including Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Virgil Thomson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. In 2017, he became the books editor at the Wall Street Journal.

Donations in Carduff's name can be made to a Christopher Carduff Scholarship at the Columbia University Publishing Course. Contact his wife, Elizabeth Cardufff, via e-mail for details.

Last Friday the city of Sonoma, Calif., installed a bench dedicated to U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón outside Readers’ Books. Pictured with Limón is Andy Weinberger, owner and cofounder of the store.

On Instagram, the bookstore wrote:

"Thank you to @sonomacity for dedicating the newest Sonoma plaza monument to @adalimonwriter #sonomaspoetlaureate.

To paraphrase Mayor Sandra Lowe at the ceremony, 'We have many monuments on the plaza, most are about war or wine, how about words?'

What better words than the ending of the final poem in Bright Dead Things: 'Say you’d still want this: us alive, right here, feeling lucky.'

Coincidentally, these words were spoken at the funeral of Lilla Weinberger, cofounder of Readers’ Books, just 4 years earlier. We are so lucky to have known Lilla, to know Ada, and to be alive, right here, your Independent Bookstore. Come by get a bookmark with Ada’s quote on it and take a selfie on the new bench!"

Bart's Books, Ojai, Calif., reported after Sunday's 5.1 earthquake:

"What a crazy hurriquake weekend! Hoping everyone in the SoCal region is having a safe Monday morning. We're open today and it seems the rain has subsided for the time being. Stop by if you're out and about."

The Mysterious Bookshop, New York City, shared this store photo, posting:

"Friday afternoon bookshop view, dog days of summer edition. We're rounding out the season with some beautiful weather here in NYC, and suggest you make the most of it with a walk down to southern Tribeca in search of a new murder mystery."

In 1964, on their first trip to the U.S., the Beatles appeared three times on the Ed Sullivan Show, including one hosted in Miami, Fla. The new Paul McCartney book, 1964: Eyes of the Storm (Liveright), a collection of amazing photographs from the period taken by McCartney, features many pictures from the Miami trip. In a series of conversations filmed at Books & Books in Miami, some of the Beatlemaniacs who greeted the Fab Four during the trip talk about seeing and meeting the Beatles and the pictures. Books & Books owner Mitchell Kaplan was included in the video, which was filmed and edited by his son Daniel Kaplan. The video made its debut on the People magazine site and is on the Norton YouTube channel. Check it out here.

Today:
Fresh Air: Drew Gilpin Faust, author of Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30, 9780374601805).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Catherine McCord, author of Meal Prep Magic: Time-Saving Tricks for Stress-Free Cooking (Abrams, $29.99, 9781419764325).

The 20-title longlist for the 2023 German Book Prize has been announced. The shortlist will be revealed September 19 and the winner on October 16, on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Jury speaker Katharina Teutsch said in part that the longlist this year again shows that "German-language contemporary literature is full of surprises. Newcomers stand self-confidently next to established authors; small publishers alternate with large publishers; stories of tragic earnestness stand next to leaps of fantasy. It was important to this year's jury also to recognize literary humor, which in many of the selected titles not only drives the storytelling, but also expresses a sympathetic, undogmatic world relationship that particularly impressed us in this time."

See the longlist here.

Aley Waterman's sensitive first novel, Mudflowers, follows a young woman exploring intimacy, biological and built families, and art. A love triangle twists and reshapes itself, with both trauma and revelation. "I wanted so badly to love in a good way," says Sophie, the protagonist and narrator, 27 years old and a Newfoundland native who recently moved to Toronto, where she lives with a misogynistic writer and her best friend since childhood. He is a beautiful man named Alex who is also her on-and-off lover. Sophie sees Maggie reading her poetry at an event and is immediately swept away. Maggie is talented and enigmatic, "with big eyes full of wide highways." The two become close friends and, sometimes, lovers.

Sophie creates glass mosaics for wealthy patrons, Maggie writes, and Alex works on indie films. They are young artists scraping together livings in a big city, taking drugs amid art events and the bar scene. They slide frankly and openly in and out of sexual relationships. Sophie obsesses over her mother's death. Alex's mother left when he was 12, their parallel losses an unspoken understanding. The addition of Maggie to their close relationship, forming a trio, acts as a magnetic force that both imbalances and strengthens the bond. Secrets surface, and the balance shifts again.

Mudflowers follows Sophie to an artist colony at a castle in France and eventually home to Newfoundland. Place is important to this thoughtful protagonist, who is given to contorted philosophic musings. Newfoundland is "the only place I had been to where there is enough space and isolation and distance from the world for people to really be themselves without even thinking about what that meant." Earlier, she notes that "in cities so many lives are wildly proximate to each other, just divided by a wall here or a door there, but each wall determined some sort of fate, keeping us organized and away from one another." She wonders: "What if the people who should be most important in life were just separated by a wall, and what if that wall meant those people never met!" Sophie has met the people most important to her, but keeping them together will be another feat.

Sophie's physical travels are dwarfed by the scale of her cerebral and emotional movements, as she tortuously navigates desire and fear. She is preoccupied with art, how to love, and purposeful attention. "[W]as it how beauty was directed or how it was received that was most important?" she ponders. "How are you supposed to be a real person when you're also supposed to be the woman inside of someone else's mind?" She also often considers mothers and their absences: "Maybe we all need more mothers than we have," she thinks. "Maybe we all need as many mothers as we can get." Mudflowers is thought-provoking, expansive, and raw. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: In this reflective debut, young artists in Toronto form a love triangle with both transcendent and painful results for all.

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

1. Twisted Love by Ana Huang
2. Twisted Games by Ana Huang
3. Hooked by Emily McIntire
4. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
5. Crossed by Emily McIntire
6. Twisted Hate by Ana Huang
7. Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins
8. The Fine Print by Lauren Asher
9. The Perfect Marriage by Jeneva Rose
10. Twisted Lies by Ana Huang

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]