Earlier this year, WordsWorth Books in Little Rock, Ark., was one of 17 plaintiffs who filed suit against the state of Arkansas over Arkansas Act 372, a new censorship law designed to limit minors' access to "obscene" material. The store's experience offers some lessons and guidance about what can happen--or not happen--in such circumstances.

Along with WordsWorth, the group of plaintiffs included the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association, the Association of American Publishers, fellow Arkansas indie Pearl's Books, and others. The law, which was passed in March, was supposed to go into effect on August 1. In July, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against parts of the law, and the appeals process is ongoing.

When WordsWorth's primary owner, Kandi West, decided to join the lawsuit, she had been in the position for only a few months, having bought the 30-year-old bookstore in January. West and her two co-owners had not done anything like it before and did not know what to expect, though they knew the decision carried risks, including potential financial ramifications, protests, and harassment. Instead, what the store received was a remarkable, and reassuring, outpouring of support, from both local customers and readers around the country.

Kandi West

"From our local customers, we had people call, e-mail, and come to the store," recalled West. Community members stopped in just to say "hey, I'm going to support you," and there have been "lots of thank yous." 

A surprising number of people also called or e-mailed to ask if they could contribute to the store's legal costs or donate to a fundraiser. But, West explained, the bookstore's legal representation was pro bono. Without that, joining the suit would have been impossible, and during the process West learned that there were a lot of attorneys out there willing to take similar cases.

"That's a key thing," West reiterated. "There are people who will represent you."

Also hugely important was the support the store received from the ABA with regard to things like media training. The ABA provided West with talking points and FAQs, and if she felt unsure how to respond to any media inquiries, she could send questions to the ABA first. Those efforts "really helped us feel comfortable being able to do this." (The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance has also been supportive, and sponsored a virtual seminar last month on book banning that featured West, other booksellers, and PEN America officials.)

West and her co-owners figured that if the store received any pushback, it would most likely come in the form of online trolls. As such, they monitored the store's Instagram and Facebook accounts more carefully and, while the owners' names remained on press releases and other official communications, they stripped the store's online presence of any picture or mention of individual staff members to keep them from being targeted.

Staff members also had no obligation to talk about the lawsuit or answer any questions, and West made sure they knew they could simply hand someone her card if the issue ever came up. Ultimately, she said, "our staff was pretty comfortable with what we're doing."

Due to a local and active Moms for Liberty group, West and her team could not ignore the possibility of having protestors. So far, though, nothing of that nature has happened, and West noted that they have yet to hear anyone "say a negative word about [the lawsuit]" in the store. In fact, the only negative feedback the store has received is a single letter that was a bit "spooky" due to its content and timing but didn't specifically mention the lawsuit or even banned books.

Long before joining the lawsuit, West reflected, WordsWorth has had many banned and challenged books on its shelves, but they were never there simply because they were challenged. "They're just good books," she said. "We're just selling good books that represent all different people." --Alex Mutter

Rumspringa Books has opened as a pop-up bookshop for the holiday season at Granny's Baking Table in Springfield, Mass. The Republican reported that co-owners Brett Albert and Kate Kreider said the bookstore, at 309 Bridge St., "will showcase the latest and greatest bestsellers" as well as "older bestsellers and personal favorites."

Albert said they have been looking to create Rumspringa for the past year for several reasons, including their love for independent bookstores. The shop's "target market is people who live in Springfield and are interested in community and storytelling," the Republican noted. The owners want to serve every aspect of Springfield, which is why having their bookstore located downtown is important.

"One of the things that made Springfield also very attractive was that it indexes people who love public media and also people who have higher education attainment," Albert said, adding that they are putting final touches on the bookstore's website, which should go live soon. The owners will personally deliver orders.

The collaboration between the two businesses is the byproduct of a previous work relationship between Albert and Todd Crosset, co-owner of Granny's, who said, "Pastries, coffee, and books--it all kind of goes together. I think it's a nice collaboration."

Granny's Baking Table posted on its Facebook Page: "When we asked our customers what they wanted next door to us, the overwhelming favorite idea was a bookstore. Sadly a bookstore is not moving next door. Good news, it's moving in house. We have invited Rumspringa Books to set up in our shop for the holidays. Rumspringa has a dream of opening a shop downtown. This bakery-bookstore pop-up is an opportunity to test Springfield's appetite for a bookstore-cafe."

Barnes & Noble recently opened a new bookstore in the Dalewood II shopping center at 381 North Central Ave, Hartsdale, N.Y. The location features B&N's latest bookstore design. Until 2007, B&N had a store nearby that closed because, at the time, retailers were leaving the area.

"Our return to Hartsdale is a perfect example of the turnaround in bricks-and-mortar bookselling," B&N noted. "A decade ago, Barnes & Noble closed stores at an alarming rate. Now we are able to open increasing numbers of beautiful new stores, entering communities we'd not yet served and returning to those we've sorely missed."

John Nichols (courtesy Milkweed)

John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War and other works and a longtime resident of New Mexico, died on November 27 at age 83.

Altogether Nichols wrote more than a dozen novels, as well as nonfiction that included collected essays, original photography, a chronicle of his parents' early life, and more.

In 1965, he published The Sterile Cuckoo, which was made into a 1969 movie directed by Alan J. Pakula and starring Liza Minnelli. As the Guardian noted, "The coming-of-age book and subsequent movie were set amid private Northeastern colleges that were a familiar milieu to Nichols, who attended boarding school in Connecticut and private college in upstate New York."

His best-known novel, The Milagro Beanfield War, was published in 1974 and was the beginning of the New Mexico Trilogy. The Guardian said that the book--"about a fictional Latino agricultural community in the mountains of northern New Mexico, a scheme by business interests to usurp the town's land and water supply, and the spontaneous rebellion that ensues--won widespread recognition for its mix of humor, sense of place and themes of social justice." In 1988, it was made into a film produced by Robert Redford and starring Rubén Blades and Christopher Walken.

Stephen Hull, director of the University of New Mexico Press, told the New York Times: "A lot of his work might be characterized as a long slow-motion valentine to the mountains, mesas, high desert, sky and especially people of New Mexico. He was a comic writer who used tropes of absurdism and excess to depict essential injustices."

His other books included the other two titles in the New Mexico trilogy--The Magic Journey and The Nirvana Blues--and a memoir, I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer, published last year by the University of New Mexico Press.

The 40th edition of the Miami Book Fair, the week-long celebration of books, authors, and reading, included events featuring this year's National Book Award finalists and winners. Back row (l. to r.): Aaliyah Bilal, Evie Shockley, Justin Torres, Kenneth M. Cadow, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, John Vaillant, José Olivarez, Sam Taylor, Charif Shanahan, Michael G. Long, Stênio Gardel. Middle row: Kidada E. Williams, LaToya Watkins, Vashti Harrison, Prudence Peiffer, Erin Bow, Jayne Anne Phillips, Tania James, Cristina Rivera Garza, Monica Youn, Paisley Rekdal, Paul Harding, National Book Foundation executive director Ruth Dickey. Front row: Huda Fahmy, Annelyse Gelman, Oliver de la Paz, Dan Nott, Betty C. Tang, Elliot Duncan, Hanna Pylvaïnen, Jonathan Eig, Dan Santat.

Evelyn Maguire

Evelyn Maguire has joined the New England Independent Booksellers Association as marketing coordinator.

She was previously the digital marketing manager for a cultural nonprofit; managing editor of Paperbark magazine; worked with BookBub on content and event coordination; and was a bookseller and event assistant at Wellington Square Books, Exton, Pa., and Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass. She is a graduate of UMass Amherst's MFA program for poets and writers, where she was the recipient of the James W. Foley Memorial Prize for Political Writing. Her writing can be found in Salamander, North American Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere.

"Happy holidays. Step out of the cold; enjoy some hot chocolate. Santa shops here!" That was the sidewalk chalkboard message at Read Between the Lynes, Woodstock, Ill., which noted: "Natasha just redesigned our sidewalk chalkboard sign, and we wanted to share the message with you."

AudioFile editor and founder Robin Whitten announces the 2023 Best Audiobooks, which includes how the titles were chosen and Whitten's own favorites.

Today:
Today Show: Liz Cheney, author of Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning (Little, Brown, $32.50, 9780316572064).

Also on Today: Kenan Thompson, author of When I Was Your Age: Life Lessons, Funny Stories & Questionable Parenting Advice from a Professional Clown (Harper, $30, 9780063348066). He will also appear tomorrow on the View.

The Talk: Henry Winkler, author of Being Henry: The Fonz... and Beyond (Celadon, $30, 9781250888099).

Kelly Clarkson Show: Danielle Kartes, author of Butter, Flour, Sugar, Joy: Simple Sweet Desserts for Everyone (Sourcebooks, $29.99, 9781728278018).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Jamila Souffrant, author of Your Journey to Financial Freedom: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving Wealth and Happiness (Hanover Square Press, $25, 9781335007797).

Also on GMA: Mike Massimino, author of Moonshot: A NASA Astronaut's Guide to Achieving the Impossible (Hachette Go, $27, 9780306832642).

Late Night with Seth Meyers: Jesse David Fox, author of Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture-and the Magic That Makes It Work (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $29, 9780374604714).

Icelandic production company Act 4 is adapting Skuli Sigurdsson's Nordic crime novel Big Brother (Stóri bróðir) into a TV project. Variety reported that Act 4 optioned the debut novel, with actor, producer and Act 4 co-founder Olafur Darri Olafsson (The Tourist) on board as showrunner and executive producer.

"I read Big Brother last summer after hearing good things from multiple sources," said Olafsson. "I was immediately drawn to the book, it is fantastically written, fast-paced and just felt so right to develop into a series. Our team at Act 4 is really excited about bringing Skuli's book to the big screen and we know that fans of crime dramas will love it. It's been a long time since I read such a fantastic debut novel as Big Brother. I would also suggest that people watch out for Skuli's books in the future as he just released his sophomore novel, The Man from São Paulo."

Sigurdsson added: "I am most pleased and honored that Act 4 will be making a television series based on my novel Big Brother. This has been in the works for some time and it is a pleasure to begin the journey. It's an honour to work with a production firm as excellent as Act 4. Their vision for Big Brother is strong and I look forward to the undertaking with Olafur Darri and company."

A longlist of 31 has been announced for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, sponsored by the New Literary Project and honoring "a mid-career author of fiction in the midst of a burgeoning career, a distinguished writer who has emerged and is still emerging." The award has a $50,000 prize, and the winner spends a brief residence at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the Bay Area, where they may give public readings and talks, teach classes, and make appearances. Finalists will be named in March 2024, and the winner in April. To see the longlist, click here.

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The longlist has been announced for the £4,000 (about $5,080) 2024 Wingate Literary Prize, which honors "the best book, fiction or non-fiction, to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader." The shortlist will be announced in late January and the winner in late February. The 13 longlisted titles can be seen here.

Screenwriter and author Iris Yamashita (City Under One Roof) presents the second installment in a series featuring Detective Cara Kennedy. Village in the Dark is an alternately moody and wacky mystery set in Anchorage and rural Alaska.

The previous year, Cara buried the remains of her husband and son, recovered some time after they disappeared on a family camping trip. As Village in the Dark opens, Cara stands by their gravesites, watching the exhumation she's requested in order further to investigate their deaths. She's been placed on long-term disability from the Anchorage Police Department after a failed psych evaluation, so her inquiries will be a bit trickier than usual, even without the personal element. But she's found pictures of her late loved ones on a gangster's cell phone, along with other people who keep turning up dead.

Chapters from Cara's point of view alternate with those of Ellie, hotelier and busybody at Point Mettier, "the city under one roof": all 205 residents stacked in a single high-rise building in the Alaskan backcountry. Ellie "always had the best interests of the townsfolk in mind whether they appreciated it or not." A bit later, these points of view are joined by that of a young woman named Mia, who grew up in the sealed-off community of Unity, where women and children have banded together in avoidance of the men who have abused them. Mia has just recently, in adulthood, joined "Man's World" (the "world outside the village"), where she's encountered even more trouble than her mother and "aunties" warned her about. Cara and Ellie, who've met before (in City Under One Roof) and do not particularly get along, are now bonded by loss, and must work together to keep their communities safe. Mia's involvement is slower to become clear.

Village in the Dark offers a mystery with both steadily increasing tension and body count, plus plenty of tragedy--not only death, but abuse, neglect, and societal ills. These are balanced with comic elements and moments of zaniness, as when Ellie leads "one of the stranger posses in the history of posses. An innkeeper, a storekeeper, a Japanese lounge singer, and a cancer-ridden geezer." These characters are just the beginning in Point Mettier, a town with an attitude nearly as suspicious and insular as that of Unity. Long-lost family members reappear and disappear; Cara hesitantly explores new romance; murders will be committed and possibly solved, and Yamashita leaves her readers well set up for the next episode in Cara's Alaskan adventures. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: Characters from all walks of life come together in this madcap second entry in a mystery series set in Alaska starring strong female leads.