This September, two former film industry professionals will open Wild Aster Books in Chamblee, Ga., the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

The future home of Wild Aster Books.

The all-ages bookstore, located in a building that formerly housed a doctor's office, will have an especially strong children's section and will focus on children's programming and events. Owners Grace and Tyler Smith have young children of their own, and they described Chamblee as a place with plenty of young families and very much in need of books.

Prior to starting Wild Aster Books, Grace Smith had a background in art direction, which she is putting to use in designing the store. It will have elements reminiscent of Diagon Alley from Harry Potter as well as the attic space in Little Women. The shop will also feature a stage for events and a seating area. Tyler Smith worked with production budgets and logistics; he concentrated on the store's business plan and created its budget.

They chose to open a bookstore of their own during the writer and actor strikes last year, when work completely dried up and they found themselves pulling from their savings to stay afloat. Starting a business of their own, especially one as firmly rooted in community as a bookstore, would give them a more stable foundation.

Tyler Smith told the Journal-Constitution: "the point is that there's so many things we can't control. So we decided to do something we could."

"There's this idea of the third spot," Grace Smith said. "You have your work, you have your home, and the third spot where you hang out. That's what we want this bookstore to be for readers and people with families. Especially after Covid, people are eager for that type of environment."

Middle Ground owners Deborah Rundus, Lance Rundus and Megan Love.

Middle Ground Books & Gifts, a new and used bookstore with titles for all ages, hosted a grand-opening celebration in Emporia, Kan., last week, KVOE reported.

Located at 606 Commercial St., the bookstore features a cafe, lounge, and dedicated children's area. Owners Deborah Rundus, Lance Rundus, and Megan Love opened the bookstore to create a third place, foster community, and fill a need left by the closure of Ellen Plumb's City Book Store in 2020. 

The festivities on Friday included a ribbon-cutting ceremony as well as sales and special promotions. The shop's first event was a book launch with local author and poet D.A. Irsik (Sunshine in the Weeds) on June 14.

Seven independent bookstores on New York City's Lower East Side are teaming up once again for the Pride Bookstore Crawl, Tag24 reported.

Spearheaded by Bluestockings Cooperative, the crawl will take place on June 29 and include Book Club Bar, Pillow-Cat Books, Village Works, Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, Yu & Me Books, and Sweet Pickle Books, along with Bluestockings. Each participating store will provide passports and stamps to customers making the crawl, and there will be giveaways, discounts, and other perks throughout the day.

This is the third annual Lower East Side Pride Bookstore Crawl.

The Half Price Books Northgate location on Colerain Avenue in Cincinnati, Ohio, will close on July 7. The company said the store's lease is up and an agreement could not be reached on a new deal, WKRC reported, adding that a note posted near the bookstore's entrance read, in part:

"Half Price Books first opened our Northgate store here in Cincinnati in 2003 and we have enjoyed being a part of this community for the past 21 years. We have great customers here at Northgate and wish we could stay, but unfortunately, we have been unable to agree to terms on a new lease.... We appreciate all the kind words of support and the passion the community has shown during this transition. Thank you, and we look forward to many more years of reading and recycling together."

Books from the Northgate store will be sent to various other Half Price Books locations in the region, including Florence, Anderson Township, Hamilton, Kenwood, and Mason.

Gary Urda

Gary Urda, senior v-p, sales, of Simon & Schuster, died yesterday morning after collapsing at the gym. He was 59.

"It is shocking and disorienting to lose someone as great as Gary so suddenly and tragically," S&S president and CEO Jonathan Karp wrote to staff. "We will want to honor his memory as best we can, and we will share information on how to do so as soon as we have it."

Urda joined S&S in 1996 as v-p for sales development at Pocket Books, and held a series of positions in both Atria/Pocket Books and the sales division before taking on the role of senior v-p, sales, in 2017. During his career, he managed sales in nearly every channel of the company's business, adapting and adjusting strategies to account for the changes in S&S's customer base and in consumer reading habits.

Karp called Urda "the best kind of colleague--engaged, thoughtful, attentive, constructive, upbeat, humorous, warm, and always approachable, personable, and capable. He was a quintessential sales executive, with a deep knowledge of our industry, and he demonstrated on a daily basis that his job was absolutely the right job for him. He cared about our books and all of the people selling them, and was himself a terrific reader, with a particular expertise in thrillers. He cared about doing his best for all our authors. He cared about our company and providing good service to his accounts. Gary would often tell me that for him, work was about people, and that's what he loved about his job: the people. His constant refrain was that the job was 'all about the relationships,' a belief that he put into practice every day. He was a team player through and through, and whenever there was a problem with sales for one of our titles, or an issue with one of our accounts, I knew I could call Gary and that he would do his best to solve it."

WORD Bookstore hosted a prepub offsite event at Three's Brewing in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, N.Y., for Chris Buehlman's The Daughters' War (Tor Books; June 25, 2024). Buehlman did a reading and had a discussion with an audience of highly dedicated fans.

"After a busy Saturday and a fun event yesterday, we're getting organized, dusting shelves, and making room for the new books coming out tomorrow. Stop in and say hi!" the Book Shop of Beverly Farms, Beverly, Mass., posted on Facebook yesterday.

At Open Road Integrated Media, Betsy Mitchell, strategic advisor/science fiction and fantasy, is retiring, effective June 28. With her departure, Stefan Dziemianowicz is joining the company as consulting editor/horror, fantasy, & science fiction.

Spellbinders: Break the Game by Andrew Auseon (Random House Children's Books/ Labyrinth Road).

Tomorrow:
Today Show: Yasmine Cheyenne, author of Wisdom of the Path: The Beautiful and Bumpy Ride to Healing and Trusting Our Inner Guide (HarperOne, $26.99, 9780063315006).

Casting choices have been announced for the second season of The Night Manager, which continues to be inspired by John le Carré's bestselling novel, with series creator David Farr also executive producing and writing the new season, Variety reported. Georgi Banks-Davies (I Hate Suzie, Paper Girls) is directing Season 2.

Tom Hiddleston and Olivia Colman are reprising their roles as former military officer Jonathan Pine and intelligence officer Angela Burr respectively. Also returning for the new edition are Alistair Petrie as Alexander "Sandy" Langbourne, Douglas Hodge as Rex Mayhew, Michael Nardone as Frisky, and Noah Jupe as Daniel Roper. Previously announced cast include Diego Calva, Camila Morrone, Indira Varma, Paul Chahidi, and Hayley Squires. 

"Story details are being kept under wraps, but the return of several cast members who were in the Season 1 orbit of villain Richard 'Dicky' Roper (played by Hugh Laurie) gives hint that there is unfinished business there," Variety noted, adding that while Laurie is among the executive producers on Season 2, so far there has been no indication whether he is returning as Roper. 

Season 1 of The Night Manager (which aired on AMC in the U.S.) scored Golden Globes wins for Colman (best supporting actress), Hiddleston (best actor in a limited series or TV film), and Hugh Laurie (best supporting actor). The new season, which takes place eight years later, is set to air on BBC in the U.K. and on Amazon's Prime Video outside the U.K. (including the U.S.).

Author and journalist Anne Applebaum has been named the recipient of the 2024 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, which has a €25,000 (about $26,820) award and will be presented on October 20 in the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt am Main during the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Organizers described Applebaum as "among the world's most important chroniclers of autocratic systems of government. She is a leading expert in eastern European history and was one of the first to warn of Vladimir Putin's potentially violent expansionist policies. Applebaum has consistently garnered considerable international attention for her work, in particular for Gulag (2003), Iron Curtain (2012), Red Famine (2019), and Twilight of Democracy (2021), each of which traces the mechanisms of authoritarian power. She has also received several prominent awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 and most recently the Carl von Ossietzky Prize in 2024."

Karin Schmidt-Friderichs, president of the Börsenverein and chairwoman of the board of trustees of the Peace Prize, said, "With her profound analyses of communist and post-communist systems in the Soviet Union and Russia, Anne Applebaum broadens our horizon and thereby reveals the mechanisms by which authoritarians grab hold of power and maintain their control. She also records and presents several witness testimonies that allow us to comprehend these mechanisms and gain further insight into them ourselves. Applebaum's research into the interplay between economy and democracy, as well as her work on the effects of disinformation and propaganda on democratic societies, sheds light on how fragile these societies can be--especially when democracies are eroded from within by the electoral success of autocrats. In her publications on autocratic forms of government and their internationally operative networks, Applebaum succeeds at combining historiographic insights with highly alert observations on the current state of our world. At a time when democratic values and achievements are increasingly being caricatured and attacked, her work embodies an eminent and indispensable contribution to the preservation of democracy and peace."

Award-winning Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist Kenzie Allen gives readers an incredible collection of work in Cloud Missives. With these poems, distributed in five sections, Allen questions what it means to structure an identity in the wake of colonialism's cruelty, while also grappling with finding new ways to heal in a bent and broken world.

The book's title is pulled from the opening poem, "Light Pollution," and in 12 lines sets the tone for the rest of the book with its stark imagery and evocative emotional plea: "We tried to obey, though muffled by order,/ though every scenic outlook was already gone./ We tipped our throats to night showers/ and tried to lick back the stars the city had obliterated,/ to resurrect anything at all by taste,/ their glittering signs and warnings."

The section "Manifest" interrogates and remakes stereotypes driven into popular culture, evoking figures such as Pocahontas, Tiger Lily, and Indiana Jones. She directly addresses the history and legacies that have helped to obliterate Indigenous identities as happens in the poem "A Date with the Ghost of the British Empire," and what it might mean to the dead to be truly returned to where they belong through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), in the poem "Repatriation."

The poems that comprise the section "Pathology" examine language in the fields of forensic anthropology, anthropology, and others, while the "Love Songs" section ends the volume on a warmer, but still poignant note. Allen considers love--romantic love, but also familial and platonic love, and what it might mean to find healing in and from a place of love. Poems such as "When I Say I Love You, This Is What I Mean" and "Quiet As Thunderbolts" bring light into those intimate spaces that are often kept hidden from others: "And if I wanted it remembered/ the way you asked my skin to sing for you... I can't hold it/ or make it stay, no matter how clever/ my pen."

Allen's probing keenness is further attested to in the endnotes, which address the many references, real and imagined, and crystallize the context for each closely observed poem. Whether savored silently to one's self or recited aloud, shared, and allowed to breathe in the air, these poems will stay with readers long after they have turned the last page. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: Kenzie Allen's first volume of poetry is a stunning consideration of constructing identity, finding love, and living life.  

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

1. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
2. Twisted Love by Ana Huang
3. Wild Love by Elsie Silver
4. Hunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
5. Throttled by Lauren Asher
6. King of Wrath by Ana Huang
7. Twisted Games by Ana Huang
8. Love Redesigned by Lauren Asher
9. The Dawn of the Cursed Queen by Amber V. Nicole
10. Love Unwritten by Lauren Asher

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]