Storyline Bookshop hosted its grand opening celebration on Saturday at 2108 Tremont Center in Upper Arlington, Ohio. Owner and founder Janine Sickmeyer posted on Facebook at the end of the day: "YOU ALL!!! WOW! What a day!! Our Grand Opening Day was better than we could have ever dreamed!! Thank you to the community for the support and to everyone who came, bought, shared thoughts, gave hugs, ahhh!! It was an incredible day full of books and smiles. We sold our first rare book within 30 minutes of opening! And heard SO MANY TIMES people say: 'Thank you for bringing a new independent bookshop to the community.'

"There is no better compliment than hearing everyone say the curation is diverse and they found things they've never seen in other bookstores!! (WE LOVE BOOKS!! CAN YOU TELL?) As we close the doors tonight, we are so thankful for all of the support and happiness you all brought us today. We hope to bring you all the same joy and happiness everyday 8am-8pm." 

Last week, in anticipation of the grand opening, Sickmeyer told Columbus Business First that opening the bookstore "is a dream come true for me." She had previously launched software company NextChapter in 2016, sold it in 2019 and since then had been investing in other startups through Overlooked Ventures, a venture capital fund she co-founded. During this time, however, she had been scouting for the right time and place to open a bookstore.

"I'd looked for a long time, but couldn't find the right fit," she said. "When I saw this space was available, I knew it would be perfect." In addition to its genre- and age-spanning title selection, the 2,500-square-foot space also features a collection of first editions and collectibles. Storyline Bookshop's centerpiece is the Skylight Room, which has a stage and will be the center for author visits, live music or other events.

"It looks small from the outside but when you walk in we want it to feel like it keeps going and going," Sickmeyer added.

Cafe Resistance Bookstore & Coffee Shop hosted its grand opening last week at 5007 Soutel Drive, Jacksonville, Fla. First Coast News reported that the new business "aims to uplift the local Black community through some books you may not find on Florida school bookshelves." The store features titles challenged and banned in Florida schools, in response to a state law requiring books to be free of "pornography" or certain race-based teaching. 

"We can learn our true history in the roots, and you know, push back against the overbearing legislature and an overbearing governor, who just really wants to keep people uneducated," said owner Angie Nixon, who is also the Florida House District 13 state representative.

Describing the shop, local author Aaron Woodson noted: "I love the artistry, that's the first thing.... you just feel at home. It's also a cafe." 

Earlier this year, Nixon told First Coast News: "We are currently in a food desert, amenity desert and entertainment desert. And so, I wanted to open not only a bookstore, but a coffee shop and a community hub. A cultural space.... I just wanted to give back and offer free tutoring programs to help get the children on grade level. In addition to that, I serve in the state legislature, and there's been a lot of book bans and book challenges."

PK Sindwani

PK Sindwani, who has been the chief financial officer of the American Booksellers Association since 2019, is retiring in August 2025, according to Bookselling This Week.

ABA CEO Allison Hill said, "ABA has been so fortunate to have PK as our CFO. His combined experience as an accountant and as a bookseller has been invaluable to ABA and our members. And his contributions to ABA's culture; the diversity, equity and inclusion council; the ABA staff; ABA's education; and ABA's financial well-being have been significant and too many to count. We're excited for him about his next chapter, but he will be greatly missed here at ABA."

Sindwani said, "This opportunity at ABA was a perfect fit for me. After spending 29 years as a bookseller, I couldn't have asked for a better conclusion to my career. This position allowed me to continue working with the finest professionals in the world and still make a difference in the industry I love. I hope to continue this journey in some capacity. I believe in the mission of ABA and would love to help out in any way I can."

For nearly three decades, Sindwani, who holds an MBA from Texas Southern University, was the owner of Towne Book Center & Cafe in Collegeville, Pa. He has done many presentations about financial matters for other booksellers and served as treasurer of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association. Before entering the book world, he was an accountant for 11 years.

Simon & Schuster will hold a virtual gathering to celebrate the life and work of Gary Urda, senior v-p, sales, who died suddenly on Monday, June 24. All who knew and worked with Gary are invited to attend the Zoom session, beginning at 4 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, July 10.

Written remembrances of Gary may be sent to corporate.communications@simonandschuster.com.

Stanley Moss, a "lyrical American poet who for seven decades evoked a troubled world of sorrows and sensual pleasures ruled by a silent God seemingly indifferent to the fate of humanity," died July 5, the New York Times reported. He was 99. 

Moss sold his work to periodicals for 20 years before his first collection, The Wrong Angel, was published in 1966. He eventually published 16 poetry collections, the last of which was Always Alwaysland, released on his 97th birthday.

His other books include The Skull of Adam (1979), The Intelligence of Clouds (1989), A History of Color: New and Collected Poems (2003), Songs of Imperfection (2004), God Breaketh Not All Men's Hearts Alike (2011), It's About Time (2015), Almost Complete Poems (2016), Abandoned Poems (2018), Act V, Scene I (2020), and Not Yet (2021).

In 1948, Moss became an editor at New Directions, and was later a drinking friend of the poet Dylan Thomas. Moss, who spoke Italian and Spanish, lived in Rome in the 1960s and early '70s. He was a contributing editor for the Rome literary journal Botteghe Oscure and taught English in Rome and Barcelona. In New York in 1977, he founded Sheep Meadow Press, which published poetry books by Hayden Carruth, Stanley Kunitz, Stephen Berg, and others, the Times noted. 

In 1969, Moss befriended the heirs of an Italian nobleman who, after his death, had left a trove of Spanish and Italian old master paintings. Starting as an agent for the nobleman's heirs, Moss began selling art to major museums and became prosperous enough to finance his life as a poet.

"When I started selling art, I had no money or training," he said in a 2005 interview. "I have a gift for finding old masters. I have discovered pictures that now hang in the Louvre that I bought for nothing. It takes taste and brains.... How do I balance my careers as a poet and a dealer? I have the advantage of not having to sleep much."

"Moss may or may not be accurately termed a religious poet," the British poet Carol Rumens wrote in the Guardian in 2015. "If he's a religious poet, he's one of the too-few irreligious kind, firmly of this world in his vivid pleasures and sorrows, joyfully harrying God from myth to unsatisfactory myth, denomination to denomination, fascinated by the whole subject of deity but hardly expecting a catch or kill."

From Moss's poem "Elegy for Myself":

Place him with "they love" and "they wrote," 
not he loves and he writes. It took so much pain 
for those Ss to fly off. It took so much trouble 
to need a new part of speech. Now he is 
something like a good small company of actors,
the text, not scripture, begins "I am laughing."

P&T Knitwear in Manhattan hosted Santiago Jose Sanchez for the pub day launch of their debut novel, Hombrecito (Riverhead), in conversation with Larissa Pham (Pop Song). Santiago read four short excerpts of the novel to an audience of about 50.

Summer heatwave report: "It's so hot even the books are taking off their jackets! Come in and check it out! That was the sidewalk chalkboard message in front of White Rose Books & More, Kissimmee, Fla.

The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan (Knopf) is the July pick for Reese's Book Club. Reese Witherspoon wrote that the book "follows main character Jane's journey as she uncovers the past lives of a home. It's an entrancing spin on a generational novel and filled with mystery."

Sullivan is the author of the novels Commencement, Maine, The Engagements, Saints for All Occasions, and Friends and Strangers.

At the Strand Book Store, New York City:

Carson Moss has been named chief operating officer. Previously he was lead buyer and has been with the store for 23 years.

Kelly Sterling has been named chief retail officer. Previously she was general manager of the Union Square location and has been with the store for 13 years.

Of Blood and Lightning by Micki Janae (Three Rooms Press).

Today:
Good Morning America: Daniel Silva, author of A Death in Cornwall: A Novel (Harper, $32, 9780063384200).

Live with Kelly and Mark: Dr. Anthony Youn, author of Younger for Life: Feel Great and Look Your Best with the New Science of Autojuvenation (Hanover Square Press, $30, 9781335007872).

Fresh Air: Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of Long Island Compromise: A Novel (Random House, $30, 9780593133491).

Tamron Hall repeat: Hilary Sheinbaum, author of The Dry Challenge: How to Lose the Booze for Dry January, Sober October, and Any Other Alcohol-Free Month (Harper Design, $19.99, 9780062937704).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Karla Tatiana Vasquez, author of The SalviSoul Cookbook: Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them (Ten Speed Press, $35, 9781984861429).

Also on GMA: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, author of True Gretch: What I've Learned About Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between (Simon & Schuster, $26.99, 9781668072318). She will also appear on the View.

Late Night with Seth Meyers: Julia Phillips, author of Bear: A Novel (Hogarth, $28, 9780525520436).

Netflix is "rounding out the cast" for Season 2 of The Sandman, adapted from Neil Gaiman's bestselling DC Comics series, Deadline reported.  Additions include Ruairi O'Connor as Dream's son Orpheus, Freddie Fox (Loki), Clive Russell (Odin), Laurence O'Fuarain (Thor), Ann Skelly (Nuala), Douglas Booth (Cluracan), Jack Gleeson (Puck), Indya Moore (Wanda), and Steve Coogan (Barnabus). The characters are from the Season of Mists and Brief Lives comics storylines.

The additions join previously announced cast members Esmé Creed-Miles (Delirium), Adrian Lester (Destiny), Barry Sloane (The Prodigal), Tom Sturridge (Dream), Kirby (Death), Mason Alexander Park (Desire), and Donna Preston (Despair), who are returning from Season 1.

The returning cast also includes Patton Oswalt, Vivienne Acheampong, Gwendoline Christie, Jenna Coleman, Ferdinand Kingsley, Stephen Fry, Asim Chaudhry, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Vanesu Samunyai, and Razane Jammal.

Developed and executive produced by Gaiman, showrunner Allan Heinberg, and David S. Goyer, The Sandman is produced by Warner Bros. Television. Jamie Childs directs all episodes.

The Life and Times of Augustine Tataneuck: An Inuk Hero in Rupert's Land, 1800-1834 by Renee Fossett (University of Regina Press) has won the 2024 William Mills Prize for Non-fiction Polar Books, awarded every two years by the Polar Libraries Colloquy and honoring "the best Arctic and Antarctic non-fiction books." Judges said that Fossett "skillfully and comprehensively introduced an Inuk interpreter/hunter as an important actor on a vast stage where 'the struggle for possession of northwestern North America by Britain, Russia and the United States' was played out."

Two other books received honorable mentions:

Expedition Relics from High Arctic Greenland: Eight Decades of Exploration History Told Through 102 Objects by Peter R. Dawes (Museum Tusculanum Press), which "lays out the panorama of European and American exploration history in Greenland from 1853-1934."

Erebus the Ice Dragon: A Portrait of an Antarctic Volcano by Colin Monteath (Massey University Press) which "gathers, in a beautifully produced book, everything one would want to know about Mount Erebus, Antarctica's only active volcano."

Each of Danzy Senna's books, including her remarkable 1998 debut, Caucasia, have spotlighted biracial identity, including her memoir Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (2009). "Biracial," however, isn't the preferred term in the novel Colored Television; "mulatto" is "better" because "biracial could be any old thing. Korean and Panamanian or Chinese and Egyptian. But mulatto is always specifically a mulatto."

Senna presents a peripatetic Los Angeles family quartet, although Jane and Lenny's love story began in Brooklyn. During one of their first dates, they compared their "various strains of Blackness": "Jane was Pinky Black... the kind of Black you can't see unless you're squinting"; "Lenny was Caviar Black... born a rich black child." Jane is a writer toiling over her sophomore title, what Lenny calls "her mulatto War and Peace"; nine years have passed since her critically acclaimed debut. Lenny is "a painter who made abstract paintings that didn't sell" because, Jane's convinced, he "steadfastly refused to depict Black bodies, Black faces, Black suffering." They both teach, but neither has tenure.

They live in a city they can't afford, which means they're constantly moving. Jane and Lenny and their two kids--almost-eight-year-old Ruby and six-year-old Finn--are "those friends" to rich people who need their possessions and pets watched when they go away on sabbaticals and film shoots. Their latest address belongs to Brett, Jane's friend from grad school, who's on set in Australia for a year. For six months, they've been particularly enjoying Brett's carefully curated wine collection while Jane finishes her tome. But her novel is more "major failure," prompting a major risk: she contacts Brett's television agent with "a pitch for a show that was 'particularly relevant at this historical juncture.' Whatever the hell that meant." Nonetheless, being a friend of Brett gets Jane into Hollywood's inner sanctums, with powerful ears willing to listen: "I want to write a comedy about mulattos.... More feminine and a lot darker." Is primetime ready for her colorful vision?

Senna is a fabulously sly, provocative writer, seamlessly focusing race and privilege on virtually every page. Perhaps more impressive is how she deftly avoids didactic stumbles, transforming Hanna Andersson catalogs, Ikea Billy shelves, and Wolf stoves into clever, charged leitmotifs. Gifting the name Zyzzyva to what could be her celluloid stand-in will certainly elicit a chuckle or three. Until the credits roll, Senna offers brilliant entertainment with plenty of surprising, shocking enlightenment. --Terry Hong

Shelf Talker: Danzy Senna again focuses on race and privilege in the novel Colored Television, with impressively engrossing, adroitly illuminating results.

The following were the most popular book club books during June based on votes from book club readers in more than 88,000 book clubs registered at Bookmovement.com:

1. The Women: A Novel by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin's Press)
2. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead Books)
3. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (Harper)
4. First Lie Wins: A Novel by Ashley Elston (Pamela Dorman Books)
5. The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters (Catapult)
6. Lady Tan's Circle of Women: A Novel by Lisa See (Scribner)
7. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese (Grove Press)
8. The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods (One More Chapter)
9. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Doubleday)
10. Mad Honey: A Novel by Jodi Picoult (Ballantine)

Rising Stars:
Long Island by Colm Tóibín (Scribner)
Just for the Summer by Abby Jimenez (Forever)