The Book Hive, a pop-up bookstore that carries new, discounted books along with book-related merchandise, has launched, serving the Albany, N.Y., Capital Region. The Daily Gazette of Schenectady reported that founder Amy Duskiewicz has recently held events at Wolf Hollow Brewing Company in Glenville and SingleCut North & Side Stage Tap Room in Clifton Park, as well as an upcoming one at Artisanal Brew Works in Saratoga Springs.

Duskiewicz's goal is not only to sell books but to create a space for conversation. A longtime avid reader, she first got the idea for the Book Hive a few years ago. "Being a single mom, my life is my children and my work. It starts to feel very isolated," she said. "So I started reaching out to a bunch of other moms, and we started sort of a book club."

The group would get together at local restaurants and bars and swap books. "It was just wonderful to connect to people, trade books and talk about how these other books inspired us in different ways. It introduced me to different books that I had never would have read on my own. So it was just such a cool opportunity," Duskiewicz said.

She also heard people, especially parents, talking about how difficult it was to find the time and place to develop new friendships and wanted to create a space for that. "It's so hard to make friends and connect to other people, especially as you get older and especially when you have children," she added.

Noting that she had to figure out how her business would fit into the local landscape, she said, "We have some really great traditional bookstores, like Open Door and we have the Book Nook. But there's this niche that I feel like I can hit." She focuses on price, ordering primarily publishers overstock in a range of genres.

Her set-up is designed to create space for people to browse and linger. At each pop-up, the Book Hive's selection of 50-some titles are spread out across several mahogany end tables and card tables. "It's all very flexible, and I try to make it so people can really wander and peruse," Duskiewicz said. "It feels a little bit more like a traditional bookstore versus a pop-up event. That seems to have worked well for folks.... The community has been awesome, which I think just further motivates me to get out there and do it."

Monarch Books, a new and used bookshop, opened in April at 696 S. Main St. in Lebanon, Ore. Lebanon Local reported that 18-year-old owner Sydney-Anne Graves was preparing for her high school graduation and "working at the tea house across the street when the previous bookstore closed, and her boss at the time suggested it might be a good fit for Graves's family. While her parents weren't interested, Graves took a tour of the space and ultimately decided to give it a shot despite the clutter." She has also been working as a model in Portland for the past year, so her mother runs the shop when she can't be there. 

"I was kind of nervous because I'm on the younger side, but I had some money saved," she said. "I was like, you know what, if I lose all my money, it's whatever. But I've had a lot of fun doing it.... I've enjoyed meeting all the new people and learning about owning a business. It's been awesome. It was a little bit of a shock at first (when it) got thrown on me."

Despite not advertising much initially, the bookshop has been busy thanks to word of mouth within the community, her sisters helping put up posters, and posts on Facebook and Instagram. "I still have stuff I want to finish in here; I want to get a little sitting room back there and start planning for events," Graves said. "I haven't even got business cards yet."

She also wants to install a coffee bar in the next year and replace older shelves, and plans to remodel the kids' section of the store with shelves built to look like a castle. She also wants to host events in the near future.

For selling to independent bookstores, Sourcebooks is moving from using commission reps to establishing an internal team of field sales and telesales reps who will be headed by Courtney Payne, the new director of independent retail sales. A 26-year publishing veteran, Payne joins Sourcebooks from Chronicle Books, where she served as director of independent retailers, wholesale, and institutional sales for the past 17 years.

Courtney Payne

Sourcebooks senior v-p Paula Amendolara said, "Courtney has a proven track record of driving growth and fostering relationships with the indie channel, and her leadership will undoubtedly steer us towards new heights, reinforcing our commitment to delivering exceptional value and innovation to indie booksellers."

Payne said, "I could not be more thrilled to be joining Sourcebooks, a publisher I have long admired, to build out an internal sales team to collaborate and grow our relationships with our independent bookstore partners. They are the reason a book takes wings. A passionate bookseller who connects with a book and spreads the love, handselling it reader by reader is the most important and crucial piece of a book's success and reach."

Sourcebooks is currently hiring field sales managers for independent bookstores in the New England, Mid-Atlantic, South, Midwest, California/Southwest, and Northwest territories as well as three telemarketing sales managers for independent bookstores.

Margaret Coffee, senior director of sales, library and education and indie specialist, will focus on working with the trade and education distribution channels while continuing to be involved with the indie channel by spearheading sales efforts to new accounts and expanding relationships with the American Booksellers Association, the regional independent bookseller associations, and independent booksellers across the country.

Commission rep groups will continue to represent Sourcebooks through the end of the year. Sourcebooks said it is "grateful" to the groups, "who over the years have expanded our business and put our books in readers' hands."

Created as a children's graphic novel imprint in 2020, HarperAlley is expanding to include a wider array of formats, such as books for adults and manga and manhwa for readers of all ages.

HarperAlley has published bestselling books by influencers such as FGTeeV and PopularMMOs, as well as award winners and finalists for the National Book Award, the Newbery Medal, and the Eisner and Harvey Awards, among others. HarperAlley's list includes many books co-branded with other HarperCollins imprints. Those titles include the National Book Award finalist Nimona by ND Stevenson and Jerry Craft's New Kid, the first and only graphic novel to be awarded the Newbery Medal. Both works are published by Quill Tree and co-branded with HarperAlley.

In recognition of HarperAlley's growth and broadened focus, several appointments have been made:

Andrew Arnold has been promoted to v-p, publisher. Arnold joined HarperCollins in 2019 and led the launch of HarperAlley.

Rose Pleuler has been promoted to senior editor. Pleuler joined HarperCollins in 2016 and moved to HarperAlley in 2019.

Maddy Price has been promoted to designer.

Sophie Schmidt has been promoted to assistant editor. Schmidt joined HarperAlley last year.

Posted on Instagram by Ratty Books, Jeffersonville, N.Y.: "Goose installed her mural today! It's such a joy to see Ratty's little face when you come in to the shop now. Did you know Ratty is a water rat? He is a character from The Wind in the Willows and the namesake of the shop. He enjoys a life of leisure on the riverbank (save Mr. Toad's shenanigans) and is my guiding inspiration. And I don't think I've properly shared our play space here before! This is where we have lots of fun and read lots of books. You are always welcome to pop in and play!"

The Bookends & Beginnings 10th anniversary celebration and auctions, one of which began late last week, are being postponed. The sad reason: Nina Barrett, who owns the Evanston, Ill., store, has come down with Covid. As she noted in an announcement about the postponement, "ironically [this is] my first bout with it, despite our having stayed open and operating and healthy throughout almost all of the deepest pandemic months!"

Ticket purchases will be refunded, and the store hopes to reschedule the event and auctions in the fall. The Endowed Chair program continues.

Burn Out by Joshua Hood (Blackstone Publishing).

Today:
Fresh Air: Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (Doubleday, $27, 9780385549936).

Tomorrow:
Today Show: Scott Galloway, author of The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Financial Security (Portfolio, $32, 9780593714027).

Late Night with Seth Meyers repeat: Whoopi Goldberg, author of Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me (Blackstone, $28.99, 9798200920235).

Alongside Academy Award winner Donna Gigliotti (Silver Linings Playbook, Hidden Figures), Stars Collective plans to develop, finance, and produce a film adaptation of Fortunate Sons: The 120 Chinese Boys Who Came to America, Went to School, and Revolutionized an Ancient Civilization by Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller (W.W. Norton), Deadline reported. 

The company has optioned the film rights to the 2012 work of nonfiction, which will be adapted by Yilong Liu. Stars Collective founder Peter Luo and Gigliotti will oversee the development and production process.

In a statement, Stars Collective co-CEO Nancy Xu said, "Fortunate Sons is a poignant story that hits different in 2024 and makes for a compelling and introspective cinematic piece. Yilong Liu is an amazing writer whose adapted screenplay will match the power of the literary work that impressed so many and vaulted the book to bestseller status."

Stars Collective's founder, Peter Luo, added, "Donna is one of the finest producers in the world and an excellent partner for Stars Collective. We are thrilled to have a project we can work on together. The tone, style, and impact of this story require producers with creative expertise related to this material, and Donna possesses that instinctual excellence. We all see Fortunate Sons as a story that resonates globally and will make a movie true to the source material."

Author and judge Ali Smith chose Astraea by Kate Kruimink and Aerth by Deborah Tomkins as the inaugural winners of the Weatherglass Novella Prize, which was launched "to celebrate the vitality and relevance of the novella form." The Bookseller reported that both winners will be published by Weatherglass Books. 

Smith said: "The shortlist, in totality, was one of the most pleasurable and exciting things I've read in quite some time. The ways in which its writers dealt with the short-but-long/long-but-short constraints of the form; the problems and the opportunities that this gave them; and the remarkable standard of the writing from entry to entry reminded me that the novella form is a kind of marvel." 

It's almost impossible to visit any news source today without encountering stories about artificial intelligence. Many of those pieces are framed either in enthusiastic or apocalyptic terms, with historical or philosophical perspective often noteworthy for its absence. In Mindless, Robert Skidelsky helps to fill that gap with a thoughtful reflection on the role of technology in the development of Western civilization and its implications for humanity's future.

Skidelsky, a life member of the House of Lords, is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick and the author of a prize-winning three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes. He takes as his starting point Keynes's 1930 essay in which he predicted that the advance of technology would make it possible for his grandchildren to work only three hours a day. Nearly a century later, Skidelsky argues, Keynes's blithe optimism lives on in "techno-utopians" like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who "preach escape from human to superhuman intelligence, from the earth to the cosmos," and who believe that even the most challenging problems facing humankind--from climate change to mass hunger--are susceptible to a technological solution. Skidelsky, clearly, is not so sanguine.

Comfortably displaying his erudition in disciplines that include history, economics, politics, philosophy, and literature, Skidelsky is as much at ease illustrating how "technology came with a rush with the onset of the 'capitalist' mode of production" as he is explaining how Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus "became a metaphor for the whole project of mechanizing human intelligence." He marshals his sources carefully to lay a strong foundation for his own skepticism about the views of those who assert technology's unfailing benignity, explaining that this crisp survey--one that brings to mind the work of writers like Yuval Noah Harari and Steven Johnson--is "primarily about how western civilization came to be captured by the dream of utopia through science and about the successive stages by which this dream turned sour."

Even as he points to the "continuing threat" of technological innovation to "rob ever-larger fractions of people of their employment, livelihood, status, skills, usefulness and identity, and finally make them redundant," Skidelsky recognizes that we are in the early days of a debate on a subject with profound implications for the future of humanity. His contribution with Mindless is one that should stimulate that debate, rather than stifle it, and anyone who wants to consider some of the fundamental questions that beg to be asked and answered will find it a useful starting point. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: Scholar Robert Skidelsky surveys the history of technology and reflects on its implications for the development of artificial intelligence.

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

1. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
2. Pure by Jennifer L. Armentrout
3. Play a Bigger Game by Markus Kaulius
4. If Love Had a Price by Ana Huang
5. Twisted Love by Ana Huang
6. If We Ever Meet Again by Ana Huang
7. The Inmate by Freida McFadden
8. Unwanted by Mia Sheridan
9. Twisted Games by Ana Huang
10. Half-Blood by Jennifer L. Armentrout

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]