Madison Books, Seattle, Wash., will reopen under new ownership on September 1. The Seattle Times reported that Christina Leber and Sarah Trainer purchased the 400-square-foot shop, which was launched in 2020, from Tom Nissley, who wants to focus his time on his other store, Phinney Books.

"I would like to get some writing done again, and that just hasn't even been close to possible the last five years. I think it's only possible if I'm a one-bookstore guy," Nissley said.

Madison Books "felt like a physical extension" of its manager, James Crossley, a legendary bookseller "known for his exquisite taste, and that taste was reflected in practically every inch of the tiny shop's metal shelves," the Times noted. When Crossley moved to St. Louis, Mo.--where he and Amanda Clark have since opened Leviathan Bookstore--"many wondered if the store could survive the loss of its heart. They'll get their answer when the store reopens under new owners." 

"We're sisters who grew up in Seattle, on Capitol Hill. And we were like homing pigeons," Leber said. "We were gone for many years--for school and grad school and work--and then we had kids and came back to Capitol Hill." Neither of them had previous bookselling experience--Trainer is an anthropologist and Leber worked as a social worker--but Trainer gradually developed a desire to work with books.

Last fall, Trainer came across Madison Books. "I fell into a conversation with James, as one does, and I said, 'This is a strange question, but by any chance, are you hiring?' 'Funny you should ask,' he said. 'How would you like to be the manager?' "

Crossley connected Trainer with Nissley, who hired her as a manager, and she soon convinced Leber to join the staff. Their first month without Crossley at Madison Books was December 2023. 

"We just kind of threw them in the deep end," Nissley recalled, "and it's a good sign that you can come in the craziest time of year in a time of transition and have your first reaction be, 'Oh, I really like this.' "

"I feel like we have been in training for this job our whole lives in that we both have been reading crazily for decades and decades," Leber noted. The sisters were soon in discussion about buying Madison Books from Nissley. 

The changes Leber and Trainer envision are modest and largely centered on expanding programming, including book fairs with nearby schools and a regular event schedule to complement the shop's monthly book club.

"I think we have a wonderful selection of books, and we feed a large geographic area," Trainer said. "One of the most common phrases I've heard about Madison Books is 'small but mighty.' Each area of focus within the bookstore has a depth that you wouldn't expect in such a little space. It's amazing."

An all-ages bookstore called Rooted Books & Gifts opens this week in Grand Island, Neb., the Grand Island Independent reported.

Danielle Helzer

Store owner Danielle Helzer, whose background is in education and community advocacy, is welcoming customers for the first time. Located at 315 N. Locust St., the shop sells all-new titles with an emphasis on diverse stories and representation.

Helzer hopes to make Rooted a community hub and third place, particularly for teenagers and young people. Her event plans include author readings, multilingual storytime sessions, teen book clubs, open mic nights, creative writing workshops, and more.

Helzer explained that the recent surge in book bans motivated her to open a bookstore. "I wanted to open this bookstore right now as a way to combat the attempts to ban, remove, or challenge books."

Last fall Helzer won an annual event called Big Pitch Grand Island, in which entrepreneurs pitch their business plans in a style based on the TV show Shark Tank. She was awarded a $5,000 prize and made valuable community connections.

Helzer has a grand opening celebration scheduled for Saturday, September 21.

The Story Garden children's bookstore will open this fall at 832 14th St. N., St. Petersburg, Fla., in a quaint, 800-square-foot building that served as a neighborhood grocery store in the 1920s. I Love the Burg reported that co-owners Megan and Jason Kotsko "would often look at the abandoned grocery store across from their home and imagine what it could become--perhaps a little café, a cozy book nook, or maybe even another grocery store to revitalize the area. But no one came, and nothing changed."

A former kindergarten and first-grade teacher who had been a stay-at-home mom for the past five years, Megan Kotsko said she wondered: "Should I go back to teaching? What should I do next?" Then she realized a dedicated children's bookstore might be the answer, and the old grocery store across the street remained empty. 

When the Story Garden officially opens around Halloween, the front of the store will feature a full retail section, offering puppets, stuffed animals, how-to-draw activity books, and more. The back of the store, which takes up about one-third of the total space, will be dedicated to children's events and include a child-sized stage. The store will stock books for children ages 0-13, organized by age. 

"I want children to have ownership over the books they select," Megan said.

Laurent Linn has been elected president of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators board of directors. He has been involved with SCBWI for more than 22 years as faculty at global and regional conferences, a member of the SCBWI advisory council, and a committee member responsible for planning illustrator programming at global conferences. 

Laurent Lunn

For more than 25 years, he has been an art director of picture books, middle grade, and YA books, with 16 years at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. Prior to that, he was a creative director and puppet designer with Jim Henson's Muppets and an Emmy Award winner for his work on Sesame Street. He is also the author and illustrator of numerous children's books, including Draw the Line. 

Linn joins board treasurer Jon E. Cawthorne, a librarian in the Wayne State University Library System; and board secretary Netta Rabin, v-p, publisher, and creative director of Klutz, a division of Scholastic.

Linn commented: "The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators is truly that: a society--a rich community of creative people coming together to share and learn and grow. In my 22 years of involvement with SCBWI, I've experienced this remarkable community up close across regions in the U.S. and around the world, and I've seen how hard the staff and volunteers work to serve the needs of all members while welcoming new members as our publishing world evolves. I am deeply honored to step into the role of president of the board of directors and can't wait to help enrich and grow this giving and joyful community!"

Executive director Sarah Baker said, "I've had the privilege of working closely with Laurent Linn since I began working for SCBWI in 2011, and I've known him from SCBWI events for over 20 years.... I'm so excited about the innovations and contributions Laurent will bring to his new role, and I'm thrilled to welcome him as our board president."

Len Riggio

Leonard Riggio, founder and longtime head of Barnes & Noble, died yesterday, August 27, at age 83 after "a valiant battle with Alzheimer's disease," his family announced. Known to everyone in the business as Len, he was also founder of Barnes & Noble College; MBS Textbook Exchange, the wholesale textbook distributor; GameStop, the videogame and entertainment software stores; and SBX (Student Book Exchange), his first venture. At the height of his career, Riggio's companies, which included B. Dalton Bookseller, Doubleday Book Shops, Bookstop/Bookstar, and others, had more than 5,000 retail stores, with staff of more than 100,000 people. In 2019, Barnes & Noble was bought by Elliott Advisors, and James Daunt, managing director of Waterstones, replaced Riggio as head of B&N.

Barnes & Noble stated in part: "We are deeply saddened to share the passing of Leonard Riggio... Len's vision and entrepreneurial spirit transformed the retail landscape, establishing Barnes & Noble as the largest bookstore chain in the U.S. His leadership spanned decades, during which he not only grew the company but also nurtured a culture of innovation and a love for reading. A true son of New York, public servant, and tireless advocate for public education, literacy, and the arts, he supported organizations such as the Children's Defense Fund, the Anti-Defamation League and DIA. We honor his remarkable contributions and extend our deepest condolences to his family. Len will be greatly missed by all who knew him."

The company added that B&N superstores "revolutionized bookselling in America by combining a vast and deep selection of book titles with experienced bookselling teams, sprinkled with welcoming cafés. For Len, definitive success was creating significant monuments to books and reading, an ethos we still own today.

"Len was an extraordinary businessman who established our bookstores as community centers. His tenacity, charisma, and preternatural sense of the retail experience ensured his success not only in business, but also in social justice causes he was passionate about, including what he called the unfinished business of the civil rights movement, advocating for public education, arts, and literacy."

While he was a student in the 1960s, Riggio started out as a stock boy in the New York University bookstore, opened a competing off-campus college store--SBX--and then expanded SBX in the New York City area. He entered trade bookselling in a major way in 1971, when he bought the Barnes & Noble store on Fifth Avenue and 18th Street. Soon he opened more B&N stores in the New York area. The stores featured discounted books, a rarity, and were promoted via radio and TV advertising, another rarity. Through its acquisition of Marboro Books, the company also had an extensive mail-order business, which provided a solid foundation for online bookselling.

Riggio became a national bookseller in 1987, when B&N bought B. Dalton Bookseller, the chain of mall stores that numbered nearly 800 and was second only in size to Waldenbooks. In the following years, B&N bought Bookstop/Bookstar and Doubleday.

The Rise of Superstores
At the end of the 1980s, Riggio launched what perhaps is his greatest career legacy: creating the Barnes & Noble superstore and expanding it nationwide. The idea of a huge store of 25,000 square feet or more that stocked several hundred thousand titles, had a café, plenty of chairs for customers, with music, video, and related sidelines, was new and popular--and aggressively pursued by B&N and by competitors that included Borders, Basset, and Crown, none of which survived. During this time, Riggio also increased his college bookstore management business, which became the second-largest, after Follett.

B&N's superstores, which totaled about 725 at their peak, revolutionized bookselling and led to the closing of many independent bookstores. For most of the 1990s, B&N, along with Borders, seemed to be the behemoth that would dominate bookselling for decades to come.

But in 1994, Amazon.com opened, initially as a bookstore only, and B&N was slow to appreciate the importance of online bookselling. While B&N eventually expanded its online presence with B&N.com, Amazon grew at a exponential pace and came to claim a much larger part of the book market than B&N ever had.

The next blow to B&N came in 2007, when Amazon introduced the Kindle. The e-book devices were so popular initially that many industry gurus predicted print books wouldn't exist other than as curiosities by 2015. Two years after the Kindle's launch, B&N introduced the Nook, which had promising sales for a time, but lost steam and became a major drag on the company financially.

B&N was late or missed out on other major trends in book retailing after the turn of the century. Most B&N superstores dated from the '90s and showed their age, especially considering the many changes in general retail since their establishment. The company made some attempts to update the stores but they were limited.

Some observers have considered B&N's initial public offering in 1993 a mistake since it seemed to force the company to run operations in a way needed to please institutional investors on Wall Street. Ever more executives at the company were recruited from outside the book industry, which usually meant they spent a lot of time learning the quirks of the book business before they could really begin work. And when sales declined in the last decade of Riggio's era, the company often took standard business approaches, which included, for example, cutting costs by firing experienced booksellers and many regional buyers, who had often made individual stores more reflective of their areas.

Riggio was fiercely loyal to many people in the business and many employees, and B&N treated publisher and distributor reps well. He was also a generous philanthropist, promoting the causes of literacy, education, and progressive politics. As his family noted, he was "deeply invested in social justice causes hoping to address what he called the unfinished business of the civil rights movement." He helped people who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina and made major donations to the Dia Center in Beacon, N.Y., New York University,  the Langston Hughes Library, and the Democratic Party. He founded, with his wife, Louise, the Writing and Democracy Program at the New School, the Brooklyn Tech Foundation, and the "Close the Book on Hate" program for the Anti-Defamation League. In 2017, he was Grand Marshall of the Columbus Day Parade in New York City (to which he invited more than 100 authors of Italian descent). In addition, he won the Americanism Award from the Anti-Defamation League, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and the Frederick Douglass Medallion. His friends included Tony Bennett, David Dinkins, Bill Bradley, and Charlie Rangel.

Riggio loved to wheel and deal. He bought and sold many companies, taking them public, then going private again, or spinning them off and sometimes buying them back. Controlled by Riggio, B&N often bought and sold companies that Riggio owned. The list of such dealings included B&N.com, B&N Education, MBS Textbook Exchange, GameStop, Software, Etc., Babbage's, Babbage's Etc., Funco, and NeoStar.

A lover of art, Riggio was also a wordsmith, who was eminently quotable. In our interactions with him, we found him to be charming, charismatic, passionate, opinionated. He stuck to his guns, even when his views went against the grain. While he repeatedly said that the book world should celebrate the opening of every bookstore "regardless of its pedigree," he also insisted B. Dalton Bookseller, with nearly 800 stores, was not a chain. (He maintained that instead it was a "network of booksellers.")

A Mass of Christian burial will take place on Friday, August 30, at 10 a.m. at the Basilica of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, 263 Mulberry St., in New York City, with a public celebration of his life to be announced at a later date. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in his memory to the Alzheimer's Association.

On the 50th anniversary of the book's publication, this fall the New-York Historical Society will host an exhibition dedicated to the making of The Power Broker, Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses that is in part a history of New York City in the mid 20th Century. Drawing on Caro's manuscripts, outlines, and notes to himself in the Society's Robert A. Caro Archive, the exhibit will run from next Friday, September 6, to February 2, 2025.

The exhibition also includes articles, photographs, and other archival documents that together depict how Caro, a young reporter at Newsday, produced a detailed depiction of Moses's power and influence despite many roadblocks to finding out how Moses operated. The installation demonstrates how years of tenacious and meticulous reporting ultimately paid off. Documents on view illuminate Caro's working process, including how he combed through files and interviewed those in Moses's orbit to reveal the full story behind the creation of Jones Beach on Long Island, the many highways he built that brutally destroyed vibrant neighborhoods, and his other projects and plans over 40 years. Additional selections show interview notes with Moses himself.

Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the Society, commented: "The Power Broker is a tremendous feat of reporting and narrative storytelling, and a work that continues to shape our understanding of New York City itself. The book has influenced generations of journalists, politicians, city planners, and countless other readers who care about the civic life of our city. I hope visitors come away from this show with a greater understanding of the enormity of what Robert Caro's monumental book meant when it was first published in 1974 and its continued relevance today.”

The Society will host An Evening with Robert Caro on Monday, October 7. In collaboration with a special episode of the 99% Invisible podcast's mini-series celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Power Broker, Caro joins the podcast's hosts, Roman Mars and Elliot Kalan, on stage at the New-York Historical Society's Robert H. Smith Auditorium. This event is sold out but will be live streamed.

Baldwin & Co. Coffee & Bookstore, New Orleans, La., posted on Instagram: "Exploring the bookshelves at Baldwin & Co. @baldwinandcompany is a truly enchanting experience. As you wander through the aisles, you're surrounded by a rich tapestry of literature, history, and culture, all curated with a deep respect for Black authors and their contributions. The atmosphere is warm and inviting, with James Baldwin's legacy felt in every corner. Each book you pick up feels like a new adventure, offering insights and stories that resonate deeply. It’s not just a bookstore; it's a celebration of knowledge, community, and the joy of reading. ExperienceExcellence!"

Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, Wis., shared a photo highlighting its sidewalk chalkboard art to promote a recent event featuring David Wroblewski and his new book, Familiaris. 

Team Canteen 1: Rocky Road by Amalie Jahn (Pixel+Ink).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Ali Rosen, author of 15 Minute Meals: Truly Quick Recipes that Don't Taste like Shortcuts (Mango, $34.99, 9781684812578).

CBS Mornings: Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of The Leadership Journey: How Four Kids Became President (S&S/Books for Young Readers, $18.99, 9781665925723).

Grammy Award winning rapper, singer, and record producer Bad Bunny has joined Austin Butler in Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing, which is based on the 2004 book by Charlie Huston, Deadline reported. Aronofsky will direct the movie for Sony Pictures from a script written by Huston. The cast also includes Zoë Kravitz, Regina King, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, and Will Brill.

Finalists for the Kirkus Prize have been selected. Winners in the three categories, who will each receive $50,000, will be announced at the Kirkus Prize ceremony in New York City on October 16. This year's finalists are:

Fiction:
Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet (Simon & Schuster)
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich (Harper)
James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
Playground by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton)
Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe (Morrow)
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Grove)

Nonfiction:
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq by Steve Coll (Penguin)
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham (Avid Reader Press)
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls (MCD/FSG)
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing (W.W. Norton)
Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America by Shefali Luthra (Doubleday)
Another Word for Love: A Memoir by Carvell Wallace (MCD/FSG)

Young Readers' Literature:
Picture books
We Who Produce Pearls by Joanna Ho, illustrated by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya (Scholastic/Orchard)
There Was a Party for Langston by Jason Reynolds, illustrated by Jerome Pumphrey and Jarrett Pumphrey (Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum)

Middle grade
Safiyyah's War by Hiba Noor Khan (Allida/HarperCollins)
Shark Teeth by Sherri Winston (Bloomsbury) 

YA
Gather by Kenneth M. Cadow (Candlewick) 
Bright Red Fruit by Safia Elhillo (Random House/Make Me a World)

photo: Emilia Galavis

Alejandro Puyana, who came to the United States from Venezuela at the age of 26, received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His work has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, the American Scholar, and elsewhere, and his story "Hands of Dirty Children" was reprinted in Best American Short Stories 2020. He lives with his wife, the writer Brittani Sonnenberg, and daughter in Austin, Tex. Freedom Is a Feast (Little Brown, August 20, 2024), his debut novel, is a multigenerational, Latin American saga of love and revolution.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

A young idealist in 1964 chooses revolution over family, a decision that will haunt them all for 50 years of troubled Venezuelan history.

On your nightstand now:

I always have a stack. An old copy of El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch) by Gabriel García Márquez, which I literally open to random pages every once in a while. One or two pages at a time is enough to get lost in the language and also all that I can take. Gabino Iglesias's House of Bone and Rain. I usually don't read thrillers, but I've been wanting to read Gabino's work for a while and am loving his unflinching look at Puerto Rico's underbelly, all while Hurricane Maria rages in the background. Althea by Sally H. Jacobs is the biography of tennis champion and African American athlete pioneer Althea Gibson. I'm obsessed with tennis, so when I saw this at the Austin Public Library, I immediately snatched it. Finally, a beat-up copy of Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw that my brother gave me. He asked me to read the profile Bourdain did on Justo Thomas, the Dominican fish butcher at Le Bernardin, at the heights of the restaurant's popularity. It is a masterclass in writing about a job, and every writer should read it.

Favorite book when you were a child:

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragonlance Chronicles are up there, but I would be lying if I said anything other than the hundreds of X-Men comic books I devoured since I picked one up at the age of 12.

Your top five authors:

Jesmyn Ward. Talk about exploration of place and character. There's so much tenderness in her work, even in the darkest moments.

Amy Hempel, like García Márquez for me, offers a refuge based almost entirely on language and its musicality.

Isabel Allende, for her heart. Reading The House of the Spirits and then jumping straight into her memoir, Paula, is a great way to fall in love with her writing.

James Baldwin, for all the reasons.

Some recency bias here, but Justin Torres has earned a top spot for me in just two books. Blackouts is a gem of a novel, both for its content and as an object in itself, and the perfect follow-up to We the Animals.

Book you've faked reading:

Oh, God. Moby-Dick. I'm sure it's the masterpiece everyone says it is, but I can't be bothered.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Not that it needs another evangelist, but Kali Fajardo-Anstine's Sabrina & Corina. What a masterpiece. Such a tight collection, all bangers.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The first book I ever bought when I moved to the U.S. in 2006, Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More than You. Bright yellow with black type. It took me on a weird ride that I still think about every now and then.

Book you hid from your parents:

I don't think I ever did! I do remember feeling weird when I read V.C. Andrews's Flowers in the Attic as a kid.

Book that changed your life:

Julio Cortázar's collected short stories Los Relatos. One story in particular, "La autopista del sur," was the piece that made me say "maybe I can write something" and put pencil to paper for the first time to try something of my own.

Favorite line from a book:

The final line of Amy Hempel's short story "Weekend," from her collection Tumble Home: "And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought: stay."

Five books you'll never part with:

My Folio Society copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, gorgeously illustrated by Neil Packer.

Julio Cortázar and Alberto Cedrón's graphic novel La raíz del ombú. Only a few copies of the first printing survive in the world, after a fire at the Venezuelan printer that made them.

My dedicated copy of Hempel's Reasons to Live.

A copy of the children's poem Margarita by Rubén Darío that I've started reading to my baby daughter.

Finally, my wife, Brittani Sonnenberg, gave me her debut novel, Home Leave, a couple of weeks after we started dating. It made me fall in love with her and with her amazing work.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

When I first read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I was working a job I didn't like, bored out of my mind, in a forgotten corner of a dark office. I was so immersed. I felt everything: fear, horror, love. While it's not one of my favorite books, and I'm not usually drawn to post-apocalyptic stuff, it made me feel intensely, and that's one of my favorite things about a good book.

Heir is a complex, spellbinding YA saga of love and intrigue that is set in the familiar magical universe of the An Ember in the Ashes series, written by National Book Award winning-author Sabaa Tahir (All My Rage).

"Small-boned, light-skinned" Aiz bet-Dafra, 18, is a desperately poor, orphaned "gutter child" in the crowded city of Kegar. The vile highborn commander of the air squadrons, Tiral bet-Hiwa, is driven to conquest and uses the city's magic-driven Sails to bomb and pillage other lands for food. When Aiz attempts to kill Tiral--who has murdered many of her fellow orphans--she is thrown into prison. There, the blessed Mother Div, historical "Savior of Kegar," manifests as an apparition and aids Aiz's escape. Mother Div promises Aiz that she will help the girl gain strength and save "the poor and wretched of Kegar."

Thousands of miles away, dark-haired, gold-skinned prince Quil is the reluctant heir to the Martial throne. The 20-year-old has been trained to fight by the "greatest warrior in the Empire." Quil is troubled, though, by an epidemic of ugly murders that has left 14 children dead; he confronts Empress Helene but receives no answers. Before he can investigate further, the palace is destroyed in an unexpected Kegari attack. Quil escapes and is sent on a mission to bring back a mysterious weapon that will save the Empire.

Twenty-year-old, "blue-black hair and brown"-skinned Sirsha Westering comes from a line of powerful magic-wielders called the Jaduna. She is approached by a mysterious Martial and asked to find a dangerous murderer who targets young people. Sirsha's magic lies in tracking and binding the magic of others, but she's been banished by the Jaduna and forbidden to use her powers on pain of death. The price the client offers, though, is irresistible. When the royal palace is attacked, Sirsha's path, her mission--and quite possibly her heart--collide with Quil.

This first electrifying book in a duology occurs 20 years after the events of the final An Ember in the Ashes book. In Heir, Tahir's three narrators take turns driving the story, their compelling tales merging into one serendipitous, exhilarating whole. The narrators' goals are seemingly unrelated--Aiz's righteousness, Sirsha's sworn oath, and Quil's need to save his people--yet Tahir's magic lies in how she makes their goals mesh, propelling the novel forward to a violent, tangled cliffhanger of an ending. Heir is a triumphant return to a beloved world. --Lynn Becker, reviewer, blogger, and children's book author

Shelf Talker: This first book in a spellbinding new duology set in the same world as the An Ember in the Ashes series is a complex saga of love, magic, and intrigue delivered by a gifted storyteller.