"Bookselling is an interesting landscape. In the liminal space between retail and the creative industries, it occupies an emotional, political, cultural, social and transactional area in the minds of its customers, the media and the industry itself....

"The book industry has always been an unlikely amalgam of the very large and the unfeasibly tiny, the stellar famous and the unknown--each part of the business circling, supporting and reinforcing the others. We need, in the noisy environment we all inhabit, to take a moment, take a breath, take a beat, to understand the value of what we have, and to invest in it; to build it, and to support those booksellers taking books to readers."

Chapter Book Lounge, featuring a curated collection of new and pre-loved books, merchandise, coffee, tea, cocktails and more, will host its grand opening celebration October 4 at 996 Conner St. in Noblesville, Ind., near Indianapolis, Current reported.

Brooke Heffernan and Jen Todderud

Co-owners Brooke Heffernan and Jen Todderud plan to host a variety of events, including themed nights and book discussions, among other activities at their bookstore and cafe. The store also will have a children's section.

"It is going to be a place for people to build relationships and find new things to read and learn about," Todderud said. "We're both passionate readers and learners, and we felt like we were lacking a space to do that. This business is a culmination of all of our favorite things."

Heffernan added: "We'll have memberships available that will include gifts, perks, and discounts--things that you would expect for a traditional membership program. But we also hope to have some exclusive events and offerings for members."

Friends since college, the owners look forward to growing their business. "We love it in downtown Noblesville," Heffernan noted. "Everyone on the street has been so welcoming and supportive. It's been pretty cool to see the response rate from the first TikTok we posted to now. People we don't know feel excited about this being here, and that feels really cool to be like, 'Oh, man, we had this great idea. We didn't know that other people would also be as excited.' "

During #BannedBooksWeek, indie booksellers nationwide are posting photos, book picks, and opinions on their social media channels, celebrating and sharing vital information in a variety of creative ways. Here are some recent highlights:

Bookstore on the Square, Fort Collins, Colo.: "It's been a tough couple of days to be an out & proud progressive LGBTQ+ bookstore as we had 3 different people complain about our store's 'biased' selection, including someone who said our books on race 'SHOULD be banned' and our LGBTQ+ books 'should be thrown into a pit' AND someone smeared the title of Gender Queer on our chalkboard sign--ironically the most banned book of 2023. The chalkboard is fixed and will be put out again tomorrow! With Banned Books Week starting tomorrow, we want to say THANK YOU to the many, many supporters we have that lift us up on these tough days dealing with the tiny, noisy few who don't support us. Thank you, Readers!"

Carmichael's Bookstore, Louisville, Ky.: "It's Banned Books Week! Since 1982, Banned Books Week has highlighted the value of free and open access to information and to draw attention to the harms of censorship."

Bluestocking Social, Evansville, Ind.: "We're with the banned. On this display you'll find books that have been challenged or banned at some point in their lives, as well as some resources and further reading recommendations. Celebrate your freedom to read and pick up a banned book today!"

Hyperbole Bookstore, College Station, Tex.: "The newest litter of kittens from Six Kittens Rescue came to play at Hyperbole! And in honor of Banned Books Week, these four little girls are all named after authors. In the first four photos, we've got Harper Lee, Lois Lowry, Judy Blume, and Margaret Atwood, in that order. We promise they're the sweetest kittens around, so if you're looking for a new pet, be sure to check out Six Kittens Rescue!"

Strand Bookstore, New York City: "Get PUMPED UP for Banned Books Week!"

Green Feather Book Company, Norman, Okla.: "Listen. We're tired. (We know y'all are tired of book banning too.) We've decided to celebrate this Banned Books Week by poking fun of the weirdos who think banning books makes more sense than having difficult conversations. Since RW is our current Superintendent Weirdo, we figure he's pretty fair game. (To give credit where it's due, our window signs are a collaboration between us and Eli, our Junior Bookseller, who said, 'you know what would make him REALLY mad? If we put his face on a Pride background!  We agreed. We are still chuckling about it, TBH.  ENJOY!)."

Peoria Book Rack Gift Booktique, Peoria, Ill.: "So today--with the weather--I did not hide any books outside. So tomorrow--if the weather is good--I will put more outside and post pic clues."

The Bookworm, Omaha, Neb.: "It's Banned Books Week! An annual event that highlights the value of free and open access to information. Here at The Bookworm, as an indie bookstore, it's incredibly important to us that readers and patrons remain able to access the books they want. We believe it's not the place of any one entity to tell another person or group what book(s) they can or cannot read. As this continues to grow as a discernible concern, we'll continue to fight for the right to read."

Southland Books & Cafe, Maryville, Tenn.: "Poppy's Pick this week is The ABA Right To Read Handbook: Fighting Book Bans and Why It Matters. It's Banned Books Week, and Poppy--just like the rest of us here at Southland--knows that censorship threatens our liberties and our literacy."

Bards Alley Bookshop, Vienna, Va.: "#BannedBooksWeek is in full swing, and can you believe these are the top 6 most challenged books of 2023? We've got these titles and more at Bards Alley if you want to shop banned books, support these authors, and see what alllllll that hubbub is about."

George Tattersfield is joining Hachette Book Group as v-p of sales operations, a newly created position, effective September 30. He was most recently client director at W.W. Norton & Company, where he expanded the client base.

George Tattersfield

Before that, Tattersfield was at Ingram for 18 years, where he played a key role in several initiatives, including the development of the guaranteed availability program to capture lost sales through print on demand services. He was also instrumental in establishing the publisher fulfillment program, which ensured seamless order fulfillment by partnering with publishers during the pandemic.

Hachette said Tattersfield has "a strong track record of innovative leadership and strategic execution" and brings "invaluable experience to team... George will be essential to enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the behind-the-scenes systems and processes to better support our books and authors. He will collaborate across the company with HBG's sales, operations, customer service, and warehouse teams to create seamless services for sales and customers. Additionally, he will focus on streamlining sales operations, implementing best practices, and ensuring alignment with HBG's overall business objectives. The creation of this new role is essential in achieving the ongoing objective in freeing up the time of the sales reps to focus on the sale of the book and customers. With George on point for any operational pain points and promoting efficiencies, sales will have the support they need to achieve this."

Fredric Jameson, "who held sway as one of the world's leading literary theorists for over 40 years, bringing his brand of rigorous, incisive Marxist criticism to topics as broad as German opera, sci-fi films and luxury hotel design," died September 22, the New York Times reported. He was 90. Jameson was the author of more than 30 books and edited collections, as well as reams of journal articles. He spent much of his career as a professor at Duke University.

Jameson was best known for two singular achievements, the Times wrote, noting that "starting in the early 1970s, he led the effort to import into American circles the critical perspectives of Western Marxism--a diverse set of ideas, popular in France and Germany, arranged around the notion that culture was closely related to a society's economic base, though not completely constrained by it."

He brought that analysis, formulated in the industrialized first half of the 20th century, into the globalizing, technology-driven second half. In the mid-1980s, he "used that same arsenal of ideas to confront his second challenge: a critique of postmodernism, which, beginning in the 1970s, had taken hold in academic departments to describe what many saw as the breakdown of grand narratives about history, culture and society," the Times noted. In response, he "argued postmodernism was itself just one more grand narrative, albeit one that tried to disguise its own status."

Jameson summarized much of this work in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981). His other books include Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), The Seeds of Time (1994), The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (1998), and Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality (2016). 

His most recent book, Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, was released in May; and another, The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, will be published next month.

Verso, which published more than 20 of his books as well as several more featuring contributions from him, shared some of Jameson's work on modernism, Benjamin, Hegel, and more on the publisher's blog, noting: "Few radical thinkers have had such a phenomenal impact on literary criticism, critical theory, and philosophy."

In a tribute, A.O. Scott, a critic at large for the Times's Book Review, observed that at the time of his death, Jameson "was arguably the most prominent Marxist literary critic in the English-speaking world. In other words, he was a fairly obscure figure: well-known--revered, it's fair to say--within a specialized sector of an increasingly marginal discipline. I don't say that to diminish his importance, but rather to make a case for it.... 

"Not that reading him could ever be easy: Criticism, as he understood it, could never be, because of the complexity of its objects and its need to perpetually revise, refine and question its own procedures. To my mind, nobody did this as doggedly--or should I say as dialectically, with such a clearly articulated sense of the intellectual stakes--as Jameson."

"Prepare to SWOON!!" Reads by the River Books and Gifts in Waterford, Wis., posted on Facebook. "I was delighted when Arie, one of our customers, asked if she and Matthew could do their engagement photos in our store. And coincidentally, it turned out that their photographer is also a regular customer of ours and she was thrilled when they made the request! I was blown away by these photos. Amanda (Amanda Jen Photography), your talent is off the charts!! And how adorable is this couple?! Thank you all for letting me share these! This isn't even close to all of them and each photo is truly stunning!"

Posted by Bridgton Books, Bridgton, Maine: "When you let Luna have her own favorite picks table."

Bright Side Bookshop, Flagstaff, Ariz., shared an Instagram reel to show that in their shop, "good pups always welcome... #dogfriendly."

The Yowlers by Stacy Lynn Carroll, illustrated by Molly Ruttan (Nancy Paulsen Books/PRH).

Today:
Fresh Air: Uzo Aduba, author of The Road Is Good: How a Mother's Strength Became a Daughter's Purpose (Viking, $30, 9780593299128).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Cory Richards, author of The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within (Random House, $30, 9780593596791).

CBS Mornings: Vernon Davis, author of Playing Ball: Life Lessons from My Journey to the Super Bowl and Beyond (Dafina, $28, 9781496746573).

Today Show: James Middleton, author of Meet Ella: The Dog Who Saved My Life (Pegasus, $28.95, 9781639367917).

Also on Today: Henry Laporte, author of Salt Hank: A Five Napkin Situation (Simon Element, $35, 9781668025482).

The View: Melissa Fitzgerald and Mary McCormack, authors of What's Next: A Backstage Pass to The West Wing, Its Cast and Crew, and Its Enduring Legacy of Service (Dutton, $35, 9780593184547).

A teaser trailer has been released for the film The Summer Book, based on Tove Jansson's 1972 novel. Deadline reported that the family drama, directed by Charlie McDowell, will star Glenn Close "in the role of an artist who bonds and heals with her nine-year granddaughter, played by newcomer Emily Matthews, in the wake of a family tragedy over the course of a summer." Shooting took place on an island near Kotka, Finland, during the summer of 2023.

The film will have its world premiere as a special presentation at the BFI London Film Festival in October. The English-language adaptation is produced by Stille Production and Free Range Film, High Frequency Entertainment in the U.S., Finnish production house Helsinki Filmi and Case Study Films--co-founded by McDowell and his wife, Lily Collins--in association with MUV Capital, Finnish Impact Film Fund, and Eye Eye Pictures. 

South African writer Nadia Davids won the £10,000 (about $13,395) Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story, "Bridling," which was first published in The Georgia Review in 2023. This year's competition witnessed a record-breaking number of submissions, with 320 entries from 28 African countries. 

Chair of judges Chika Unigwe said: " 'Bridling' is an impressive achievement, a triumph of language, storytelling and risk-taking while maintaining a tightly controlled narrative about women who rebel. It embodies the spirit of the Caine Prize, which is to celebrate the richness and diversity of short stories by African writers. That is to say, to challenge the single story of African literature."

In addition to the cash prize, the winner's work will be featured in the 2024 Caine Prize Anthology, Midnight in the Morgue and Other Stories (Cassava Republic Press). Runners-up Tryphena Yeboah, Samuel Kolawole, Uche Okonkwo, and Pemi Aguda receive £500 (about $670) and will be included in the anthology. 

photo: Becca Farsace

Elyse Graham is a historian and professor at Stony Brook University in New York. She holds degrees from Princeton, Yale, and MIT, and is the author of three previous books. Her fourth book, Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II (Ecco, September 24, 2024), is the story of the academics who became OSS spies and helped turn the tide of the war.

Handsell readers your book:

The untold true story of how professors and librarians fought in World War II and invented modern spycraft, for fans of dark academia and spy thrillers.

On your nightstand now:

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. Nobody does conversations like Mantel. And nobody since Jane Austen has had such command of a certain brutal, delicate irony. We were robbed of the Jane Austen adaptation she was working on when she passed away.

Favorite book when you were a child:

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. Two children run away to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What a life! And what a book!

Your top five authors:

I'll stick with contemporary authors: Hilary Mantel, Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison, Patricia Lockwood, Bill Bryson.

Book you've faked reading:

There's a plotline in a David Lodge book, Changing Places, in which a college's literature professors play something called "the humiliation game," in which they confess the most important book they haven't read. A younger professor wins the game by saying Hamlet, then doesn't get tenure, because his colleagues decide they can't give tenure to someone who hasn't read Hamlet.

The book and the game are familiar touchstones in literature departments. But even though I sometimes make references to them, I haven't actually read Changing Places. (I mean to! I've read other David Lodge books! The time was just never right.)

Book you're an evangelist for:

Not a book so much as a writer: S.J. Perelman. The things this guy could do with a sentence.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic. Well worth it: eerie, haunting, harrowing, and expertly combines fantastical with real historical horrors.

Book you hid from your parents:

Not a book so much as a reading practice. I found a secret storage space behind a bookcase in my high school's library, and I used to skip class, hide there, and read. Sorry, Mom and Dad.

Book that changed your life:

When I say James Joyce's Ulysses, I mean specifically the experience of reading Ulysses in Maria DiBattista's literature seminar in college. I think it made me a better person, although it would take quite a long time to explain how or why. The idea that ways of looking are forms of ethics. The idea that the language in the novel reflects not so much the characters, but the larger social forces within which they're struggling to survive. The question of whether you can get through the day without being crushed by everything around you, whether you can survive the pressure of those larger forces with your voice and your humanity intact.

But this is one of those books that you need help to get through, at least the first few times around. Which is to say that books often change your life because of the teachers who change your life.

Favorite line from a book:

"I should not feel it to be strange." --Alfred, Lord Tennyson. There's a whole poem that comes with this one, but it's too long to quote.

Five books you'll never part with:

To keep things interesting, I'll make them nonfiction books.

Inside the Whale by George Orwell. I read this when I was younger, and it really knocked my socks off. Orwell just seemed endlessly curious, and he was willing to do serious reading and legwork to do justice to whatever he was writing about. He wanted to learn about the human cost of coal, so he went down a mine. I think Orwell's essays are his best work, and this is a fine collection of them.

The Great Cat Massacre by Robert Darnton. A truly great historical writer. He brings together a historian's rich understanding of the past on its own terms with a journalist's narrative flair. He's unmatched in his ability to find great stories in the archives.

Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman. Hartman is a writer of great clarity and depth. She moves between history, imagining, and first-person retrospection so deftly, and so clearly, that her prose is very much like the living water of a river. This book chronicles a journey, in the present and past, along a route of the Atlantic slave trade.

American Studies by Louis Menand. I had just arrived in the United States when I saw this in a bookstore. I was like, "American Studies! This will explain everything to me." In Menand's most famous work, The Metaphysical Club, he describes an idea that I think informs most of his writing, including here: that ideas are tools that people use, need, cling to. It's an idea that's very useful for writing about the world of ideas.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. Bryson is genuinely interested in the world, and his Midwesterner-transplanted-to-England-transplanted-back-to-the-United-States perspective yields an unrepeatable style of irony. His description in this book of what he would do if bears came into his campsite is unreprintable and unforgettable.

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

Edward P. Jones's All Aunt Hagar's Children. An absolute maestro of the short story.

You mentioned that your book takes inspiration from the genre "dark academia." What are some other books in that genre that you'd recommend?

There are the usual suspects: Donna Tartt's The Secret History, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, R.F. Kuang's Babel, Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House. But the nonfiction authors in this space really prove that truth is stranger than fiction: the fabulous and famous include Kathy Peiss, Jonathan Petropoulos, Noah Charney, and Bret Witter and Robert Edsel.

Multi-award-winning author and 2020-2022 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature Jason Reynolds enters the world of YA romance with Twenty-Four Seconds from Now...: A LOVE Story, a hilariously sweet, candid, and guileless story about two Black teens preparing to have sex with each other for the first time.

Seventeen-year-old Neon and his girlfriend, Aria, have been dating for two years and have decided that they are both ready to have sex. But at book's open, Neon is stuck in Aria's bathroom talking to himself in the mirror, nervous with anticipation. Twenty-four minutes before that, Neon, who works three nights a week at his father's bingo hall, arrives at Aria's house with her favorite chicken tenders. Twenty-four hours prior to that, he is thinking about the perfect gift to make for Aria to take with her to college.

The conceit continues. Next is 24 days: Neon accompanies his Gammy and her dog, Denzel Jeremy Washington, on her weekly visit to his grandfather's grave. Gammy tells Neon, for the millionth time, how she and Grandy first met. That same morning, Neon's mother takes him out for breakfast for some straight talk about sex. Neon is "mortified and mystified" but also made aware that "all them movies" he watches are not "accurate depictions of what sex is like" and that "women are meant to feel pleasure too." Twenty-four weeks before that is Halloween, one of the busiest nights at the bingo hall, and when Neon figures out his prompt for seniors for the school's online yearbook: "How would you describe high school in three words?" Twenty-four months ago, Neon meets Aria for the first time. And then we're "back to now" and the exciting, special, nerve-wracking moment when Neon and Aria's relationship will change.

Twenty-four Seconds from Now... features Reynolds's distinct, direct, and informal style in Neon's intimate first-person narration. Reynolds (Long Way Down; Track Series) tenderly covers the big topics he's taken on--love, sex, bodily autonomy, and consent--through mindful and attentive advice from Neon's older sister, parents, and grandparents. Neon receives nothing but sex-positivity from his loved ones, including his Dad's refrain: "don't bring no babies in here unless they know how to count money." Not only is this the perfect book for sex-curious youths, Reynolds's messages on how to approach sex, how to be gentle, and how to respect each other give readers profuse, healthy versions of Black love and community. --Natasha Harris, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: In this gentle, candid, and approachable YA romance, two Black high school seniors prepare to have sex with each other for the first time.