The Mountains and Plains Independent Bookselling Association's FallCon programming began yesterday with executive director Heather Duncan welcoming everyone back to the Renaissance Denver Hotel and Conference Center for the Young Readers' Fest Keynote Breakfast. The first seven of nearly 60 book creators to be featured at the conference discussed the inspirations for their books and what independent bookstores have meant to their lives and their careers.

The popular "Pick of the Lists"--in which publisher reps do rapid-fire presentations of their big fall books and a sneak peek at some upcoming lead spring titles--was filled to capacity at both the morning and afternoon sessions. Lively roundtables of themed discussions, "Conversations with Colleagues," spotlighted such topics as "Community Collaborations" and "Total Compensation." Thirteen authors--of both books for youth and for adults--described their novels at the Feast of Fiction Lunch.

Duncan noted that MPIBA now has the most bookstore members since 2007, the exhibit hall is full, and librarians were in attendance for the first time; 225 people had pre-registered. --Jennifer M. Brown

The first full day of programming began with the Young Readers' Fest Keynote Breakfast, featuring (l.-r.) Dean Hale and Shannon Hale (Princess in Black and the Kitty Catastrophe, Candlewick); Brian Selznick (Run Away with Me, Scholastic, April 1, 2025); Thyra Heder (Nose to Nose, Abrams BFYR); Jorge Cham (Oliver's Great Big Universe: Volcanoes Are Hot!, Amulet); Rex Ogle (When We Ride, Norton Young Readers, March 25). (Not pictured: Michael Sampson, author of Rainbow Bear, Brown Books Kids). (photo: Tori Henson)

MPIBA's FallCon Exhibit Hall Opening Reception, with more than 80 exhibitors, topped off the first day of full programming.

Torrey House Press's Kirsten Johanna Allen chats with Anne Holman from The King's English Bookshop (Salt Lake City, Utah).

Feast of Fiction Lunch authors (l.-r., top row): Jason Stone (The Beauty of the Days Gone By, Saudade Press); Carter Wilson (Tell Me What You Did, Poisoned Pen Press, Jan. 14); Kevin J. Anderson (Nether Station, Blackstone); Elizabeth Lowham (Casters and Crowns, Shadow Mountain); Claire R. McDougall (Mrs. McPhealy's American, Sibylline Press); Sarah Damoff (The Bright Years, Simon and Schuster, April 22); Luis Jaramillo (The Witches of El Paso, Primero Sueno Press/Atria); (front row): Shaylin Gandhi (When We Had Forever, Canary Street Press, Dec. 10); Alexis Castellanos (Guava and Grudges, Bloomsbury YA); Sarah Henning (The Lies We Conjure, Tor Teen); Trang Thanh Tran (They Bloom at Night, Bloomsbury YA, March 4); Amanda DeWitt (The Underwood Tapes, Peachtree Teen, Feb. 4); Ariel Courage (Bad Nature, Holt, April 1) (photo: Tori Henson)

Heartland Fall Forum kicked off this week with booksellers from the Great Lakes and Midwest regions descending on downtown Milwaukee. The opening reception featured five authors in a round-robin style panel led by GLIBA executive coordinator February Spikener and MIBA operations manager Grace Hagen.

Emi Watanabe Cohen, author of Golemcrafters (Levine Querido, November 12, 2025), spoke about wanting to confront the "pain of worrying whether or not you're authentic" by creating adventurous biracial Japanese characters who make up a new language using the Hebrew alphabet in order to cover up their trouble learning the others. Alice Austen, author of 33 Place Brugmann (Grove, March 11, 2025), expressed excitement in researching the lives of those residing in a Beaux Arts apartment in Brussels as a way to access their comical and tragic stories during Nazi occupation.

L.-r.: Denise Williams, Nickolas Butler, Ada Calhoun, Alice Austen, Emi Watanabe Cohen, Grace Hagen (not pictured: February Spikener)

Known for her nonfiction, Ada Calhoun described her first novel, Crush (Viking, February 25, 2025), as a thematic sequel to two of her earlier books, Why We Can't Sleep and Also a Poet. Nickolas Butler recounted the real-life interaction he witnessed in a bar that inspired him to write the love story A Forty Year Kiss (Sourcebooks, February 4, 2025). And Denise Williams, author of Just Our Luck (Berkley, March 25, 2025), summarized her approach to writing romance by saying, "I believe in luck, and love stories are all about luck."

The common thread among their remarks were the authors' deep gratitude for the passion and hard work that indie booksellers bring to their stores in supporting authors like them. --Dave Wheeler

At a ceremony with more than 250 booksellers in attendance, the Heartland Booksellers Awards were presented by writer and podcaster Ira Madison III, whose first book, Pure Innocent Fun: Essays, will be published by Random House (February 4, 2025).

In the category of YA/Middle Grade, the award went to Pedro Martin for his graphic novel Mexikid (Dial Books); in lieu of attending, Martin sent a video message expressing his gratitude. The award for picture book went to Philip C. Stead for his reimagining of The North Wind and the Sun (Neal Porter Books). In his acceptance speech, Stead said, "I have tried my best, even with a fable, to move past the tyranny of message, into the kinder, gentler, more open-hearted and ambiguous land of meaning." The award for poetry went to Diane Seuss for Modern Poetry (Graywolf), whose video acceptance speech highlighted the importance of the Midwest's culture and landscape in influencing her work. And the award for fiction went to Percival Everett for James (Doubleday), who also expressed his thanks through a video.

From left: Hanif Abdurraqib, Ira Madison III, Philip C. Stead

But the evening's most decorated winner was Hanif Abdurraqib, who graciously accepted both the award in nonfiction for There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House) as well as the Voice of the Heartland Award, presented by Brett Gregory of Two Dollar Radio HQ, recognizing Abdurraqib's substantial contributions to books and community. "What's more impressive than the writing and his giving of things is his generosity of his time and attention," Gregory said in his touching tribute. "He shows up for his community. He shows up to the poetry reading, to the going-away party, to the graduation party, to the award ceremony. He shows up to the thing, whatever it is." In his acceptance speech, Abdurraqib spoke of how Two Dollar Radio has been integral to his success: "The only reason They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us exists--which actually means the only reason that everything that came after it exists... is because of Brett's persistence and care." --Dave Wheeler

Barnes & Noble will open a new bookstore tomorrow, October 9, in Columbiana Centre at 100 Columbiana Circle, Columbia, S.C. 

"We are very excited to return to this area, just across the street from our old store which was redeveloped in 2013 after 18 years of bookselling," B&N noted. "Our store in the Shoppes at Woodhill opened in the spring to acclaim and we now open on the other side of town this fall. It is a great time for bookstores and nowhere more so than in Columbia." 

Robert Coover, "who along with Donald Barthelme, John Barth and others occupied the vanguard of postmodern American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and who went on to a long and prolific career writing and teaching," died October 5, the New York Times reported. He was 92.

Robert Coover

Coover's first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), was fairly traditional in its telling, with Webster Schott writing in the New York Times Book Review: "If he can somehow control his Hollywood giganticism and focus his vision of life, he may become heir to Dreiser or Lewis."

But Pricksongs and Descants (1969), Coover's early story collection, made it clear he had no interest in inheriting the kingdom of social realism from Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. "Those stories firmly established his career-long interest in remixing fairy tales, exploding myths and placing only the most transparent window in front of fiction's inner machinery," the Times noted.

In an interview with the New Yorker in 2014, Coover said, "I've engaged with folk tales and fairy tales all my writing life, as part of my attempted disruption of the myths that environ and sometimes govern us."

He targeted political myths in The Public Burning (1977), a novel reimagining the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and featuring other historical figures--Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover--as well as two mythic characters, Uncle Sam and the Phantom, who represented the overheated rhetoric of Cold War antagonism.

Michiko Kakutani, former Times chief book critic, called Coover "probably the funniest and most malicious" of the postmodernists, "mixing up broad social and political satire with vaudeville turns, lewd pratfalls and clever word plays that make us rethink both the mechanics of the world and our relationship to it."

During his many years as a professor at Brown University, beginning in 1979, Coover's students included the authors Rick Moody, Joanna Scott, Jim Shepard, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, and Alexandra Kleeman. Coover would alternate a semester of teaching with two or three spent writing. Marcus, now a professor at Columbia University's MFA program, said Coover "thought tenure was death," and could be "a thorn in the side of the lifers." 

Lipsyte, who also now teaches at Columbia, studied with Coover as an undergraduate. "He was very much aware of his position as a part of that postmodern movement that was breaking away from American tradition in the novel," he said. "That was a big part of his teaching--to expand our mind and make us think about new modes and new approaches" and "to knock us into new places."

In a 1992 column in the Times titled "The End of Books," Coover wrote that he was "interested as ever in the subversion of the traditional bourgeois novel and in fictions that challenge linearity."

Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1987, Coover was prolific and ambitious into late life. In 2014, he published The Brunist Day of Wrath, a thousand-page sequel to his debut novel. Huck Out West (2017) imagined Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in the Wild West.

In recent years, he continued to publish stories in the New Yorker, and released two collections of fairy tale-influenced books through McSweeney's: A Child Again (2005) and Stepmother (2004). In 2021, he published Street Cop, a short novel with illustrations by Art Spiegelman. His other books include The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), Gerald's Party (1985), and John's Wife (1996).

"There's nothing necessarily wrong with myths," Coover said in a 2011 interview with the New Statesman. "We tend to need some sort of sustaining mythic notion or pattern or vision in order to get through each day. We need a little bit of structure to get out of bed, to keep going. But most of it is stifling, in some way corrupting."

Illustrator AG Ford, touring for his new book Construction Site: Garbage Crew to the Rescue! by Sherri Duskey Rinker (Chronicle), visited Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, Ga. The store arranged a day of school visits for him.

On Sunday, Porter Square Books, Cambridge, Mass., began its move 1,000 feet to new quarters in the Porter Exchange Building (owned by Lesley University) on Massachusetts Avenue with a book bucket brigade of some 300 people. Among the Porter Square Books fans and helpers: (from l.) Chris Kerr of Parson Weems, Maureen Karb of Como Sales, and Susie Albert of Penguin Random House.

Brianna Yamashita has been promoted to v-p, executive director of marketing at Scribner.

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Quinne Rogers is joining Grand Central Publishing as v-p, executive director of marketing, effective October 30. Most recently she was v-p, marketing director for Ballantine Bantam Dell.

Independent Publishers Group has added six publishers to its sales and distribution programs:

PAPP International, Montreal, which publishes books for both children and adults and has six imprints: Beaver Books, Papp Publishing, Imagine Publications, Récré-Jeux, Chouette Publishing, and CrackBoom! PAPP International was founded 20 years ago. (Starting January 1, 2025, U.S.)

Editorial Patmos, a Spanish-language publisher focused exclusively on Christian titles. Patmos began publishing Sunday School curriculum before growing to publish trade books on other Christian topics and study Bibles. It now publishes a wide range of books, including Bibles, books for church leaders, academic books, children's titles, and titles adaptable to secular markets for a general audience. (Starting January 1, 2025, U.S. and Canada.)

The Little Press, a traditional publisher with headquarters in Wood Ridge, N.J. It specializes in stories by debut and early career creatives, bringing new talent and new voices to children's literature. (Starting March 1, 2025, worldwide.)

Siglo XXI Editores, founded in 1967, which has the goal of disseminating knowledge and facilitating social and academic debate. It has an extensive Spanish-language catalog covering the humanities and social sciences. (Starting January 1, 2025.)

Bruna Publishing, whose mission is to spark a passion for reading in children and young people by providing them with engaging and enriching stories that inspire their imagination, promote a love of literature, and encourage lifelong learning. It publishes illustrated stories starring Bruna, a little dog exploring her emotions and navigating first experiences. (Began September 1.)

Rupa Publications, with headquarters in India, has a long history of publishing a wide range of books, including nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Rupa has a loyal base of authors as well as a dedicated readership earned by their efforts to engage, entertain, move, and delight. (U.S. and Canada, starting January 1, 2025.)

Waiting for the Dawn by Fabiola Anchorena (Tra Publishing).

Tomorrow:
CBS Mornings: Maha Abouelenein, author of 7 Rules of Self-Reliance: How to Stay Low, Keep Moving, Invest in Yourself, and Own Your Future (Hay House, $26.99, 9781401978662).

Today Show: Trevor Noah, author of Into the Uncut Grass (One World, $26, 9780593729960).

Drew Barrymore Show: Josh Gad, author of PictureFace Lizzy (Putnam, $19.99, 9780593463123).

The View: Riley Keough, co-author, with her late mother, Lisa Marie Presley, of From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir (Random House, $32, 9780593733875). She will also appear on Live with Kelly and Mark and Late Night with Seth Meyers.

Nicole Kidman and Per Saari's Blossom Films, and Bruna Papandrea and Steve Hutensky's Made Up Stories are teaming up on a series adaptation of Liane Moriarty's new novel, Here One Moment. Deadline reported that the project reunites Kidman, Papandrea, and Moriarty after their collaborations on HBO's Big Little Lies, Hulu's Nine Perfect Strangers, and the upcoming Australian series The Last Anniversary.

Fifth Season recently won the screen rights to the novel "in a competitive situation" and has set the project up with Blossom and Made Up Stories, Deadline noted, adding: "While nothing has been set in stone we understand there's a good chance Kidman will star in the adaptation, as she did in Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, and The Last Anniversary."

"I'm so happy for the ongoing partnership with Liane and so grateful to count her amongst my closest friends and collaborators," Kidman said.

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art's recent 2024 Carle Honors Gala in New York City gave a variety of awards and raised more than $270,000 for the Museum, supporting its programming, exhibitions, and reach.

A highlight of the evening was a tribute to Marlo Thomas, who received the Inspiration Award celebrating the 50th anniversary of Free to Be... You and Me, the groundbreaking picture book co-created by Thomas. A commemorative exhibition celebrating the art of Free to Be... You and Me will open at the Eric Carle Museum in November.

Other honorees were:

Artist: Uri Shulevitz. "A Caldecott Medalist known for his profound storytelling and mastery in illustration, Shulevitz's journey from Warsaw to New York underpins much of his inspiring work. Israeli American Leerone Hakami paid tribute to Shulevitz with a stunning violin performance to accompany his poignant watercolors, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux editor Wesley Adams accepted the award on his behalf as he was unable to attend at the last minute."

Angel: We Need Diverse Books. "A pioneering organization advocating for diversity in publishing, WNDB was recognized for its relentless efforts to amplify underrepresented voices. Ellen Oh accepted the award. Grace Lin, a Taiwanese American children's writer and illustrator, paid tribute to WNDB with a drawing activity for the audience."

Bridge: KidLit TV. "Julie Gribble, founder of KidLit TV, accepted the award for bringing picture books to a digital generation, helping children around the world access author interviews, read-alouds, and art tutorials. KidLit TV was honored with a multimedia presentation consisting of comments from Leonard S. Marcus, Andrea Davis Pinkney and a number of leading educators."

Mentor: The Horn Book. "Celebrating 100 years as a critical voice in children's literature, the Horn Book was honored for its enduring contribution to literary criticism and its influence on the world of picture books. Elissa Gershowitz, editor-in-chief, accepted the award. Dr. Claudette S. McLinn, executive director of the Center for the Study of Multicultural Children's Literature, paid tribute to the Horn Book with a personal and professional history lesson, including a series of top Horn Book covers through the years."

Brooke Randel's debut, Also Here, is a poised, tender family memoir blending research with her grandmother Golda Indig's recollections of the Holocaust.

"Bubbie" caught her granddaughter in her arms when Randel was born suddenly in her parents' car on her grandmother's driveway. Ever since, they have been close. Bubbie was warm and energetic; always giving, never asking. But in her mid-80s, she did make a request: that Randel, then an ad agency copywriter, write her story. Although Bubbie spoke multiple languages, she had only attended school for four years and was functionally illiterate.

Randel agreed and flew to south Florida to conduct interviews with her grandmother. The oral history that emerges is fragmentary and frenetic--full of impressions but few details, it couldn't stand on its own. The structure of the book makes up for this, though. Interview snippets are interspersed with narrative chapters based on follow-up research. Randel effectively contrasts facts and emotions, tracing how events translate into memories and, ultimately, written language. Vignettes from the Florida trip depict Bubbie's comfortable American lifestyle, a world away from the hardship of wartime Europe; the greatest threat she faced now was getting lost in a strip-mall parking lot.

Golda, born in 1930, grew up in Sighet, Romania. When the Nazis came, her older brothers were conscripted into forced labor. Her mother and younger siblings were killed in a concentration camp. At every turn, Golda's survival was miraculous. Only because her mother gave Golda her fur coat did the 13-year-old look old enough to avoid the first cull at Auschwitz. Transferred to Christianstadt with her older sister, Blimchu, Golda was twice sent left (to the crematoria) but snuck back into the right-hand line. Newly undocumented, she had to hide all day while the rest went to work in a munitions factory. Finally, they were moved to Bergen-Belsen. After liberation, Golda nearly died of typhus. The sisters returned to a deserted hometown. Of 14,000 Jews deported from Sighet, only a few hundred remained alive. As Bubbie repeats throughout these transcripts, "Unbelievable."

Golda married and immigrated to North America, cooking for her husband Benti's coffee shop and then, for decades, sewing leather seats in a General Motors factory. She endured widowhood and breast cancer. This concise, touching memoir bears witness to a whole remarkable life as well as the bond between grandmother and granddaughter that emerged as one generation's history was entrusted to another. Randel speculates about reasons for Bubbie's continued illiteracy but ultimately it is little barrier to a loving connection across the generational divide. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck

Shelf Talker: Brooke Randel's touching family memoir--perfect for fans of Esther Safran Foer's I Want You to Know We're Still Here--captures her Holocaust survivor grandmother's life via oral history and research.

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

1. Hunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
2. Goldfinch by Raven Kennedy
3. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
4. The Reset Mindset by Penny Zenker
5. Nifty Thrifty Dentists by Glenn Vo
6. Twisted Love by Ana Huang
7. Does It Hurt? by H.D. Carlton
8. Grimstone by Sophie Lark
9. The Ritual by Shantel Tessier
10. The Boyfriend by Freida McFadden

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]