The Nonbinarian, a literary mutual-aid collective that distributes queer books, will open a bricks-and-mortar bookstore in Brooklyn, N.Y., this Friday, the Brooklyn Paper reported.

From book bike to bookstore.

The bookstore, which resides at 1130 President St. in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, debuted as a pop-up book-bike about two years ago. In its bricks-and-mortar home it will sell new and used titles by queer authors, with a variety of genres for all age groups represented, as well as gift items & local goods.

Founder K. Kerimian and their team will also have a selection of pay-what-you-can titles for those who cannot afford full-price books. They plan to host a variety of community events and hope the store becomes a gathering place.

Kerimian, who was the recipient of the 2022 Carla Gray Memorial Scholarship for Emerging Bookseller-Activists, and worked at Greenlight Bookstore and P&T Knitwear, told the Brooklyn Paper that they never thought the mutual-aid, bike-based pop-up would ever have a physical storefront, but volunteers and supporters advocated for the idea.

They said: "It's a real show of faith from the people who have been foundational in building the Nonbinarian Book Bike that we've grown to be ready to even consider a future beyond the bike as it is, that the people around me saw something that I wasn't ready to see."

Kerimian also noted that the Nonbinarian has distributed books in the neighborhood before, and is familiar with the community.

Mosaics Community Bookstore & Venue, a queer bookstore and event space founded by drag artist Tara Lipsyncki in Provo, Utah, last year, is in danger of closing due to the rising cost of operations, including additional security. 

To help offset costs and keep the store open, Lipsyncki has launched an Indiegogo campaign with the goal of raising $200,000. Money raised will go toward rent and utilities, security, employee salaries, providing medical and mental health services for community members, and more. Without help, Mosaics will have to close by December 1.

Noting that the bookstore is in a deeply conservative area, Lipsyncki wrote that there have been multiple bomb threats made against Drag Story Hour events held at Mosaics, and Lipsyncki and their husband have had to move due to being doxed by hate groups.

Mosaics is also the hub of the United Drag Alliance 510c3, and offers free and pay-what-you-can services to the community such as a food pantry, Spanish-language books (in partnership with the nonprofit Brain Food Books), contraception supplies, and more.

"Mosaics provides services and a safe space that saves lives," Lipsyncki wrote. "Many individuals come to find shelter and safety inside Mosaics when they are abandoned by family, isolated from previous religious and social groups, and even blacklisted from employment opportunities simply for being who they are."

James Patterson

This Friday, November 8, is the deadline to nominate booksellers for James Patterson's Holiday Bookstore Bonus program. Patterson has pledged $300,000, to be distributed in amounts of $500, to 600 booksellers at ABA member bookstores. Nominations can be submitted here.

Booksellers can self-nominate to be considered for a bonus, or they can be nominated by bookstore customers, owners, employees, managers, fellow booksellers, publishing professionals, or authors. Past recipients of James Patterson bonuses and grants are eligible for another bonus.

Editor, publisher and literary agent Philippa Brewster died October 15. She was 74. The Bookseller reported that her career started at Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1971, where she was working within the emerging academic fields of film studies and women's studies. 

In 1983, Brewster founded the feminist nonfiction imprint Pandora Press, which published politics, history, biography, memoir, health, travel writing and cultural studies, including Jeanette Winterson's debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which won the 1985 Whitbread Award for a First Novel. 

"We were all part of the women's movement", Brewster later said. "We represented it, but we also informed it."

She joined Jonathan Cape in 1991 and in 1993 moved to I.B. Tauris, where she built the visual culture list. She also instigated and championed academic publishing on popular TV series, including Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Sex in the City.

In 2000, she joined Georgina Capel Associates as a literary agent, while continuing to commission for I.B. Tauris. She was awarded the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation's Outstanding Contribution to Publishing award in 2014 in recognition her publishing career.

Jonathan McDonnell, former managing director of I.B. Tauris, called her "a force for good in every way."

Brewster's obituary described her as "an excellent and instinctive editor--empathetic, acute and generous to her authors who admired and benefited from her literary intelligence. She had a precise commercial acumen, never losing sight of the reader, but never compromising her integrity either. She inspired respect and loyalty in all who worked with her, creating opportunities not only for her authors but also for her colleagues, enabling and supporting the burgeoning careers of many."

About Time Bookstore, Libertyville, Ill., posted a photo on Facebook of the shop's "#1 bookseller (Finn) whose only competition is yours truly, the store owner. He's enjoyed giving out recommendations during our first official week open."

Barnes & Noble has chosen Like Mother, Like Mother by Susan Rieger (Dial Press) as its November national book club pick. In a live virtual event, on Tuesday, December 3, at 3 p.m. Eastern, Rieger will be in conversation with Lexie Smyth, category manager for fiction at B&N, and Jenna Seery, associate producer of Poured Over: The B&N Podcast.

Smyth said, "Susan Rieger has gifted readers with an absolute gem of a novel with Like Mother, Like Mother. This is such a rich portrait of a family, a marriage, and women's ambition. I have not been able to stop talking about Lila since reading Like Mother, Like Mother, and I know our Book Club readers won't be able to either."

For more information, click here.

Simon & Schuster will handle sales and distribution of ACC ART BOOKS and its distributed publishers in the U.S. and Canada, beginning May 1, 2025.

ACC ART BOOKS publishes books on the arts and visual culture, with publications representing more than 50 years of innovation, including collaborations with some of the world's foremost brands, artists, and photographers. ACC also distributes the work of more than 50 fine-art publishers from around the world, including major museum, gift and lifestyle publications.

ACC ART BOOKS CEO James Smith said, "ACC have had an excellent 20-year relationship with NBN and we are grateful for the superb service they have provided us. Now, after several years of strong growth, we believe the change to Simon & Schuster will give us both the foundation and the strong partnership we need to press on further and build on our success. We are impressed by their team and look forward to working with them."

Alfie Explores A to Z by Jeff Drew (Random House Books for Young Readers).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Dan Pashman, author of Anything's Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People (Morrow, $35, 9780063291126).
 
Jennifer Hudson Show: Jamie Kern Lima, author of Worthy: How to Believe You Are Enough and Transform Your Life (Hay House, $27, 9781401977603).

The first episode of the HBO Original series Like Water for Chocolate, based on Laura Esquivel's Mexican literary classic, made its debut this past Sunday, November 3, on HBO Latino in the U.S. and is streaming globally on Max, with new episodes dropping weekly. 

The cast includes Irene Azuela, Azul Guaita, Ana Valeria Becerril, Andrea Chaparro, Andrés Baida, Ángeles Cruz, Mauricio García Lozano, Ari Brickman, and Louis David Horné. An original production from Warner Bros. Discovery, the six-episode series is produced by Salma Hayek Pinault's Ventanarosa Productions, Endemol Shine North America, and Endemol Shine Boomdog.

The Canadian Children's Book Centre has named the winners of its eight English‐language children's book awards for outstanding literary achievement. See the complete list of winners here.

Skating Wild on an Inland Sea by Jean E. Pendziwol, illustrated by Todd Stewart, won the C$50,000 (about US$35,935) TD Canadian Children's Literature Award, with winning publisher Groundwood Books receiving C$2,500 (about US$1,795) for promotional purposes. An additional C$10,000 (about US$7,185) will be shared among the four remaining finalists for their contributions to Canadian children's literature.

CCBC executive director Stephanie Wells said the winning books "represent a spectrum of childhood experiences, including courage and resilience, being surrounded by the wonders and beauty of the natural world, and reflections on the joy and poignancy of growing up. Woven throughout these books is hope for a brighter future and a recognition that with someone by your side, whether that is a pair of loyal dogs, a long-time foe, a stranger that steps up, family, or friends, none of us are alone. At a time when the world seems more and more divided, the books honored tonight bring us closer together and remind us that we are more alike than different." 
 
CCBC also announced the establishment of the C$10,000 Sharon Fitzhenry Award for Canadian Children's Nonfiction, designed to recognize and raise the profile of exceptional nonfiction for young readers. Last year marked the 25th anniversary of the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children's Nonfiction, and the final year the prize was given. 

Pico Iyer's illustrious writing career has taken him around the world many times, but one of his favorite places appears to be a tiny monastery high above the Pacific Ocean. Aflame: Learning from Silence is a love letter to a place to which Iyer has returned over and over for more than 30 years, seeking solace and renewal in the consolations of solitude.

The location that has played such a central role in Iyer's spiritual and emotional life is the New Camaldoli Hermitage, established in 1958 in California's Big Sur. The monks who reside there are Benedictines whose congregation dates to Italy in 1012, and is the oldest continuous one in the Western church. In addition to operating a bookstore and supplementing their revenue with the sale of "(brandy-soaked) fruitcake," the monks open the property to visitors like Iyer.

Though he admits his own "aversion to all crosses and hymnals," Iyer--who has spent considerable time with the Dalai Lama--finds himself drawn to this place of "just silence and emptiness and light" and its "nine hundred acres of live oak, madrona, redwood and desert yucca, a quarter of a mile above the sea." As he experiences it, "The world isn't erased here; only returned to its proper proportions. It's not a matter of finding or acquiring anything, only of letting everything extraneous fall away." When he's not reading or writing in the small room where he resides during his retreats, he wanders the grounds of a place constantly shadowed by the risk of devastating forest fires.

In addition to his spiritual reflections, Iyer recounts some of his encounters with the Camaldolese monks, most notably Cyprian, the prior, who's also a musician and something of a Renaissance man. He also describes his deep and tender conversations with Thérèse, an elderly French-Canadian woman who lives in a cabin in a nearby valley. Iyer intersperses these reminiscences with glimpses of visits with his friend Leonard Cohen--who spent periods of his life at a Zen Buddhist monastery--at his Los Angeles home in the latter years of the poet-songwriter and contemplative's life.

Iyer forgoes any attempt at temporal or geographic continuity, slipping effortlessly backward and forward over the years and across the globe at will. He weaves insights from thinkers like Meister Eckhart, Albert Camus, and Thomas Merton into his own reflections and evocative descriptions of the Hermitage's physical surroundings in brief, epigrammatic sections that occasionally partake of the quality of Zen koans. As Sarah Anderson recognized in her book The Lost Art of Silence, a life of quietude may be anathema to some. For others, like Pico Iyer, it may just be the antidote that's required to survive in a cacophonous world.--Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: Pico Iyer offers an assortment of reflections on his love for the Catholic monastery in California he visits to cultivate self-renewal in silence.

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

1. The Striker by Ana Huang
2. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
3. The Boyfriend by Freida McFadden
4. Hunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
5. Where's Molly by H.D. Carlton
6. What He Doesn't Know by Kandi Steine
7. Twisted Love by Ana Huang
8. How My Neighbor Stole Christmas by Meghan Quinn
9. Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief Workbook by David Kessler
10. You, Me, We: Why We All Need a Friend at Work by Morag Barrett, Eric Spencer and Ruby Vesely

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]