Unionized staff at the Strand Book Store in New York City went on strike on Saturday, after what UAW Local 2179 described as "months of stalled negotiation and three separate contract extensions" and the store failing "to meet worker demands for a living wage." Union members began picketing at 10 a.m. at the main store on Saturday and asked customers not to cross the picket line "by attending any in-store events, selling their used books, or making any purchases--either in store or online."

In an announcement about the strike, Andrew Stando, a visual merchandiser and shop steward at the Strand, said, "It's becoming impossible to live in New York on what the Strand pays. We're just asking for enough to make rent every month."

Shop steward and bookseller Brian Bermeo told WNYC's Gothamist that the union has wanted a $2 hourly raise from a base pay of $16 an hour, the minimum wage, in its first year of the contract, followed by a $1.50 per hour raise in each of the second and third years, but that management has offered 50 cents less for each year.

For its part, the Strand said: "Bookselling is a challenging business, labor-intensive coupled with slim margins, but we remain fiercely dedicated to its mission. We--by which I mean everyone from ownership to cashiers to our warehouse receivers--fight every day to ensure the viability of Strand. We respect and value our staff, and we have made sizable economic offers during this contract negotiation accordingly. The union has not been willing to accept those increases so far. We will continue to bargain in good faith and target a compromise that creates a bright future for the company, our employees, and customers. Every decision we make is an effort to keep our business alive and maintain responsibility for our 150+ employees, and to continue serving our community as we have for the last 97 years."

The Strand said that some 94 employees are union members. The UAW said it is the first strike at the Strand since the 1990s.

Bookstore and wine bar Book Society opened over the weekend in Berkeley, Calif., the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Located at 2945 College Ave. in Berkeley's Elmwood district, the store carries a curated selection of general-interest adult books, with a focus on local authors. The books are displayed on floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, complete with rolling ladder, and the bar serves a rotating variety of wines along with an assortment of snacks, including popcorn, olives, smoked sturgeon paté, and cheeses. Book Society also features an Italian-made wine dispenser, which allows customers to serve themselves.

When it comes to events, owner Laura Guzman plans to host author readings, book clubs, and yoga classes. She offers monthly subscriptions featuring book and wine pairings as well.

Guzman, originally from a small town in upstate New York, moved to the Bay Area in 2014 and had a previous career in marketing. A life-long reader, she became interested in opening a bookstore of her own after volunteering with the Friends of the Oakland Public Library, where she eventually managed their bookstore. Her decision to make the store a bookstore and bar was inspired in part by places like Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C.

"It's the place that I felt like I needed right after Covid, and frankly we continue to need, now more than ever," Guzman told the San Francisco Chronicle. "There's something special about being surrounded by books and ideas and the joy of discovery."

Bedford Books will host its grand-opening celebration this Thursday, December 12, at 13 Court Rd. in Bedford, N.Y. According to the Daily Voice, owner Fran Hauser is an author, speaker, and leadership expert who has funded more than 40 female-founded companies. She is also the creator of Bookbound, a platform that launches nonfiction writers. 

"Opening a bookstore has been my lifelong dream, and I'm so excited to share Bedford Books with our wonderful community," Hauser said. "I hope the bookstore will be a welcoming place where people can find inspiration, learn new things, and connect with others." 

Starting in the new year, the bookstore will host special events, including a salon series, author talks, and meet-and-greets, she noted, adding that Bedford Books will feature titles for every kind of reader.

The grand-opening event will feature hot cocoa from Mast Market, cookies from 351 Bakery, and an evening reception with wine and treats from Graze New York. Guests can also enjoy surprises, prizes, and special gifts throughout the day. 

"I can't wait to see everyone on December 12," Hauser said. 

Maze Books, Rockford, Ill., has launched a publishing initiative that will focus on showcasing local talent. The first book to be released under the Maze Books imprint is Cold Comfort, a collection of poems, essays and illustrations by the bookshop's owner, Dave Pedersen. The Rock River Current reported that his goals "extend beyond a glorified form of self-publishing: Pedersen hopes to make Maze Books a means to export Rockford's literary and artistic talent to other communities."

"We're importing so many things here, and there's so much talent I think we can export it," he said. "There's something about Rockford that's not like anywhere else. There is something here that we can export, and I think it's a lot of creativity."

The next title from Maze Books, set for a 2025 release, will be a haiku anthology focused on Rockford and illustrated by local artist Joe Tallman. Pedersen also envisions poetry chapbooks and reprints of classic works in the public domain with fresh covers from Rockford artists or forewords from local literary experts, the Rock River Current noted.

"The hope that this can be a cultural hub for literature--that is something I've talked about since we opened," Pedersen said. "The anthology is going to be a great way to showcase some of the talent, and it's going to be a great way for me to get more into the editing role....

"I like to showcase writers and authors and poets who are in regular attendance at other authors and poets events. The people who will be published at Maze Books will be people who you already know about, who have already been putting in the work and supporting everybody, and this will be the cherry on top for them."

Breyten Breytenbach, "a dissident South African-born poet, memoirist and former political prisoner who was jailed on trumped-up charges for anti-apartheid actions in the 1970s," died November 24, the New York Times reported. He was 85.

Breyten Breytenbach

"To be an Afrikaner is a political definition," he wrote in 1985. "It is a blight and a provocation to humanity."

When he was 20, Breytenbach traveled to Paris and studied painting. In 1962, he married Hoang Lien Ngo, who was from Vietnam, "but because of South Africa's laws forbidding mixed-race marriages, she was refused entry to the country," the Times noted. They settled in Paris and he eventually became a French citizen.

Breytenbach wrote poetry in Afrikaans and prose in English. He published his first volume of poetry, The Iron Cow Must Sweat, in 1964. His best-known work, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1985), focused on the seven years he spent in prison in South Africa from 1975 to 1982 after traveling to South Africa and being charged with terrorism. 

His other memoirs include A Season in Paradise (1973), Return to Paradise (1991), and Dog Heart: A Memoir (1999). The Times noted that "the volumes are hardly the stuff of conventional travelogues; they are a subjective collage of impressions, lyricism, self-deprecation and cynicism about politics heaped on by the shovelful. Dog Heart recounts a sojourn to the valley of his birth and his disillusionment with the violence and political sloganeering of the post-apartheid country he had gone to prison to bring about."

Breytenbach was also a painter. His works have been exhibited in Paris, New York, and South Africa, when apartheid was ending.

Politics and Prose, Washington, D.C., shared photos of the store's festive windows: "Have you seen our new window paintings? HUGE shoutout to our in-house artist Amber for bringing holiday magic to P&P! Did you spot her working on the windows this week? Tell us which painting is your favorite! p.s. The windows also make an excellent photo background."

"Congratulations to this super cutie couple! Thanks Stevie and Kate for letting us being part or your special day," Nowhere Bookshop, San Antonio, Tex., posted on Instagram.

Rachel Sammons, formerly the trade marketing associate at Barefoot Books, has joined Augsburg Fortress as publicist for the Broadleaf Books imprint.

Tomorrow:
Jennifer Hudson Show: Jennifer Love Hewitt, author of Inheriting Magic: My Journey Through Grief, Joy, Celebration, and Making Every Day Magical (BenBella, $16.95, 9781637745953).

The BBC plans to adapt Caleb Azumah Nelson's 2021 debut novel Open Water into a TV series. Deadline reported that Banijay-backed Mam Tor is making the series alongside Newen Studios-backed B-Side Productions, with Nelson serving as the project's lead writer, director and executive producer. The author's second novel, Small Worlds, is being adapted by Brock Media.

"I can't wait for viewers not only to meet Marcus and Effie but to step into their world: their private, intimate spaces, their communities, their desires," Nelson said.

BBC drama head Lindsay Salt said that Nelson is "another example of us backing a first time TV writer. He is one of those extraordinary voices and we are going to go on to see a great many things." 

The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire by Richard Adams Carey narrowly won the 2024 Bookseller/Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year with 27% of the public vote, just ahead of How to Dungeon Master Parenting (24%) and Speculum: Examining the Women's Health Movement (22%). 

This was the closest Diagram race since the selection process for the 46-year-old prize went to an online public vote 25 years ago, the Bookseller reported, adding that "there will no doubt be some controversy this year," since the book was first released in 2005, "but the new 2024 edition has enough fresh material that judges (well, your ol' pal Horace after those Courvoisiers) deemed it suitable for inclusion."

There is no award for the winning author or publisher (Brandeis University Press), "barring a Taylor Swift level of fame and a Richard Osman-like spike in book sales. Traditionally, a passable bottle is bestowed on the nominator of the winning title. But for the second year in a row, the champ was put forward by a Bookseller staff member. So the claret goes back into the cellar and next year we shall give three bottles," the Bookseller added. 

The joy and surprise of finally encountering a long-celebrated writer feels almost physical--a sharp reminder of all the great work that could so easily get missed. For a newcomer, reading Gliff by Booker Prize-nominated Ali Smith (Autumn; How to Be Both) is like that. This is a marvel of a book, a tale that manages both to distill and distort the present to project a sobering yet hopeful view to an uncanny future where surveillance is king and one's personal data determines their fate.

At the start, Gliff is a bit like peering in the windows of a house and finding familiar furniture and people and languages being spoken, but none of it makes sense. Smith's luminous prose keeps readers from turning away, and they instead remain locked on a scene that, to Smith's great credit, does become clear--startlingly so. Until then, the reader must wonder: Who are these children? Why must their mother work in this fancy hotel? And why must they quiet their questions and leave her there, departing "like we were guests who'd been quite nice to her" as she hugs them "separately, polite, goodbye."

These will not be the only questions, of course. The narrator remains unnamed for a third of the book and then is found to alternate between two names--Briar and Brice--noting matter-of-factly: "Sometimes I get called one of those names, sometimes the other." There is an ominous red line that keeps being painted around places and later even people with no explanation. There is the boy named Colon who asks Briar's sister, Rose, "Do they do data differently where you're from?" before explaining he's the youngest designated data collector, "locally I mean."

Repeatedly, the tale establishes something that seems utterly foreign until the moment it clicks into place as a very possible reality in the future. Rather than being terrifying, however, Gliff is driven by an energetic hope for better, standing in reckless defiance of the very picture it paints. Like the children's mother, who knows telling "the truth meant they'd have to change what they were doing, and they didn't want to," Gliff tells a certain kind of truth--one that may push readers to consider the things they don't yet want to change despite the harm they are doing. A challenging book in every sense of the word, Gliff is tremendously clever and equally full of heart. Read it and think. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

Shelf Talker: Ali Smith's Gliff projects an uncanny near future where everything feels foreign yet eerily familiar, offering an inventive resistance to the creep of big tech and data harvesting so common today.

The following were the most popular book club books during November based on votes from book club readers in more than 88,000 book clubs registered at Bookmovement.com:

1. The Women: A Novel by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin's Press)
2. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Doubleday)
3. James: A Novel by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
4. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead)
5. First Lie Wins: A Novel by Ashley Elston (Pamela Dorman Books)
6. All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker (Crown)
7. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead)
8. The Briar Club: A Novel by Kate Quinn (Morrow)
9. Hello Beautiful: A Novel by Ann Napolitano (Dial Press)
10. Weyward by Emilia Hart (Griffin)

Rising Stars:
The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali (Gallery Books)
How to Age Disgracefully: A Novel by Clare Pooley (Pamela Dorman Books)