Friends to Lovers, the romance bookstore in Alexandria, Va., that suffered a devastating fire its opening weekend, will move to a new storefront next month, Patch.com reported.

Jamie Fortin

Since December, the bookstore has been operating out of a temporary space at 108 N. St. Asaph St., above Wine Gallery 108. On April 2, owner Jamie Fortin and her team will host a grand opening in the new storefront at 301 Cameron St.

The romance bookstore held a grand opening party on Thursday, November 14, 2024, with the festivities continuing throughout the weekend. That Sunday, a fire broke out in the building that caused severe smoke and water damage and left none of the store's books or merchandise safe to sell.

In the days following the fire, Fortin launched a GoFundMe campaign to support the bookstore that has raised more than $46,000.

The Larry McMurtry Literary Center officially opened on March 8 at the former site of the late author's bookstore, Booked Up, "allowing the public to buy novels from McMurtry's book-scouting collection," the Dallas Observer reported. The Center plans to remain open on weekends through March to raise money needed for repairs. Additional donations to the foundation can be made through its website.

The opening comes four months after the Archer City Writers Workshop, a nonprofit literary foundation, purchased the bookstore from Chip and Joanna Gaines, the stars of cable home improvement show Fixer Upper who helm the Magnolia brand. 

Noting that "the essence of the Texas-born author still fills the same building that's now home to the Larry McMurtry Literary Center," the Observer wrote: "He is in the vases of yellow roses, his favorite flower, that decorate tables in the front lobby. He is in each of the thousands of books housed in the building's dozens of bookshelves, many of which feature his own 'pricing signature' on their front pages." 

"I feel like I'm going to pull these books out and see Larry behind them," LMLC director George Getschow said. "Every book I see, every nook and cranny I see, I think about Larry. Why do I do that? Well, he's everywhere."

The timeline for the center's progress remains open-ended, but "members and volunteers at the LMLC envision the center growing into one that highlights the remarkable life and legacy of one of Texas' literary greats," the Observer noted. 

"I'd like to think that Larry would be pleased that the whole purpose of this center, that we've reincarnated his bookshop into the Larry McMurtry Literary Center, with the sole mission of carrying on perpetuating his life, his legacy and his book collection. I would hope that he would appreciate that we are carrying his torch," Getschow said, noting that in addition to book sales, the Center hopes to offer writing workshops and other educational opportunities.

"We are doing nothing more than making sure that his remarkable life and legacy and his epic literature continues forever," he added. "That's why this place is so important, because it's the bedrock of his life. He called this place sacred. It's sacred to us."

Bloomsbury USA is launching Bloomsbury Archer, an imprint that will publish across a wide range of speculative fiction, from fantasy and science fiction to speculative romance, horror, myth retellings, alternate histories, and more. "Archer" refers to the existing Bloomsbury emblem, Diana, goddess of the hunt.  

Bloomsbury Archer will be led by Noa Wheeler as publishing director and Erica Barmash as v-p, marketing and publicity. The U.K. arm of Bloomsbury Archer will be led by Vicky Leech Mateos as publishing director. Wheeler and Leech Mateos are currently building the first few Bloomsbury Archer lists.

Bloomsbury authors Samantha Shannon and Alan Moore will move to the new imprint when it launches in the U.S. next year, and in the U.K. this fall.

Wheeler and Barmash have been working together as the editorial and marketing leads of Bloomsbury's Sarah J. Maas group and will continue to do so while expanding into the new imprint. Wheeler began her career at Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, joining Bloomsbury in 2020. Barmash, who will also continue to lead up the children's marketing and publicity team, joined the company in 2012 after stints at HarperCollins and Abrams.

Wheeler said: "As a lifelong fantasy reader and a career-long fantasy editor, creating a new home for SFF at Bloomsbury is an incredible privilege. We're excited to build a list with something for every reader, encompassing the wide breadth of fantasy and all it has to offer."  

Barmash added: "Reaching the passionate fandoms around genre fiction has always been the most inspiring part of my work. We can't wait to continue engaging with readers online and in-person and talking about our favorite other worlds."

Bloomsbury USA president Sabrina McCarthy commented: "As an established powerhouse publisher in the fantasy space, we are thrilled to launch this new imprint dedicated to the genre. More and more readers have come to fantasy in recent years, and we look forward to bringing them a whole new slate of books to fall in love with." 

The Globe Pequot Publishing Group is purchasing the assets of Waterford Press, founded more than 30 years ago by Jill Kavanagh and her late husband, James Kavanagh. The company, which is based in Safety Harbor, Fla., publishes more than a thousand state and regional folding guides on birds, trees, animals, fish, and other wildlife. Jill Kavanagh will continue in her role as publisher when the acquisition closes on April 1.  

Waterford Press guides will continue to be sold and distributed by Globe Pequot's sister company, NBN, until both move to Simon & Schuster on September 1. Until then, all orders should be directed to NBN.

Jed Lyons, CEO of Globe Pequot said, "This is the first of what we hope will be many niche acquisitions for our company now that we are solely focused on trade publishing after selling our Rowman & Littlefield academic division. We came to know and admire Jill Kavanagh as a National Book Network distribution client for the last six years. Waterford is an ideal complement to our own FalconGuides, whose content and customers overlap with Waterford's."

Jill Kavanagh commented: "Our publications have been closely aligned with Globe Pequot's FalconGuides line for nearly 28 years, during which time we've recognized the value of the relationship for both product alignment and NBN's top-notch sales representation. Being acquired by Globe Pequot promises an opportunity for growth on a scale that is not possible while remaining an independent publisher."

The British Book Awards (the Nibbies) unveiled the regional and country winners for the 2025 Independent Bookshop of the Year Award, which celebrates bookshops that "continue to draw book lovers to towns and cities across the United Kingdom and Ireland," the Bookseller reported. 

The overall winner of Independent Bookshop of the Year, which will be named during the awards ceremony on May 12, receives £5,000 (about $6,475) from Gardners and also competes for Book Retailer of the Year. Check out the complete regional and country winners list here.

Meryl Halls, managing director of Booksellers Association, said: "Independent bookshops have long transcended being only a place where books are sold. Today, they're drivers of community projects, distributors of creatives industries and engines of local economies--and you'd be hard pressed to find a group of independent booksellers that better deliver on all these fronts than this sensational collection of deserving winners." 

Tom Tivnan, the Bookseller's managing editor, added: "The finalists speak to what makes indies great: their individuality and idiosyncrasy.... Ultimately, what links these indies is they are a vanguard, bold tastemakers who support authors and create bestsellers, often long before those books are glimmers in chain or online bookshops' eyes."

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A new survey by YouGov has found that 40% of Britons has not read or listened to a book in the past year. The Guardian reported that the "median British adult has read or listened to three books in the past year.... Women seem to be bigger readers than men, with 66% of women reading at least one book in the last year, compared with 53% of men." Other highlights from the survey:

• 65% of those aged 65 and over read a book in the last year, compared to 53% of those aged 18 to 24.
• 22% of Britons read or listened to between one and five books over that period, while 4% reported reading more than 50 books.
• 53% do not consider listening to an audiobook equivalent to reading the book, with 29% saying that listening to audiobooks is the same as reading and 18% responding "don't know."

Half of the respondents said they had purchased a new book over the past year, with 40% buying secondhand, 28% borrowing from family and friends, and 19% taking out books from the library.

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Patriotic window display: Galiano Island Books, Galiano Island, B.C., posted on Facebook: "Canada is on our mind! We support Canadian authors, illustrators and publishers!" --Robert Gray

Author (l.) Carole Lindstrom (Anishinaabe/Métis) and (r.) illustrator Aly McKnight (Shoshone-Bannock), right, shared their picture book, The Gift of the Great Buffalo (Bloomsbury) at an in-store school visit at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C. They were introduced by (center) bookseller Gracynn Scott (Mvskoke Creek), who wore her tribal ribbon skirt.

Oprah Winfrey has chosen venture capitalist Amy Griffin's memoir The Tell (The Dial Press) as the latest Oprah's Book Club Pick, Oprah Daily reported, describing the book as "an earth-shattering memoir about one woman’s quest to uncover repressed childhood trauma, overcome perfectionism, and live a life of authentic joy."

"I was just floored when I read Amy's story," Winfrey said. "What she discovered about herself, about her past, made me recognize how powerful the desire to forget is and also how powerful the desire to remember is and how your life can change when you reconcile the two."

"I've spent the last five years writing, drafting, and considering every word I wanted to share about my experience," said Griffin. "When Oprah called, I forgot every one of those words. All I know is that I was in my closet, thinking, is this really happening?"

Winfrey interviewed Griffin for the most recent Oprah's Book Club: Presented by Starbucks podcast, available here.

"White Whale had our very first proposal this weekend, and it was one for the books!" White Whale Bookstore, Pittsburgh, Pa., posted on Facebook. "In particular, we feel so honored that a couple of our long-time customers chose our space for this momentous occasion. Congratulations, Ashley and Bonnie! We love your love!

Backwater Books, Ellicott City, Md., shared a photo on Instagram of bookseller dog Chomsky "trying to rearrange the display table."

A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl by Nanda Reddy (Zibby Publishing).

Tomorrow:
Drew Barrymore Show: Rawaan Alkhatib, author of Hot Date!: Sweet & Savory Recipes Celebrating the Date, from Party Food to Everyday Feasts (Chronicle, $35, 9781797226446).

The View: Kara Swisher, author of Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (Simon & Schuster, $19.99, 9781982163907).

Sherri Shepherd Show: Tabitha Brown, author of Hello There, Sunshine (HarperCollins, $21.99, 9780063342262).

Jennifer Hudson Show: Big Sean, author of Go Higher: Five Practices for Purpose, Success, and Inner Peace (Simon Element, $28.99, 9781668045732).

Netflix has made a deal to turn Stephen King's bestselling novel Cujo into a new film, Deadline reported, adding that Roy Lee is producing, and the project will go out to writers immediately. The novel was first adapted into the 1983 movie starring Dee Wallace.

King's "backlist continues to be golden," Deadline wrote. The Osgood Perkins-directed adaptation of his short story The Monkey was just released, and upcoming are the Francis Lawrence-directed The Long Walk, the Edgar Wright-directed It prequel with Andy Muschietti directing, the Jack Bender-directed The Institute, and a series adaption of Carrie, with Mike Flanagan directing.

Manya Wilkinson won the £4,000 (about $5,175) Wingate Literary Prize, which honors "the best book, fiction or nonfiction, to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader," for Lublin. The award run in association with the Jewish Literary Foundation.

The judges said: "What a wonderful--and excruciating--process judging this prize was. We were and are so proud of our longlist and our shortlist, showcasing such a wide range of fiction, history, memoir and biography. Each of these books conveys 'the idea of Jewishness to the general reader,' as the prize rubric has it--at the same time engaging with a remarkably wide variety of material. Choosing one winner was not a simple process, and there was much impassioned debate; all of us judges absolutely stand behind each of these titles. But in the end only one book can triumph, and Manya Wilkinson's Lublin was the book that surprised us most, astonished us most, left the most lingering impression in all of our minds."

photo: Lac Hoang

Rebe Huntman is a Latin and Afro-Cuban dancer and choreographer, and former director of Chicago's Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music and its resident dance company, One World Dance Theater. She is a Macondo fellow and recipient of an Ohio Individual Excellence Award, and teaches creative writing and marketing for artists at the Columbus College of Art & Design. She lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and Delaware, Ohio. Her essays, poems and short stories have been published in the Missouri Review, the Southern Review, CRAFT Literary, Parabola, and elsewhere. Her debut memoir, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle, was recently published by Monkfish.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

A daughter's search for her deceased mother brings her face to face with the gods and ghosts and saints of Cuba.

On your nightstand now:

Memoirs about Cuba! There's a tendency among Americans to view Cuba as a land frozen in time, but my experience is that there are many Cubas. There is a pre-colonial island inhabited by the Taino and a colonial Cuba ruled by the Spanish. There is the Cuba of the early 1950s with its glittering casinos, and the Cuba of 1959 with its mountains filled with revolutionaries. There is the Cuba for whom that revolution filled their hearts with hope, and the Cuba of those who've watched its aftermath morph into realities that challenge and complicate that hope. I'm interested in the light the multiple voices of these memoirs shine on a single place. And my hope is that My Mother in Havana adds to that prism through the story of a daughter who healed her grief, 30 years in the making, among the island's rich and multivalent spiritual traditions.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The books I loved as a child include myths and fairytales, and novels like Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door and C.S. Lewis's the Chronicles of Narnia series--books in which gods and children pass through secret doors and wardrobes. To this day, the stories I love best (books like Madeline Miller's Circe; Kelly Barnhill's When Women Were Dragons; and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern) point to portals through which we might slip from one world to another.

Your top five authors:

Lyricists like Brenda Miller and Eula Biss who gift us models for the kind of structural and linguistic choices that make their pages sing. Toni Morrison for her gorgeous blending of the spiritual and the mundane. James Baldwin for the rigor of his intellectual inquiry. And memoirists like Cheryl Strayed (Wild), Helen Macdonald (H Is for Hawk), and Doireann Ní Ghríofa (A Ghost in the Throat), whose memoirs braid excavations of grief with a parallel quest that allows them to transform that grief.

Book you're an evangelist for:

I'm an evangelist for books where structure mirrors content! Take Patti Smith's Just Kids, a memoir about her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe whose inclusion of art and poetry creates the sense that not only the words but the book itself is an altar both to Mapplethorpe and to the art of creation. Another favorite is Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, a memoir about her time in a psychological institution she literally tucks inside a reproduction of her actual patient folder. In structuring the chapters of My Mother in Havana to mirror the 30 days I spent searching for my mother among the gods and ghosts and saints of Cuba, my hope is that my reader will feel like they are riding on my shoulders, experiencing every hope and doubt and frustration as together we test the veil between the living and the dead, the material world and the world of magic and miracle.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I'm not sure I've bought a book explicitly for the cover, but I've admired quite a few! Some favorites include Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Latino Poetry (edited by Rigoberto González), and The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. And I'm probably biased, but I adore the cover of My Mother in Havana. Its central image is a sunflower, which is the most ubiquitous offering to Cuba's spiritual mothers, Ochún and Our Lady of Charity. My inclusion of the image is a nod both to those mothers and to the act of writing, which for me is always an offering. It is an act of saying: "I am here. This is what I stand for. This is what I find beautiful. Important. Worth paying attention to." And there is a power in reaching out to the world through that act of attention and saying: Won't you pay attention alongside me?

Favorite line from a book:

I'm in love with the physicality of language, and when I encounter a line that delights and moves me, I will press the page to my cheek, as if I might absorb all that beauty into my own being. Take this one from Toni Morrison's Tar Baby:

"At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough." I could hold that line to my cheek for all of eternity and never fully absorb the power and beauty of its message.

Five books you'll never part with:

My great grandfather Gerhardt Huntmann's 1886 Bible, with his name and date embossed in gold on the cover.  
Darkroom: A Family Exposure by Jill Christman
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
From Our House by Lee Martin

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

Circe by Madeline Miller--I can think of nothing better than reliving my time with its heroine, cultivating magical herbs and spells and exacting revenge on men who don't know how to behave themselves.

What you have planned next:

I've got a couple of projects that I'm excited to start in on--novels based on the stories of my grandmothers. A work of fiction that dives into the worlds of the Nordic gods. But first, I have a poetry collection that is almost ready to find a publisher. Like My Mother in Havana, the poems are a cinematic exploration of the forces that collaborate in the shaping of what it is to be woman. Unlike My Mother in Havana, the settings of that inquiry widen to include a kaleidoscopic catalog of Midwestern bowling alleys and 1950s burlesque clubs, mermaid meet and greets, a dead mother's tour through 1980s Russia, and of course the mother saints and goddesses of Cuba. Tentatively titled Zinnias in My Mother's Vase, the collection is both a container for wildness and a portal between generations--an invitation to join the author as she and the concentric circles that bloom from that central eye--ancestors, role models, and ultimately that ineffable, unnameable force that animates life itself--weigh in on the feminine body. Is it object? Is it vessel? Or is it a cosmos both contained by and too vast to be contained by any vessel?

In Nikki Van De Car's dazzling blend of myth and magic, The Invisible Wild, a Hawaiian teen who can see menehune endeavors to stop construction that endangers the forest spirits' sacred home.

Part-Hawaiian Emma Arruda, 16, and her family are busy preparing their Big Island home for her sister's marriage to her girlfriend. Their chores, however, seem to be undone overnight--a cleaned garage is re-cluttered, a bathroom retiled crookedly. Emma, who has grown to believe that she imagined speaking to spirits as a child, is the one to catch the culprit: a strong, three-foot-tall man--a menehune.

The being of legend leads her to a plot of 25 "miraculously pristine," "gorgeous acres" recently purchased by a developer. A bulldozer has already leveled many of its 'ōhi'a trees and hāpu'u (giant ferns). The menehune's community lives inside a lava tube under all the destruction: "We have a sacred duty here," Koa, the menehune, explains. "We protect this forest, and we cannot leave it." Staying, however, will mean their deaths.

Emma is determined to stop the construction. A teenage boy, Hilo, tasked with making amends to the land after harming an 'ōhi'a tree, becomes her partner in crime. When Hilo's vandalization of the excavation equipment leads nowhere, though, Emma attempts to convince the menehune community to abandon a duty (kuleana) she doesn't understand.

Emma's forthright first-person narrative exudes a love for her Big Island home. She bristles at tourists who ask to "see the lava flowing"--a disaster that devastated neighborhoods--and she resents how she and other Hawaiians need such tourists to survive. The teen connects deeply with the forest: she shares the story (mo'olelo) of the naupaka blossom with Hilo, and volunteers to plant trees that drive out invasive plants on Mauna Kea. Emma's inextinguishable desire to help the menehune is part of her deep celebration of her Hawaiian identity, as well as her fear that a tradition and way of life is being erased.

Van De Car's wondrous and magical YA debut cherishes Hawai'i's everyday, developing a stunning atmosphere through creation chants, a pālila's "bubbly warble," mist "like the breath of an unseen dragon," black lava roadsides, and heaps of haupia (a coconut dessert). The Invisible Wild is altogether enthralling, hopeful, and great fun. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer

Shelf Talker: A Hawaiian teen who sees forest spirits must stop the destruction of a menehune community's home in this lushly backdropped and tenderly wrought YA adventure rooted in legend.