The Wandering Shelf, a mobile bookshop in a renovated camper van, will hit the road this summer in the Arlington, Va., area, ARLnow reported. Owner Tessa Cannon will offer about 700 fiction and nonfiction titles, focusing on three categories: cozy, fantastical, and impactful reads.

"I want, you know, books that help transport people, because there's a lot of things going on in the world, and sometimes books can be a helpful escape for people," she said. "I [also] love books that challenge and inspire and ignite change in our conversations with people."

Since she works full-time in humanitarian aid, Cannon plans to operate The Wandering Shelf on weekends only, aiming for a soft launch in May and an official opening in June. She plans to set up shop in Clarendon after Barnes & Noble closes for renovations in May, and also mentioned visiting Columbia Pike and Crystal City as potential pop-up destinations.

"We don't really have another [bookstore] that's walkable for people who don't have cars," said Cannon, who hopes The Wandering Shelf will feel "like a warm hug" for her customers. "I think that Arlington and the [Washington metropolitan area] area--it's very transient, and people are constantly on the move, but they're also really passionate people. A lot of people are rooted in community here."

Displaced Pages, a book and record store, will open in May at 1359 East 4th St. in Owensboro, Ky. The Owensboro Times reported that siblings and co-owners Virginia Hardesty and Josh Hardesty will offer a mix of new and used books in a variety of genres, along with book-themed merchandise like candles, tote bags, and tumblers. The store will also sell new and used vinyl records. The bookstore also plans to host events such as poetry readings, writers' nights, and local author signings.

Virginia Hardesty said they hope to stay current with new releases while also providing vintage titles: "I think people are starting to swing back toward physical media. Books and music are both very nostalgic, and there's a growing community around that--especially on platforms like TikTok, where book reviews and record hauls have really taken off."

Displaced Pages began as a pop-up bookstore last year, setting up booths at local markets and fairs. Noting that opening a bookstore has been a lifelong dream, Hardesty said partnering with her brother to include records made the idea more appealing: "This is really about building something for the community. We want it to be an inclusive, welcoming space where everyone can find something they love.... The personal connection is what sets us apart. At an independent bookstore, it's more than just transactions--it's about community and conversation."

She told WBKR that for a time the idea of opening a bookshop "seemed unattainable, and one of those 'meh. Maybe one day' type of things. But after opening at the vendor mall, doing pop-ups and book fairs, and meeting so many in the book community, it became apparent to me that I could make this happen. And why wait? I'm just gonna go for it."

The application period for the Susan Kamil Emerging Writers Prize, administered by the Book Industry Charitable (Binc) Foundation, opens today and runs through April 22. The prize awards two aspiring writer-booksellers or creator-comic retailers $12,500 each to focus on a full-length manuscript. Any writer working on a full-length manuscript, graphic novel, or comic who is currently employed at a physical book or comic store in the U.S. and has been for a minimum of three months is eligible. To learn more about eligibility and to apply, click here.

The prize was established by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author Charles Duhigg and his wife, Liz Alter, a professor of biology at California State University Monterey Bay. The award is in honor of Susan Kamil, who was executive v-p and publisher of Random House when she died in 2019 and was known for recognizing new literary voices and introducing them to the public.

Duhigg said, "Booksellers are the heart of not only our literary communities, but defenders of democracy and freedom. I hope this scholarship helps some writer, toiling away, know that there are legions cheering for their success."

The judges are:

• Emma Aprile, a copy editor of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for independent presses, and a part-time bookseller at Carmichael's Bookstore, Louisville, Ky.
• Chriscynethia Floyd, v-p and publisher of Our Daily Bread Publishing, who joined Binc's board of directors in 2024.
• Jonathan Hawpe, a bookseller at Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville, Ky., for more than 20 years, and a freelance writer and artist, who has published work in LEO weekly, Bejeezus magazine, and Louisville Cartoonist Society anthologies.
• James Killen, a longtime buyer at Barnes & Noble, who is now director of retail operations for the Manga Spot stores for Kadokawa World Entertainment and serves on Binc's board of directors.
• Susan Hans O'Connor, owner of the Penguin Bookshop in Sewickley, Pa., who began her publishing career at Viking Penguin, where she was an associate editor.
• Jonathan Putnam, author of historical fiction, including the Lincoln & Speed Mystery series, who is a past board member of the Historical Novels Society of North America and is treasurer on Binc's board of directors.
• Christie Roehl, a former member of Binc's board of directors and current member of the Binc Program Committee. She was formerly a Borders Bookstore store manager and Borders Group Foundation volunteer, who now volunteers in the Walsh College mentor program.

Thomas Hoobler, who with his wife, Dorothy Hoobler, wrote 103 books on a range of subjects, including YA biographies, mystery novels, and more, died February 22, the New York Times reported. He was 82.

Thomas & Dorothy Hoobler

The Hooblers spent most of the 1970s as trade magazine editors, even after they began writing books. Their first three titles appeared in the mid-1970s: House Plants, a manual; Frontier Diary, about a young girl's 19th-century trip across America; and Margaret Mead: A Life in Science.

They went on to contribute to a number of series, including Penguin's history books known by fans as "Big Heads" for their cartoonish covers, with titles like Where Are the Great Pyramids? (2015) and What Was the San Francisco Earthquake? (2016), the Times noted.

They wrote other series, including 10 "American Family Albums" for Oxford University Press, starting with The Chinese American Family Album (1994). The series won several honors, including three awards from the Parents' Choice Foundation.

Their most recent title was a book about presidential love letters titled Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?

"Given their prolific output and the esteem they earned among teachers, parents and librarians, it's a good bet that a sizable percentage of any given elementary school library was written" by the Hooblers, the Times noted. 

In addition to their nonfiction, they also wrote novels. In Darkness, Death (2004), part of a seven-book series about a samurai detective, won an Edgar Award.

In 2001, Thomas Hoobler appeared on the TV quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, winning $500,000. They used some of the money to write some books for adult readers, such as The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein (2006) and The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft and Detection (2009).

"They did not, as some curious readers assumed, sit side by side, clacking out manuscripts on matching typewriters," the Times wrote. The Hooblers worked in separate rooms, with separate responsibilities. Though they both researched and wrote, Dorothy Hoobler was better at the former while her husband took the lead on the writing.

"Sometimes I would do a very rough draft, and then he would write the final script of it--it really did depend," Dorothy Hoobler said in an interview. "We worked together pretty well, I think. Obviously, we got these projects done."

Print Bookstore, Portland, Maine, posted a video sharing "six things you might not know about booksellers and bookselling."

New York Review Books is now distributing titles by Archipelago Books to the trade. Archipelago books appear in the NYRB catalog and are available through NYRB's distributor, Penguin Random House Publisher Services.

Jill Schoolman founded Archipelago in 2003 with the mission of bringing vital works from around the world to English-language readers in translation. In Archipelago's first 21 years, it has published 250 works from more than 45 languages. Authors include Scholastique Mukasonga, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hebe Uhart, Mahmoud Darwish, Sara Gallardo, Paulina Chiziane, Manuel Rivas, and Antonio Tabucchi. Archipelago includes the imprint Elsewhere Editions, which is devoted to translated picture books.

Archipelago publishes about 16 books a year. This year's list includes Indonesian writer Felix Nesi's People from Oetimu, translated by Lara Norgaard, which illuminates the revolutionary movements of 20th-century Timor; Cécé, a novel investigating life in the slums of Port-au-Prince by the Haitian writer Emmelie Prophète, translated by Aidan Rooney; and works by Hanne Ørstavik and Cesare Pavese, among others.

NYRB Classics editorial director Edwin Frank said: "Archipelago has built a beautiful, mythic, wild, welcoming, and unsettling space, a space like no other space, a space full of new and old things that reveals things we have never known and renews the things that we have always known. Archipelago is, in other words, something else, even as--and this is also important to the press's achievement--even as it is part of, and has helped to create, a larger scene. Their list feels like a natural fit alongside ours."

A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America's Disabled by Alex Green (Bellevue Literary Press).

Today:
Fresh Air: Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater, authors of Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress (Random House, $32, 9780593731260).

MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes: Elie Mystal, author of Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America (The New Press, $26.99, 9781620978580).

Tomorrow:
CBS Mornings: Bob the Drag Queen, author of Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert (Gallery Books, $27.99, 9781668061978).

Good Morning America: Tamron Hall, author of Harlem Honey: The Adventures of a Curious Kid (HarperCollins, $19.99, 9780063244849).

Today: Laila Lalami, author of The Dream Hotel (Pantheon, $29, 9780593317600).

Tamron Hall: Krysten Ritter, author of Retreat: A Novel (Harper, $28.99, 9780063334601).

Drew Barrymore Show: Michael Symon, co-author of Symon's Dinners Cooking Out: 100 Recipes That Redefine Outdoor Cooking (Clarkson Potter, $35, 9780593797648).

Late Night with Seth Meyers repeat: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Dream Count: A Novel (Knopf, $32, 9780593802724).

Uberto Pasolini, who produced The Full Monty and most recently directed The Return, is developing a TV series adaptation of Jonathan Swift's classic novel Gulliver's Travels. Variety reported that British writer William Ivory (We Want Sex, The Great Escaper) is writing the screenplay for the six-episode project, with Pasolini serving as showrunner. 

The series is being produced by Italy's Roberto Sessa (The Sea Beyond) and Germany's Jan Wünschmann (The Swarm, Concordia), and will be unveiled to prospective broadcasters during the Series Mania festival in Lille.

"What Gulliver allows us to do today is to make something really, really fun," Pasolini said. "But at the same time--very much like Swift did in his time--to talk about the world around us; to talk about politics; to talk about greed; to talk about the place of the Western man in the world as a whole; to talk about the relationship between man and nature." Pasolini developed Hallmark's 1996 Gulliver's Travels series that won five Primetime Emmys.

Eight writers have been awarded Windham-Campbell Prizes in four categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. Each will receive $175,000 "to support their work and allow them to focus on their creative practice independent of financial concerns." The winners:

Sigrid Nunez (U.S.), fiction
Anne Enright (Ireland), fiction
Patricia J. Williams (U.S.), nonfiction
Rana Dasgupta (U.K.), nonfiction
Roy Williams (U.K.), drama
Matilda Feyisayọ Ibini (U.K.), drama
Anthony V. Capildeo (Scotland/Trinidad and Tobago), poetry
Tongo Eisen-Martin (U.S.), poetry

To see more about the winners, click here.

Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, said in part: "It was the late Donald Windham's wish in establishing these prizes to call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with time, space and freedom. This mission remains at the heart of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, and in today's world it is more vital than ever to recognize and support the crucial work and wisdom that writers share with us all."

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Longlists have been released for the 2025 PEN America Literary Awards, which honor writers and translators with awards totaling more than $350,000. Including fiction, poetry, translation, and more. "These longlisted books are dynamic, diverse, and thought-provoking examples of literary excellence," PEN America noted. Finalists for all book awards will be revealed before the 2025 Literary Awards ceremony, which will be held May 8. The longlisted titles may be viewed here.

With The Lilac People, Milo Todd delves into the nearly lost history of trans people in the Holocaust. Integrating imagined characters with historical research, Todd's novel brings humanity and specificity to atrocities that are still being uncovered. The heartbreaking result honors love and friendship, and ends with hope for one built family of survivors.

The opening pages find Bertie on the outskirts of the German city of Ulm in 1945. He has ridden out the war with his partner, Sofie, "on a little farm that was not theirs," growing vegetables, raising chickens and one cow. It is an unadorned but not unpleasant life, and they know they are lucky. "The apple blossoms were beginning to show on their three trees at the far edge of their land, pollen spilling out as they blushed." Then, weeks after the news that the Allies have freed camp prisoners, Bertie finds a body in the garden. Dressed in rags from the camp, the young man is alive, barely. "[The Allies] sent all the pink triangles to jail. And all the black triangles that qualified the same," he tells Bertie. He wears a black triangle. He is a trans man--like Bertie. This changes everything for Sofie and Bertie, who will be greatly endangered by their choice to hide and protect Karl.

But Bertie finds that he must help, to confront his survivor's guilt, his failure to protect his own community, and (as a hostile Allied lieutenant accuses) his complicity in Germany's crimes. Karl's appearance takes Bertie back to 1932 Berlin, where Bertie assists Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute for Sexual Science and is a member of a vibrant queer and trans community, with a tight-knit group of friends that is lost on the Night of the Long Knives. Karl's existence brings hope, guilt, and memory. To save Karl and themselves, Bertie and Sofie must leave the farm's relative safety.

The Lilac People is filled with music, with an emphasis on the queer anthem "The Lilac Song." Sofie is a pianist who gives Karl piano lessons alongside Bertie's instruction in "how to transvest," or pass as a cis man. The song is an important piece of history and means of accessing a pride in community that's been all but destroyed. Notes from the author detail the research required for this writing, what is true history and what is fiction, and just how limited is the historical record on Germany's queer and trans communities in this era.

The Lilac People is emotionally wrenching, but also lovely in its details, the humanity of its characters, and the resilience and hope at its end, when a fresh start seems possible. Todd has made an enormous contribution to historical fiction with his own research and this beautiful, touching narrative. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: A trans man survives with a small chosen family, from Berlin's lively queer scene in 1932 through the Holocaust and the Allies' hostility, in this moving historical novel.

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

1. Story of My Life by Lucy Score
2. Lululemon and the Future of Technical Apparel by Chip Wilson
3. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
4. Kiss of the Basilisk by Lindsay Straube
5. Hunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
6. Wild Side by Elsie Silver
7. If You Love Me by Helena Hunting
8. The Boyfriend by Freida McFadden
9. Shallow River by H.D. Carlton
10. On Being Jewish Now by Zibby Owens

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]