Pages Bookshop, Detroit, Mich., which was scheduled to close at the end of February after a decade in business, has a new owner. Model D reported that Jelani Stowers has purchased the business from Susan Murphy, who is retiring. He will host a grand re-opening on April 26, Independent Bookstore Day

"I'm excited. I've been a part of this community for this long time, but this will be stepping into this community in a new way," said Stowers, who was raised in Rosedale Park and still lives there. He first became familiar with Pages as a teenage customer when Murphy opened in 2015. "In the decade since, Stowers has emerged as one of Detroit's leading Gen Z voices, working with the Steen Foundation, a Detroit-based youth-focused philanthropic organization, as well as an advocate and educator in computer science and entrepreneurship for young Detroiters," Model D wrote.

"I'm really interested in engaging the youth in and around Rosedale Park. The neighborhood in general is aging, but there are schools being served in the neighborhood, so there is youth somewhere," he noted.

The Steen Foundation, where Stowers is v-p of narrative and research, will fund a new $1,000 scholarship fund for Detroit Public Schools Community District students. Named in honor of Murphy and her "bookstore cat" Pip, the scholarship will be tied to the purchase of select books in-store, with each book sold supporting students' education directly and indirectly.

"Middle-grade literacy is shrinking in places across the board--not just in Detroit," Stowers said. "What you choose to read in middle school sets your pace for the personal choice to read later on. I'm really wanting to engage that aspect through the Steen Foundation."

Since January, when Murphy announced her retirement, Stowers joined the American Booksellers Association, attended several trade shows, and networked with publishers, retailers and authors. He also sought counsel from both Murphy and Janet Jones, owner of Midtown's Source Booksellers. He told Model D that he will keep the store's book offerings close to Murphy's stock, but is also looking to engage other community partners, faith-based organizations, chambers of commerce, and Detroit residents to build on Pages' stature as a community-oriented staple.

"Even though we've been here in the neighborhood, it'll be getting to know each other in a new context," he said.

Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, Calif., reopened on Sunday after having been forced to close in February for several weeks to repair extensive flooding damage to the store.

"We are OPEN!! GUESS WHO'S BACK!! After a long few weeks, we are so excited to announce that we have re-opened for business!" the bookshop's e-newsletter announced yesterday: "Thank you everyone for being so patient as we recovered from the unexpected flooding over the last month. Our booksellers worked so hard to make sure we could open as soon as possible and we are glad to say the day is finally here!

"We are still working on some areas so please pardon our dust as we continue to tidy up some smaller areas. But we welcome everyone to come by Mysterious Galaxy to shop books!! Happy reading! Stay safe!"

Now in its second year, BookCAMP, the trade show for independent authors and publishers organized by Ted Olczak, publisher of BookCAMP magazine, will take place May 2-4 in Newark, N.J., near Newark Liberty International Airport. Last year's BookCAMP offered sessions on marketing; publicity; distribution through bookstores, libraries and big box stores; podcasting; audiobooks; and more. This year's BookCAMP will add sessions on social media; AI; and movie adaptations of books. BookCAMP aims "to give practical, actionable information and connect attendees to other publishing professionals that can absolutely make a difference in how they will continue their book publishing programs and book sales."

Speakers include keynoters Mara Anastas of Muse Media (formerly of Open Road Integrated Media, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins) on AI's impact on publishers and authors; and Zoltan Istvan, former presidential candidate, AI thought leader, and author of The Transhumanist Wager, on the future of publishing and storytelling in the age of AI.

Session participants include Becky Parker Geist, CEO of Pro Audio Voices and president of the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association, on audiobooks and podcasts; novelist and social media guru Amy Rivers, director of the Writing Heights Writers Association, on social media and building an online presence; Aryn Van Dyke, book marketing consultant and author coach, on helping authors promote their books and build their brands; Brian Feinblum, publishing industry veteran, author, and blogger, on navigating the publishing landscape; author Lee Woodman (in one session) on the art of series building, and (in another session) on marketing tips, including leveraging radio and e-marketing strategies; and Gloria Mindock, author and publisher, on hybrid and small publishers.

On Saturday, May 3, the Independent Press Award/NYC Big Book Awards reception, awards dinner, and ceremony take place.

For more information and to register, click here.

British author Alex Wheatle, whose books include East of Acre Lane and the Crongton series, died March 16. He was 62. The Guardian reported that Wheatle "traced his interest in writing to his time in prison. After being arrested during the Brixton uprising of April 1981, Wheatle spent four months in prison, where he read CLR James, Charles Dickens, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and John Steinbeck among other authors handed to him by his cellmate."

"Whatever I achieve in this old writing game is down to the conversion I experienced under Simeon in Wormwood Scrubs," he wrote in the Guardian in 2021.

His first novel, Brixton Rock (1999), is about a 16-year-old who has lived in a children's home all his life. Wheatle also wrote many novels for adults, including Island Songs and The Dirty South. His first YA novel, Liccle Bit, was longlisted for the Carnegie medal in 2016. A follow-up, Crongton Knights, won the 50th Guardian children's fiction prize the same year. Two more Crongton books, Straight Outta Crongton and In the Ends, were published in 2017 and 2023 respectively. 

Wheatle was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2008. His recent books include Home Boys, Home Girl, Cane Warriors, and Kemosha of the Caribbean. In 2023, he published his memoir Sufferah: Memoir of a Brixton Reggae Head.

Several of Wheatle's early books are based on his life in Brixton as a teenager and his time in social services' care. His early life was dramatized in an episode of Steve McQueen's BBC One anthology series Small Axe. Shortly before it aired, Wheatle told the Bookseller: "There are still people in children's homes, kids who don't know where they belong, they need inspiration. If they can see me and see I made it they might feel they can do the same. That means so much to me."

His agent, Kerry-Ann Bentley of KAB Literary, said: "Alex loved life and had a great zeal for it. Family, friendships and football were important to him, and he always found a way to fit those into his books. I'm devastated at the scope of this loss for his family and loved ones, all who knew and admired him. Working with a writer of Alex's caliber, who had integrity and grace, has been the highlight of my career." 

Yoga poet Victoria Hutchins (l.) kicked off her tour for Make Believe (Convergent) with an offsite event at Practice Yoga Austin, hosted by Birdhouse Books, Austin, Tex. Hutchins led attendees through a yoga session and then did a book talk with poet Whitney Hanson.

Congratulations to Tom Lowenburg and Judith Lafitte, co-owners of Octavia Books, New Orleans, La., which is being honored with a 2025 Award of Excellence in Preservation from the Louisiana Landmarks Society for its historic renovation project. The project started in 2021 and included an expansion of the store to 4,500 square feet from 2,000.

According to the organization's citation: "A 129-year-old corner storefront was rehabilitated to unite a treasured bookstore and café while preserving its architectural integrity. Originally built in 1896 as P. Draube's Sons grocery and barroom, the structure underwent multiple renovations, including fire repairs in 1910 and an adaptive reuse project in 2000. The recent rehabilitation carefully integrated the historic masonry walls and wood ceilings with modern updates, ensuring all new elements could be removed without damaging the original structure. Key improvements included expanding the children's section, adding a built-in stage for events, and installing energy-efficient systems and permeable pavers for stormwater management. Thoughtful design solutions, such as pivoting bookcases, created a seamless connection between the businesses while maintaining the historic character of the space."

In addition to Octavia's owners, the rehabilitation team included NANO LLC, Artisan Millshop, Gibbs Construction, Huseman & Associates, Batture. 

"Great at books! Not so great at art." That was the chalkboard message at Abalabix Books Crystal Lake, Ill., which noted: "Ever wonder why our sandwich board never displays great works of art? It’s because here at Abalabix we are great at discussing books but art? Not so much."

At Macmillan Children's Publishing Group:

Mary Van Akin has been promoted from director of school & library marketing to executive director of school & library marketing.

Lauren Wengrovitz has been promoted from associate marketing manager to marketing manager.

A Universe of Rainbows: Multicolored Poems for a Multicolored World by Matt Forrest Esenwine, illus. by Jamey Christoph (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers).

Today:
Fresh Air: Amanda Knox, author of Free: My Search for Meaning (Grand Central, $30, 9781538770719).

Tomorrow:
Sherri Shepherd Show: Elisabeth Hasselbeck, author of God's Masterpiece: An Adventure in Discovering Your Worth (WaterBrook, $14.99, 9780593796115).

Jimmy Kimmel Live: Chelsea Handler, author of I'll Have What She's Having (The Dial Press, $32, 9780593596579).

James Norton will star in Wavewalker: Breaking Free, a TV adaptation of Suzanne Heywood's bestselling memoir. Deadline reported that Norton's production company, Rabbit Track Pictures, will produce the series, which is written by Jack Thorne. Norton said that being involved in a four-part series like Thorne's Netflix hit Adolescence made the new project "very exciting." 

Heywood's memoir chronicles how, when she was seven, her parents took her on a trip sailing around the world that "became a grueling decade-long journey during which she was desperate to return home," Deadline noted.

Norton, who will play Heywood's father, had initially not planned to act in the project, but said as "a bit of boat man" who loves sailing, "it was an amazing role.... What starts as a dream as this roguish father paints this beautiful picture about this trip that is meant to take a year or two, takes about 10.... The father is on the one hand an incredibly inspiring, charismatic, imaginative and wonderful person--the father everyone dreams of having if they want a swallows and amazons lifestyle--but he is actually as well a deeply narcissistic and navel-gazing toxic person."

Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) has won the $20,000 Story Prize, which honors the author of "an outstanding collection of short fiction. Books by living authors, written in English and published in the U.S. in a calendar year, are eligible." The award is underwritten by the Chisholm Foundation.

Runners up were There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr. (Mariner Books) and Ghost Pains by Jessi Jezewska Stevens (And Other Stories). Each author receives $5,000.

Organizers described Highway Thirteen as "a collection of 12 skillfully written short stories that take place over the course of 78 years and explore the far-reaching effects of a serial killer's crimes without directly depicting the murderer or the killings."

The judges wrote, "Fiona McFarlane writes with psychological precision and a masterful sense of suspense. Each story is artfully constructed and the way they fit together, spanning 78 years, is nothing short of dazzling. Fiona McFarlane's book is a tour de force about the stories we tell, the surprising ways our lives connect, and the ripple effects of violence."

Highway Thirteen is Australian author McFarlane's fourth book of fiction and her second short story collection. She is the author of The Night Guest and The High Places, which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her short fiction has been published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Zoetrope: All-Story. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Story Prize director Larry Dark and founder Julie Lindsey selected the three finalists from among 107 short story collections published in 2024, representing 87 publishers or imprints. Three judges--writer and editor Elliott Holt, writer Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and bookseller Lucy Yu of Yu & Me Books, New York City--determined the winner.

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Ann Regan has won the 2025 Kay Sexton Award for her "significant contributions to and leadership in Minnesota's literary community." She will be honored at the 37th annual Minnesota Book Awards Ceremony in St. Paul on April 22.

Organizers wrote: "Regan retired in 2024 as the editor in chief at the Minnesota Historical Society Press, the oldest publisher in the state and the largest historical society press in the country, where she worked for 46 years. She acquired and edited books in Native American studies, ethnic studies, memoir, true crime, and politics."

The award panel praised the way Regan "has worked with writers throughout her career, her willingness to take a chance on an idea and help the author or editor develop that idea into a book. The panel stated that Regan has exemplified 'sheer dedication and devotion to literature... she is everything this award stands for.' "

For more about Regan's life and career, click here.

photo: Julie Fay Ashborn

As a Nancy Drew devotee, Kim Fay began writing when she was 12. She kept writing, and with a lot of perseverance, her first novel was published when she was 45. Between those years, she worked as an indie bookseller, lived in Vietnam, published a culinary travel memoir, and moved from Seattle to Los Angeles. She is the author of the #1 Indie Next bestseller Love & Saffron, and Kate & Frida (Putnam, March 11, 2025), a charming epistolary novel about books, cuisines, and hopes.

Handsell readers your book in 30 words or less:

An aspiring war correspondent in Paris, a bookseller in Seattle, the early 1990s, life in our 20s, indie bookselling, food, heartbreak, joy, and the true meaning of friendship.

On your nightstand now:

Ready for it! Rachel Carson's Under the Sea Wind, William Souder's Rachel Carson biography On a Farther Shore, Richard Powers's The Overstory, Elie Wiesel's The Night Trilogy, Margaret Renkl's The Comfort of Crows, Colum McCann's Apeirogon, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, Émile Zola's The Belly of Paris, Elizabeth Alexander's The Light of the World, Claire Keegan's Walk the Blue Fields, Niall Williams's History of the Rain, Pema Chödrön's Welcoming the Unwelcome, Thich Nhat Hanh's Good Citizens, Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Désirée Zamorano's Dispossessed, which I'm rereading because it's an essential book for these times. Based on America's mass deportation of people of Mexican descent in the 1930s, the novel follows the life of a young boy wrenched from his parents. Zamorano writes with honesty and tenderness about how demonizing entire populations destroys individual lives.

Favorite book when you were a child:

One junior high summer alone I read more than 50 books, so this question makes my brain ache. But I was a girl of my times, so I'm going to say Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume. This might have been the first time I thought, wow, this author really gets me.

Your top five authors:

Laurie Colwin, Penelope Lively, Mary Oliver, M.F.K. Fisher, and I'm leaving this last spot open so I don't hurt the feelings of Toni Morrison, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, Madeleine L'Engle, Emily St. John Mandel, Michael Ondaatje, Tembi Locke, and all the other favorite authors on my shelves.

Book you've faked reading:

Middlemarch by George Eliot. When I was younger, some stupid guy told me it was his favorite novel, so of course I said it was mine, too!

Book you're an evangelist for:

Since everyone I know has heard my pitch for Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin, I'm going to cheerlead for my latest discovery: This Is Happiness by Niall Williams. Thank you, Ann Patchett, for your essay in the New York Times that led me to it. The glorious, playful language! I spent so much time rereading sentences that it took me two months to finish this book.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I know I'm not answering this question as it's meant to be, but when I have a beloved book, I buy every version I come across. This is how I ended up with a cover like the gorgeous blue-and-orange watercolor on the Triad Panther special overseas edition of Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac, discovered in a bin in front of Vangsgaards Antikvariat og Forlag bookshop in Copenhagen.

Book you hid from your parents:

It wasn't the whole book, but the few pages torn from Judy Blume's Forever that were being passed around by my friends. Out of context, I'm not sure I even knew what those pages were about!

Book that changed your life:

Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger affected me in a profound way as a writer. I marveled at how she worked with timelines and points of view. It was a wonderful surprise to learn that fiction didn't have to be written just one way.

Favorite line from a book:

I have loved this line from Czesław Miłosz's poem "Elegy for N.N." for decades: "And the heart does not die when we think it should, we smile, there is tea and bread on the table."

Five books you'll never part with:

I was writing this when the wildfires broke out in L.A., and I had to pack to evacuate. These are the books I discovered I'd grabbed when I unpacked: my ragged Penguin paperback of Happy All the Time, my copy of Moon Tiger with the odd dent in the front cover, Mary Oliver's Devotions (both covers are decoupaged, and I write on the pages like it's a journal), my signed, first edition of Eve Babitz's Slow Days, Fast Company, and Judith Freeman's The Chinchilla Farm, which I ordered online a few years ago. When it arrived, it contained a startling ghost from my past, an inscription from Freeman to my ex-boyfriend (the inspiration for Sven in Kate & Frida) who passed away in 2005.

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

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. The first time I read it, I was so mesmerized by Hurston's writing that I often lost track of the story. I had to reread it again as soon as I finished it. Hurston has a luxurious command of her craft, pragmatic insight into the human spirit, and a rare ability to bring the two together in a way that takes a reader's breath away.

Authors you will buy every time their new book comes out:

I am a loyal reader, and I live for new Jesmyn Ward and Anne Michaels novels. Artistically, I believe Ward is one of the finest writers of our times, and I'm in awe of her ability to blend the intimate with the universal. A poet, Michaels has published only three novels, but each one is an exquisite meditation on the heartbreak and dazzling beauty of being human.

Two-time Newbery Medal winner Erin Entrada Kelly (Hello, Universe; The First State of Being) turns her immense talents to nonfiction in an inspiring middle-grade biography about Filipino hero Josefina "Joey" Guerrero. The spy and guerilla fighter overcame tremendous odds while supporting the Allied troops in the Philippines, and went on to win the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, but died in obscurity. At Last She Stood tells Guerrero's story with compassion and respect, and enables the young audience to appreciate the incredible depth of her courage and resilience.

Kelly's approachable account introduces Joey and swiftly builds momentum and intrigue with her spy activity during World War II. The formidable young woman faces mortal dangers as she delivers important messages that help the American and Filipino forces fight the Japanese. At the same time, she contends with the incredible pain and discomfort caused by her active Hansen's disease. Kelly depicts Joey's suffering with raw honesty. In the leprosarium, "there are no lights. There is no running water.... Joey quickly realizes... they are waiting to die." Joey is diagnosed with leprosy around the same time the Japanese occupy the Philippines, so she decides to spend what is left of her life in the guerilla movement supporting the Allies. Her condition means she is ignored and shunned, which allows her to bypass Japanese soldiers. Once the war ends, Joey receives permission to move to the United States, where she can be treated for--and cured of--her leprosy at the Carville Leprosarium in Louisiana.

Kelly's exemplary research offers fascinating knowledge about Guerrero as well as the Philippines, the history and horrors of leprosy ("lepers were once required to wear hoods and cloaks and ring a bell to announce their presence"), and World War II ("Prisoners, desperate for food, catch rats and pigeons and eat them. They pull weeds out of the ground and gobble them up."). When Joey died in 1996, "her friends weren't even aware that this diminutive Filipino woman had walked through war zones, carried secret messages for the Allied Forces, or spent much of her time in forced quarantine. They were shocked to discover the truth." At Last She Stood gives a remarkable woman the respect and recognition she deserves. Photographs, maps, sidebars, an author's note, and other supplemental materials enhance this already gripping biography. Kelly's nonfiction debut shows her incredible versatility--here's hoping it's only the first. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

Shelf Talker: A two-time Newbery Medal winner forays into nonfiction with a stunning biography about a courageous Filipino hero.