We hope booksellers have a lovely day tomorrow, the seventh annual Bookstore Romance Day. Feel free to send reports about your BRD festivities, with pictures if possible, to news@shelf-awareness.com.

Little Gay Bookstore will host a grand opening celebration on September 2 inside Stonewall Columbus at 1160 N. High St., Columbus, Ohio. NBC4 reported that the "partnership with Stonewall, central Ohio's leading LGBTQ+ organization, marks a major milestone for Little Gay, which has long aimed to foster a safe space for marginalized folks to find community while bonding over books."

The bricks-and-mortar bookshop has long been in the making for co-owners Lauren Branch and Reese Steiner, who originally planned to open it in 2023 at a different address. After a series of challenges, they postponed their plans and began selling books at local markets as well as online.

"We're just so excited, honestly, I don't think we thought we'd ever get this far. After years of doing this, it just doesn't feel real yet," said Branch. "November 2023 was when we had to pivot and we were like, 'OK, we really want to continue to do this, we just can't give up, everyone's so excited. That's when we moved into the market scene, and we've been able to completely do our online business."

The owners noted that the delay proved to be a blessing in disguise, since it led to the newfound partnership with Stonewall, which also allows the couple to operate the coffee shop, called Queer Beans, inside the bookstore.

"Along with books, coffee in general is also community building," Branch said. "You come in here and you want to talk with your friends over coffee, and that's what I always did growing up and, for us, that was relaxing."

Steiner added: "I'm really excited to hear people connecting, making community, drinking their coffee, talking about books; the excitement is growing. We did this for the LGBTQ+ community, but everyone is welcome no matter where they come from or who they are. Inclusivity means all, which is straight people, gay people, trans people, literally everybody."

San Antone Books, San Antonio, Tex., has closed after fewer than five months in business. Despite the challenging environment for indie bookstores, owners Alberto and Valentina Bisi "were hopeful their personal touch and curation would help the business stand out," the San Antonio Current reported, adding that the Bisis, who work in publishing, "will continue a life surrounded by literature--though this chapter has closed."

In a brief statement on social media as well as the bookstore's website, the owners wrote: "We are deeply sorry to inform you that we had to move back to Italy, close to our family. Therefore, we had to close our bookstore. We are refunding the unused credit of the gift cards and prepaid orders. Sorry for the inconvenience. It has been a great adventure, we met wonderful people. Thank you for your support and for your warm welcome. Farewell."

No additional context has been released for the sudden closure, the Current noted, adding that workers at Gravves Coffee, located next door, "didn't know anything more about the family's sudden departure but said they'll miss having the bookstore as neighbors."

Barnes & Noble will open a new store next year in Colorado Springs, Colo., the Gazette reported.

The new store will span roughly 18,000 square feet and will reside in a newly constructed building at 3173 Cinema Point, within the First & Main shopping center. It will feature B&N's new store design and will be the third B&N in Colorado Springs. 

B&N is aiming for a summer 2026 opening.

The print book market in the U.K. in the first seven months of 2025 has seen sales "broadly even against the previous year, although with a contraction in the number of books sold," the Bookseller reported.

From the beginning of January to the week ending July 26, book sales totaled more than £859 million (about $1.2 million), a 0.3% decline compared to the same period in 2024. Unit sales totaled 93.1 million, representing a 2.3% decline, though fiction was up 6%, to £281 million (about $376 million), even considering that 2024 was the category's all-time record. 

Noting that "fortunes have fluctuated with the seasons," the Bookseller wrote that at the end of March this year, units were tracking down 2.1%, with sales "ever so slightly up thanks in part to a higher average selling price. But by mid-June, things were looking slightly better--the value upside had tripled and while volume was still down, it had clawed some of it back and was down just 1.5%."

June's Independent Bookshop Week arrived along with the summer's first heatwave across the south of England to deliver one of the worst seven-day periods of the year, the Bookseller noted. During that important week, unit sales declined 9.7%, with value falling 7.7%. Since then, sales have been down every week compared to 2024, "at least in part due to consistently hot weather across some areas of the country, tempting shoppers away from the town centers and into the parks and beaches."

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The Coalition for Books in Aotearoa New Zealand has released the Mahi Tahi Work Together: A Strategic Plan for the Aotearoa New Zealand Book Sector 2025–2030, which is the culmination of the publishing sector "committing to increase the visibility and sales of books by local authors as a priority." The report is available here.

Books+Publishing reported that the report aligns with the government's Amplify: Creative and Cultural Strategy for New Zealand (2024–2030) and "highlights goals and action areas that will drive growth, sustainability and greater local and international recognition of New Zealand's literary work."

Chair of the Coalition for Books Melanie Laville-Moore said: "Despite the current economic and social headwinds facing all retail sectors, domestic publishing revenue grew by 5% in 2024, with a slight 2.4% increase in revenue also generated in 2023 compared to the year prior. Local book lovers are reading more novels written by NZ writers than ever before, across all genres: crime, contemporary, historical and literary fiction. The 'cultural cringe' days where Kiwis shied away from reading books written by their own are gone. One of the aims of collaborating as a sector is to capitalize on the hunger Kiwis are showing for stories by and about ourselves."

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In Ukraine, Readeat Misto, a new bookstore dedicated to Kyiv, will open in September near the Arsenalna metro station, the New Voice of Ukraine reported. Dmytro Felixov, founder of the Readeat bookstore chain, made the announcement on social media, noting that the bookshop will offer curated collections focused on the city.

Describing the bookstore as the "most personal" project, created for those "in love with the city and ready for new stories and routes, and about books where the city lives," Felixov added that it will offer books about other cities worldwide, "from New York and Paris to fictional towns in the novels of Fitzgerald, Gilbert, or Stephen King." --Robert Gray

Cypriot bookseller Ruth Keshishian, "who had an encyclopedic knowledge and understanding of Cyprus's history and literature, and owned the Moufflon Bookshop in Nicosia for decades," died August 6, Cyprus Mail reported. She was 81.

Ruth Keshishian

Her brother opened the bookshop in 1967, catering to international tastes, schools, musicians, and more. Ruth Keshishian returned to Cyprus and took over the shop in 1995. 

"For years, Moufflon Bookshop stocked books in various languages and themes, featuring a large collection of new and used, in-print and out-of-print books on Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean," Cyprus Mail wrote, adding: "In 2020, the bookshop moved to new premises and reinvented itself to meet changing customer demands. Apart from modernizing the shop itself and taking online orders and delivering too, the Moufflon streamlined its stock and focused on what it knew best: Cyprus."

Many tributes to Keshishian were posted on social media, including one by the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, which noted: "Moufflon Bookshop was always one of the first ports of call for generations of archaeologists working on Cyprus and a frequent stop for those who live here and Ruth always reserved a warm welcome for us all.

"The shop was always alive with myriads of volumes in piles on the floor, in boxes, on the shelves and Ruth knew everything about all of them. More than a tireless archivist of Cypriot book production, she was a guarantor of its continuity and continuation.... We will miss her warmth and wisdom terribly."

The Australian High Commission posted: "Over the years, Ruth formed a special bond with the many Australian archaeologists who visited Cyprus. Ruth, a proud independent shop owner, was a pillar of the cultural and intellectual community in Cyprus. Our thoughts are with her family, friends and the community she nurtured so lovingly. She will be missed."

On Tuesday, August 5, the Detroit Tigers held their first Book Club night, featuring hometown hero Lauren Roberts, author of the bestselling Powerless series, who threw out the first pitch of the game against the Minnesota Twins. Roberts also participated in a pregame author q&a, and ticketholders received an exclusive Tigers edition of Powerless and a limited-edition jersey inspired by the book. From left: Paws, Lauren Roberts, pitcher Casey Mize. (photo: Allison Farrand/Detroit Tigers)

Celebrating the "dog days of summer reading" (sidewalk chalkboard message), Greedy Reads Bookstore in Baltimore, Md., posted on Instagram: "The weather is beautiful and we are out here until 6 in Fells and 7 in Remington! [Pic] of Katya and Julia (and Audie!) in front of Fells with short stacks of beautiful books."

Saskia den Boon has been promoted to marketing coordinator, school and library for Candlewick Press, Holiday House, and Peachtree. Her previous title was marketing assistant, school and library.

The AARP Caregiver Answer Book by Barry J. Jacobs and Julia L. Mayer (Guilford Press).

Alice Kellen's 2023 novel All That We Never Were is being made into a feature film produced by Pepe Bastón, Monica Gil-Rodriguez and Nancy Cartwright (The Simpsons). Deadline reported that Gil-Rodriguez and Cartwright's Cre84U Entertainment has co-produced the adaptation, which just wrapped production in Spain. A 2026 release is anticipated.

Starring Maxi Iglesias (Valeria), Sebastián Zurita (How to Survive Being Single), and Margarida Corceiro (Citas Barcelona), and directed by Jorge Alonso (Camino de la Suerte), the film "follows 19-year-old Leah Jones as she navigates a coming-of-age journey in the wake of a tragic car accident that claims her parents. Relocated to a coastal town under the care of her brother's best friend, Axel Nguyen, Leah grapples with grief, haunting nightmares and a fractured sense of self," Deadline wrote.

"We are honored to bring this deeply moving story to life--one that captivated us from the very first read of Alice Kellen's beautiful novel," said Bastón and Gil-Rodriguez. "With the powerful chemistry between Maxi Iglesias, Margarida Corceiro and Sebastian Zurita, we believe this adaptation will fully capture the emotional essence and spirit of the book."

The Australian Crime Writers Association has released a shortlist for the Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction, which "showcases our newest Australian writers and the diversity of style and stories they bring to the crime fiction genre." This year's shortlisted titles are:

Down the Rabbit Hole by Shaeden Berry
A Town Called Treachery by Mitch Jennings
The Chilling by Riley James
All You Took From Me by Lisa Kenway
Everywhere We Look by Martine Kropkowski
Those Opulent Days by Jacquie Pham

The other Ned Kelly Awards category shortlists (true crime, international, crime fiction) have not been announced yet. Overall winners will be named in September.

Miranda Mellis is the author of Crocosmia (Nightboat Books, August 5, 2025), a novel (or parable) of art, adventure, and radical politics, set in a world on the precipice. She has also written three novellas--The Revisionist, The Spokes, and The Quarry--and a short story collection, None of This Is Real. Her poetry and nonfiction include The Revolutionary, Demystifications, Unconsciousness Raising, and Materialisms. With Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz, she was a founding co-editor at The Encyclopedia Project. She is a professor at Evergreen State College in Washington State.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Crocosmia describes a potential world on the other side of climate change and autocracy: a transformed world of ecological healing and liberation from collective suffering.

On your nightstand now:

Warlike, Howling, Pure by Areïon--it's always the time for Dionysian anti-fascism. Life-Destroying Diagrams by Eugenie Brinkema, a wildly brilliant book of film theory that limns how horror is structured. The Magic of the State by Michael Taussig, on the mystique of state power.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Later, reading Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea was revelatory: you mean you can talk back to the classics? Perhaps every family has someone locked up somewhere, some figure banished, hidden, elided, whose story bears reclamation. And maybe Crocosmia shares something of Jane Eyre's gothic form, its radical discontinuities and intense emotions.

Your top five authors:

I'm going to do three pairs, couples across time: Marcel Proust and Etel Adnan for poetics of memory, at opposite ends of the 20th century--they died a century apart. Henry James and Robert Glück for the finest sentences. Franz Kafka and César Aira for fiction as slapstick philosophy.

Book you've faked reading:

Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit. A couple of years ago I joined a study group to finally read it and only went twice. Once during Occupy I found myself in a seminar led by the poet Keston Sutherland and he recommended reading Hegel stoned. But I don't smoke weed, so what to do?

Book you're an evangelist for:

Visceral Poetics by Eleni Stecopoulos on chronic illness/chronicity, theater and poetry, and medical pluralism as a key aspect of disability justice. Her most recent book, Dreaming in the Fault Zone, explores similar terrain with an illuminating discussion of the use of divination in ancient Greek medicine.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Touching Feeling by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, which contains two formative (and canonical) essays: "Pedagogy of Buddhism" and "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading."

Book you hid from your parents:

I never had to hide books. My family's idea of fun is everyone sitting around reading together. The delightfully raunchy comix we grew up with were strewn around by the adults.

Book that changed your life:

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin. The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir was also a game changer for me and right now, for the first time, I am noticing that both books have "ambiguity" in their title! The Dispossessed depicts a utopia that is realistic: life will still suck when we are finally free of classism, domination, and exploitation, but much less so, and for more worthy reasons. Anarres is free of capitalism, but is ecologically difficult to survive on, as Earth increasingly is, due to climate change.

Favorite line from a book:

It's between Simone Weil: "Contradiction is the criterion of the real" from Gravity and Grace, and Hélène Cixous: "I write by the other light" from "Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey," where Cixous writes on having severe myopia which becomes both a method and a metaphor for visionary writing, resonating with the ancient mythopoetic of the blind seer. She describes sight as limiting--"Solar daylight blinds me to the visionary day"--and myopia as capacitating: "Even with my eyes wide open at noon I am able to not see." Édouard Glissant also undoes conflations of light with knowledge. Decoloniality is a "right to opacity." He writes, in Sun of Consciousness, of a diffractive, holographic awareness, of coming to "know one's projection in another light, the shadow of what one will be."

Five books you'll never part with:

It's so hard to narrow down, but if I constellate them it's easier, so I'm going over five again! Shōbōgenzō by Dōgen Zenji, The Imperative by Alphonso Lingis, Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici, Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, The Problem with Work by Kathi Weeks, and The Psychoanalytic Mystic by Michael Eigen. Lingis and Rankine show the inseparability of politics and form, aesthetics and ethics, offering language equal to experience. Eigen and Dōgen help us deal with having a mind, a psyche. Weeks and Federici teach what has happened to the worker and the witch across the world for the past 500 years.

And of course, I'll never part with my mother's faded, stained copy of Lenin's The State and Revolution. Her annotations are in pink sharpie!

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

Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser, whom I read thanks to Lisa Robertson who told me that my first book, The Revisionist, reminded her of Walser, whom I had never heard of. Come to think of it, The Baudelaire Fractal, Robertson's wonderful "poet's novel" evokes something of Walser's antic performativity. The main protagonist in The Baudelaire Fractal, Hazel, "assumes" Baudelaire's corpus becomes, in a magical way (reading does this), its author.

On utopias and dystopias:

Going back to The Dispossessed and adding Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower; Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos series;and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, all of these may be read doubly as works of art and forms of guidance, sources of moral vision. Taking seriously the ways in which representation participates in shaping reality, would it be helpful politically (to put it modestly, as art has its limitations) if there were as many, or more, utopias on offer (however ambiguous and ambivalent) as there are dystopias?

A young woman's intellectual blossoming sets the tone for Lily King's Heart the Lover, an enchanting story about the pursuit of love and the exquisite, bittersweet regret of paths not taken. Taking stock of the relationships that shaped her life, a famous writer returns to her senior year of college and to the one great love that got away.

The first part of Heart the Lover is an entertaining romp of a college drama set at an unnamed university. Uninspired by her classes, the narrator is practically sleep-walking toward graduation until she meets two exceptional scholars, Sam and Yash, who ignite her creative ambitions and sharpen her understanding of her potential. What was only "paltry dabbling" before she met them transforms into a mission to complete an honors thesis in creative writing. They take to calling her "Jordan" and it isn't until the end of the novel we learn the narrator's true name, one that fans of King's Writers & Lovers will happily recognize.

Jordan's college experience has been limited by the fact that she works several nights a week to stay ahead of her student loans. Now, she dates Sam, although his celibacy is a point of tension in their relationship, and spends all her time in the house he and Yash share, an elegant home filled with books and belonging to a professor away on sabbatical.

Jordan's awareness that she is "unbearably naïve" is offset by her nonchalant sense of humor and sharp eye for irony, and she holds her own through marathon card game sessions with Sam's friends. Although Jordan is dating Sam, it's charismatic Yash with whom she develops an undeniable connection and whose magnetic pull she can't resist. It makes for a crowded threesome, with one person at the loneliest corner of their triangle at any given time.

Heart the Lover is streaked through with tragedy and betrayal, some of its characters undone by "life's tricks." King (Euphoria) is not one for dramatic plot flourishes; instead she calibrates Jordan's story with superbly timed, understated revelations and dazzling dialogue that will keep readers riveted. Misfortune has a clarifying effect for the characters, exposing the worn and comforting patina of their friendship and forcing a reconciliation with past mistakes. There may not be second chances exactly, but King allows for Sam, Yash, and Jordan's destinies to collide spectacularly far into the future. --Shahina Piyarali

Shelf Talker: In this enchanting story about a student's intellectual awakening and the bittersweet regret of paths not taken, a famous writer reflects on her college years and the one great love that got away.