The Best Bookstore in Palm Springs has reopened in its new home in Palm Springs, Calif., NBC Palm Springs reported. The bookstore, which announced earlier this summer that it would be relocating due to a dispute with its landlord, now resides at 113 La Plaza, within the historic Plaza Shopping Center. The new space is larger than the bookstore's previous home and has better foot traffic, co-owner Paul Bradley Carr told NBC. He also called the plaza "one of the most iconic places in Palm Springs."

The dispute with the previous landlords came about after the bookstore's air conditioning failed over Fourth of July weekend. When Carr and store co-owner Sarah Lacy reached out to the shop's landlord about getting the unit repaired, the landlord refused, and the bookstore was left without AC in an area that often sees extreme heat in the summer. 

Eventually, the landlord offered to pay either 50% of the repair costs for the AC or to let them out of their lease early; Carr and Lacy chose the latter option. Once they decided to move, Lacy and Carr ran a "buy two, get one free" sale at the store and began raising funds to help with the move.

"Palm Springs will forever be a city with a bookstore if I have anything to do with it," Carr told NBC.

Monstera's Books, Overland Park, Kan., suffered smoke damage from an electrical fire that started early Thursday morning at Torreador Mexican Restaurant next door, the Johnson County Post reported. "The restaurant sustained moderate fire damage, but considerable smoke damage," said Overland Park Fire Department media manager Jason Rhodes. "The adjoining bookstore suffered moderate smoke damage as well."

In an Instagram post, co-owner Kate Wieners and her team noted: "Our neighbors at The Torreador had a fire last night and our store took on lots of smoke and water damage. Our building is still standing tall, and we will open again soon. We are temporarily closed while we clean up, restock inventory, and make sure our building is safe to return to.

"If you'd like to support us while we work to re-open, you can buy a gift card from our website... or you can purchase from @bookshop.org, a website that shares profits with a favorite bookstore of your choosing. We will see you soon, neighbor."

Monstera's opened in March 2024, at 7930 Floyd St. in downtown Overland Park.

Books Across Borders has chosen its 2025 Fall Fellows--U.S. booksellers who will visit the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Guadalajara International Book Fair.

Vannessa Martini of Green Apple Books in San Francisco, Calif., will attend the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. She is the lead buyer at Green Apple and previously bought books for City Lights, where she learned from Paul Yamazaki the value of a good conversation over a good drink. Her first job was at her hometown library shelving books, and she has continued to shelve books ever since.

Three booksellers will attend the Guadalajara fair in December:

Barbara Cerda, co-founder of La Revo Books in Milwaukee, Wis., the state's only Latinx-focused bookstore. This year she is celebrating five years of Milwaukee's Biggest Free Library, an event that promotes literacy by bringing thousands of free books to families. She serves on the board of directors of the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association. Through her community work and dedication to accessible learning spaces, she hopes to inspire conversations about history and identity.

Stephen Krause, co-founder, book buyer, and a bookseller at Alienated Majesty Books in Austin, Tex. He has been in bookselling for over a decade at shops across the country, including Farley's Bookshop in New Hope, Pa., where he was introduced to small presses; Panoply Books in Lambertville, N.J., where he sold collectible art books and 400-year-old crumbling tomes; as well as Half Price Books on North Lamar Boulevard in Austin, the second largest Half Price in the country. His most recent gig before opening Alienated Majesty was at Malvern Books in Austin, a store renowned for exclusively stocking small press titles and works in translation. Now, at Alienated Majesty Books, he has helped to curate one of the largest selections of international literature, poetry, nonfiction, and comics in the region. He has also worked for the publishing houses New York Review Books and Dalkey Archive Press.

Lisa Moser, manager of Julia de Burgos Bookstore, the only bilingual, Latine-focused bookstore in Philadelphia, Pa. As part of the nonprofit Puerto Rican cultural center Taller Puertorriqueño, the bookstore is a vital literary and cultural hub for diasporic communities, showcasing authors from every Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking country in Latin America. During her five years as manager, Moser has expanded the store's visibility and impact through a carefully curated selection of books and community partnerships. She has also served on the organizing committee of Philadelphia's Latin American Book Fair. Connecting readers with books that reflect and affirm their intersecting identities is one of her greatest joys.

Late this fall, Books Across Borders will announce the Spring 2026 Fellows, who will attend the RISE Bookselling Conference in Verona, Italy; the Salone del Libro in Turin, Italy; and other fairs. All booksellers who applied during the 2025-26 application season remain eligible for these opportunities.

Books Across Borders is supported by Ingram Content Group, Frankfurter Buchmesse, FIL Guadelajara, Salone Libro Torino, RISE Bookselling, Europa Editions, Other Press, the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, Princeton University Press, NorthSouth Books, Shelf Awareness, the American Booksellers Association, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association, and the Great Lakes Independent Publishers Association.

Waterstones will open two new bookshops in John Lewis department stores, following the success of the branch operating in the company's flagship Oxford St. location, which opened last year, the Bookseller reported. Waterstones at John Lewis Cheadle will open August 29 and Waterstones at John Lewis Bluewater, the second Waterstones bookshop in the shopping center, will make its debut September 12. 

Waterstones COO Kate Skipper said the company was "thrilled to be continuing our partnership with John Lewis and unveiling two new Waterstones bookshops... as we aim to bring a bookshop to even more readers. Both shops will be fully ranged bookshops and staffed with expert Waterstones booksellers, adding personal reading recommendations and extensive bookshop ranges to these flagship John Lewis stores."

Katie Papakonstantinou, director of hospitality and services for John Lewis, commented: "We're delighted to be expanding our partnership.... The response to our first bookshop on Oxford Street was overwhelmingly positive, proving that our customers love the experience of being able to browse a curated collection of books as part of their John Lewis visit. This is a key part of our strategy to invest in our existing stores, enhancing them as exciting destinations for our customers and showcasing the experiential role that physical retail can play."

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In Australia, Mark Newman will step down from his role as CEO of Dymocks Retail after five years at the helm, Books+Publishing reported. He was appointed managing director in 2020, replacing Steve Cox. The board said it has "commenced a leadership transition process and will provide a further update on future arrangements in due course."

Dymocks Group chair John Forsyth said, "On behalf of the board, I want to thank Mark for his leadership and dedication during the past five years. His contribution during a complex period has helped position Dymocks Retail for continued success."

Newman commented: "I would like to thank the Dymocks Group board for giving me the opportunity to lead one of Australia's most well-known and respected brands and to be able to work with such a dedicated and passionate team across both our company employees and franchisees. I am honored to have played my part in a short period in its long history, and I look forward to keeping an eye on its continued success."

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In its latest "Shop Talk" series, Quill & Quire interviewed the trio behind Good Dog Books in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Canada: Michael Higgins, Madelaine Higgins, and Tyler LeBlanc. Among the highlights from the q&a was this one from Leblanc:

What has been most surprising or unexpected about opening a bookstore or about your first year in business?
It has been the demographics of our customers. We see tons of young people coming in looking for books. Teenagers looking to read the classics, tweens picking up the next book in their favorite series, and folks in their early 20s picking up titles the day they are released. Often people doubt that younger generations are reading, but from what I've seen here, that is absolutely not true. --Robert Gray

Marc Estrin, an author, publisher, and activist who wrote 17 novels and two memoirs, died August 10. He was 86. Seven Days reported that Estrin and his wife, Donna Bister, also "started and operated Fomite Press, the 14-year-old 'postcapitalist' publishing company that returns 80% of book revenue to authors."

Estrin's fiction works include Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (2002), The Education of Arnold Hitler (2005), Golem Song (2006), The Lamentations of Julius Marantz (2007), The Annotated Nose (2008, artwork by Delia Robinson), Skulk (2009), The Good Doctor Guillotin (2009), When the Gods Come Home to Roost (2011), and Kafka's Roach (2017). 

Fomite has published about 350 titles, "primarily literary fiction, poetry and 'odd birds,' works that elude classification," Seven Days noted. The company has published about 20 books with the legendary Bread and Puppet theater company, Bister said.

Painter and sculptor Delia Robinson, who has illustrated books for Fomite Press and had known Estrin since she was 16, told Seven Days that he treated everyone as if their ideas were valuable and worth discussing, adding: "He really was a person of integrity in many astonishing ways, and that included helping other people to try to learn, to jump a little higher and to discover the best things they could do."

On his website, Estrin described The Insect Dialogues, one of his nonfiction books, in third person: "In 2016, Marc Estrin decided to publish Kafka's Roach, the unedited version of the manuscript that a dozen years earlier Fred Ramey had acquired, edited, and published under the title Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa. Estrin's decision raises questions about the editor's role in the life of a book, the trajectory of one author's career, and whether a published novel is a stable thing anymore. All of that is worth a wide discussion, and so Ramey asked his erstwhile author to engage in a colloquy. The Insect Dialogues is the record of the e-mail conversation that ensued."

After Estrin's death, Ramey, co-publisher of Unbridled Books, recalled their exchange and editorial relationship: "It's been about 25 years, since I published Marc's debut novel at BlueHen/Putnam. (I published it a second time at Unbridled Books.) In all, I published, I think, six of his first seven novels. Marc was prolific and irrepressible, but he was not in any way uneditable. On the contrary. What he wrote was always brave and imaginative and unexpected. After he and Donna founded Fomite Press, he would often encourage my  work as he did for so many people. I think that was an extension of his activism. After 25 years of our exchanges, I imagine I'll keep wondering about all the books Marc didn't get to write."

Burlington, Vt., City Councilor Gene Bergman, who knew Estrin as a friend and comrade in peace and justice work, said, "Marc had a philosopher's sensibility" and was "an intellectual in the truest sense of the word."

Bergman's wife, Wendy Coe, who co-founded the Peace & Justice Center where Estrin was hired as the first paid staffer in 1984, told Seven Days that while Estrin could be curmudgeonly at times, he was positive and always thinking about ways to change the world. "He did enough thinking for a thousand people."

Author Ron Jacobs had just finished a piece, "Marc Estrin's Fictions of Alienation," for CounterPunch when he received news of his friend's death. "I will write a tribute to him once I gather my thoughts. I'll miss him as a friend, editor and co-conspirator," he noted.

In the tribute, which was published this morning in CounterPunch, Jacobs wrote: "I don’t want to make Marc sound too serious because he wasn’t. Consciously or not, he reminded me of the trickster more than once. While our work may have been serious, his approach reminded me of a quote attributed to Emma Goldman about dancing and revolution. I never saw Marc dance, so this seems like a more honest paraphrase: 'If I can’t laugh, I don’t want to be in your revolution.' "

Author Tessa Bailey threw the first pitch at the Miami Marlins home game (they lost to the Houston Astros, 7-3) on Tuesday, August 5, to celebrate the fourth book in her Big Shot series, Pitcher Perfect (Avon, September 9). Pictured: Bailey, Billy the Marlin, and Kaleigh Fowler and Gabriela Enriquez, both with the Marlins.

"New chalkboard just dropped at 14th street!" Solid State Books in Washington, D.C., posted on Facebook, along with photos of the shop's latest and pointed sidewalk chalkboard messages: "All Natural De-ICEer... Read to learn basic empathy and critical thinking skills" and "Land of the Free D.C." 

Phoenix Books, Essex Junction, Vt., shared a photo of the shop's sales floor display that "is ready for Taylor Swift's new album! Whether you are a long time fan or brand new swiftie, we've got the books you need to get ready for The Life of a Showgirl! Come by and share your theories."

At the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group:

Christopher Metts has joined KDPG as an associate marketing manager for Pantheon Books. He has worked in marketing at several companies, including the Liberty NYC, Aetrex Inc., and WMCHealth.

Lauren Cohn has joined the creative services team as marketing associate. She was an intern at the Book Group and is a recent graduate of the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism.

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Emily Afifi, formerly a publicist at Wunderkind PR, has joined Blackstone Publishing as a publicist.

Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film by Alison Griffiths (Columbia University Press).

Apple TV+ and Tom Winchester's Pure Fiction have acquired the rights to Barry Eisler's bestselling espionage series featuring "ex-CIA operative John Rain. He is a half-Japanese, half-American assassin who specializes in making his kills look like natural causes," Deadline reported. The option covers 18 novels and four short stories.

The adaptation as a TV series will be produced by Pure Fiction in association with See-Saw Films, with Winchester (Shōgun) and Gillis (Slow Horses) both expected to be executive producers alongside Eisler, Deadline noted.
 
"With features like F1 The Movie and shows like Dark Matter and The Studio, Apple's quality and range has become the best in the business," Eisler said. "And as Slow Horses has proven over the course of four glorious seasons so far, Apple's executives have a particular feel for the dangers, intricacies, and absurdities of espionage. Add Tom Winchester and Simon Gillis... and you have all the makings of a dream team for a show about a contract killer living in the Tokyo demimonde."

"This was an exceptionally competitive process," said literary agent Laura Rennert, who was involved in the negotiations. "There were numerous impressive parties vying not just for the rights to John Rain, but for the rights to Barry's other series, too. But in the end the opportunity to work with Apple, Pure Fiction, and See-Saw was indisputable. They all recognize the promise not just of a fantastic Rain show, but of building out and connecting all Barry's thrillers into a Killer Collective Universe."

The Sunburst Award Society released shortlists for the C$3,000 (about US$2,170) Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, which will be presented this fall again after a four-year hiatus. This year's shortlisted titles are:

Mood Swings by Frankie Barnet
Bird Suit by Sydney Hegele
Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson
Code Noir by Canisia Lubrin
A Seal of Salvage by Clayton B. Smith

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The shortlist has been selected for the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize, which celebrates the best popular science writing from around the world. The winner will be revealed October 1 and receives £25,000 (about $33,830). The other shortlisted titles receive £2,500 ($3,383) each.

The shortlist:
Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and our Future by Neil Shubin
Music as Medicine: How We Can Harness Its Therapeutic Power by Daniel Levitin
Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist's Patients Taught Him About the Brain by Masud Husain
The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: A True Story of Science and Sacrifice in a City under Siege by Simon Parkin
Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction by Sadiah Qureshi
Your Life Is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters and How We Can Do It Better by Tim Minshall

photo: Phoebe Orner

Peter Orner is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction and recipient of four Pushcart Prizes. He is chair of the English and Creative Writing Department at Dartmouth College. The Gossip Columnist's Daughter (Little, Brown, August 12, 2025) is the story of a contemporary writer's epic and comic quest, which weaves together family drama and a true-life unsolved case of a Hollywood starlet's death.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Revenge, it's about revenge.

On your nightstand now:

An old radio I can't get to work. Pills. Patrick Modiano's Ballerina. The First and Last King of Haiti by Marlene L. Daut. The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler. I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante. Edward Hirsch's new one, My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy. The Shared World by Vievee Francis. Berlin Stories by Robert Walser. More pills.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill. Has any book, kid book or not a kid book, explained human relations, or economics, any better?

Your top five authors:

Marilynne Robinson
John Edgar Wideman
Andre Dubus
Isaac Babel
Gina Berriault

Can I have six?

Juan Rulfo.

No, wait, seven.

Wright Morris.

Shit.

Eudora Welty.

Okay, one more.

Primo Levi.

Damn, can't leave off Mavis.

Mavis Gallant.

A belligerent drunk genius is yelling at me from the bookshelf.

Who have you turned to when you've got nothing? Huh? Who always bailed you out and gave you an idea when you had nothing, zero, zilch? And what happens when push comes to shove? You forget...

Faulkner Faulkner Faulkner.

Book you've faked reading:

A friend's book, can't say which.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Plains Song by the criminally forgotten Nebraskan Wright Morris. Not to be confused with a perfectly good book with a similar title by Kent Haruf called Plainsong. I talk about Morris's Plains Song to whomever will listen. Even so, I've been an extraordinarily unsuccessful evangelist as I don't think I've converted a single person to it. Even my New York Times piece didn't do any good. Though I did receive a nice note from a postal carrier who said she was a fan.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Patrick Modiano's Ballerina. Just yesterday. Gorgeous black cover with a ghost dancer on the cover. That said, I'd buy a new Modiano if the cover was a sewer cover.

Book you hid from your parents:

Like everybody else in the '80s, Forever by Judy Blume. I kept it under my mattress, not that my parents would have cared. I think I hid it just to be hiding it. Along with the Penthouse magazines I stole from my father's stash under his bed.

Book that changed your life:

Have I mentioned Plains Song by Wright Morris? A line on the first page goes like this: "Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe, in the teeth of the life we endure in the present?" I read it every year and every time the novel floors me. Nothing much happens, or at least not much is made of what happens; it's more about the passage of time. I've learned more about time from Plains Song than I have by the passage of actual time.

Favorite line from a book:

" 'Tis a muddle." Stephen Blackpool in Dickens's Hard Times. I probably mutter this line to myself 12 times a day. Isn't so much of every day a muddle?

Five books you'll never part with:

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
Women in Their Beds by Gina Berriault
The Plain in Flames by Juan Rulfo
All Stories Are True by John Edgar Wideman
The Long-Winded Lady by Maeve Brennan

(6) My first edition of A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago by Ben Hecht. Out of my cold dead hands.

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

Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March. Somehow a requiem for the Austro-Hungarian Empire--and who really gives a damn about the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire--becomes an elegy for everything that's long gone, that we can't retrieve but can't stop thinking about.

Why do you read so many dead people?

Good question.

Why do questionnaires like this always cause stress and anxiety?

Because though my sales record would indicate that I am especially bad at it, I feel like I'm somehow performing for a sale. Like when you're in a store and the security guard looks at you askance like you are going to steal something and you feel guilty even though you haven't (at least not yet) intended to steal anything. You know what I mean? Or is this just me?

Cartoonist and stand-up comedian Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell (Murder Book) intimately mines her complex relationship with what she can/wants to/will/attempts to eat in The Joy of Snacking: A Graphic Memoir About Food, Love & Family. What lingers longest is her wide-open vulnerability--guaranteed to invoke frustrated, sympathetic, concerned, laugh-out-loud, shocked reactions.

The Joy of Snacking opens in 2024, with Campbell brimming with nervous energy (peppered with plenty of f-bombs), in anticipation of an imminent significant event, and ends with exhilaration over the gloriously revealing experience. Snacks are (always) integral--this time, it's Cool Ranch Doritos grabbed last-minute from a nearby bodega. Over the almost 400 pages in between, Campbell traces decades of her personal history that culminate in her sparkling "slay"ing debut before a sold-out Manhattan audience.

"My truest self is... a 5-year-old," Campbell confesses, specifically referring to her eating habits: even into her 30s, grilled cheese ("I fucking LOVE Kraft Cheese") cut diagonally and prepped for ketchup-dipping remains her go-to must-have. She was "told [she] was a really easygoing kid... UNTIL IT CAME TO FOOD." Hamburgers, bananas, marinara were potentially life threatening. Rather than meals, Campbell preferred snacking. In childhood, she didn't have the words to explain she was "legitimately terrified of food." Body issues and disordered eating plagued her well into adulthood, by which time she didn't know the difference between "hungry or nauseous." Prominently interwoven with her interactions with parents, siblings, friends, lovers is her four-year, on-and-off relationship with E.: "Sometimes it feels like we're in a bad romantic comedy. A wine salesman who loves to cook meets a cartoonist whose ideal meal is popcorn and cheap wine? Let the comedy of errors begin!"

"Drawing has saved my life," Campbell declares. Her astute illustrations capture quotidian scenes, particularly involving food: confronting hunger, seeking satiety, planning meals, anticipating culinary outings--and, especially for Campbell--facing comestible confrontations. Her hand lettering, varying in size and heft, add an inviting familiarity. She sublimely uses color, with black-and-white reserved for the most disturbing, devastating moments she might rather mute. However, humor is never far, particularly in pairing certain memories with distinct snacks that continue to nourish Campbell--"midnight toast," "(PEELED) Apple and Peanut Butter," "adult lunchables." Her not-quite recipes are also appended with telling "suggested use[s]": "healing rituals," "always eat near a dog so they can clean your fingers," "3 P.M. anxiety attacks." In wholeheartedly embracing all the nuances of the "joy of snacking," Campbell commands the stage to finally "live my life the way that I want." --Terry Hong

Shelf Talker: Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell learns to takes control of her life--and her eating--in her deliciously gratifying graphic memoir The Joy of Snacking.