Seekers Bookshop held a soft opening over the weekend in Colville, Wash., the Spokesman-Review reported.

The bookstore carries general-interest titles for all ages. Alongside books, owners Lisa and Buddy Wilson offer crystals, meditation supplies, candles, jewelry, and other nonbook items. Their event plans include book clubs, author signings, and cooking classes that will be held in a kitchen space that is still under renovation.

Seekers Bookshop resides in a building at 270 S. Main St. that the Wilsons purchased two years ago. It was built in the early 20th century and required significant reinforcement work before the Wilsons could begin renovations for the bookstore.

"We love bookstores," Buddy Wilson told the Spokesman-Review. "They're a good place to hang out, and it seemed like that was one of the things that Colville needed."

"If this can connect people to more books and more worldviews in a small town, I think that that's super important for the world we live in today," said Lisa Wilson.

Ten Trees Books has reopened in its new, permanent location at 29 N. Main St. in Natick, Mass., thanks to some help from a "book brigade" that moved 8,000 books across the street from its former, temporary location at The Hive, a retail incubator space that had housed the bookshop for its first year, MetroWest Daily News reported. A grand opening celebration is scheduled for November 7.

Owner Kim Rickard said that when customers learned of the upcoming move, they were eager to help: "People started to say, 'I want to help,' let's do a book brigade. I probably had 35 people ask me if they could help move. It was literally a human chain, hand to hand, arm to arm. It was such a great experience, because people met their neighbors and they started talking about the books. It was a very community-building event."

Rickard's inspiration for opening a bookstore in Natick came after she moved to town with her family and was looking for a place to meet new people. "With her lifelong love for books, she wanted to create a place that would help others find the same type of community she was looking for," MetroWest Daily News wrote. 

She added that the bookstore's inventory is carefully curated to reflect the interests and spirit of Natick residents: "I really want to emphasize the Natick community, because I think they're exceptional in their vision of what they want the town to be."

The Flora Shelves, a bookstore and floral studio, will open in Appleton, Wis., early next year, the Post Crescent reported.

Located at 425 W. Walter St., the Flora Shelves will carry romance and fantasy books along with book-related gifts and merchandise. While the bookstore will occupy most of the space, a portion will be set aside for a floral studio. The space will include seating and tables for customers, and event plans include both book events and floral events.

Founder Heather Vale also owns a floral business called Wed & Willow, which she has run for approximately eight years and intends to combine with the Flora Shelves once the latter opens. Vale is an avid reader and told the Post-Courier she's been "dying for a bookstore like this in the area that showcases my favorite reads, new releases, and just having a place to go shop. I'm just excited to open. I feel like we deserve a bookstore like this in the Fox Cities."

Nye Beach Book House

Nye Beach Book House in Newport,, Ore., is set to close in mid-November. Owner Ulrike Bremer made the decision after learning that the building's owners would be selling the property, KLCC reported. 

The location had been a bookstore for 10 years before Bremer took it over in 2004 after moving to Newport from the San Francisco Bay Area. She was looking for a quieter, slower-paced life, after a career as a bioengineer. 

Reflecting on the shop's legacy, Bremer said, "The most rewarding aspect has been the customers. I'm grateful for their patronage. It was fun having them around. The 22 years were wonderful because of the customers--and because of the dogs." Her own bookshop dog, Maggie, "is very sad because she's not going to get nearly as many pets now. And now she's out of a job." 

After selling off the store's remaining inventory and closing, Bremer plans to continue with her other passion: dog training.

South African author Zoë Wicomb, "who wrote from self-exile in Scotland and drew global praise for fiction that rendered with nuance and wit the life of mixed-race people like herself during and after apartheid," died October 13, the New York Times reported. She was 76. Wicomb left South Africa in 1970 to put, as she later described it, "the whole oppressiveness" she felt under apartheid behind her. She taught secondary school before embarking on a literary career in her 30s.

She wrote four novels, two short-story collections and a book of essays, and became, as South African author and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, put it, "the most significant of the writers who quit South Africa in the 1970s to get away from the grinding pressures of apartheid.... From her eyrie in Scotland, yet with roots deep in pre-colonial Africa, she explored in one book after another the modalities of South African experience, in language whose wit and irony masked a deep seriousness."

Wicomb's first book, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, was published in 1987 and received enthusiastic reviews, while her first novel, David's Story (2000), "is set during South Africa's transition out of apartheid." A collection of loosely connected stories, Cape Town, "offers scenes from the life of Frieda Shenton, a mixed-race girl growing up under apartheid, from childhood to young adulthood," the Times wrote.

In 2013, Yale University awarded Wicomb the inaugural $150,000 Windham Campbell Literature Prize for fiction. "The challenge," she said of her aims as a novelist in an interview that year with the website 2paragraphs, "is to capture marginal voices, thus not only a matter of my voice but, rather, one of polyphony, the many different, even contradictory, voices that engage with each other.... My project includes the recovery of minor, neglected or disparaged peoples and events."

She taught English and creative writing at the University of Strathclyde from 1994 to 2012 and also taught at universities in South Africa. Her later books include the novels Playing in the Light (2006) and October (2014);  a short-story collection, The One That Got Away (2008), set in Cape Town and Glasgow; and the 2018 nonfiction work, Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays, 1990-2013. Her last novel, Still Life (2020), was chosen by the Times as one of the 10 best historical novels of the year.

Wicomb preferred working with small literary presses, avoided using literary agents, and rarely granted interviews, the Times noted, adding that she said her writing "was a way to reconcile feeling like an émigré longing for but disconnected from her homeland." 

Phoenix Books (in Essex, Burlington, and Rutland, Vt.), with Brome Lake Books in Quebec and the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, hosted author Louise Penny (left, with CBC journalist Mellissa Fung) for the only U.S. stop on her tour for Black Wolf (Minotaur), the 20th book in the Chief Inspector Gamache series. 

Penny canceled all her U.S. tour stops, including a launch at the Kennedy Center, in protest and solidarity with her fellow Canadians. The Haskell Library was chosen because it straddles the U.S./Canadian border, with entrances on both sides. "This is my moment [to resist], and I could, and if I didn't, then shame on me," Penny said. Some 800 people attended two sold-out weekend readings, and more than 450 watched a livestream of Saturday's event. Phoenix Books noted that it was "proud to support Louise, who has done events at our store twice in the past, and honored to promote American-Canadian unity at the Haskell and with Brome Lake Books."

Today co-host Jenna Bush Hager has chosen Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Doubleday) as her November Read with Jenna book club pick. Cursed Daughters is about a "family of women in Lagos who believe they are not destined to love due to a generational curse."

"This is a book about family, sisterhood and what it means to fall in love," Jenna said. "It is very funny at moments and extremely poignant at others. It'll have you getting a pen out to underline as I did. I think you will love this book and I hope you will share it with your daughters, your sisters, your mothers."

Posted on Facebook by Back Again Bookshop in Myrtle Beach, S.C.: "On today’s episode of, 'Why is there always stuff on the floor when I get to the store?' Caramel explains his process to me through a demonstration."

Winning the Earthquake: How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress by Lorissa Rinehart (St. Martin's Press).

Today:
Here & Now: Susan Orlean, author of Joyride: A Memoir (Avid Reader Press/S&S, $32, 9781982135164).

All Things Considered: Kate Baer, author of How About Now: Poems (Harper Perennial, $18, 9780063306080).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Mirta Ojito, author of Deeper than the Ocean (Union Square & Co., $28.99, 9781454961901).

CBS Mornings: Kenny Chesney, author Heart Life Music (Morrow, $32.50, 9780063423107). He will also appear on the View.

Kelly Clarkson Show: Ariel Sullivan, author of Conform: A Novel (Ballantine, $30, 9798217090990).

Tamron Hall: Tim Tebow, co-author of Look Again: Recognize Your Worth. Renew Your Hope. Run with Confidence. (Thomas Nelson, $29.99, 9781400254200).

Chloe East (Heretic) will star in Foster Dade, Hulu's YA drama pilot written by You co-creator Greg Berlanti and Bash Doran, Deadline reported. The project, which is based on Nash Jenkins's debut novel, Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos, comes from Warner Bros. Television, where Berlanti Productions has an overall deal.

Foster Dade is described as "a sophisticated mystery set at an East Coast boarding school that explores privilege, scandal, sexuality and masculinity amid the rise of social media, millennial anxiety and pharmaceuticals," Deadline noted. Filming on the pilot is slated to begin in December.

Shortlists have been released for Blackwell's Book of the Year, the Bookseller reported, adding that Zool Verjee, the company's commercial manager, said the finalists represent "titles that our booksellers loved to share with their customers this year." Category and overall Book of the Year winners will be named on December 1. This year's shortlisted titles are:

Fiction
On the Calculation of Volume: Book I by Solvej Balle 
The Silver Book by Olivia Laing 
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan 
The Rose Field by Philip Pullman

Nonfiction
Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane 
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
38 Londres Street by Philippe Sands 
Indignity by Lea Ypi 
The Buried City by Gabriel Zuchtriegel 

Children's 
Donut Squad by Neill Cameron 
Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
Alice with a Why by Anna James
Mighty Myths by Thiago de Moraes
Don't Trust Fish! by Neil Sharpson 

Trina Moyles's stunning second memoir, Black Bear, is an exploration of the fraught connection between humans and bears, and a tender account of her complex relationship with her brother.

Moyles (Lookout; Women Who Dig) probes the complicated bond humans share with black bears, the most populous ursine species in North America and thus often the most undervalued. She recounts the story of an orphaned black bear cub her wildlife biologist father brought home for a night when Moyles was five years old. Fascinated by the cub, Moyles felt a deep empathy for the young animal. That encounter sparked Moyles's interest in the black bear, which only grew when she later spent several seasons as a fire lookout in the Albertan boreal forest. As she watched the nearby forest for smoke, she began to notice, identify, and eventually develop relationships with several black bears who denned, grazed, and played near her fire tower. Though her friends and family reminded her that the bears are wild and therefore unpredictable, Moyles became convinced they are also more intelligent than most people realize. Through research, interviews with wildlife experts, and her own experiences, Moyles developed a nuanced understanding of a species often treated as a nuisance or a threat.

Alongside her growing bond with the bears, Moyles traces her sometimes difficult relationship with her older brother, Brendan, who spent much of his adult life working in Alberta's oil industry. The isolation and hard labor of working in oil camps took their toll on Brendan, who struggled with mental health issues and substance abuse. Moyles writes about her brother with affection and admiration, but is also candid about the rift between them, and the shifts that led to a delicate reconciliation despite their wildly differing lives and viewpoints.

"All too often we want wildlife on our own fixed, human terms," Moyles writes, examining the human tendency to carve up and control the land over which bears and other creatures roam. She considers different methods for managing wildlife, advocating for a thoughtful, layered approach to coexistence rather than extermination. She writes in vibrant, poetic prose about close encounters with bears in the boreal forest, then turns the same clear, lyrical lens on her relationship with Brendan and its challenges. "Fear can serve us," she admits, "but clinging to it can get in the way of being fully present in the world." Black Bear is a powerful, sensitive account of one woman's willingness to set aside her fears and pay attention--to the bears, to her brother, and to the possibilities for living in relationship with fellow creatures, be they human or ursine. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Shelf Talker: Trina Moyles's stunning second memoir traces her encounters with black bears in the Alberta boreal forest, alongside her complicated, loving bond with her older brother.

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

1. Delivering the Wow by Richard Fain
2. The Things Gods Break by Abigail Owen
3. Lights Out Collectors Edition by Navessa Allen
4. Lights Out by Navessa Allen
5. Caught Up by Navessa Allen
6. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade
7. Playing to Win by Monica Murphy
8. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
9. West Bound by Maggie Rawdon
10. The Captive and the First Blood Game by K.A. Linde

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]