Jennifer Gonzalez

At Sourcebooks, longtime senior v-p and editorial director Todd Stocke is retiring, effective May 15, and Jennifer Gonzalez, senior v-p, publisher of children's, is becoming senior v-p and publishing director, responsible for editorial strategy for all Sourcebooks publishing divisions, adult and children's. She joined the company in 2024 after serving as president of sales at Macmillan, and earlier held senior sales and brand leadership roles at Random House, Candlewick Press, and ReaderLink.

Stocke, who was the sixth staffer at Sourcebooks, which now employs more than 350 people, said, "I got to make books for a living. I've never lost sight of how lucky I am to have been part of the Sourcebooks family. Jenn deeply understands the mission we're working towards, and she brings that same energy to all she does. Our brilliant acquiring editors plus the authors, readers, booksellers, librarians, and customers we serve couldn't be in better hands."

Todd Stocke

He helped build some of Sourcebooks' most influential programs, including Sourcebooks Landmark, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary and specializes in general fiction; Sourcebooks Kids, which began with Sourcebooks Jabberwocky in 2007 and now includes multiple imprints across children's and YA fiction and nonfiction; and Poisoned Pen Press, which Sourcebooks acquired in 2018 and has since grown into the leading mystery/thriller imprint in the country.

Gonzalez said, "Every part of this job comes back to our creative partners and the people who love their books. The editorial program Todd built is rooted in a deep instinct for what readers of all backgrounds are looking for, and the data to make sure we're meeting them where they're at. We have an extraordinary, entrepreneurial editorial team, and I'm honored to work with them to develop what's next."

Sourcebooks publisher and CEO Dominique Raccah commented: "Among the many values that Todd and Jenn share is a belief that our work is about the books: about the authors who bring them to life, and the readers who need them. Todd has lived that belief since the day I very luckily met him, and Sourcebooks would not be who we are today without him. I'm incredibly grateful for everything Todd has given us, and I'm so excited for all that Jenn and the team will create next!"

A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland, Calif., will close permanently after 22 years in business, KVTU reported.

On April 30, owner Kathleen Caldwell announced that "through many tears, difficult conversations, and sleepless nights," she had decided to close the bookstore in the weeks ahead.

"I have loved being a part of your community, watching your children grow up, being their safe place, turning you onto that book I just couldn't put down, and introducing you to the authors who have set your imaginations on fire," Caldwell wrote. "Sadly, it's time for me to step away."

In an interview with KVTU, Caldwell explained that the bookstore has faced financial difficulties since the Covid-19 pandemic, as the "crowd never came back after Covid." Last holiday season and the start of 2026 were slow, and keeping the bookstore running became untenable. "You're putting more money into the store than you're taking out," she said. "It's not viable."

In the wake of Caldwell's announcement, Caldwell's sister launched a GoFundMe campaign to help her transition into retirement. It has so far raised more than $27,000 out of a $35,000 goal.

"I don't consider this giving up," Caldwell told KVTU. "I consider this going out gracefully. I'm going out with love and telling this amazing village how much they mean to me."

Archer's Book Lounge, a bookstore, coffee shop, and cocktail bar, will open in Monroe, Mich., later this year, the Monroe News reported.

Alaina and Joel Williamson in the future Archer's Book Lounge.

Owners Alaina and Joel Williamson have found a space at 39 South Monroe St. that spans 7,000 square feet and three floors. They plan to carry new books for all ages, with about 5,000 titles in stock at opening. The selection will be general interest, and the event plans include poetry workshops, scavenger hunts, movie screenings, and more. 

The bar, meanwhile, will have a laid-back atmosphere and will serve cocktails, beer, and wine, along with coffee and other non-alcoholic options. "We're not expecting people to get loud and rowdy," Williamson told the Monroe News. "This is going to be a place where people can come to relax and either study or have a work meeting or they could get together with friends, but it's not going to be that super high energy."

Williamson noted that initially, she and her husband thought they were still a few years away from opening the bookstore and lounge, but "things just kind of fell into place," and they got started sooner than expected.

They are aiming to have Archer's Book Lounge open by September.

The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators announced that Angela Dominguez has joined Meg Medina as a co-sponsor of the Volemos Grant, and the program is expanding to include Latine illustrators. Every year, one early-career author and one illustrator will each receive $500, along with a year-long SCBWI membership and promotion of their work to agents and editors. Medina founded the Volemos Grant in 2021 to support aspiring and early-career Latine authors. 

"We have both benefited from the SCBWI community over the years, having met many wonderful colleagues and mentors who helped us along the way in our careers," Medina and Dominguez said in a joint statement. "It's an honor to build on that tradition by supporting new Latine creatives entering the world of publishing."
 
SCBWI executive director Sarah Baker commented, "When Meg Medina founded the Volemos Grant, she created an important opportunity for emerging Latine authors, and we are so thrilled and grateful that she and Angela Dominguez are expanding that opportunity to also serve illustrators. Everyone at SCBWI is excited to see who the next recipients will be, and to shine a bright light on the talent and perspective of Latine creators."  

J.H. Prynne, "an enigmatic poet who became a cult figure--and, to some, one of Britain's most inventive literary voices--despite an aversion to giving interviews or readings or doing much of anything to help readers navigate his richly intellectual, at times impenetrable works," died on April 22, the New York Times reported. He was 89. Prynne was also a literary critic, known for analyses of Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Wallace Stevens, as well as an art critic.

For nearly 40 years, he taught and was the librarian at Caius College at Cambridge University. Prynne "was hailed as a leading light of the so-called Cambridge School, a loose aggregation of poets who emerged in the 1960s and were known for their cerebral approach, marked by late Modernist experimentation," the Times wrote. 

In a 1987 Times of London piece, author Peter Ackroyd described Prynne as "without doubt the most formidable and accomplished poet in England today, a writer who has single-handedly changed the vocabulary of expression."

One of Prynne's best known poems, "The Ideal Star-Fighter," originally published in his collection Brass (1971), begins, "Now a slight meniscus floats on the moral pigment of these times, producing displacement of the body image, the politic albino."

In a critical appraisal in 2020 in the Chicago Review, Luke Roberts observed: "Part of the prestige of Prynne's poetry is its much-vaunted (and perhaps equally derided) difficulty, and the usual claim about reading Prynne's work involves the experience of bafflement, frustration, doubt, and dead-ends, all exhilarating in their own way."

Prynne's output was prolific, including "dozens of publications, often booklets of fewer than 40 pages, almost exclusively released through small presses," the New York Times noted. A major collection of past work, Poems (1999), was more than 400 pages, and a follow-up, Poems, 2016-24, added more than 700 pages of new material. 

His other collections include Kitchen Poems (1968), The White Stones (1969), Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is (2011), To Pollen (2006), Biting the Air (2003), Triodes (1999), Her Weasels Wild Returning (1993), Not-You (1993), Poems (1982), and more

"I am frequently accused of having more or less altogether taken leave of discernible sense," he said in a 2007 lecture. "In fact, I believe this accusation to be more or less true, and not to me alarmingly so, because what for so long has seemed the arduous royal road into the domain of poetry--'what does it mean?' seems less and less an unavoidably necessary precondition for successful reading."

The Times noted that despite the complexity of much of his work, "Poem 48," included in Snooty Tipoffs (2021), "avoids the philosophical complexity he was known for--and indeed, might be read as an acknowledgment of that complexity's limits":

When the heart stops, its business concluded
there's not much to do, however deluded;
immortal longings, like belongings,
abandon their fate at the turnstile's gate.

Narberth Bookshop in Narberth, Pa., hosted author and Epiphany magazine editor-in-chief Sara Lippmann (left) for a conversation with author Jiordan Castle about Lippmann's new novel, Hidden River (Tortoise Books). Hidden River is primarily set in Lower Merion Township, Pa., in the Narberth area, where Lippmann was born and raised.

Here is the May edition of The Poetry Shelf, our suggested poetry assortment, compiled by Michelle Halket of Central Avenue Publishing.

Happy May! I don't know about you, but I love this month--it's generally fantastic weather, the sky is extra blue and the flowers are extra pretty. This time, there are quite a few new titles on the bestseller list, including:

Galahad and the Grail by Malcolm Guite
Poetry Says It Better by Ellen Burstyn
Conjuring the Hurricane by Sarah Hanson
How to Eat a Poem by American Poetry and Literature Project
Darby, Love...  by Darby Hudson

You know, like with any endeavor in market research, we can find holes in our methodology, and I just came across one this week--purely for selfish reasons. I was quite looking forward to being able to brag about one of our recently released titles, which last week debuted at #4 on the BookScan bestseller list and made the Top 40 Independent Press List. But this week, it's nowhere to be found, so I can't put it on this list.

You see, I undertake this project monthly, but I use the most recent weekly bestseller lists from BookScan and the Independent Press Top 40. So, it's possible that a book that did very well in one or more of the three weeks that I didn't look at won't be suggested to you in this e-mail. But perhaps it continues to have strong sales, and do I honestly think it's a great addition to a store's poetry shelf? Yep. But is it on this list? Nope. And how many books other than mine have I missed that flashed massive sales to get on those lists? And how many other books have I missed that sell strongly every week, but don't quite make that bottom threshold. Too many to tell.

But I will still keep going with this monthly frequency for two reasons. The first is that I don't think that a poetry assortment needs refreshing more than once a month. The second is that while I keep an eye on the lists weekly, for me to try to average out four weeks of data is a lot more work for me (and likely more error prone). The third and most important is that if a book is a bit of a flash in the pan (and I'm not trying to call my book that 😝), then perhaps it doesn't deserve to be on this list--which is designed to be a best-of-the-best kind of project for stores that don't have time or resources to constantly curate a poetry section.

For our feature month in June, I'm suggesting some iconic titles by some iconic queer poets, as well as some new books gleaned from the finalist lists of the Lambda Literary Awards.

As always, everything I put on these lists are just suggestions meant to spark ideas of your own. Pick and choose as best fits your store!

Marisol Salaman has joined UTA's corporate communications department, focusing on the talent agency's publishing and media rights divisions. She formerly was senior publicity manager at Algonquin Books and earlier worked at Portfolio Books and Hachette Books.

Murder Most Delicious by Danielle Postel-Vinay (Harper Perennial). Postel-Vinay (Danielle Trussoni), who produced the trailer, said about the book and the mouth-watering trailer, "French food is at the heart of my new novel, a culinary mystery set in Paris. When a renowned French Chef is poisoned, an American sommelier joins forces with a group of neighborhood amateur sleuths--a pâtissier, a café owner, a part-time librarian, and a florist--to solve the murder. It's a race through French cuisine, one filled with food, wine, and friendship. When making the book trailer at the iconic French bistro Balthazar in New York City, we wanted to represent the most delicious French confections: crème brûlée, the Paris-Brest, and profiteroles dripping chocolate. I admit it was hard to resist eating everything before we got it on film! Such temptations are difficult to manage. Luckily, when you read the novel, and experience all the delicious things on offer, you won't have to."

Today:
CBS Mornings: Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter (Simon Six, $26, 9781668249970).

Live with Kelly and Mark: Barbara Costello, author of Did Your Mother Ever Tell You?: Words of Wisdom, Wit, and Love (Zonderkidz, $19.99, 9780310167662). 

Tamron Hall: Kim Polinder, author of Why We Fight: A Transformative Road Map to Healing Conflict in Any Relationship (HarperOne, $28.99, 9780063437692).

Here & Now: Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster (Vintage, $21, 9780385494786), on the 30th anniversary of the disaster that claimed the lives of eight climbers.

Late Night with Seth Meyers repeat: Sabrina Rudin, author of Healthy with a Side of Happy: 100 Plant-Based Recipes to Feed Your Family (Union Square & Co., $35, 9781454956587). 

Tomorrow:
CBS Mornings: Arthur C. Brooks, author of The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness (Portfolio, $30, 9780593545423).

Also on CBS Mornings: Jonathan Vigliotti, author of Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn, and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild L.A. (Atria/One Signal, $30, 9781668219034).

Today Show: Joanna Stern, author of I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything (Harper, $32, 9780063446618).

Also on Today: Shannon Garvey, author of June Baby: A Novel (Random House, $30, 9780593979907).

Kelly Clarkson Show: Cedric the Entertainer, co-author of The Husky and Handsome Guide to Grilling (Simon Element, $30, 9781668075357).

Guillermo del Toro was recently awarded a BFI Fellowship, the British Film Institute's highest honor, and during a q&a with film historian and BFI executive Jason Wood the filmmaker teased his next production, a stop-motion adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Buried Giant (2015) that he is making at Netflix, Deadline reported. The novel "follows an elderly British couple, Axl and Beatrice, living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no one is able to retain long-term memories."

Del Toro described the film as a "fascinatingly difficult stop-motion movie for adults" that is being produced "without any concession to a family audience." 

He added that he chose to tell the story in stop-motion, as he did with Pinocchio (2022), to protect the story's authenticity: "If you do a live action movie about an old couple crossing a landscape full of trolls and fairies, and there are special effects and actors.... I want all the creatures to be of the same material. It's gonna take us years. And it's incredibly difficult."

Winners have been selected for the 38th annual Minnesota Book Awards, presented by Education Minnesota and the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library and the Minnesota Center for the Book:

Children's Literature: All the Stars in the Sky by Art Coulson, illustrated by Winona Nelson (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)
General Nonfiction: Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie by David Hage and Josephine Marcotty (Random House)
Genre Fiction: The Quiet Librarian by Allen Eskens (Mulholland Books)
Memoir & Creative Nonfiction: Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage by Kelly Foster Lundquist (Eerdmans)
Middle Grade Literature: Weird Sad and Silent by Alison McGhee (Rocky Pond Books)
Emilie Buchwald Award for Minnesota Nonfiction: Enmity and Empathy: Japanese Americans in Minnesota During World War II by Ka F. Wong (Minnesota Historical Society Press)
Novel & Short Story: Ashes to Ashes by Thomas Maltman (Soho Press)
Poetry: I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always by Douglas Kearney (Wave Books)
Young Adult Literature: The Flip Side by Jason Walz (Rocky Pond Books)

Special Awards:
Kay Sexton Award: Sun Yung Shin, poet, writer, editor, children's book author, and cultural worker
Hognander Minnesota History Award: It Took Courage: Eliza Winston's Quest for Freedom by Christopher P. Lehman (Minnesota Historical Society Press)

Japan's Gengoroh Tagame, revered globally for his erotic gay manga, went mainstream with My Brother's Husband, published in the U.S. in two volumes; it won major awards including an Eisner. He continues irresistibly to entertain general audiences with Fish and Water, translated again by writer/musician Anne M. Ishii.

Akira, who works in sales, isn't sure what to do with a hefty box of fresh-from-the-farm cabbage he's given during a site visit, especially since he can't cook. Remembering his culinary friend Koji, Akira calls him with an offer to share and happily accepts Koji's invitation for "something delicious" he'll create with the veggie windfall. Proactive with masks and sanitizers, Akira arrives at Koji's and immediately notices Koji's long hair--he's "always worked from home." Koji admits, "I haven't been to the barber in a while. Pandemic lockdown." He encourages Akira to stay over so they can both drink with dinner. His toothsome spread, with multiple cabbage dishes, inspires Akira's gratitude: "I could eat like this every day," to which Koji quips, "In that case we should get married." Akira is quick to admonish him about saying things he doesn't mean, but he underscores his sincere appreciation by doing the dishes.

The two exchange stories of early lockdown challenges, with Akira "eating nothing but convenience store bento" and Koji "being home alone all the time." Akira's heartfelt "I love being with you like this, Koji" brings a moment of discomfort, but the friends quickly settle back into easy camaraderie. When they part the next morning, Koji notices Akira has left his toothbrush in the bathroom, and Akira wonders why he made things awkward. An omniscient narrator presciently deduces, "It's possible that... unbeknownst to these two men... the romance between them has already begun."

In meticulously drawn black-and-white inked panels (with a few R-rated glimpses) Tagame reveals a charming love story about which the readers quickly know more than the two single men, who are perhaps not quite ready to admit their attraction. The small joys of domesticity they increasingly share nurture both bellies and souls. Manga aficionados will likely notice inventive, tempting foodie parallels with Fumi Yoshinaga's delectable, ongoing What Did You Eat Yesterday? series. Beyond-the-kitchen experiences--shopping, an arboretum visit, a walkabout--cement the not-yet-lovers' compatibility. Tagame particularly excels in capturing nuanced emotions and gifts audiences intimate access to a couple tentatively falling in love. An appended "supplemental chapter" provides their meet-cute backstory. Satisfyingly swoon-worthy fun indeed. --Terry Hong

Shelf Talker: Gengoroh Tagame's culinarily inspired Fish and Water centers a heartwarming love story of two friends enjoying post-pandemic, gratifyingly quotidian home-cooked meals.