Skip Dye, senior v-p at Penguin Random House, will receive the 2026 Sally Dedecker Award for Lifetime Service from the Book Industry Study Group. Named for one of BISG's longtime volunteers and advocates, the Sally Dedecker Award recognizes "the tireless and persistent efforts--often unseen--of an individual working on behalf of the book industry. Dye's career exemplifies that spirit of service, combining deep publishing expertise with an extraordinary commitment to strengthening the connections among publishers, libraries, authors, and readers."

Skip Dye

During his nearly three decades at Penguin Random House, Dye has become one of the publishing industry's most prominent advocates for libraries and intellectual freedom. As head of PRH's Intellectual Freedom Task Force, he has helped lead the publisher's efforts to defend the freedom to read through public awareness, author education, employee engagement, and legal action. He has also worked extensively with the American Library Association, serving in leadership roles and helping develop resources, training, and advocacy initiatives for libraries and their supporters. 

Dye has received significant recognition in the book world. In 2025, the ALA conferred upon him Honorary Membership, its highest honor. He was also named one of Publishers Weekly's 2024 Notables for his central role in the publishing industry's efforts to defend the freedom to read and received the 2024 Library Champion Award from the Friends of Delaware Libraries and the Delaware Legislative Committee for his advocacy on behalf of library funding.

BISG executive director Allison Belan said, "Skip's career is a remarkable example of what the Sally Dedecker Award was created to recognize: sustained, generous service that makes the entire book industry stronger. He has spent decades building bridges between publishers and libraries while advocating for the fundamental importance of access to books and information. His willingness to put his expertise, relationships, and influence to work on behalf of the broader community has had an impact far beyond any one organization."

Dye said, "Having had the privilege of working with Sally for many years and seeing firsthand the contributions she made to our industry, receiving an award bearing her name is especially meaningful to me."

The Sally Dedecker Award for Lifetime Service will be presented during BISG@50: Book Publishing Next Forum & Anniversary Celebration, which takes place September 16 at the New York Historical in New York City.

Following its debut earlier this month, the Dog-Eared Book in Edenton, N.C., will host a grand opening this Friday, August 28, the Chowan Herald reported. The bookstore opened at 419 S. Broad St. on August 8 and sells new and used titles for all ages, with owner Carrie Deming calling the children's section "small but mighty." Alongside books, customers can find journals, puzzles, onesies, stickers, and gifts. Given the store's small size, Deming plans to work with other businesses around Edenton to host author readings and other events.

Carrie Deming and Cody (photo courtesy Main Steet Edenton)

"We're hoping to become an anchor store in the downtown district that is loved by both tourists and locals alike," Deming told the Chowan Herald. "We love stocking and recommending great books and look forward to becoming a third place for area book lovers."

Long before opening the store in Edenton, Deming started selling books in Palmyra, N.Y. Initially a used bookstore, the Dog-Eared Book gradually became a predominantly new store over the course of 11 years. She closed that version of the business when she and her husband moved south to be closer to family. It turned out that she loved Edenton, and decided to reopen the bookstore in her new home. So far, she said, the store has been well-received.

The Dog-Eared Book will host a ribbon-cutting Friday morning, followed by two days of festivities. On Friday and Saturday, customers will be able to win discounts and free books via a prize wheel, and there will be a scavenger hunt with a gift card as a prize. Customers who spend $75 or more will also get a free store-branded tote bag.

The Booksellers Association of the U.K. & Ireland has restructured and expanded its team with a view to "increasing capacity in areas that members have consistently highlighted as priorities," including advocacy, communications, and consumer campaigns. The Bookseller reported that the new structure organizes the BA around five functions: marketing and consumer campaigns, membership, strategy and events, policy and public affairs, and PR and communications.

Simon Armstrong has been promoted to head of PR and communications, with expanded responsibilities to cover the BA's communications activity across the U.K. and Ireland. The organization is also recruiting for a new communications and policy officer to support Armstrong and Laura McCormack, head of policy and public affairs, as well as a new marketing executive to support the marketing and consumer campaigns team, led by Emma Bradshaw, whose title has been updated to head of brand and consumer marketing.

In addition, Amy Bradley will take on the role of website and systems manager, working within the membership team led by Kate Gunning, head of membership development. Pippa Halpin has returned from maternity leave to resume her role as membership manager. The BA's events team will continue to be led by Miriam Robinson, head of strategy. Earlier this year, Ethan Thorne was hired as membership and events executive. 

Meryl Halls, managing director of the BA, said: "Booksellers are constantly evolving to meet the needs of their customers, communities and retail landscape, and the Booksellers Association must continue to evolve alongside them. These changes are about ensuring we have the best expertise and necessary capacity in place to bring value to our members in the areas where they most need it.... 

"The BA team is a dedicated and astonishingly hard-working group of professionals working to advance bookselling issues and to collaborate with our members to forge solutions, partnerships and innovations. I'm grateful to, and very proud of, the work the team does, and delighted that we've been able to recalibrate the team to continue to deliver value and relevance to bookshops across the U.K. and Ireland."

--- 

The Sunway Library

British bookseller Goldsboro Books is opening its first permanent international retail space on August 27 at the Sunway Library by BookXcess in Bandar Sunway, Selangor, Malaysia. The Star reported that the Goldsboro Room is a compact, "purpose-built space designed exclusively for Goldsboro Books, echoing the look and feel of its flagship store in London's historic Cecil Court. The outpost set-up--it's the first phase of the collaboration--will offer readers access to Goldsboro Books' collection of signed first edition hardbacks, exclusive editions, and highly collectable books." 

The Sunway Library by BookXcess, the largest 24-hour bookstore in Southeast Asia, opened at Sunway Square Mall in 2025. "When we founded BookXcess, our mission was simple: to make great books accessible to more people," said co-founder Andrew Yap. "Over the years, we've worked hard to remove barriers between readers and books, and this partnership with Goldsboro Books is another exciting step in that journey." 

Goldsboro Books co-founder and managing director David Headley commented: "Kuala Lumpur will not be our last international opening. Other Goldsboro shops will follow, and sooner than people might expect, although I cannot share everything just yet. Each must feel rooted in its city and welcoming to its readers, rather than like a British shop has simply been lifted from London and placed somewhere else. We will bring Goldsboro’s identity with us, but we will also listen, learn and allow every new shop to find its own place within the community around it."

---

Singapore's inaugural Indie Bookshop Day 2026 will feature 20 bookstores across the city. CNA reported that the event will take place primarily on October 3, with programs beginning on October 2 and running through October 4. 

The event is jointly organized by participating indies and the Singapore Book Publishers Association, and is supported by the National Arts Council and Hachette Book Group. "It also takes inspiration from bookseller- and reader-centric events in other countries, including Independent Booksellers Week in the U.K. and Independent Bookstore Day in the U.S.," CNA noted.

"SGIBD is not a fair just to sell books, but to celebrate the spaces of our bookstores and bring more people into our worlds," Ibrahim Tahir, one of SGIBD's organizers and the founder/principal bookseller of Wardah Books in Kampong Glam.

B&N in Lexington, Ky.

Barnes & Noble will open stores in Lexington, Ky., and Costa Mesa, Calif., today.

The Lexington store, at 3565 Nicholasville Rd. in the Fayette Mall, replaces a smaller B&N that opened in the same mall in August 2024. At around 13,000 square feet, the store's new location is about 50% larger than its previous one. It will not include a B&N Cafe. The store will officially open with a ribbon cutting and signing featuring Sav R. Miller, author of Liars and Liaisons (Sourcebooks Casablanca). The Cat in the Hat costume character will join the opening festivities and appear for storytime events over the weekend.

The Costa Mesa store, meanwhile, occupies a 27,000-square-foot space in the South Coast Plaza mall, at 3333 Bear St., Suite 340. The company described it as a "major flagship store" that will include a B&N Cafe. The same space once housed a Borders store, and it is across the street from Metro Pointe Costa Mesa, where B&N operated a store until its closure more than 10 years ago. Tahereh Mafi, author of Release Me (Storytide), will be on hand today for the ribbon cutting and signing.

The Lexington, Ky., store is the first of two B&Ns to open in the state this year; the other will open in Louisville in the coming months. The company plans to open 60 stores nationwide before the end of 2026.

John Rousmaniere, a sailing writer "best known for his chilling firsthand account of the worst disaster in yacht racing, the 1979 Fastnet Race between southwest England and Ireland, an event that changed the direction of his life," died on August 8, the New York Times reported. He was 82. Sometimes called the dean of American sailing historians, he "wrote gracefully and without sentimentality about the sea and about a sport that is often associated with the Larry Ellison class of yacht owners, but that also appeals to plenty of nonwealthy people drawn by the freedom of open water and the exhilaration of a well-trimmed boat."

Educated as a historian at Columbia University, Rousmaniere's books include The Annapolis Book of Seamanship (1983), a practical reference--now in its fourth edition--that has been used by the U.S. Naval Academy and recreational sailors; and The Golden Pastime: A New History of Yachting (1986).

An experienced offshore sailor, in August 1979 he joined the crew of a 48-foot Swan sloop, one of 300 yachts entered in the Fastnet Race, with a planned route of 605 miles from the Isle of Wight to Fastnet Rock off Ireland and back. A freakish storm hit, with gale-force winds and 50-foot frothing waves. In waves that flipped 35-foot yachts "like bathtub toys," as he later wrote, 24 crews abandoned their vessels and 15 sailors died. Helicopter crews and commercial and naval seamen rescued 136 sailors, the Times noted.

Rousmaniere's book about the tragedy, Fastnet, Force 10 (1980), spurred changes that made yacht racing safer. He also helped create the U.S. Sailing Association's Safety at Sea course, which about 2,500 sailors take every year.

The experience also changed his life. "It was after that book that he began to think about expanding his religiosity," said his wife, Leah Rousmaniere.

In 1984, he entered Union Theological Seminary in New York, and received a Master of Divinity degree. Although Rousmaniere did not enter the ministry, he published After the Storm (2002), "a ruminative book about well-known ocean calamities and how survivors have looked for meaning in their aftermaths," the Times noted, adding that he admitted introspection wasn't natural for him.

"Ordinarily, I repress these sorts of emotions," he told the Washington Post. "I'm a Yankee, after all.... If life is a voyage, storms are a pretty good metaphor for what hits everyone at some point."

Early in his writing career, Rousmaniere worked as an associate editor at Yachting magazine from 1972 to 1977, and then was an independent writer. He helped America's Cup skipper Dennis Conner write a memoir, No Excuse to Lose (1978), and edited Desirable and Undesirable Characteristics of Offshore Yachts (1987) for the Technical Committee of the Cruising Club of America.

While writing Fastnet, Force 10, he interviewed survivors, rescuers, and grieving family members throughout England. "I took trains everywhere," he wrote. "Having survived a force 10 storm, I was not about to strain whatever good luck remained by driving on the right-hand side of the road."

Traci Saulsberry (right) discussed her memoir, This Is How You Love Her: A Journey to Radical Self-Love (Abrams), with journalist Janee Bolden at Charis Books & More in Decatur, Ga.

When Hurricane Lala forced Kona Stories in Kailua-Kona, Hawai'i, to postpone its Bookstore Romance Day celebration on August 15, the indie bookstore gave romance a rain check. As the storm approached Hawai'i Island, local officials asked residents to stay home, keeping roads clear for emergency, utility, and rescue crews. Keauhou Shopping Center, where Kona Stories is located, experienced minimal damage, and the bookstore was able to reopen soon after conditions were safe.

Kona Stories bookseller Elena Wagstaff at the store's delayed Bookstore Romance Day.

A week later, on August 22, Kona Stories' Romance Day finally arrived, and customers were ready for it. "Much of the celebration was created by bookseller Elena Wagstaff, who joined Kona Stories about a year ago and has quickly become an important part of the store's efforts to keep pace with rapidly changing reader interests," co-owner Brenda Lea McConnell said.

Wagstaff transformed some of the trends she has seen online and in the romance community into an interactive bookstore experience. Customers could purchase "Blind Date with a Book" selections, judge books by their sprayed edges, and add their favorite romance trope to an in-store trope wall. Lollipops, stickers, bookmarks and giveaways added to the festivities.

Games proved especially popular. A soundtrack of songs from romantic movies and television shows played throughout the store, with customers challenged to identify where each song had appeared. Another puzzle asked customers to solve clues identifying characters from romance novels and films. 

Wagstaff "also dressed for the occasion in an elaborate romantic dress, which turned out to be more than decoration. The dress signaled to customers that something special was happening and gave her an easy opening to explain the day's activities--and, more importantly, start conversations about romance books," McConnell noted.

The conversations translated into sales, with the bookstore seeing an uptick over a typical Saturday as customers browsed the romance displays, participated in the challenges and asked Wagstaff for recommendations.

McConnell said that for Kona Stories, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, "Wagstaff represents something especially valuable for a longtime independent bookstore: a new generation of booksellers bringing fresh ideas and an instinctive understanding of what younger readers are seeing, discussing and reading.

"The hurricane may have changed the date, but it didn't dampen the romance. If anything, the rescheduled celebration demonstrated that sometimes a bookstore event works best when a bookseller's own enthusiasm becomes the main attraction."

"This has happened at least 3 times." Flame & Fable bookshop in Lakewood, Ohio, shared a POV video depicting those moments when "a customer walks in while you're making social content."

"Happy Tuesday! We are thrilled to announce that our AC has been fixed and the shop is now sitting at a cool 70 degrees. We're open from 11-4 today," Hills & Hamlets Bookshop in Chattahoochee Hills, Ga., posted.

Scott Sanders has been appointed v-p, online & digital sales, HarperCollins U.S. Trade. He formerly was with Amazon, where he most recently led the books vendor services team responsible for strategic partnerships with the Big Five publishers and more than 20 other publishing houses across North America. He has a strong background in digital commerce, account management, data-driven growth, and building and developing high-performing teams.

A book sequel to the 2001 cult classic film Donnie Darko will be released later this year from filmmaker Richard Kelly and Range Literary Publishing. Variety reported that The Philosophy of Time Travel, an approximately 800-page book, "will take place in 1988, in the immediate aftermath of the original film, which famously ended with the death of Jake Gyllenhaal's titular Donnie Darko, a Southern California teen who spends the better part of the movie in a dreamlike state while anticipating the end of the world."

Written by Kelly over the past 10 years, The Philosophy of Time Travel will appear around the time of the 25th anniversary of Donnie Darko October 26. A specific sale date will be announced in the coming months.

Produced by Flower Films, Donnie Darko premiered at Sundance in 2001 and was distributed theatrically by Newmarket Films later that year. The cast also included Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osborne, Katharine Ross, Patrick Swayze, Noah Wyle, and Seth Rogen.

Kelly said the book sequel is the first step in a larger plan to make multiple Donnie Darko film sequels. His goal is to have this novel adapted into an animated/motion-capture movie and then continue to the story with a live-action project, Variety noted.

"I've kept in touch with all the cast over the years," Kelly said. "I'm fairly certain they're aware that I've been working on all this stuff, everything, and the sequel is so big that this book starts off in the 14 months after Donnie's death, and then there is much more narrative material that I've been developing where the time jumps 28 years into the future, and there's a lot of really exciting stuff that happens starting around 2015/2016 and onward after that, so that's where I started with the sequel."

Mimi Kawahara's Disaster preparedness test, ex post facto won the 2026 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, the Bookseller reported. Founded and organized by the Desperate Literature bookshop in Madrid, Spain, the award is "an international attempt to provide a holistic framework of opportunities for writers of innovative and boundary-pushing short fiction."

Judge Ottessa Moshfegh called the winning book "devastatingly intimate... accomplishes something exceedingly rare... so structurally inventive." Judge Joanna Walsh said: "The Desperate Literature Short Story Prize remains a beacon for experiment in times when this is both increasingly rare and increasingly vital."

As winner, Kawahara receives €2,000 (about $2,330), a week-long residency at the Civitella Ranieri artists' retreat in Umbria, Italy, and a manuscript assessment of up to 60,000 words through the Literary Consultancy. 

The runners up--Eric Baker for This History of Violence and Emily Roese for Slug--each receive €1,000 (about $1,165), while all three writers will have a consultation with a literary agent from Johnson & Alcock. The 11 shortlisted writers will be published by Desperate Literature in its annual collection, Eleven Stories, as well as receiving an invitation to read at a number of events over the course of the next year, the first of which will be a launch event at the Madrid bookshop, the Bookseller noted.

photo: Caleb Whitten

Hannah Whitten has been writing to amuse herself since she could hold a pen, and sometime in high school figured out that what amused her might also amuse others. Her books have been international bestsellers and translated into multiple languages. She lives in Tennessee with her family, two dogs who think they run the house, and a cat who actually does. In her sixth novel, Reliquary (Run for It, August 11, 2026), a young woman is lured to her late fiancé's remote island estate--only to uncover eerie family secrets, a haunting past, and a monstrous hunger stirring beneath the sea.

Handsell readers your book:

Reliquary is a wetter, squelchier Ready or Not, with a seaweed garnish and cosmic horror sauce. Claire has been hollowed out by grief and a neglectful childhood, so getting love-bombed by her tech-bro fiancé works a little too well. But when he dies suddenly and she's invited to his stupidly wealthy family's private island for a wake, she has to decide how far she's willing to go for belonging.

On your nightstand now:

I've always got multiple books on my nightstand! Right now, I'm about 100 pages from the end of King Sorrow by Joe Hill, but I also have Convent Wisdom by Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita as well as Doe by Rebecca Barrow, which I've already read and loved. There's also a Five Nights at Freddy's graphic novel that my daughter left there.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Seer and the Sword by Victoria Hanley is the book that showed me I loved reading. I think I checked it out from the library at least 10 times.

Your top five authors:

Holly Black
Carmen Maria Machado
Bethany C. Morrow
Michael Wehunt
Caitlin Starling

Book you've faked reading:

I've read just enough of Bram Stoker's Dracula to know what I'm talking about, but at this point I mostly know those things from memes. I'm also chipping away at a copy of House of Psychotic Women by Kier-La Janisse and it's taking me so long that I feel like I'm fake-reading it, but I promise I actually am!

Book you're an evangelist for:

Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White and Middlegame by Seanan McGuire. And when I have romance-curious friends who don't know what they like or where to start, I slip them a copy of Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Last Witch on the Knock by Aimée MacDonald, and I searched around until I could find the U.K. version! The book was an absolute fever dream and absolutely lived up to the cover.

Book you hid from your parents:

God, so many, but the first one was Ghost Beach by R.L. Stine. I hid a lot of Goosebumps books as a child. I also have a copy of Uzumaki by Junji Ito that I turn around when my parents visit because the picture on the spine might raise some questions I don't really want to answer.

Book that changed your life:

I read Tithe by Holly Black when I was 15, and it's what made me want to write books. As an adult, Valiant is my favorite of the Modern Faerie Tales, but Tithe changed my brain chemistry.

Favorite line from a book:

"I will holler you home" from Lisey's Story by Stephen King. I have it tattooed! A close second (and another tattoo) is "Courage, dear heart," from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis.

Five books you'll never part with:

I never part with books, but the ones I most like to keep around are Lisey's Story by Stephen King, the Gospel of Mary Magdalen from the Apocrypha, Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours, The Likeness by Tana French, and Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente.

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

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. I UGLY cried.

The book that felt the most "you":

The Children by Melissa Albert.

Like Glass, by YA author and William C. Morris and Stonewall Award Honor winner Jen Ferguson (The Summer of Bitter and Sweet; A Constellation of Minor Bears), paints a poignant portrait of grief through a Métis teen's captivating and chaotic determination to understand her sister's death and why her father refuses to leave the place where it happened.

One year ago, Tate's older sister, Bronwyn, died of an aneurysm while living in a small town in the French Alps. Tate's Métis father and "white settler" mother left Toronto to bring Bronwyn's body home, but only Tate's mother came back. Now, the 16-year-old Métis teen arrives in Chamonix with one goal: convincing her father to leave this snowy place. Tate can't imagine her sister having lived there at all: "Either she was following a bad thing or running from one." As she endeavors to figure out what Bronwyn was doing in Chamonix, she meets queer American ski jump athlete Agatha, who is trying to qualify for the Olympics. Agatha makes Tate's heart beat like "a drum in a circle of other drums" and she seems to "get" the grieving teen. Meanwhile, Tate worries she will have no purpose once she has uncovered every mystery about her sister, and she flounders under the feeling that she's "misplaced" herself.

Ferguson precisely encapsulates the desolation of a tragic loss and the desperation to understand it. There is no fantasy here, but there is a familiar and near-mystic entropy in the foreboding undercurrent that Tate feels among the people who knew her sister and the places where she lived and died. Tate's attempt to exist in Chamonix, where everyone who looks at her sees Bronwyn first, eloquently portrays how one sibling can be measured by another: "In French, limes are called green lemons... defined not by what they are, but what they are like... I don't know what limes would do, in French, if lemons went extinct." Ferguson also adroitly depicts an eggshell-lined path to mending between an imperfect yet loving father and the only daughter he has left. She seamlessly folds racism into Tate's interactions with locals ("Are you of the full blood, ja, or like us, appreciative of their unique, primitive culture?") and plants a satisfying queer romance in stuck elevators, heart-stopping break-in missions, and a stealth road trip. Tate, who cuts the collars from her shirts, isn't a hugger, and tends to overexplain, is a fully realized teen who acknowledges that "personhood is hard" in this deeply felt YA novel about sorrow and reconciliation. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer

Shelf Talker: A Métis teen travels to the town where her sister died and where her father now lives to understand them both in this genuine and chaotically adventurous YA exploration of grief and personhood.