Well Read Bookstore hosted its grand opening celebration on August 28 at 241 SE Main St. in Lee's Summit, Mo. The Kansas City Star reported that owner Anna Buser launched her "dream" bookstore in a familiar downtown storefront, the former location of KD's Books, which had moved earlier this summer to 207 SE 3rd St. 

Buser, who grew up in the area, was adamant that the storefront needed to remain a bookshop: "It's been a dream since I was a kid. So when the other store decided to move, we were like, 'This has to stay a bookstore. It's been at this location, I've been coming here since I was five.' " 

Once she and her husband, Bryan Buser, got the keys to the storefront in May they began renovations, which included repainting the walls and ripping out five layers of flooring in the 1890 building.

"We were like, how can we have like a smoking lounge meets a slightly strange antique mall," Anna Buser said about the finished space, which sells books and book-themed gifts. There is also a room that will eventually become a space for events and can be rented by anyone in the community. 

Behind the POS table, which was constructed with reclaimed wood from the building, is "a designated children's section featuring an old train set that locals may remember playing with," the Star wrote. 

"My mom would be perusing books, and I'd be at the train table. Forever I was like, 'Can I have a wooden train set for Christmas?' every year," Buser recalled. She obtained the train set from KD's Books original owner, Cheryl Collier, who had been storing it in her basement. Buser hopes to continue Collier's legacy through her new store. 

"She just had this way of connecting with people, and she cared so much. Like when I was a kid and I would bring in my books, because she did trades, and she would look at me and go, 'Okay, Anna, you have $5,'" Buser said. "Her heart for the community was huge." 

Fable & Craft Co., an all-ages bookstore with a strong emphasis on fiction, opened Saturday, August 22, in Beaver, Pa., the Sentinel reported. 

Located at 501 Third St., Fable & Craft Co. carries a mix of new and used titles, with prominent sections devoted to fantasy books and local authors, along with a variety of crafts, apparel, and gifts. Owner Courtney Riggio's event plans include local author signings, book clubs, craft nights, and storytime sessions. A monthly book subscription is available, and starting in September, customers will be able to book the space for private events. 

"Opening a bookstore has been a dream of mine for many years and I can't wait to finally welcome the community into the space," Riggio told the Sentinel. "I plan for Fable & Craft to be not just a bookstore, but a space for community members to meet and connect with one another."

Sirena Noir Books opened at 2 W. Center St. in Southington, Conn., on Saturday, August 29, the New Britain Herald reported. The 700-square-foot bookstore sells new and used titles, with an emphasis on fantasy, horror, paranormal romance, gothic fiction, and local authors. While there are books available for teen readers, there are no children's books, and owner Sirena Kyser has also decided not to carry political or self-help books. 

Nonbook offerings include candles, tumblers, notebooks, and pens, and coffee and tea are available to customers. The store has a lounge area with comfortable seating, and Kyser's event plans include book clubs for both teens and adults as well as author signings.

Before launching Sirena Noir Books, Kyser originally wanted to open a food truck and even went to school to become a chef. However, after having a dream about receiving a check to open a bookstore, she decided to pursue a different passion.

"I've always been an avid reader," Kyser told the New Britain Herald. "It was an escape for me as a child. I didn't read books with pictures, I liked to imagine myself in the story."

During the grand opening festivities, Kyser had goodie bags and other treats for customers.

Winners have been announced for the 2026 Linda Cannon Program Grants, sponsored by Parson Weems in memory of Linda Cannon, the Parson Weems co-owner who in 2017 won NAIBA's inaugural Kristin Keith Sales Rep of the Year Award. Two bookstore winners received $250 each for funding a project or program:

Frenchtown Bookshop, Frenchtown, N.J. "Thirteen local students were chosen by Hunterdon County librarians as their libraries' 'Most Enthusiastic Readers.' Your welcome grant allowed us to give each winner a signed book (from children's author Adam Gidwitz, who spoke at the ceremony) and a Frenchtown Bookshop gift card to fuel their further reading." --Scott Sheldon

Huxley & Hiro Booksellers, Wilmington, Del. "We are most grateful for this honor as community outreach has been at the heart of our mission, our passion, and also our success as an indie bookstore in a world with a lot of corporate competition." --Claire van den Broek

Applications are now open for the eighth annual Carla Gray Memorial Scholarship for Emerging Bookseller-Activists, which was created in honor of the executive marketing director at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who died suddenly in May 2017. Applications will be accepted through September 20. Eligibility requirements and the application can be found here. 

The winning bookseller will be awarded a year-long scholarship for professional development, which includes travel and hotel to attend Winter Institute 2027; travel and hotel to attend their 2027 regional fall trade show; and a $2,000 stipend to fund a community outreach project. The goal of the community outreach project is to find new readers and ensure access to books that improve readers' lives while integrating bookstores even more fully into their communities. In recognition of rising costs, the travel and hotel allowances have increased, and the project stipend has doubled.

Presented by the Friends of Carla Gray Committee and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc), the scholarship is intended to help a bookseller with at least one but fewer than 10 years of experience connect with other booksellers, publishers, and authors as well as establish the long-term relationships needed to keep the book industry thriving.

Binc executive director Pam French said: "Binc is honored to support booksellers through this professional development opportunity that celebrates Carla’s legacy and her enthusiasm for bookstores and their communities. We look forward to meeting the winner at Winter Institute and learning more about their outreach project."

Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer "who plowed his fields behind Belgian draft horses and wrote lyrical poems, novels, and essays--mostly in pencil and without electric light--that explored his elegiac visions of the life and death of agrarian America," died August 31, the New York Times reported. He was 92. Berry wrote more than 50 volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that championed small family farms, the environment, local foods, and interdependent communities.

"Wendell Berry has passed. Another great light gone out," Kentucky-born author Silas House posted on Facebook: "There are so many ways he influenced me but most of all what I keep thinking is that he was so good to me. Generous with his time and words. Complex. Brilliant. Revolutionary. Here's my favorite picture of him. In his socks out on the porch at Port Royal, laughing and telling a tale, with a dog nearby.... I’m sending big waves of love to Tanya and the entire Berry family, all of them so good, like him."

Raised on a farm in north-central Kentucky, Berry studied English at the University of Kentucky, then writing at Stanford University with Wallace Stegner. He traveled in Italy before ending up in New York, where he intended to write and teach. He married, had two children, and taught for two years at New York University. At 30, however, "he confronted in himself a deep need to return to his roots--specifically, to an old two-room cabin on the Kentucky River at Port Royal, in Henry County, where his ancestors had lived since 1803. The cabin had been built in the 1920s by a great-uncle. He had known the place all his life; indeed, had visited it often as a boy and spent a summer there with his wife, Tanya." the Times wrote.

"In the life we lived that summer, we represented to ourselves what we wanted--and it was not the headlong pilgrimage after money and comfort and prestige," he recalled in his essay "The Long-Legged House." In 1964, they bought a 125-acre farm, called Lanes Landing, and started raising sheep, corn and grain crops, along gardens for their own table. Berry also taught for 20 years at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington.

Regarding his decision to return home to write for the rest of his life, Berry recalled: "It made a permanent connection between me and my native place, and with its landscape. The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky. I worked with people here in all walks of life and learned from them. It's been a very rich experience."

His first major book was The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (1977), a manifesto to save small farms from big business and a government bent on agricultural efficiencies that, he said, were destroying the land and a way of life. The book launched the modern movement for sustainable farming and became a conservationist classic, the Times noted.

In a Times review, farmer-poet Donald Hall praised the book's "worldview that derives its premises from the experience of working on the land. [Berry] argues with careful logic for the recovery of lost land, for the return of the small farmer to the countryside, the small farmer expropriated by the army of agribusiness."

Berry's essay collections The Gift of Good Land (1981) and Home Economics (1987) continued the theme as did his fiction--more than a dozen novels and volumes of short stories. "He invented a town, Port William, Ky., as a setting for generations of lives interwoven in tales of murder, alcoholism, marital discord and remembrance against subtexts of fading agrarian life," the Times wrote.

Berry's novels include Nathan Coulter (1960), A Place on Earth (1967), The Memory of Old Jack (1974), Jayber Crow (2000), Hannah Coulter (2004), and Andy Catlett: Early Travels (2006). In 2018, the Library of America published Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories (The Civil War to World War II), which was followed in 2019 by the two-volume What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry 1969–2017.

Among his many poetry collections are This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems (2014), Given (2005), A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (1999), The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (1988), Collected Poems 1957-1982 (1985), Clearing (1977), and The Broken Ground (1964).

From Berry's poem "Before Dark":

From the porch at dusk I watched
a kingfisher wild in flight
he could only have made for joy....

The splashes went on out of hearing.
It was dark then. Somewhere
the night had accommodated him

--at the place he was headed for
or where, led by his delight,
he came.

"While I have no business being in my 50's and making silly videos for the bookshop, here I am... and I must admit... I'm having fun," Tere Hyfield, co-owner of Red Stick Reads in Baton Rouge, La., posted on Instagram. "I may not always know what I'm doing as our official social media person, but I do know this much: getting to make these videos with my bookshop family makes me laugh A LOT. And cringy or not, I'm so very grateful for them and for all the laughing. Carpe the Cringe."

"Good morning, bookstore! Good morning, Multnomah Village!" Annie Bloom's Books, Portland, Ore., posted on social media.

"Be the kind of reader Dolly would want you to be." That was the poignant chalkboard message on the sidewalk chalkboard yesterday in front of Curious Iguana bookstore in Frederick, Md., paying tribute to Dolly Parton, who died last week.

At Macmillan:

Helene Webb recently joined the company as manager, trade sales, premium & corporate.

Tim Foszcz recently joined the company as associate, trade sales.

---

Kiana Condomitti has joined Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing as publicity assistant. She most recently served in the U.S. Navy.

Today:
Fresh Air: Natasha Singer, author of Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools (W.W. Norton, $31.99, 9780393881943).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Carla Lalli, author of Food Is a Feeling: Recipes & Stories, with Love (Clarkson Potter, $36, 9780593800621).

Also on GMA: James Patterson and MrBeast, co-authors of The Most Dangerous Games (Morrow, $35, 9780063488762).

The cast for Heated Rivalry "continues to grow as a slew of season 1 cast members have set their return for the second season," which will be an adaptation of Rachel Reid's sixth book, The Long Game, a direct sequel to the original Heated Rivalry novel. The new season will also incorporate elements from the fifth book in the "Game Changers" series, Role Model.

Returning alongside Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams are François Arnaud, Robbie G.K., Sophie Nélisse, Ksenia Daniela Kharlamova, Christina Chang, Dylan Walsh, Callan Potter, Benjamin Roy, and Kamilla Kowal. They join the previously announced Season 2 cast members Justice Smit, Charlie Gillespie, Daniel Diemer, Shaheen Jafargholi, Emily Hampshire, Edvin Ryding, Robert Naylor, Sabrina Jalees, and Priyanka.

From Bell Media's Canadian streamer Crave and HBO Max in the U.S., Heated Rivalry is created by Jacob Tierney, who also serves as writer, director, and an executive producer of the series. 

Josh Silver won the £2,000 (about $2,710) YA Book Prize, which celebrates fiction for teenagers and young adults written by authors living in the U.K. and Ireland, for his novel Traumaland, the Bookseller reported. The winner was named at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in a ceremony hosted by writer and former recipient of the prize Juno Dawson.

"Traumaland is everything I would want in a YA novel; it's original, it's darkly funny, it's authentic and stylishly written," said Dawson, who was on the judging panel. "What's more, there is something distinctly British about the novel; Josh Silver is a thoroughly deserving winner, showcasing emerging U.K. talent at its finest."

Chair of the judges Caroline Carpenter, the Bookseller's children's editor and deputy features editor, called Silver "a rising star of the U.K.'s literary scene. As ever, this year's shortlist was incredibly varied, showcasing exceptional ideas and writing, but our adult and teen judges picked out Traumaland for its unique premise and page-turning plot. This bold, exciting storytelling is exactly what the YA Book Prize was set up to champion."

photo: Iden Ford

Hank Phillippi Ryan is the author of 17 thrillers, including All This Could Be Yours, winner of the 2026 Mary Higgins Clark Award. Ryan has won every major mystery award, and her thrillers have been translated into multiple languages worldwide. A Chicago native with Indianapolis roots, Ryan lives in Boston. Her new book is Mother Sister Daughter Stranger (Minotaur, September 1, 2026), a twisty and captivating thriller about two sisters--sole survivors of the fiery plane crash that killed their parents a decade ago--who must contend with a sinister family history.  

Handsell readers your book:

A missing mom. A frightened daughter. And a sister forced to uncover her family's terrifying legacy.

On your nightstand now:

So funny--because of all the author interviews I do, much of my reading is "homework" to prepare for them. (Isn't that terrific? Someone says: "Want to read a brand-new book by a wonderful author and then interview them?" Well, yes, yes, I do.) So coming up are the iconic Tess Gerritsen's The Shadow Friends, Lee and Andrew Child's Exit Strategy, How to Write a Murder by Jessica Brody, and The Fine Art of Lying by Alexandra Andrews. But I just found my incredibly battered paperback of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and I fear that will be irresistible.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Since I was the geeky bookish misfit as a kid, I loved--and still do--books where a group of smart kids got together and solved a puzzle or a crime. The Edward Eager books, like Half Magic and Knight's Castle. C.S. Lewis's Narnia books. The Mushroom Planet books by Eleanor Cameron, and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. But maybe my favorite favorite is The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton. It taught me about transcendentalism, and Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and about working as a compassionate team, and also how to speak backwards.

(Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy was not written at the time I was a child, or I'm sure that would be on the list.)

Your top five authors:

Ah, in the universe? Ever? Just five? William Shakespeare. (I majored in Shakespeare in college, to the detriment of everything else.) Edith Wharton. Agatha Christie. Tom Wolfe. And Stephen King. They're all such wonderful storytellers, smart and savvy, and with such a sense of the voice of their time.

Book you've faked reading:

I'm going to admit this to you, but you can never tell. I have never read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. I decided, long ago, that it would be too sad, and that was the end of that. Now it's probably too late to read it. I've agreed how wonderful it is so many times that I feel as if I have actually read it. (And I haven't seen the movies, either.)

Book you're an evangelist for:

Oh, Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin. I've read it so often, and if you ask me what it's about I have to say I have no idea. The turning of two centuries, love and justice and journalism and truth and sacrifice and snow and a flying horse. The Woola-Woola Boys, and Peter Lake. Life changing. You just have to read it, then let me know what you think.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Have I ever done that? I'm not sure I've done that. One day the Brookline Booksmith bookstore gave me a free book for doing an author interview, so I decided I'd choose the first thing that caught my eye in the crime fiction section. And that was Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal. Very good choice! (If I had not just been sent The Mortons by Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld, that might have been a candidate.)

Book you hid from your parents:

I totally sneaked Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar, that was so pivotal. I figured they would not approve, but it turned out they were so delighted that I loved to read that they didn't care what book I picked from their shelves. Or from the library. Oh, wait. They hated one thing I read, so I did have to hide it: Mad magazine. I loved every one! They are probably still finding my old issues back home.

Book that changed your life:

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. I remember I was starting to think about writing crime fiction, and it was a glimpse into a new and richer depth of storytelling. Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby--my favorite high school English teacher demanded I read it, and I did so completely under duress. I adored it, as he knew I would. But the first time a book changed my life was Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. When I was 11 or so, I used to read constantly, finish one book and instantly pick up the next one. But after I read Black Beauty, I started to close the book, but my mind was still connected to it. And I realized: I think that book was about more than a horse. I had discovered theme!

Favorite line from a book:

An old boyfriend gave me my first copy of Winter's Tale. And on the front page, he inscribed it to me: "When the apocalypse comes, I will find you in the fire."

Five books you'll never part with:

My beloved and battered volume of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. My collection of Sue Grafton's books, does that count as one choice? A first edition of The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber. A signed (to me!) copy of The Diamond in the Window. And the very first copy from the very first box of my very first novel, Prime Time.

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

Don't get me started. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. I don't think I realized how groundbreaking it was when I read it. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, what would it be like to read that again? Jess Walter's brilliant Citizen Vince. And oh, definitely, Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. That would be fabulous.

Book you called in sick to read when you weren't sick:

The Stand by Stephen King. When that first came out, the very first version, I started reading it on a Sunday, and when Monday morning came, and it was time for my shift as a reporter for WSB-TV in Atlanta, I just couldn't do it. For the first and only time in my life, I called in sick when I wasn't sick, because I just could not stop reading that book. Many years later, at a party, I told Stephen King that story. He said: "Good call."

Taiwanese author/illustrator Jimmy Liao's exquisite Our Starry, Starry Night is both picture book and graphic novel. This striking hybrid relies as much on its breathtaking illustrations as its gentle, succinct prose to tell a poignant story of two lonely children who briefly find a deep connection. This spectacular English edition, originally published in Taiwan in 2009, is translated by Ian Tseng.

A child, often shown in a red dress and blue shoes, lived with mountain-dwelling grandparents until the age of six. Now back in the city with their parents, the child "really" misses Grandpa (alone "up on that mountain") and Grandma ("who lives up in heaven"). The house is "so very quiet," and busy Mama and distracted Papa are unavailable: "I often close my door, hiding in my own world." Going to school doesn't alleviate the loneliness--"I pretend to be cool, but in my heart, I'm really fragile"--but peeking into strangers' windows offers glimpses of what other families are like. One night, the child notices the old lady next door has a new tenant, an "unfamiliar boy" who sings on the snowy roof, "so happy and carefree." The boy begins attending the child's school but silently keeps to himself. When he's viciously bullied, the child intervenes and, although both take some "knocks" and must go to the hospital, this event marks the pair becoming inseparable. Together, they decide to leave the city in search of peaceful calm. They share an enchanting journey all the way to Grandpa's cabin, which still rings of "the happiest laughter." The return home, alas, includes sickness and separation, but eventually engenders healing surprises.

Liao's meticulously detailed pages feature fully saturated colors and magical images: gifts, for example, grow huge, as if needing to fill up empty, looming spaces. Mythical beasts come and go: a red dragon fumes with anger, and a pair of deer flies by. The child even interacts with famous art pieces (with canvasses by René Magritte and Vincent van Gogh brilliantly adapted by Liao) that include their own chimerical flourishes. Liao relies on as many pages without words as with, and they speak volumes: each child says "whale" just once, but Liao manages to embed an illustrated narrative involving size, migration, and diversity of whales. Throughout Our Starry, Starry Night, Liao (Turn Left, Turn Right) magnificently bestows his characters and his readers with moments of wondrous beauty and utter joy. --Terry Hong

Shelf Talker: Jimmy's Liao's spectacular picture book for middle-graders, Our Starry, Starry Night, depicts the healing friendship of two lonely children.