Rainy Day Books, based in Fairway, Kan., has opened a second location, in downtown Kansas City, Mo., and plans to open a third location, in Lenexa, Kan., Axios reported.

Located at 161 E. 14th St., in Kansas City's Power and Light District, the bookstore shares a 6,000-square-foot storefront with Made in KC, a retailer focusing on gifts, apparel, and other goods local to Kansas City. The store also includes a Made in KC cafe, which is up and running, and a bar that will begin serving alcoholic beverages in the weeks ahead.

Per Kansas City magazine, the bookstore carries around 10,000 books; compared to the original Rainy Day Books in Fairway, the Kansas City store has a greater focus on adult books. Rainy Day Books co-owner Tyler Enders told Axios the goal is to host around 10 author events per year in the downtown store.

The Lenexa store will open within the Made in KC Marketplace at 8703 Penrose Lane. The bookstore will take over a space that was previously used for playing shuffleboard. The inventory will be roughly the same size as the Fairway store's selection, though Lenexa will have a bigger focus on children's books.

Enders is part of an ownership group that bought Rainy Day Books in 2022 and includes Keith Bradley and Thomas McIntyre. Enders, Bradley, and McIntyre are the co-founders of Made in KC.

Special Sauce, a culinary bookstore focusing on cookbooks and chef memoirs, will open next month in Charlotte, N.C., Axios Charlotte reported.

The bookstore will reside in a 500-square-foot space in Optimist Hall, a food hall at 1115 N. Brevard St., and will officially open on Monday, November 9, with a grand opening to follow on November 14. In addition to books, food-related merchandise like pantry items and kitchen accessories will be available. 

Owner Kat Skeen will place a major emphasis on highlighting local and regional chefs. Beginning next month, Skeen will create an Instagram Reel series called Chef's Shelf, which will feature cookbooks chosen by members of Charlotte's culinary scene; the titles in those videos will be displayed in-store. Skeen will also work with a company called Bonnie + Bud to create gift boxes that include cookbooks as well as culinary items sourced from North Carolina. 

Looking further ahead, Skeen will launch a monthly cookbook club in early 2027 and create a bookstore subscription that will cost $200 per year and offer subscribers a cookbook every quarter along with access to a special happy hour. She also intends to host pop-ups around Charlotte in collaboration with local chefs.

Originally from Charlotte, Skeen spent about 20 years living elsewhere around the country, including in New York City and San Francisco. After returning to Charlotte and seeing the growth of its restaurant scene, Skeen decided to open a culinary bookstore. She told Axios she was inspired in part by Omnivore Books on Food, a culinary bookstore in San Francisco.

Riverstone Books, Pittsburgh, Pa., held a ribbon cutting recently for its in-store Greenhouse Cafe, which had still been under construction when the bookstore reopened in August in its new Pine Creek neighborhood location at 65 Blazier Drive, Pittsburgh Business Times reported. The store relocated after a nearly nine-year run at McCandless Crossing. Customers can also shop at Riverstone's Squirrel Hill bookstore. 

At Greenhouse Cafe, Riverstone is partnering with Mechanic Coffee Co., a local coffee roaster, and local bakery One Sweet Cookie to provide pastries and other baked goods. The menu offers espresso drinks, drip coffee and assorted teas "in a setting inspired by owner Barbara Jeremiah's interest in gardening," Pittsburgh Business Times noted.

"It was incredibly important to me that our new store would not just function as a bookshop, but as a true third space," Jeremiah said. "The cafe is the final piece of the puzzle in creating this environment, giving us the space for our customers to celebrate, communicate, relax or attend a writing, flower, craft or art workshop." She founded Riverstone in 2017 after a more than 30-year career at Alcoa Corp.

White Rabbit Book Cafe, Oregon City, Ore., which launched as a small bookshop in 2014 and eventually relocated "to a spot along the city's bustling Main Street and transitioning into a joint bookstore and coffee shop," will be closing, though a specific date has not been announced, the Oregonian reported. 

In a recent social media post announcing the decision, White Rabbit noted: "Thank you for all the years of talking books, enjoying coffee and creating community! It has been an honor to be a part of this community.... All events in October will be happening, we hope to see you! We will keep you updated regarding the status of all other future events.... Thank you for your kindness and consideration of the amazing White Rabbit Book Cafe staff as we complete our tenure on your historic Main Street, and thank you for allowing us into your lives."

Ever since Danielle and Rolland Walsh opened the shop more than a decade ago, White Rabbit "was loved not just for its literature and lattes--but also for its unique roster of free events, from themed trivia and tarot readings to puzzle nights and 'boozy' book fairs," the Oregonian noted. A former children's librarian, Danielle Walsh "amassed a small social media following during the COVID-19 pandemic when she began hosting weekly livestreams talking about books and other gift shop items."

"People still want to have that community connection and to hear about the books," she said at the time. "The livestreams were a pivot for us and a real lifesaver."

Cheikh Hamidou Kane, a Senegalese writer and civil servant "whose 1961 novel, Ambiguous Adventure, reshaped perceptions of the colonial relationship," died October 3, the New York Times reported. He was 98. Kane's death was announced on social media by President Bassirou Diomaye Faye of Senegal, who posted: "He gave generations of Africans the words to grapple with a question that still haunts us: that of opening ourselves to the world's knowledge without losing anything of who we are. His work now belongs to the heritage of our Nation and of all Africa."

Despite publishing just two novels, Kane "achieved the status of Pan-African seer and was lauded as one of the founding fathers of African literature and as a writer who subtly captured the shock of colonization from the perspective of the continent's people," the Times wrote. 

In Ambiguous Adventure, Kane modeled the novel's protagonist, Samba Diallo, on himself while focusing on the psychological trauma of colonization, especially on the colonized elites. Samba is torn between two civilizations, and the title refers to his journey into the world of his land's conqueror.

When he wrote the book, Kane was also between two worlds. In the 1950s, he attended French schools in Senegal and then Paris, earning degrees in law and philosophy at the Sorbonne. He was trained in colonial administration at the National School for Overseas France, and returned to Africa in 1958, eventually becoming governor of a region near Dakar by the new government of independent Senegal.

Ambiguous Adventure won the Grand Literary Prize of Black Africa in 1962. An English translation generated little attention in the U.S.. but the book has long been considered seminal in Francophone Africa. It was read "in all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa," Le Monde journalist Éric Fottorino wrote in a 1996 profile of the author, adding that the book had sold 100,000 copies across the world.

In an interview with the author Maryse Condé on Radio France Internationale in 1974, Kane said that the novel contains "a sort of political denunciation of what was, if you will, the colonial adventure.... I thought the central problem was the conflict of cultures, of a traditional culture, the African culture, Black and Muslim, with the culture of the colonizers."

In 2018, he told Le Monde that he felt the colonial era was "marked by the denial of our being, of our identity.... By the white men who colonized us and wanted us to think we were inferior beings.... I admired them but I had in front of me people who had contempt for me. I had to fight to gain access to a world I admired but that wanted nothing to do with me."

Kane's second novel, The Guardians of the Temple (1995), did not achieve the same celebrity as his first. Poet Aimé Césaire had persuaded him not to publish it in 1965 because it "could have been used as a weapon against Senegal," Kane told Le Monde in 1996, adding, "Criticism of African regimes could have been seen as an appeal for military takeover."

But Ambiguous Adventure "endures as a classic plea for the independence and inherent worth of African cultures, and it is still taught in schools across the continent," the Times noted. Kane told the British critic J.P. Little in 1997, "When I wrote it, it was to bear witness to the Westerners of the existence of a Black culture, of a Black civilization, of a Black sensibility."

Publisher Transit Books hosted its second annual Big Fall Fundraiser to celebrate the transformative power of international literature at Donkey & Goat Winery, Berkeley, Calif. Proceeds from the event support 20 new books in 2027, including new works from Japan, Colombia, Turkey, and Norway. The party took its theme from Transit Books' fall title Our Life in the Forest by Marie Darrieussecq, translated from the French by Penny Hueston, about a woman writing from a forest encampment at the end of the world, in the unsatisfying company of her clone, and guests dressed accordingly. Among them were the City Lights team: Lise Solomon, sales representative for City Lights; Stacey Lewis, v-p, director of marketing & publicity; Paul Yamazaki, buyer; and Caroline Picard, associate publisher.

"The endings of books aren't all that haunt us.…" Booksellers at Village Books and Paper Dreams, Bellingham, Wash., recounted the trials of working with a bookstore ghost, especially as Halloween approaches.

"Nook + Press is a space for everyone. Whether you"re picking up a new read or bringing a book from home, our doors are open for you to slow down, disconnect, and get lost in the pages," Nook + Press bookstore in San Angelo, Tex., posted, adding: "Some come for the books. Some come for the community. Either way, there's a place for you here."

This Is a Door: A Novel by Daniel Nayeri (Stonefruit Studio/Sourcebooks).

Tomorrow:
Today: Barbara Kingsolver, author of Partita: A Novel (Harper, $32, 9780063577541).

Also on Today: Sophia Bush, author of And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress (Flatiron, $29.99, 9781250457899). 

WBUR's Here & Now: Emily Feng, author of Our Hearts Burned for Home: Uyghur Militants in Syria's Civil War (Columbia Global Reports, $18, 9781967190188).

The shortlist has been selected for the 2026 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. All shortlisted authors will receive a magnum of Bollinger Special Cuvée and a copy of Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (Everyman's Library). The winner, who will be announced November 30, receives a jeroboam and a case of Bollinger Special Cuvée, the complete set of the Everyman's Library P.G. Wodehouse collection, and a pig named after their winning book. 

The shortlist:
A Good Person by Kirsten King
Black Bag by Luke Kennard
How to Lose a Lord in Ten Days by Sophie Irwin
Motherfaker by Anna Brook-Mitchell
Offseason by Avigayl Sharp
We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad

Andrew Lewis Conn (O, Africa!) sets his mischievous third novel, I Swore I'd Burn This Book, in 2009, but the despair over the state of American reading habits that runs through its spine still rings familiar. For narrator Dmitri Boris Godunov, the preponderance of "ghostwritten pop-star pap, voyeuristic true-crime butchery, YA illiteracy, and... adult coloring books" threatens to render him penniless. Not that he's the brains behind the Godunov literary estate--that would be his late father, Vladimir, a Russian immigrant to the United States whose novels took the 20th century by storm. Most notorious among them is Annabeth's Limbs, a serially celebrated and decried work of fiction about a 12-year-old girl's rape by her "angel-tongued, beetle-browed European stepfather."

If this Vladimir calls to mind another, then Conn has calibrated his keen sense of satire impeccably. "What to do with a body of work teeming with some of the most limpid language ever committed to English," Dmitri muses, "when fully a third... is predicated on the discomfiting theme of pedophilia?" Indeed, faced with indigence, evidence about his father's alleged improprieties, and a biographer with an axe to grind against the Godunov name, what is a failson to do? The obvious answer for Simon Graves, the Godunovs' literary agent, is to resurrect Vladimir's unfinished final novel, The Tyrant Cantos. It's a lucrative prospect undercut by just how incomplete the project actually is, not to mention Dmitri's oath to destroy the small stack of note cards, which bear only a faint whiff of Vladimir's genius.

I Swore I'd Burn This Book is at once homage to and a skewering of the male novelists whose influence on literature continues to spark debate. Conn's blundering narrator is unrestrained in his self-laceration, but he reserves his purest hatred for Gary Charsky, his rival, his father's former assistant, and the author of the forthcoming biography. Their repartee is as vicious as it is vulgar--petty and puerile yet erudite and insightful--as they clamor to have the final word on the Godunov legacy. Because it's in words themselves where Conn finds the greatest pleasure--words in service of an unforgettable voice. "The most insistent of literary devices, first person proposes a mode in which voice is everything," reads one of numerous footnotes riddled throughout the madcap quest to save Vladimir's reputation from ruin. Equally adept with literary references and dick jokes, sometimes in the same breath, Dmitri proves to be a trenchant emissary for the titans of yesteryear. And his growth may inspire many a pessimist to realize along with him, "It's never been a better time to be a book!" One of Conn's, especially. --Dave Wheeler, senior editor, Shelf Awareness

Shelf Talker: Satirist Andrew Lewis Conn takes mischievous aim at the frantic maneuvers behind the preservation of a literary titan's legacy from tarnishment.