Alison Reid and John Evans have found a buyer for the Diesel bookstore in Brentwood, Calif., which they put up for sale just a year ago. Richard and Heather Turner are taking over ownership of the store this Thursday, August 1. Reid and Evans, who will help with the transition, continue to own the Diesel bookstore in San Diego, in Del Mar, which they will rename Camino Books "over the next couple months." They had put that store up for sale in 2022 and have several interested parties but don't anticipate a sale until next year.

In a statement to customers about the sale of the Brentwood store, which they founded in 2008, Reid and Evans wrote in part, "We are pleased to announce that we have found the right buyers for the store, and they've found us!... We are so excited to work to help them keep the store as good as you've come to expect and to take it forward into the future. All of your favorite booksellers will be continuing to work in the store.

"At this time we want to express our appreciation for your support, in so many ways, throughout these 16 years. We are grateful for your sticking with us through thick and thin, through the pandemic especially, for being able to be a part of this wonderful community of passionate readers. It has been a pleasure to talk books, and all else, with you and to share the book world."

Since 1989, Reid and Evans have opened five bookstores, all in California. In 2017, they sold the Oakland store to longtime manager Brad Johnson; it's now called East Bay Booksellers. They've also had stores in Larkspur and Malibu.

Old Town Books, Alexandria, Va., will expand this fall with the addition of Old Town Books Junior. Northern Virginia magazine reported that the children's bookstore at 128 S. Royal St. will be adding to the existing store and is expected to open the larger space in September.

"We're going to have SO MANY BOOKS!," owner Ally Kirkpatrick posted on Instagram. "Young teen, middle grade, early reader, graphic novels, manga, picture books, board books--we will have it ALL!" She also shared video of "demo time in the new Old Town Books Junior space! We get our bookshelves next week--ahhh it's really happening!"

Earlier in the spring, Kirkpatrick had written on the bookshop's blog: "Imagine a warm splash of sunlight on old oak floors, a riot of colorful picture book covers, and a passel of babies crawling around at Saturday morning storytime--I personally can't think of a happier space than our children's nook at Old Town Books....

"It's an understatement to call it a 'new section,' though, when in reality we're building out an entire kids bookstore. The new space will expand our shop into the other half of our beautiful historic 1840s brick building.... Our expansion comes with lots of fun surprises, including more than tripling the inventory of books in stock for young teens, middle graders, and early readers. We're also growing our selection of kids nonfiction titles, activity books, picture books, and baby books." She has also shared a sneak peek behind the scenes of what goes into designing a bookstore.

The Crafty Reader, offering new and used books as well as handmade craft goods from local artists, is scheduled to open August 30 at 39 N. Walnut St. in Milford, Del. Owner Kori Lewandowski told Delaware Live that she loves books and crafts, so whenever family members and friends asked what she wanted to do with her life, if cost were no object, "it's always been to open a bookstore."

Lewandowski grew up in Bridgeville and still lives there. "The closest bookstore was always 40 minutes away, in Salisbury or at the beach," she said. "Milford was the first place that drew my eye. Something kept drawing me back to Milford. It really was the welcoming community."

She expressed gratitude for mentoring by Maryland booksellers Mickie Meinhardt of the Buzzed Word in Ocean City and Liz Decker of Caprichos Books in Ocean Pines.

Lewandowski earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Delaware, and early in the pandemic started a jewelry business. "Crafting is near and dear to my heart," she said, adding that she encountered other artisans who were wishing for some sort of permanent space to display and sell their creations. That is why she is making space in the Crafty Reader for artisans, changing the lineup on a month to month basis. When she opens, she'll also have a small selection of her own crocheted items and jewelry.

The store will also start with a selection of used books donated by family and friends, offering what she called "a cool sneak peek into what they like."

Noting that mixing books with other items is a common business model, Lewandowski said, "I don't think that anyone who runs a bookstore does it to get rich. I'm opening it for the love in my heart for reading."

Lewis Lapham (photo: Joshua Simpson)

Lewis H. Lapham, "the scholarly patrician who edited Harper's Magazine for nearly three decades, and who in columns, books and later his own magazine, Lapham's Quarterly, attacked what he regarded as the inequities and hypocrisies of American life," died July 23, the New York Times reported. He was 89.

After a decade as a newspaper reporter and magazine writer, Lapham became the managing editor of Harper's from 1971 to 1975, then editor-in-chief from 1976 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 2006. He "offered a blend of high culture and populism: the fiction of John Updike and George Saunders mixed with reports on abortion fights, global warming and the age of terrorism--generally, but not always, with a progressive eye," the Times wrote. His last book, Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy (2016), argued that the election of Donald J. Trump was the culmination of decades of degradation of U.S. democracy under a number of Republican administrations.

In 2006, Lapham retired from Harper's and founded Lapham's Quarterly, an intellectual journal that used the lessons of history and the persuasions of literature to dissect modern problems. "The idea was to bring the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present," he told the Times in 2009. "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

Many of his books had their genesis in his essays for Harper's, including Fortune's Child: A Portrait of the United States as Spendthrift Heir (1980), a collection of thematically unified columns around his metaphor of America as a spoiled rich kid; and Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-Siècle (1995), which portrayed a society of lost values as it approached the turn of the millennium. In Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy (2004), Lapham indicted the Bush administration for what he called its efforts to deceive the nation about the Iraq war's origins and aims. 

In 2005, Lapham wrote and appeared in The American Ruling Class, a documentary-style film featuring fictional characters as well as interviews with real celebrities, including Bill Bradley, Walter Cronkite, Pete Seeger, Robert Altman, and Barbara Ehrenreich. It was shown on the Sundance Channel in 2007.

Lapham also wrote for Commentary, Vanity Fair, Fortune, Forbes and many other publications. He won the National Magazine Award in 1995 for his columns in Harper's and the 2002 Thomas Paine Journalism Award, and he was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame in 2007.

In a tribute to its "editor emeritus," Harper's noted: "His life and career, at Harper's and later at Lapham's Quarterly, were distinguished by a different approach, not to produce a magazine that would clothe readers 'with opinions in the way that Halston or Bloomingdale’s dresses them for the opera,' but rather one that would aim 'to ask questions, not to provide ready-made answers, to say, in effect, look at this, see how much more beautiful and strange and full of possibility is the world than can be imagined by the mythographers at Time or NBC.'

"In 1984, Lapham introduced the iconic Harper's Index, Readings, and the Annotation, journalistic forms that recognized the time constraints modern readers faced amid the flood of information in the electronic age. This redesign remains the foundation of the magazine to this day, and Lapham's editorial sensibility continues to guide our work."

"Who doesn’t love Snoopy?! He appeals to all ages & stages," Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, N.C., noted in sharing a pic of the shop's "Read-Write-Snoopy" chalkboard.

At Simon & Schuster:

Ashley Herzig, previously at Macmillan, has joined the company as a national account manager for Amazon.

Alex Yokom, previously a buyer at Browsers Bookshop, Olympia, Wash., is joining the company as telesales account manager for the Western region, effective August 1.

First Do No Harm: A Novel by Joe Kenda (Blackstone Publishing).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Jay Ellis, author of Did Everyone Have an Imaginary Friend (or Just Me)?: Adventures in Boyhood (One World, $29, 9780593243190).

Also on GMA: Robert Jobson, author of Catherine, the Princess of Wales: A Biography of the Future Queen (Pegasus, $29.95, 9781639367122).

Sony Pictures Television is expanding its relationship with author Liz Moore, acquiring her novels The God of the Woods and The Unseen World for series development. Deadline reported that Original Film's Neal H. Moritz and Pavun Shetty, who are executive producing Peacock's Long Bright River limited series adaptation--based on Moore's novel as part of their exclusive first-look deal with Sony--are also exec producing both new projects.

Co-created and executive produced by Moore, Long Bright River stars Amanda Seyfried. Nikki Toscano (The Offer, Hunters) and Moore executive produce, along with Seyfried, among others. Hagar Ben-Asher (Bad Boy, Dead Women Walking) directs and serves as executive producer on the first episode. 

Winners have been announced in 32 categories for the 2024 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, considered "the Oscars of the comics industry." (See them all here.) Among the winners:

Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailer Award: Blackbird Comics and Coffeehouse, Maitland, Fla.
Best Comics-Related Book: I Am the Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future by Michael Molcher (Rebellion)
Best Academic/Scholarly Work: The Claremont Run: Subverting Gender in the X- Men by J. Andrew Deman (University of Texas Press)
Best Adaptation from Another Medium: Watership Down by Richard Adams, adapted by James Sturm and Joe Sutphin (Ten Speed Graphic)
Best Publication for Early Readers: Bigfoot and Nessie: The Art of Getting Noticed by Chelsea M. Campbell and Laura Knetzger (Penguin Workshop)
Best Publication for Kids: Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir by Pedro Martín (Dial Books for Young Readers/Penguin Young Readers)
Best Publication for Teens: Danger and Other Unknown Risks by Ryan North and Erica Henderson (Penguin Workshop)
Best Anthology: Comics for Ukraine, edited by Scott Dunbier (Zoop)
Best Reality-Based Work: Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy by Bill Griffith (Abrams ComicArts)
Best Archival Collection/Project--Strips: Dauntless Dames: High-Heeled Heroes of the Comic Strips, edited by Peter Maresca and Trina Robbins (Fantagraphics)
Best Archival Collection/Project--Comic Books: All-Negro Comics 75th Anniversary Edition, edited by Chris Robinson (Very GOOD Books)

The reissue of Broke Heart Blues, originally published in 1999, reintroduces readers to the breathtaking novel and includes a self-reflective afterword by its author, award-winning writer Joyce Carol Oates (Hazards of Time Travel, Butcher). Oates's contemporary classic about small-town obsession and nostalgia in the wake of a true-crime scandal will appeal to today's readers perhaps even more than before.

John Reddy is only a teenager when he is tried for killing his mother's lover. Amid the trial's media circus, the local high school's swooning girls and overeager boys turn the quiet, enigmatic shooter into a heartthrob of epic proportions: the subject of speculative daydreams, the projection of personal desire, and the target of collective hero worship. Imagined to be gentle and misunderstood by some and discussed as a James Dean-esque hero by others, John remains an elusive presence in the life of his classmates, while he himself sags under the exhaustion of seemingly never being able to escape his fate.

Told in three parts, Broke Heart Blues uses its first portion to construct John Reddy as mythic vision through the collective first-person perspective of his admirers. In the most propulsive of the sections, this chorus allows the narrative itself to become "like background in a picture in which the foreground, the actual subject, is missing." While the high school girls' descriptions of John rise to orgasmic heights, the high school boys are just as enthralled with John ("Not that we were jealous. Maybe we were jealous....") as they are with his mother, Dahlia, as easily painted a victim as a femme fatale. In this prominent opening section, Oates's virtuosic control of pacing and voice constructs a tilt-a-whirl of mania, thrusting the narrative forward to the pulse of a small-town community's feverish heart.

The novel's second section slows to a gentler, more grounded pace as it explores John's later life as Mr. Fix-It. While this section provides both an intermission of sorts and a new emotional core to the novel's tension, the final act whips the story back into a collective frenzy as Oates uses a high school reunion as a setting to probe the dark hysteria underlying seemingly innocent nostalgia. In her afterword, Oates doesn't spell out any answers to the "murder mystery" she claims the novel is. Nevertheless, she does pull back the curtain a bit for readers to take a voyeuristic peek into inspiration for the novel's dream-like world. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

Shelf Talker: Joyce Carol Oates's stunning novel about one town's ramped passion for a boy accused of murder, Broke Heart Blues, feels more resonant than ever in this reissue with a thoughtful afterword.

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

1. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
2. Twisted Love by Ana Huang
3. The Inmate by Freida McFadden
4. If We Ever Meet Again by Ana Huang
5. The Ritual by Shantel Tessier
6. The Body in the Backyard by Lucy Score
7. If Love Had a Price by Ana Huang
8. Twisted Games by Ana Huang
9. Catch the Sun by Jennifer Hartmann
10. Off to the Races by Elsie Silver

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]