Gladys Books & Wine, a Black lesbian-owned bookstore and wine lounge, opened earlier this month in Brooklyn, N.Y., the New York Times reported.

Located at 306 Malcolm X Blvd. in Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighborhood, the bookstore focuses on Black queer femme culture and serves coffee, tea, and wine. Owner Tiffany Dockery and her team have a suite of events planned that include poetry readings, game nights, short film screenings, writing workshops, and more.

Before deciding to open Gladys Books & Wine, Dockery worked in tech. She was already feeling burned out with that career when she was let go from her job at Google in September 2024. She told the Times that it "felt like God was saying, 'All right, at what point are you going to actually do something that you believe in?' "

A lover of books and bookstores, Dockery decided to take the plunge and open a bookstore and wine bar meant to be a gathering place and safe space for Black women and lesbians. She named the bookstore after her grandmother Gladys, whose home was Dockery's "first safe space." 

The Times noted that the opening of Gladys Books & Wine comes amid a period of gentrification for Bed-Stuy that has seen the percentage of Black residents drop from about 75% to 40%. On the bookstore's website, Dockery wrote: "Like my grandmother, Bed-Stuy has held me, taught me, and reminded me that--as Nikki Giovanni said--'Black love is Black wealth.' "

Gladys Books & Wine had a soft opening in late August followed by a grand opening on September 6. The grand opening celebration featured a storytime session and other family-focused activities in the morning followed by an afternoon tea time, an event with Briona Simone Jones, editor of the Mouths of Rain anthology, an opening toast, and music and dancing with a local DJ.

"The amount of Black women who said 'Thank you' and 'I'm proud of you' to me felt like the ultimate payoff," Dockery told the Times. "It genuinely felt like my grandmother speaking to me through them."

Aubri and James Cook

Quill & Candle Bookshop opened recently at 2007 100 Year Party Ct. in the Prospect New Town neighborhood, Longmont, Colo. The Times-Call reported that co-owners Aubri Cook and James Cook "owe a lot to books, considering that they met at a Barnes & Noble. Both are passionate about reading, and with The Quill & Candle, they're taking that passion to the next level."

The shop "is a haven for every kind of reader. Books lining the shelves include entries in the romance, science fiction and fantasy genres. A separate room is filled with reading material for children and teens," the Times-Call wrote, adding that for customers "hoping to stay a while, seats are abundant, from a big couch in the middle of the store to a chair facing a window in the back." The store also offers plants, gifts, local artwork, and antique furniture.

For Aubri Cook, owning a bookstore was always a "starry-eyed dream," and when a retail space in the neighborhood became available to rent earlier this year, she knew it could make her dream come true. The Cooks spent the summer working on renovations and hosted ribbon cutting and grand opening celebrations on September 9 and 13.

"We just wanted to create a really cozy, whimsical atmosphere," she said. "The world feels like a really overbearing and unsafe place right now, so we just want to create a space where people can kind of escape for a little bit."

Regarding the shop's book inventory, James Cook noted that in addition to its general selections, the bookstore has a robust horror section, a "rare" display containing a signed Ray Bradbury book, and novels published decades ago. "We wanted to have physical copies of stuff here that we think are great books that may have been forgotten," he said.

The Cooks noted that their location in Prospect New Town feels right. Aubri Cook added, "Because this place is so small and tight-knit, everyone was just really supportive and excited that we were going to be here. That meant the world to me."

Abbi Diego

Prelude Bookstore is set to open in Dunwoody, Ga., in late October, RoughDraft Atlanta reported.

The 1,900-square-foot bookstore will carry titles for all ages and reside in the Dunwoody Village shopping center at 5529 Chamblee Dunwoody Rd. Store owner Abbi Diego plans to have around 7,000 books at opening, with about 60% of the inventory devoted to adult books and 40% to children. Alongside books, Diego will carry a variety of gifts and sidelines, and her event plans include author events, book clubs, storytime sessions, craft nights, and more.

"We are so excited to launch this passion project," Diego told RoughDraft Atlanta. "The people we've talked to are overwhelmingly excited about it."

Diego described herself as a lifelong bookworm, noting that she was raised by a "librarian mom and a sci-fi loving dad," and grew up to believe that "every genre was universal, every story worth exploring, and no book was ever off limits." 

She decided to open a bookstore of her own relatively recently, after a "charming little space" became available next to her and her husband's favorite coffee shop. "It just seemed too serendipitous to pass up," she wrote.

Meryl Halls

During this year's BA Conference and Gardners Trade Show (September 20-21), Meryl Halls, managing director of the Booksellers Association of the U.K. & Ireland, spoke of "another challenging year" for bookshops, with last year's tax increases "starting to crash to shore," the Bookseller reported.

Halls noted that booksellers have been left "reeling" from National Insurance contributions and minimum wage increases, as well as from the removal of rate reliefs. Halls also cited a recent BA survey that revealed booksellers "can suffer from harassment and intimidation" based on the books on the shelves of their bookshops, adding that this is "not a well-known thing about booksellers."

Fleur Sinclair, BA president and owner of Sevenoaks Bookshop, observed: "Our shop doors are open for absolutely anyone to walk through them. I wish I knew a way to guarantee our safety in the face of this potential hate.... I do know that by being here today, under the umbrella of the Booksellers Association, that none of us are alone. And the association's work is to do all they can to protect us, encourage us, and allow us to all trade freely."

Although the BA's membership numbers decreased slightly this year, Halls said bookselling remains an attractive career path for many, noting that a "record" number of attendees took the BA's Introduction to Bookselling training course. 

In her final speech as BA president, Sinclair spoke about her goal "to help make our bookselling workforce better representative of the reading population," noting that "writers of color often struggle to find platforms, which can mean less book sales, which publishers can then interpret as it being bad business to publish anyone who isn't white.... I've seen a very definite fall in the number of mainstream publishers publishing books by black authors since the height of the Black Lives Matter movement."

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Young people in Finland are increasingly buying books in English rather than in their mother tongue, "raising fears among publishers over the future of translated literature," the Guardian reported. One in four titles sold in Finnish bookshops last year were written in a foreign language, primarily in English, according to figures from the country's association of booksellers. 

Publishers said a major cause of the increased demand for English language works is BookTok, with younger readers not wanting to wait for a Finnish translation to come out to take part in the BookTok conversation, the Guardian noted, adding that Finnish-language titles brought in just €26 million (about $30.4 million) of the €57 million (about $66.5 million) generated by all fiction book sales across digital and print last year.

Leena Balme of Finnish publishing house WSOY said changed buying habits meant they had to think "very carefully whether it is worth the risk to translate a book into Finnish.... I am a bit concerned. I'm mostly concerned for the young readers. It seems a bit cool to read in English. On the streets of Helsinki you can find teenagers born in Finland with Finnish-speaking parents who speak English to each other."

She added that, curiously, the popularity of English can also be traced to some readers finding the sex scenes less embarrassing: "When you read in English you can detach yourself a little bit." --Robert Gray

Charley Rosen

Charley Rosen, "a fiery former basketball player and minor-league coach who became a bestselling author of nearly 30 books, most of them about basketball," died September 13, the New York Times reported. He was 84. In 2007, Chronogram, a Hudson Valley media website, described him as an "odd mix of street fighter and Bodhisattva, with a dash of vintage Deadhead." 

As a player, Rosen was a star center at Hunter College in New York, played semipro basketball, and coached four teams in the Continental Basketball Association. He fictionalized his CBA experience in a novel, The Cockroach Basketball League (1992). After coaching the Bard College men's basketball team to a 1-16 record in the 1979-80 season, Rosen chronicled the experience in Players and Pretenders: The Basketball Team That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1981).

His other books include the novel Have Jump Shot, Will Travel (1975); the memoir Crazy Basketball: A Life In and Out of Bounds (2011); and The First Tip-Off: The Incredible Story of the Birth of the NBA (2008). He also collaborated with NBA player and coach Phil Jackson on two books: Maverick: More Than a Game (1975), an autobiography, and More Than a Game (2001), which was a memoir by both men, told in alternating chapters, with coaching philosophy.

Two of Rosen's novels were bestsellers: The House of Moses All-Stars, (1996), about a touring Jewish basketball team in 1936 that barnstorms the country in a hearse with a Star of David painted on the side; and Barney Polan's Game: A Novel of the 1951 College Basketball Scandals (1998), a fictionalized version of a subject that he had tackled as history in Scandals of '51: How the Gamblers Almost Killed College Basketball (1978).

In 1994, the Wall Street Journal called Rosen the "foremost literary chronicler" of basketball. In 2005, Jackson told the Middletown, N.Y., Times Herald-Record: "Writing is Charley's gift to basketball."

The two first met in 1973, when Rosen, on assignment for Sport magazine, attended a postgame party at a loft above an auto repair shop in Manhattan where Jackson, who was then playing for the Knicks, was living, the Times noted. In More Than a Game, Rosen wrote that beneath Jackson's "peaceful hippie smile," he was a relentless competitor. They developed a quick friendship that eventually led to Jackson hiring Rosen as his assistant coach with the CBA's Albany Patroons in 1983.

Rosen also wrote The Wizard of Odds: How Jack Molinas Almost Destroyed the Game of Basketball (2001), about a former college and NBA player who fixed college games between 1957 and 1961.

Peter Guralnick appeared last Saturday at Jabberwocky Books in Newburyport, Mass., to discuss his new book, The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership That Rocked the World (Little, Brown). Here: Guralnick with Jabberwocky owner Sue Little, who opened the store in 1972. (photo: Michael Barson)

In response to the ongoing wave of independent bookstore openings and the needs of new bookstore owners, the Bookstore Training Group of Paz & Associates has launched "Life Raft: Survival Tools for New Bookstore Owners," a bundled training program that helps new owners to:

• Manage payroll with a budget spreadsheet based on owner's compensation and staff scheduling
• Buy with a budget, with a straightforward frontlist and restock buying budget spreadsheet
• Monitor bookstore metrics with a bookstore management scorecard
• Organize bookkeeping with a handy checklist
• Manage priorities with the Taskmaster spreadsheet
• Ask questions with one hour of coaching time

"Working toward sustainability means knowing how to manage, what metrics to monitor, and prioritizing tasks that are critical to growing the business and achieving profitability," Donna Paz Kaufman, founder of Paz & Associates, said. "This new bundled training program pairs downloadable worksheets with personalized time with a seasoned expert to relieve the pressures of those first years in business."

The cost of the new training program, developed by Paz & Associates consultant Nicole Magistro, former owner of the Bookworm in Edwards, Colo., is $495, with a discount available for ABA members. For more information, contact the Bookstore Training Group of Paz & Associates at 904-277-2664 or visit OwningaBookstore.com.

"Leaves fall and reading calls." That was the seasonally appropriate sidewalk chalkboard message in front of Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.

"It was a good day here today," Neighborhood Books in Presque Isle, Maine, posted on Facebook. "I can't really put it into words but it was a fulfilling day. Feeling like maybe we have a purpose here more than just books. It was busy with lots of people and good conversations, some hard and sad conversations. I was shown old family pictures, and talked about health and hiking. So many people I love in these doors today. If you've never come in before, we hope you can stop in soon. We'll greet you with smiling faces and a hug if you need one."

Sisters of the Jungle: The Trailblazing Women Who Shaped the Study of Wild Primates by Keriann McGooga (Douglas & McIntyre).

Two indie bookstores have connections with The Lowdown, a new FX/Hulu series starring Ethan Hawke as a used bookshop owner as well as self-described "truthstorian" and local media journalist in Tulsa, Okla. The booksellers were celebrating their contributions on social media this week as the series made its debut:

Magic City Books, Tulsa, Okla.: "Did you catch us in the first episode of The Lowdown? Big thanks to Sterlin and the amazing cast/crew for including MCB in this magical mosaic. And that writers room! WOW. Might just be the best show ever for book nerds!"

Dickson Street Bookshop, Fayetteville, Ark.: "If you're watching The Lowdown on FX/Hulu you might notice Ethan Hawke with some vintage crime paperbacks their production picked up from us last year when filming the pilot in Tulsa. Also, the always amazing Magic City Books in Tulsa is heavily featured."

HBO Max's three-part special Charlotte's Web, based on E.B. White's classic novel, will be released in its entirety on October 2. The animated retelling of the story is from Academy Award winner Luke Matheny (Ghostwriter) and executive produced in collaboration with Sesame Workshop.
 
The ensemble voice cast includes Amy Adams as Charlotte, Elijah Wood as adult Wilbur, Griffin Robert Faulkner as young Wilbur, Jean Smart as Narrator, Cynthia Erivo as Goose, Natalie Chan as Fern, Danny Trejo as Gander, Randall Park as Templeton, Chris Diamantopoulos as Homer, Rosario Dawson as Edith, Ana Ortiz as Dolores, Tom Everett Scott as John, Leith Burke as George, Keith David as Old Sheep, Patricia Richardson as Widow Fussy, and Dee Bradley Baker as Animals.

"This adaptation has been years in the making, and every detail reflects our passion for E.B. White's novel, which has touched generations," said Kay Wilson Stallings, executive v-p, chief creative and production officer at Sesame Workshop. "With this extraordinary cast, we've created a retelling of this story that celebrates friendship, empathy, courage, and community. We can't wait for families to fall in love with these characters all over again."

Nalo Hopkinson won the C$3,000 (about US$2,160) Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic for her novel Blackheart Man. The author is now a three-time winner of the prize, having previously taken the honors for Skin Folk (2003) and The New Moon's Arms (2008).

The judges wrote: "Blackheart Man is sublime, bringing an extraordinary landscape of literary, magical, and cultural history together in a new world. The influence of magic is discreet, almost invisible, a sweet low hum that sets the tone as a whole: good natured, optimistic, fun, but serious, too. The characters' struggles are multivalent; interpersonal, political, and ethical questions are explored through a complex narrative that places identity within and without the individual. The novel gains strength from the windows it opens into our world--the history of slave revolts, the history of colonialism, the slightly topsy-turvy effect of living in a world so like (and unlike) our own. Ultimately, Blackheart Man is a magical book with depth, wisdom, and lightness of touch, challenging the reader to widen their scope on the genre."

photo: Taylor Hughes

Emily Jane is the author of the fun, genre-bending novels On Earth as It Is on Television and Here Beside the Rising Tide. She lives on an urban farm in Cincinnati, Ohio, with her husband, their two kids, their cat, Ripley, and their dog, Nymeria. Her next book--American Werewolves (Hyperion Avenue, September 16, 2025)--brings readers from the wilds of the New World to the opulent board rooms and golf courses of the 21st century in a tale where America's venture capitalist werewolves meet their match.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

A fantabulous pop star, a glitter wolf, an epic journey, and some unlikely friends who team up to defeat the venture capitalist werewolves!

On your nightstand now:

In print I'm reading Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman, recommended by my 11-year-old who wants to read only science fiction books featuring animals. I love it so far! She's already on book six in the series. I should probably catch up, especially since the kid and I are co-authoring our own series of Lit-RPG middle-grade books. On audiobook, I just finished So Far Gone by Jess Walter, which was really fabulous and timely, and I started The Keeper of Lonely Spirits by E.M. Anderson, which is a cozy and delightful read.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I had two favorite series as a kid: The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis and the Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I probably read each all the way through at least five or six times. I read Narnia again to both of my kids, but I could never get them interested in Anne of Green Gables. But in the kids' defense, the books don't have any dragons.

Book you've faked reading:

I faked reading an embarrassing number of books in college. The one that stands out most is probably Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which I was supposed to read for a seminar course with an oral exam. The professor grilled me for an hour on the book. I must have faked it well, because I think I got a B. After college, I went back and read the book, along with many others I'd skipped, and I adored it.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Can I pick a graphic novel? The Transmetropolitan series, written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Darick Robertson, is awesome. It's like Hunter S. Thompson in a cyberpunk dystopia. The main character has a three-eyed cigarette-smoking cat. I haven't read it in a long time, not since the copies I loaned out never came back, but I've recommended it more times than I can count.

Book you hid from your parents:

Kudos to my parents for being cool (or oblivious) enough that I never had to hide a book from them!

Book that changed your life:

I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac as a teenager. I haven't picked it up in years but that book, and the Beats in general, impacted the development of my own writing style. I also love the idea of having a big group of writer, musician, and artist friends who all travel around together and inspire each other.

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

I'd love to go back and read The Stand by Stephen King for the first time. It's so epic. I remember getting shivers when I read it--not the scary kind, but the kind you get when all the pieces in a story begin to fall into place and it's so exciting and emotional that your whole body vibrates. Stephen King is a master of weaving disparate storylines together.

Five books you'll never part with:

This is an impossible question--I love so many books! But here are five great ones from my bookshelves:

1984 by George Orwell was the first book I ever read that blew my mind. I read it as a high school freshman. My own daughter, about the same age, recently discovered it and had the same reaction. It's a true masterpiece.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is one of the few books I've read multiple times as an adult. It's darkly humorous, absurd, and absolutely brilliant.

The Postman by David Brin sparked my love for postapocalyptic novels. It's another one of those books that will give you the excited-shivers.

The Moorings of Mackerel Sky by MZ is the first book I was asked to blurb--an exciting milestone for me as an author, but also such a privilege. It's powerful, enchanting, and gorgeously written.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is one of my favorite books from the past few years. It's a perfect, page-turning, cross-genre blend of sci-fi and romance, and the prose is exquisite.

On your TBR list:

A lot of brand-new sci-fi and fantasy! In October I'm hitting the road "traveling book festival"-style with a talented group of up-and-coming sci-fi and fantasy authors--my teenage dreams coming true! I want to check out all their latest works before the trip. I've already had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of Saltcrop, Yume Kitasei's latest, out September 30, an epic dystopian tale of two sisters who sail across the sea to find their missing third sister. Teo's Durumi is the sequel to Ocean's Godori by Elaine Cho--I can't wait to dive in to this cinematic space opera series. J.R. Dawson's sophomore novel, The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World, is sure to be haunting and heart-wrenching. And Mia Tsai's new science fantasy, The Memory Hunters, where humans hunt and preserve memories extracted from blood, looks thought-provoking and original.

Georgia Summers (The City of Stardust) renders an enchanting world of self-sabotage, romance, deadly ink magic, and dearly beloved bookstores in her sophomore novel, The Bookshop Below. London was once full of shops where books and the magic they held could be exchanged for the priceless: self-extracted teeth, a lock of hair, a firstborn child. In contemporary times, the force that imbues books and bookshops with their power, through the particular magical workings of booksellers, is fading. Now Cassandra, a disgraced former bookseller, is drawn back into the life that exiled her, just in time to die along with the world she reveres--or, perhaps, to save it.

She's been living as Cass Holt for years, getting by (and keeping her hands on the books she loves) in the most ignoble fashion: Cass is a book thief. She is also one of the most talented readers--wielders of the magic within enchanted books; now she sells that gift without scruples to whomever can pay. But Cass once had another name: "Cassandra Fairfax, named after a woman whose words melted into thin air no matter how truthful they were, with the surname of a character in disguise from a novel by a long-dead author. Layers upon layers of insubstantiality."

Summers's enchanting fantasy opens with Cassandra in great danger, called to return, reluctantly, to the bookshop where she was raised, trained, and then banished by her mentor, Chiron. She was once his protégé, destined to become an owner one day. Now, just as suddenly, she finds herself reinstated, struggling to rehabilitate Chiron's decayed shop "and all its finicky, unpredictable moods." She is in over her head, wrestling with her considerable guilt over past crimes against bookshops, against the underground river that powers the bookshop systems in ways Cassandra has yet to understand, and against Chiron himself. She is in danger from enemies who know about her deeds as Cass Holt, and whatever is threatening the bookshops. Cassandra must manage a bookseller she feels lucky to hire, a wonderfully capable woman named Byron; a handsome, magnetic rival named Lowell Sharpe; and the duty she feels to solve the mysteries of what happened to Chiron and why the magic bookshops are disappearing. Cassandra is not sure she wants to be here at all, let alone on the hook for saving everything she knows from destruction. But she feels she owes a debt. She finds she cares about people she never expected to. And she uncovers an enormous secret about her own origins that upends the stakes entirely.

The Bookshop Below offers a delicious combination of shadowy, sinister magic, wistful romance, propulsive action, and the utter reverence one holds for the right book. Summers excels at transporting her readers to a dreamy otherworld where anything is possible. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: This dark fantasy about the magic of books and the power of love is both heartrending and inspiring.