New and used bookstore Tesseract Books held a grand opening last month in Yellow Springs, Ohio, the Yellow Springs News reported.

The bookstore, at 232 Xenia Ave., carries general-interest titles for all ages. It is a successor to Epic Book Shop, which first opened in Yellow Springs more than 50 years ago. Tesseract Books owner Kathy Engisch officially took over the store from Epic Book Shop owner Gail Lichtenfels in April and has added to the store's selection and changed the name.

The new name, Engisch told Yellow Springs News, is a reference to Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. "I chose it because I like the sound of the word and I like the idea of traveling to another world, which is what reading is for me, especially reading science fiction," she said.

Engisch has also brought in some prints and cards from local artists, and she plans to continue adjusting the inventory based on community feedback. One thing that is very important to her, she added, is highlighting banned books and promoting literacy during such polarized times.

Prior to buying Epic Book Shop, Engisch taught at Wright State University as part of the Department of Neuroscience, Cell Biology and Physiology. She had wanted a bookstore of her own for years, ever since seeing one for sale while on vacation, but the timing did not work out and she did not want to compete with Epic Book Shop. When she learned that Lichtenfels was thinking of selling, she jumped at the opportunity.

Little District Books has moved to a new, larger location in Washington, D.C., the Washington City Paper reported.

Last month, the queer-owned and operated bookstore moved from its original home on 737 8th St. SE to 631 Pennsylvania Ave. SE. The new space, located less than a mile from the old store, is much larger. The additional space will allow owner Patrick Kern and his team to expand the store's offerings, host more frequent events, and add a tea bar, which Kern expects to be ready next spring. The shop's new home is also close to another D.C. indie, East City Bookshop.

"The net effect of having a bunch of bookstores together is people spend money on books," Kern told the Washington City Paper. "More readers will come here because we're together…. We have different audiences and we don't have that much overlap in what we have in the store."

Kern, who founded Little District Books in 2022, had wanted to move to a larger space for a while, as the old location's size made hosting events tricky. While the timing is unfortunate in that it coincides with the government shutdown and the deployment of the National Guard in D.C., Kern is optimistic about the new space and what he and his team can build. Along with the forthcoming tea bar, that includes Lavender Con, a LGBTQIA+ book convention that Little District Books started two years ago. 

"It's both creating more queer inclusivity spaces because we can do things that create more community," Kern said. "But it's also that now, we're not tucked away."

Chapters Books and Gifts, Seward, Neb., has begun rebuilding its original location after months occupying a temporary space. Nebraska Now reported that both the construction crew on site and owner Kelly Limback "are hopeful the refurbished store will be stronger than before." 

Limback bought the bookstore last January, but in early August the building sustained significant damage because of severe weather, with the exterior brick wall separating from the structure, rendering it structurally unsound. 

"There were bricks all over the ground, and part of the decorative molding was on the street," she recalled. "But when I got to the store, I realized nothing had been damaged inside.... They told me to get everything out right away. More storms are coming. We've got to move."

Limback told Nebraska Now that moving the entire store's inventory had required a lot of workforce and organization, yet all items were moved out by that afternoon, due in large part to the community that rallied around her. The bookstore soon reopened in a temporary space and has been there ever since. 

The building's owner worked to secure a crew to begin construction, "but masonry work isn't so common, so that was a big hurdle," Limback noted. Construction crews have now broken ground for the refurbishment, but she is not sure when the original location will open again.

This coming Friday, November 7, 1-1:45 p.m. Eastern, ReadingGroupGuides.com will host its 14 1/2 Annual Book Group Speed Dating Event---virtually. Representatives from six publishers will share selections from their publishing houses via video to give booksellers, librarians, and book group leaders an inside look at new and upcoming titles that book groups will want to know about and discuss. E-galleys for select titles will be available to be requested from Edelweiss and/or NetGalley, as well as print galleys from some of the publishers. Leave-behinds will be made available in PowerPoint and Excel formats. Advance signup is required and can be done here.

Participating publishers include Grand Central Publishing, Harlequin Trade Publishing, Random House Publishing Group, Simon & Schuster, Sourcebooks, and W.W. Norton.

This past week, Shelf Awareness sent our monthly pre-order e-blast to more than 913,000 of the country's best book readers. The e-blast went to 913,809 customers of 275 participating independent bookstores.

The mailing features 11 upcoming titles selected by Shelf Awareness editors and a sponsored title. Customers can buy these books via "pre-order" buttons that lead directly to the purchase page for the title on each sending store's website. A key feature is that bookstore partners can easily change title selections to best reflect the tastes of their customers and can customize the mailing with links, images and promotional copy of their own.

The pre-order e-blasts are sent the last Wednesday of each month; the next will go out on Wednesday, November 26. Stores interested in learning more can visit our program registration page or contact our partner program team via e-mail.

For a sample of the October pre-order e-blast, see this one from tbr books and tea, Baton Rouge, La.

The titles highlighted in the pre-order e-blast were:

Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Ace Atkins (Morrow)
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe by James Patterson and Imogen Edwards-Jone (Little, Brown)
House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead)
A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken (Ecco)
Tailored Realities by Brandon Sanderson (Tor)
The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage (Cardinal/Grand Central)
The Award by Matthew Pearl (Harper)
Pendergast by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Grand Central)
The Bodyguard Affair by Amy Lea (Berkley)
Eternal Ruin by Tigest Girma (Little, Brown BFYR)
Better in Black: Ten Stories of Shadowhunter Romance by Cassandra Clare (Knopf BFYR)

Caldecott Honorees Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey, co-creators of The Old Sleigh (Norton Books for Young Readers), visited Lee Lewis Campbell Elementary in their hometown of Austin, Tex., in partnership with BookPeople. In their presentation to almost 200 students, the brothers discussed their collaborative approach and art process. Pictured: Jerome Pumphrey, Rachel McInnes of BookPeople, and Jarrett Pumphrey.

At Round Table Books

On election day, many indie booksellers were urging their patrons to get to the polls, including: 

Round Table Bookstore, Topeka, Kan.: "Reminder from your friendly local bookstore... go vote!"

Eagle Eye Book Shop, Decatur, Ga.: "Don't forget to get out and vote today! Local elections are a great way to effect policies on a local scale, from Book Bans to Public Service Commissions."

Merritt Bookstore & Toystore, Millbrook, N.Y.: "Election Day! VOTE if you can!" 

Bookish Books, Camas, Wash.: "Happy Election Day! Did you know that only 17% of Camas Voters have turned in their ballot?! SO, since we're now open on Tuesdays--come show us you're on your way to vote (sealed ballots or voters sticker) for a free coffee on us! We have this pamphlet here today in case you need it."

Reverie Books, Austin, Tex.: "Go vote or something!"

Blacksburg Books, Blacksburg, Va.: "Did you vote?? You deserve a little treat... not that you *need* an excuse to go to the bookstore, but still."

Bleak House Books, Honeoye Falls, N.Y.: "It's mop and glow Tuesday here at the bookshop. But also Election Day. And so our votes are in and the floors are clean. Polls are still open. So go vote if you haven't done so already. Your vote matters, your voice matters!"

Sidetrack Bookshop, Royal Oak, Mich.: "Local elections matter!"

Barnes & Noble has chosen Like Family: A Novel by Erin O. White (‎The Dial Press) as its November national book club pick. In a live virtual event on Tuesday, December 2, at 3 p.m. Eastern, White will be in conversation with Mallory Rochester, store manager at Barnes & Noble in Calabasas, Calif.

B&N described the book this way: "Life-long friends endure the ups and downs of adulthood in this glowing tale of chosen family and complicated love. In an idyllic town, cozied up between river and mountain, six friends raise their families in a seeming Eden. When tragedy strikes, secrets and forgotten dreams resurface and the three couples must confront difficult truths."

Click here to join the December 2 event.

Bonfire Bookstore & Yarnery in Woodstock, Va., shared a "day in the life" video on Instagram, noting: "People always ask me what it's like to own a book yarn game jigsaw puzzle store. And I'd say it's kind of like owning any other business."

Wicked Good Books, Salem, Mass., shared a photo of its latest sidewalk chalkboard message on Instagram, noting: "Is everything OK? The answer is always... come get a book."

Today:
Here & Now: Tom Colicchio, author of Why I Cook (Artisan, $35, 9781648291289).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Kardea Brown, author of Make Do with What You Have: 100 Delicious New Recipes from Favorite Old-School Meals (Amistad, $32, 9780063425576).

CBS Mornings: Rainn Wilson, co-author of Soul Boom Workbook: Spiritual Tools for Modern Living (Grand Central, $19.99, 9781538775547).

Drew Barrymore Show: Haley Lu Richardson, author of I'm Sad and Horny (Simon & Schuster, $28.99, 9781668210352).

Sherri Shepherd Show: Michelle Obama, co-author of The Look (Crown, $50, 9780593800706).

The View: Padma Lakshmi, author of Padma's All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes from Taste the Nation and Beyond (Knopf, $40, 9780593535325).

Late Show with Stephen Colbert: Patti Smith, author of Bread of Angels: A Memoir (Random House, $30, 9781101875124).

Actress and model Dree Hemingway (Starlet, While We're Young) will executive produce a new film about her legendary great grandfather, Ernest Hemingway. Deadline reported that The Hemingway Files "will follow the writer's last years, as his closest friends A.E. Hotchner and Duke MacMullen help him navigate his deepening mental struggles, his strained relationship with his trans daughter Gloria Hemingway, and the growing paranoia surrounding his belief that the FBI, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, was watching him."

Directed by Jessica M. Thompson (The Light of the Moon, The Invitation, The End) from a script by Cory Todd Hughes and Adrian Speckert (Armor), the film is currently in development with casting discussions underway.

Dree Hemingway commented: "My great grandfather's story has been told many times but rarely with this level of empathy and honesty. The Hemingway Files is about understanding him not as an icon, but as a father, a friend, and a man trying to hold on to himself."

Thompson said her vision is to approach Hemingway's decline "with empathy and honesty. I want to peer underneath the mask of Hemingway's legend and lay bare the truth of this multifaceted artist. I'm fascinated by the intersection of myth and reality. Hemingway's story isn't just about a writer grappling with obsolescence, it's about the cost of masculinity, the fragility of family, and the truth that even the strongest among us can struggle."

Winners were named for the 2025 Books Are My Bag Readers Awards, which are curated by bookshops, voted for by readers across the U.K. and Ireland, and sponsored by National Book Tokens. The winning titles, announced at an awards ceremony held at Foyles Charing Cross Road, are:

Fiction: Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
Nonfiction: Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton
Poetry: To the Women by Donna Ashworth
YA fiction: Wish You Were Her by Elle McNicoll
Children's fiction: Impossible Creatures: The Poisoned King by Katherine Rundell
Picture book: Otto the Top Dog by Catherine Rayner
Newcomer of the year: Emma Swan (Cruise Ship Kid: Thief at Sea!, illustrated by Katie Saunders)
Readers' Choice: Cruise Ship Kid: Thief at Sea! by Emma Swan, illustrated by Katie Saunders

photo: Rinaldo Sata

Malala Yousafzai is an education activist, the youngest-ever Nobel laureate, a bestselling author, and an award-winning film producer. She was born in Mingora, Pakistan, in 1997 and graduated from Oxford University in 2020. In her latest memoir, Finding My Way (Atria, October 21, 2025), Yousafzai reintroduces herself to the world.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

A book for anyone who has ever felt out of place, yearning for friendship, love, connection. The most personal thing I've ever written.

On your nightstand now:

I'm so suggestible. If someone, even a casual acquaintance, recommends a restaurant, TV show, or book to me, I will probably give it a shot. I like trying new things and going on little cultural/culinary/literary adventures. Though I haven't yet read anything by Lily King, a couple of people have told me to check out Heart the Lover. I'll put that on the nightstand when I'm back from my book tour.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I'd never been inside a bookstore or library until I came to the U.K. at 15 years old. Where I grew up in Pakistan, literacy rates are quite low, and reading to kids or giving children books is uncommon. So I had only a handful of books as a kid. A friend of my dad traveled abroad and brought back Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time for me. When international journalists came to cover what was happening with the Taliban, they brought me selections like Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens and Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder.

I was always grateful to receive any book, and I read the ones I had over and over. But I wish I'd had the experience of being able to walk into a bookstore and spend hours browsing for a story that felt exciting or inspiring to me. That just wasn't part of my world as a child.

Your top five authors:

This changes all the time, but I'd love to use this opportunity to shout out some talented Pakistani writers: Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Sanam Maher, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Sara Suleri. Reading their work makes me feel connected to my homeland, even when I'm thousands of miles away.

Book you've faked reading:

Honestly, most of the books my professors assigned in college! My teenage years were quite lonely. So, while it will probably come as a surprise to people who know me as an education advocate, I prioritized my social life in college--house parties, pubs, and late-night kebab runs with my friends.

At the time, I told myself I could go to a library and check out the books on the syllabus in the future. (Though, five years out of college, I'll admit I haven't circled back to any of them.) I suspect my professors already know I wasn't doing the reading, but if they're just finding out now, I'm sorry!

Book you're an evangelist for:

People send me a lot of memoirs. And I always want to give them attention because I know how hard the writing, editing, and promotion processes can be. But I wish they could all be as good as Trevor Noah's Born a Crime. It's raw, funny, personal, and poignant. His descriptions of life in South Africa are so vivid. When he's writing about himself as a boy, I love the way he guides the reader to understand the discrimination he faced from a child's perspective. It's a perfect memoir to me.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I was in London at a charming shop called Word on the Water, which is a floating bookstore or "book barge," and came across the Wordsworth Collector's Edition of Frankenstein. I saw the moody blue cover, gold-foil lettering, and the bolt of lightning down the center, and I had to have it.

Book you hid from your parents:

None when I was a child, but I'm not sure I'd want to loan my mom A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas! When my brothers were in middle school, they used to tell my parents that Game of Thrones was a "historical TV show." My mom and dad never watched it, so the boys got away with that. Sort of how I feel about reading ACOTAR.

Book that changed your life:

When I was 15 years old and in the hospital for months after the attack on my life, someone gave me a copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. I'd never heard of it, but immediately found the book so compelling. It felt like exactly what had happened just to me--a moment of terror followed by waking up in an entirely new world that I was struggling to navigate. I was so relieved that Dorothy made it home at the end of the story.

Favorite line from a book:

Lately I have been thinking a lot about these lines from bell hooks's All About Love: "Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape."

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time alone--in the hospital and then four lonely years of high school. In college, I surrounded myself with as many friends as possible. As a young adult, I'm learning how to enjoy solitude and why it's sometimes necessary to take a break from socializing.

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

I went to an event recently and there were tons of celebrities there. They were all lovely and interesting, but then I saw Zadie Smith and just lasered in on her. She was the most important person in the room to me.

I love her for her writing, but also because Zadie, like me, got mediocre grades at Oxford. I read that fact about her when I was struggling in college and it gave me hope that such a luminary was once in the same place as me. I would love to re-read White Teeth.

What you are most looking forward to with the publication of Finding My Way:

This book means so much to me, and I can't wait to share it with readers. I hope other young women can see a bit of themselves in my story, and feel comforted in the knowledge that it's okay to struggle, to stumble a bit on your way to finding yourself. If it can make someone feel less alone, then I have done my job.

Of course, ailurophiles (cat lovers) are the perfect audience for author/artist Natalia Shaloshvili's enchantingly whimsical picture book, What a Small Cat Needs, but it's also likely to attract anyone and everyone who opens their hearts to animals. As in Miss Leoparda, Shaloshvili's text is once again smoothly translated from the original Russian by Lena Traer.

"What does a small cat need?" Shaloshvili queries. Her furry protagonist here has two small eyes, two small ears, four small paws, and "a body, with spots on her back." She also needs a tail--"even a small one"--to lure a fish, as well as "small pointy teeth" to catch a mouse to feed the "big hunger in her belly." When she can't hold on to her catch, her hungry belly will need milk. With hunger sated, she needs diversions and adventures--"a flower patch. For this and that" and rain for getting soaked (why not?). But when showers become torrential, she'll need "a roof to hide under," walls for protection, and a window with a view. Afterward, she'll need sunlight "to warm her furry belly." Most of all, when darkness falls and she "feel[s] a bit scared," she'll need a door where she can wait for that special "someone to walk in." That someone just needs "a big heart and warm hands" for purring snuggles. "Because every cat--big and small--needs that very much." Everyone does.

Shaloshvili creates dreamy, welcoming spreads, capturing a heartwarming softness that avoids sharp angles and dividing lines. She favors a blue-scale palette with bright pops of orange and yellow (and the tiny pink triangular kitty nose), creating inviting, multilayered textures. She, of course, centers the small titular feline throughout but also presents a delightful chorus of protective seabirds with charming personalities: one adorable blue-beanied avian buddy jauntily upstages the kitty on the title page. The kitty, with bright button-shaped blue eyes, remains utterly irresistible as she sports a round polka-dotted floaty when near open water, wears a bib when hopeful for a meal, and is protected by boots and an umbrella in the downpour. She drinks from teacups and basks in sunshine with an open book (even if she might be dozing off). Her human arrives home--nose and ears flushed from just having come in from the cold--and their matching eyes are immediately noticeable, suggesting a forever promise to provide everything a small cat will ever need. --Terry Hong

Shelf Talker: Natalia Shaloshvili's inviting picture book whimsically captures a small cat's many needs--milk, a flower patch, a window--but what she needs most is that special someone with a big heart.