Pages & Peonies, a romance-focused bookstore in Walker, Mich., is hosting a grand opening celebration on Saturday, June 21, WOODTV reported.

Located at 2751 Alpine Ave. NW, Pages & Peonies sells romance titles from traditionally published and independent authors representing a wide variety of subgenres. The book inventory includes a small children's section as well as a curated selection of non-romance titles. There is also a coffee stand in-store and, as the name would suggest, a variety of plants. 

Co-owners Sarah Gramza-Howard and Jess Hodges first met while working at a greenhouse and soon bonded over romance novels and plants. Gramza-Howard, who writes romance titles under the name Sarah Ellison, had already started selling some books online. Then they started talking about partnering on a bricks-and-mortar store.

"We were like, 'hey, let's open a store,' " Gramza-Howard told WOODTV. "So then we quit our jobs."

"Now is the best time to start," Hodges added. "There's never going to be the perfect moment to start a business."

The celebration on Saturday will include door prizes, giveaways, a raffle, and more.

Daughters Coffee & Books opened earlier this spring at 5410 NC-55, Suite AF in Durham, N.C. Indy Week reported that the business, owned by Nicole Grinnell, "offers new and used books alongside a literary-themed cafe menu.... Toward the back of the new South Durham café is a children's corner stocked with used picture books, building blocks, and even a toy espresso machine for kids to mimic the baristas working across from them."

"My idea was if there's a safe little corner for them to either read or have a little toy that they can play with while Mom enjoys a cup of coffee, even for five or 10 minutes--that could be the best five or 10 minutes of her day," Grinnell said, adding that the concept is closely tied to shop's name because of her close relationship with her mother and sister, all three of whom have daughters. 

Noting that she has "never been unhappy in a bookstore," Grinnell recalled that when she began thinking about what she wanted to do with her life, she decided to open her own. "While Grinnell's original vision for the space was focused entirely on books, she decided to embrace a café concept after seeing that the location already had a bar built in," Indy Week wrote.

"As far as an independent bookstore, we're the only one for miles," bookseller Frances Gasior said. "I think that we're catering directly to the neighborhood."

Grinnell hopes to cultivate Daughters into a collective space for local readers: "Something that I wasn't expecting when we announced that we were opening and after we opened was how many local authors there were who were looking for a place to sell their books, a place to market them, [and] a place to meet with people in the community. So that has been a big need in the community that we have been looking to help fill."

She added that locally accessible, independent businesses like hers bring something special to their communities: "This is all of our livelihoods and it needs to succeed. There's just another personal care that you get from coming to an independent store like ours."

Author Mac Barnett, 2025-2026 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, gave a closing keynote at Children's Institute that, much like his books, played with form and concept in unusual and interesting ways. While many attendees had left early on Saturday, the Portland, Ore., Convention center ballroom was packed for Barnett's speech.

National Book Award judge, events coordinator, kids' specialist, and general bookselling badass Cathy Berner of the Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, Tex., introduced Barnett by telling the assembled crowd the author loves a prank. She showed several pictures of him over the decades, describing Barnett as a man who "has never met a mustache he didn't love." One mustache, however, disagrees with Barnett: Ted Lasso's. "We have very different opinions on this show," Berner said. "I don't like it!" Barnett yelled from the audience. "You haven't watched it! How do you know?" Berner yelled back. "And don't tell me it's vibes!" They do agree on many other things: "That books for children are a true art form. That kids are the best audience for books and that they ask the questions artists and writers ponder." Barnett's slogan for his ambassadorship is "Behold the Picture Book!" which should "tell everyone the importance he places on the role children's books--and by extension children's booksellers--play in this world."

Mac Barnett

Barnett started by thanking the crowd: "I would not be here if it weren't for you. I write strange books, very specific books that I believe in. They don't always make sense to people immediately and it was because of fiercely independent booksellers recognizing what was valuable about my work that I found my readership and now have a career." He introduced himself as an author and former child. "I've had a lifelong fascination with picture books. They are my favorite books to write--I write novels and graphic novels, but the picture book is my favorite." This, he said, is because "the picture book is children's literature's greatest contribution to literature as a whole." The picture book has the combination of text and image; the economy and rhythm of poetry; great art. "But it's not just words and pictures--it's theater." The picture book, Barnett continued, is "a little stage play you can carry around with you. And you, the adult who reads the book to the child, have been cast as every character in the book. You are [the author's] collaborator." The picture books is an object, Barnett said, but it is also ephemeral--a performance that will never be repeated.

What else is the picture book? It's dance. "The body is so important, the angle of the book to the body to the arm to the face. The gesture of the page turn." It's music: It is "a piece of sheet music that is also the instrument." Picture books are connected to "that oldest human tradition: Telling stories out loud to each other. To entertain kids, to introduce them to the things that we think, and to reflect the things that they think about and enjoy, too."

Barnett's keynote was, as always, excellently plotted, well-spun, and full of entertaining asides. ("My first audience was sweaty crying four-year-olds who just had their dreams crushed on the soccer field. Probably why I hate Ted Lasso! Cruel show. 'Believe?' Believe in a false promise. You will never be a professional soccer player.")

Barnett is bringing to life his "Behold the Picture Book" platform. What is literature? What is children's literature? What is a picture book? These are the questions he is going to spend his ambassadorship examining, reflecting upon, and answering. And, likely, he will mostly be speaking to the importance of understanding and respecting the child: "We don't understand kids. It can be surprising for adults to see how deeply complex they are, how strongly they feel things, to hear their sometimes profound, sometimes silly (in a good way) questions about the world." Children, he said, "deserve real, ambitious literature." They deserve a balance of text and illustration, they deserve a curtain rise of a page turn, they deserve design that challenges as it teaches.

"There are so many adults between the book and the kid," Barnett said, "and what those adults think about those books determines whether the kid gets to read them. If we don't think it's real literature, it means we won't let kids read the books they want to read. All adults every step of the way have to pay attention to kids. We have to listen to them and think about what they are going through. We have to believe they are worthy of real art and real stories." Why? Because "if we don't think picture books are real literature, then on some level we don't think children are real people." --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Barnes & Noble is returning to Tysons Corner Center in northern Virginia, with a new bookstore at 1961 Chain Bridge Rd., Tysons, Va. B&N's previous store there closed in May 2024. 

B&N will officially open the bookstore, which also has an updated B&N Café, today, June 18, with author David Baldacci cutting the ribbon and signing copies of his books.

"We are very pleased to return to the Tyson's Corner Center where we have proudly served readers for nearly 20 years," B&N said. "Our McLean booksellers are excited to be back and are especially pleased to welcome customers into such a unique and beautifully designed Barnes & Noble."

The company is also opening a new bookstore today in the Southbury Green shopping center at 775 Main St. S., Southbury, Conn. Author Terri-Lynne DeFino will cut the ribbon and sign copies of her books. 

"We are very pleased to add another new Barnes & Noble to our fleet of Connecticut bookstores," said B&N. "We are especially happy to take over one of the largest storefronts in Southbury Green."

Barbara Holdridge, who co-founded Caedmon Records, "the first commercially successful spoken-word record label, one that began with the poet Dylan Thomas reciting his story A Child's Christmas in Wales and that led to today's multibillion-dollar audiobook industry," died June 9, the New York Times reported. She was 95. Thomas's recording was released in 1952, and went on to sell more than 400,000 copies during the 1950s.

Holdridge and Marianne Mantell built Caedmon Records with LPs featuring authors and poets like W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway reading their own works. By 1966, sales had reached $14 million (about $141 million now) and Caedmon began recording plays and other works of literature performed by actors such as Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud, Maggie Smith, Richard Burton, and Basil Rathbone. The label also produced children's stories like Babar and Winnie the Pooh, featuring the voices of Boris Karloff, Carol Channing, and others.

"They were enormously prescient," Matthew Barton, the recorded sound curator for the Library of Congress, said in an interview last year. "If you walked into a record store in 1952 and heard Dylan Thomas reading A Child's Christmas in Wales, you would say, 'I want that,' and your wallet comes out. It showed how well they understood the potential of the medium in this way." The Library of Congress added the album to its National Recording Registry in 2008, noting that "it has been credited with launching the audiobook industry in the United States." 

The story of Caedmon, which "earned dozens of Grammy nominations and became the gold standard for spoken-word recordings," is all the more striking because Holdridge and Mantell were 22-year-old recent graduates of Hunter College in Manhattan when they founded the company. "Both had degrees in the humanities, and neither had any business experience. In an era when women were expected to be housewives or schoolteachers, Ms. Holdridge, who worked as an assistant editor at a New York publisher, and Ms. Mantell, who wrote label copy for a record company, were ambitious, determined and bored," the Times noted. 

In 2001, Holdridge was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, which honored her for creating a broad audience for "diverse, high-quality literature" and demonstrating the significance of spoken-word recordings. After selling Caedmon, she created Stemmer House Publishers, which published children's books and sourcebooks for designers and artists. She also taught book publishing and writing at Loyola University Maryland.

Regarding Caedmon, Holdridge told NPR in 2002: "We did not want to do a collection of great voices or important literary voices. We wanted them to read as though they were recreating the moment of inspiration. They did exactly that. They read with a feeling, an inspiration that came through."

Myra Barreiro, owner of Sea Shelves by the Seashore in Port Aransas, Tex., with Skip Rhudy, author of Under the Gulf Coast Sun (Stoney Creek Publishing), after a signing event in the store.

{pages} a bookstore, Manhattan Beach, Calif., shared a photo of the shop's Pride Month display on Facebook, noting: "June is Pride Month and today {pages} and other businesses in @downtownmanhattanbeach are celebrating with Shop for a Cause m! {pages} will be donating 15% of today’s sales to @pflag_manhattan beach."

"Books, your reward for having an attention span." That was the message on a sidewalk chalkboard sign in front of Anthology for Books, Geneseo, Ill., which added: "Reward your attention span today."

Jodi Weiss has been appointed executive v-p, head of sales, at the Stable Book Group and Stable Distribution, Stable's distribution division launched last week in partnership with Hachette Book Group.

Weiss has more than two decades of publishing sales experience, most recently as v-p, sales strategy and business development, at Hachette, where she helped the integration of Workman Publishing into Hachette after Hachette bought Workman. Before that, she was chief sales officer at Workman, where she worked for 20 years. Earlier she was a sales manager at Anness Publishing and was at Simon & Schuster.

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Steven Tran has been promoted to v-p, director of sales at Soho Press and is joining the Soho's executive team. Previously he was director of sales.

The Tontine Caper by Dianne K. Salerni, illustrated by Matt Schu (Holiday House).

Tomorrow:
CBS Mornings: Kellie Carter Jackson, author of We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press, $30, 9781541602908).

The Other Bennet Sister, the BBC and BritBox's Jane Austen universe series, has added Ruth Jones (Gavin & Stacey), Richard E. Grant (Withnail & I), and Indira Varma (Game of Thrones) to the cast. Deadline reported that they will play Mr. and Mrs. Bennet in the adaptation of Janice Hadlow's novel about "the seemingly unremarkable and overlooked middle sister in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice."

Ella Bruccoleri (Bridgerton) leads the 10-part series as Mary Bennet. Other cast memebrs include Richard Coyle (Heads of State), Roisin Bhalla, Reggie Absolom, Jasmine Sharp, Laurie Davidson, Dónal Finn, and Varada Sethu. Sarah Quintrell has adapted Hadlow's novel for the screen.

The Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation has released the shortlist for the £10,000 (about $13,505) Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, which is open to writers of any nationality, writing in English. The winner will be named in September. The shortlist:

Babylonia by Costanza Casati
Sycorax by Nydia Hetherington
Redemption by Jack Jordan
A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay
Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis

Also being celebrated will be the New Voices award for aspiring writers and the Author of Tomorrow award for writers aged 21 years and under who have completed a short piece of adventure writing.

photo: Stuart Gresham

Laura Elliott is a disabled writer and journalist from Scunthorpe, England. Her articles on disability and politics have appeared in the Guardian, the Metro, iNews and ByLine Times. Her stories have been published by Strix magazine, STORGY, and CloisterFox. She lives in Sheffield with her partner, James, and their two feline overseers, Catticus Finch and Hercule Purrot. Her debut novel, Awakened (Angry Robot, June 10, 2025), is set in a dystopian world where science has taken sleep from humanity to make them more productive, but sleeplessness has turned people into feral monsters.

Handsell readers your book in about 25 words:

If you like gothic dystopians about abjection, unethical medicine, the horror of love, and the burden of duty (with shades of Greek mythology), you'll love Awakened!

On your nightstand now:

If you could see my TBR shelf right now you would weep (or I might), but the next in line are: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, which has had a lot of hype thanks to its spot on the Women's Prize shortlist [editor's note: it won!]; Feast While You Can by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta, which looks entirely up my alley; and Flesh by David Szalay, which is a wild card I picked up purely because I read an excellent review of it by Keiran Goddard in the Guardian recently.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I read voraciously as a child, but the book I still vividly remember hitting me like a polar freight train is Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. From the first few pages, I felt as though I knew Lyra and that she was the character I'd been waiting for. Around the same time, I also read Midnight Is a Place by Joan Aiken, and its depiction of the industrial era struck me almost as deeply. I can still "see" the factory chimneys belching smoke and fire into the air, and feel the panic of the child "pickers" as the machinery to make carpets crashed down around them. A true masterclass in tension and tone.

Your top five authors:

I'm not sure I can ever stick to the same five for very long, but today I'll go with: Jeff VanderMeer, for being one of the greatest weird fiction writers working today; Toni Morrison, for sheer sublime talent and storytelling wonder; Shirley Jackson, for being the queen of horror for a reason; Jack Kerouac, for how much he blew my mind as a teenager; and Rivers Solomon, for writing incredible genre fiction that never misses.

Book you've faked reading:

With apologies to one of my English lecturers at university, it was The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. This was an assigned text during the second week of my first year, and I ploughed through the first 50 pages before deciding that I utterly loathed it and giving up. Somehow, I did manage to discuss it vaguely coherently during the seminar, and as far as I'm aware no one was any the wiser that I was lying through my teeth about having finished.

I know a lot of people who love this book so I've been meaning to give it a second try, but it hasn't quite happened yet.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Hollow Shores by Gary Budden is a little-known short story collection published by Dead Ink Books in 2017, and it's far and away the best collection I've ever read. Blending weird fiction and landscape writing, and taking a razor-sharp look at the collective British psyche through ordinary people living their lives in the margins of various local and music subcultures, it has a sense of time and place that--for me--is absolutely unmatched. I recommend it to everyone.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. The orange cover and the beautiful midnight dragon coiling around the tower had me at first glance.

Book you hid from your parents:

When I was 17, my friend lent me his copy of Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin. Needless to say, I didn't discuss that particular erotic short story collection with my Mum at the time!

Book that changed your life:

I hate to be a walking cliché, but probably Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac. I read it at 16, which is of course the perfect age to encounter the Beats for the first time, and I was simply amazed by both the style and the profound madness of it all. I'd read On the Road already and hadn't really seen what all the fuss was about, but as a teenager living in a very isolated little English village, Desolation Angels felt like opening up a doorway onto a world I'd never dreamed existed.

Favorite line from a book:

I could choose something very literary and meaningful here, but instead I'll pick: "Ford... you're turning into a penguin. Stop it," from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Something about that line had me genuinely crying with laughter the first time I read it, and I return to it whenever I need a smile.

Five books you'll never part with:

I'm not all that precious about books as objects--my favourites I often give away to friends and I usually have no idea where anything lives--but I do have a few special copies I wouldn't part with. A signed first edition of Dervla Murphy's incredible travelogue Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle that my partner bought for me one birthday. The stunning 1973 Reader's Digest compendium Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain, which is quite rare and sought-after these days. And a leather-bound copy of the Collected Works of Shakespeare that once belonged to my grandpa. I also have a handwritten journal from my grandma, in which she wrote down her life story for me some years ago. Although not a published book, it's definitely the first thing I'd save in a fire.

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

Perhaps an unusual choice, but Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I read it when I was 16--mostly to impress my English teacher--and I was completely lost and confused for the entire first half. At some point after that though, everything suddenly fell into place, in a strange feat of storytelling alchemy I've never quite been able to figure out.

I've refused to read it again ever since as I'm scared it won't live up to my memory of it, but I ended that book both laughing and crying, and it remains one of the strangest reading experiences I've ever had.

A little-known book you would like people to read:

Gilbert Adair is probably best known for the film adaptations of two of his books, The Dreamers and Love and Death on Long Island. But I'll tell anybody who'll listen that they should dip into reading his Evadne Mount trilogy. These books were, according to him: "a celebration, a parody, and a critique not only of Agatha Christie but of the whole Golden Age of English whodunits."

They're incredibly good fun, featuring an elderly bisexual woman as a sleuth who never seems to age despite decades passing between books/mysteries. The third installment collapses into a comedic mess of postmodern references, and a moment in which the author becomes a character in his own novel and meets with his creation, until it's difficult to tell where fiction begins and reality ends. In this era, when cozy genre books are having their moment, Evadne Mount deserves more fans!

Swedish author/illustrator Cecilia Heikkilä's The Slightly Spooky Tale of Fox and Mole is a lightly gothic tale that illustrates the dual perils of taking more than we give and not asking for what we need.

Fox and Mole are countryside neighbors by the sea, which is a popular summer destination for city folks whom Fox plies with homemade cookies, jam, and tea while Mole "join[s] in all the fun." Then autumn arrives. The visitors leave and Mole comes round to Fox's every evening to sit "in Fox's best chair" and enjoy a cozy spread and a storybook, The Legend of the Scuffling Monster. It's the tale of a racoon "transformed" into something monstrous after too many nights of solitude. Eventually, Mole eats all of Fox's provisions, leaving "only cabbages and an old jar of pickled herring" in Fox's pantry. When Mole forgets Fox's birthday, "something thorny [finds] its way to Fox's heart," and Fox, too, is transformed.

Heikkilä gives an expert demonstration of the power of foreshadowing. On the first autumn evening at Fox's house, not only does Mole interrupt the story but also "spill[s] cookie crumbs over the chair and the rug and the table." Fox finishes the evening's reading and wants a cookie, but Mole has "already licked this one."

Heikkilä's digitally edited watercolor, gouache, and pastel illustrations track her narrative's theme of transformation perfectly, primarily through color. Bright reds, lovely sky blues, and pure emerald greens vanish from her spreads as Mole and Fox's friendship tips off balance, replaced by cooler-toned creams, browns, and olives. Fox also changes even before the ultimate transformation, whiskers and fur taking on a rougher, more haggard appearance, ears flattening, eyes widening, gaze vacant and haunted.

With a title like The Slightly Spooky Tale of Fox and Mole, adults will want to know just how spooky this picture book really is. Children who have already met Little Red Riding Hood's lupine grandmother aren't likely to be more frightened by these scuffling monsters. Heikkilä's narrative seems informed by Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper, but her moral takes a notably different direction: only by restoring the balance of mutual care in their friendship do Fox and Mole set each other to rights again. That's not spooky at all. --Stephanie Appell, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: This lightly gothic picture book for readers seeking a "slightly spooky" story illustrates the dual perils of taking more than we give and not asking for what we need.