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The ABA's hour-long Town Hall drew almost 200 participants, with booksellers celebrating the board’s increased diversity, but also concerned about changes made this past fall to the ABA Ends Policies regarding its view on freedom of expression.
Judy Blume, Louise Erdrich, and many other authors also have ‘independent bookstore owner’ on their résumés.
While a number of Black bookstore owners said they were grateful for the increase in business, they worried that this sudden interest in certain books would only put a temporary Band-Aid on the much more pervasive problem of systemic racism in the U.S.
Some authors are masters of worldbuilding and Joanne M. Harris continues her reign as one them. Like the ever-present honeybees who buzz through her fantasy hybrid novel through stories, Honeycomb, carrying stories from world to world, protecting the Honeycomb Queen and her son, the Lacewing King, Harris constructs a magical universe, called the Nine Worlds and ruled by the insect-like Fae Silken Folk, as intricate as the beehives internal lives and delicate hexagonal walls. As if each small room of the hive contains a small story, Honeycomb is comprised of mostly two-to-three page stories ...
Brenda Peynado’s debut book, The Rock Eaters, a short-story collection that bounces around genres such as speculative fiction, science fiction and straight fiction, will definitely leave you deeply unsettled, though perhaps not always in a good way. Peynado’s is a gifted, imaginative writer and I admit I was prepared to be blown away after reading the book’s introductory story, “Thoughts and Prayers,” a stunning, ironic piece about a world where angels perch on people’s roofs, their actual physical presence akin to cows as they chew “cud from the grasses and bugs they scavenged...