Chicago Style

As librarians gear up for ALA, hundreds of booksellers are also preparing to descend on Chicagoland for this year’s Children’s Institute June 26–29, with programs including a tour of the city’s 90-plus indie bookstores and workshops on how to better connect with young readers. Meanwhile, the Center for Fiction has awarded its Medal for Editorial Excellence to Doubleday VP and executive editor Lee Boudreaux. We talked with the founders of the small but mighty Quite Literally Books, which serves as a home for undersung American women authors from history. And for the next installment of our Pride Month interview series, we sat down with Hachette CEO David Shelley to discuss fostering inclusivity in publishing and the queer books that shaped him. In other news, Vulture’s Emma Alpern pays a visit to the New Jersey home of Joyce Carol Oates to talk with the prolific author about her career—and her somewhat notorious social media presence. YA novelist Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé reflects on how the publishing industry commodifies young authors in a guest post on publicist Kathleen Schmidt’s Substack, Publishing Confidential. Cultured spotlights cookbook-author-turned-romance-novelist Julia Turshen, who makes her fiction debut with 831 Books later this month. On the latest episode of the Open Book podcast, David Steinberger chats with City Lights Booksellers head buyer Paul Yamazaki. And Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s The Book of Birds debuts at #1 on the IPC’s Independent Press Bestsellers nonfiction list.

There will be no PW Daily tomorrow in observance of Juneteenth. We’ll return to your inbox on Monday.