The  National Association of Black Bookstores (NAB² ), founded on Juneteenth 2025, has announced the first National Black Bookstore Day to be celebrated on April 7.

National Black Bookstore Day is intended to “recognize, elevate, and drive support to Black-owned bookstores across the United States.” NAB² founder Kevin Johnson, who owns  Underground Books in Sacramento, CA, noted in a release that the event also honors the legacy of his late mother, Georgia “Mother Rose” Peat West, who opened Underground Books in 2003.

Participating in National Black Bookstore Day is easy:

• Consult NAB²‘s directory to locate a Black-owned bookstore near you.
• Buy some books!
• Share on social media using #NationalBlackBookstoreDay and #NAB2.

Your support matters. Per data from the State of the Black Bookstore Report NAB² released in February, the 306 Black-owned bookstores in the U.S. account for just 8% of all indies, and the vast majority report annual revenue under $250k.

• If you’re in one of the 14 states that does not currently have a Black-owned bookstore, you can shop online from a NAB² member store or  donate directly to the organization.

Read up on the history and impact of Black-owned bookstores in Char Adams’s wonderful book, Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore.

📆 We’ll see you out there April 7! - RJS

This is it, the month that publishing really gets sprung. You could do months’ worth of reading with the new books coming out April 7 alone. In order to help you narrow down the options, we’ve created a highly scientific vibes-based process of elimination to determine the It Book of the Month.

The ideal It Book rings four bells:

• 🔔 Art - Is it good?
• 🔔 Acclaim - Will it contend for awards and best-of lists?
• 🔔 Sales - Where’s the money?
• 🔔 Zeitgeist - What’s the buzz?

This month’s contenders include a novel about middle-aged women on a cruise with their favorite ’90s boy band, a Booker International shortlisted novel about a mediocre witch, narrative nonfiction about a mysterious death in London, and short stories from a celebrated writer.

🎧 Listen as we play a knock-out round with 11 of the month’s most interesting new releases.

What began with Lights Out ends with a bang.

Game On is the thrilling conclusion to Navessa Allen’s #1 bestselling Into Darkness series.

Stella knew Tyler was trouble the moment she saw him. She was right.

This explosive ending to Navessa Allen’s three-million-copy series has everything. It’s an enemies-to-lovers, high-stakes revenge story with fake dating, blackmail, kidnapping, a morally gray MMC, and a black cat FMC who gives as good as she gets. Dark past, power imbalance, age gap, betrayal, redemption. It’s all in here.

Poetry makes people nervous. There’s a whole TED talk about it. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Poetry can be accessible. It can be comforting. It can be exciting. It can even be life-changing.

Poetry is best when read aloud, especially by the poets themselves. As we kick off National Poetry Month, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, here are a few of my personal faves to watch and listen to:

• "Ode to Prince" by Hanif Abdurraquib, who elevates pop culture like no one else
• "Today Means Amen" by Sierra DeMulder, for when the mundane is sacred
• "Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude" by Ross Gay, just one of the best to ever do it
• "Acceptance Speech after Setting the World Record in Goosebumps" by Andrea Gibson, for when the mundane is sacred, part 2
• "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver, everyone quotes it for a reason

➡️ Want to get started reading poetry? Here’s how. - RJS

The International Booker Prize is one of the biggest and buzziest literary awards, celebrating fiction works translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland in the past year.

Here is this year’s shortlist, which "transport readers from Japan-ruled Taiwan in the 1930s to Nazi-controlled Europe during the Second World War, from magic and domesticity in suburban France in the 1990s to the turmoil and after-effects of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, from a brutal prison colony in a remote corner of Brazil to a strict patriarchal community in the Albanian Alps."

• Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
• The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump
• On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan
• The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin
• She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel
• The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin

A decade ago, Americans read nearly 500 billion pages a year. Then something shifted. We’re now reading 200 billion fewer pages. Thriftbooks is here to change that. Join the challenge!

ICYMI: There have been a bunch of high-profile adaptation announcements over the last few weeks.

• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans sparked a seven-studio bidding war. Jane Fonda is set to star in the movie from winner Lionsgate.
• Billie Eilish will make her big screen debut in a film version of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath directed by Sarah Polley
• The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende arrives on Prime Video April 29. Watch the trailer for the eight-episode first season.
• Noted nerd Stephen Colbert is developing a new Lord of the Rings movie
• Queer coming-of-age novel Fake Dates and Mooncakes is headed to TV in a series written by Steven J. Kung.

🍿 Stream these new mystery and thriller adaptations while you wait.

I like to imagine that people drawn to unsettling and uncanny stories have a shared connection to a certain era of subversive media.

Today, you only have to pick up your phone to find a trove of this content (what does subversive even mean anymore?), but elder millennials remember when you really had to hunt for it. There exists a generation of us who were molded by Sundance and IFC features, MTV’s Liquid Television, and the like.

I sometimes encounter books that throw me back to this time in my own life and feed the beast that hungers for the kind of horror-adjacent indie content I used to love. It happens that this book hits all the right spots for subversive elder millennials like me.

A send-up and takedown of corporate drudgery, late-stage capitalism, and adulthood listlessness familiar to so many of us, Ling Ma’s Severance serves up a wry and tense satire featuring an eerily monotonous pandemic.

Read more... - SZW

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Amelia Blackwell is the author of A Crime Through Time: Miss Darcy Investigates, out now from Pan Macmillan. Below, she considers what Jane Austen would think of Georgiana Darcy as an amateur detective in a cozy mystery novel.

Like most writers, Jane Austen was keen to make money from her work. If she were alive in 2026, I like to imagine her publishing a slew of cosy crime novels and earning a fortune from her books, certainly more than the £668 that historian Lucy Worsley reports Austen to have made from publication of the four novels that were released during her lifetime, in a period when the average solicitor could expect to earn an annual income of £1500, overtaking Austen’s total lifetime earnings in just six months. 

Austen’s mix of gentle humour, razor-sharp characterisation, and clever plotting conjures worlds that perfectly lend themselves to cosy mysteries—passions swirl beneath a tranquil surface, little is said but much is felt, and all that unspoken tension, lust, and ambition is the perfect stage for a crime.

Sadly for us, Jane Austen is not here to swerve into the cosy mystery lane, but I hope she would be amused rather than offended by the thought of Mr Darcy’s younger sister, Georgiana, as an amateur detective and heroine of her own story.

It’s hard to know what kind of voice Jane Austen envisaged for Georgiana Darcy, as she doesn’t give her a single line of dialogue in Pride and Prejudice; Austen already had her hands full with her magnificent cast of principal characters, but Georgiana is a silent and intriguing figure in the story, nonetheless. 

In A Crime Through Time, Georgiana Darcy finds a new vocation as a time-travelling detective and, with her Motorola pager stowed safely in her reticule and her fierce intellect at the ready, she also finds a voice—whether it’s one that would meet the approval or censure of the author of Pride and Prejudice is up for debate, but it is my cherished hope (and secret belief) that A Crime Through Time would, at the very least, have given Jane Austen a good laugh.

💥 Stock up on the best new graphic novels and comics out in April.

🌷 Keep it snappy with 10 short books for spring.

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🌈 Support one of Manhattan’s last queer-owned bookstores.

🍭 Satisfy your book craving with a deluxe new edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.