Jane Smiley’s new novel is a delightful trip through the 20th century

You’ve probably seen encouraging stories about the surprising resilience and even resurgence of small booksellers. Last year, the Guardian looked “inside the thriving world of independent bookshops.” Fortune magazine explored how bookstore revivalists “made a big comeback.”

Such stories make everybody feel good, and hundreds of new bookstores have reportedly opened over the past few years, but don’t kid yourself. These small literary entrepreneurs are competing with the world’s largest online retailer, which is selling the same products with steep discounts and overnight shipping. For indie bookstores, staying alive requires constantly proving the benefits of employing local curators and providing cultural space. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Tomorrow is Independent Bookstore Day. This annual celebration — now in its 11th year — is a coordinated effort to remind all of us how much indie bookstores enrich our communities. Across North America, more than 1,000 stores will host readings, musical performances, games, contests, barbecues and more. (Find a participating bookstore near you in the United States or Canada.)

Many cities will also offer “bookstore crawls” — like this one in the nation’s capital — to encourage readers to discover more bookstores around them.

If you don’t have an indie bookseller near you, that’s God’s way of telling you to open one yourself (details). Until then, you can still demonstrate your support by ordering through Bookshop.org, which has raised more than $31 million for local bookstores across the country.

Libro.fm, the audiobook provider for indies, is celebrating this year’s Independent Bookstore Day with a promotion a la Willy Wonka: Five hundred Golden Tickets — each good for 12 free audiobooks — will be hidden tomorrow in participating bookstores. Start plotting your approach now.

Finally, a special call-out to Charlottesville’s New Dominion Bookshop, the oldest independent bookstore in Virginia. This year’s Indie Bookstore Day is a special one for New Dominion because the store will also be celebrating its 100th anniversary. Join the party in the rose garden from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Books to screens and stage:

“The Idea of You,” a rom-com starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine, starts streaming May 2 on Prime Video. The movie is based on Robinne Lee’s novel about the romance between a 40-year-old divorced mom and a 24-year-old pop star, who is not modeled after Harry Styles so don’t even think that. In a 2017 interview, Lee said, “I wanted to write a novel that challenged certain myths,” like the one that claims “female sexuality ceases to exist after we hit middle-aged.” As you can see from the trailer, the movie is a gritty, myth-busting dose of hard reality. In Sonia Rao’s recent profile of Galitzine for The Washington Post, Hathaway claims, “Nick could have chemistry with a lamp,” which may not be the compliment she thinks it is.
A musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” officially opened last night at the Broadway Theatre in New York. Jeremy Jordan stars as Jay Gatsby with Eva Noblezada as Daisy Buchanan. Like Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 desecration, this new adaptation by Kait Kerrigan — with music by Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen — is not constrained by the sounds of 1920s jazz. The Disneyesque song titled “My Green Light” might help you decide if you want to buy tickets, which are reportedly selling fast. So we beat on ... If a quiet night at home sounds better than Broadway, get “The World of The Great Gatsby,” a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, illustrated by Adam Simpson (Laurence King, forthcoming May 7). It includes a poster with an introduction by Kirk Curnutt, executive director of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society.

John James Audubon was born on this day in 1785. Copies of his monumental work, “The Birds of America,” are now among the most expensive books in the world. But the famed naturalist has lost some plumage during recent decades. Increasing awareness of Audubon’s racism — and slaveholding — makes him a problematic patron saint for today’s environmental movement. (Why the National Audubon Society must change its name.) (Why it didn’t.)

Similar debates have swirled around Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Georgetown University’s Mulledy Hall and the Army’s Fort Lee. Traditionalists squawk that contemporary attitudes are being unfairly projected back on history. But history is always subject to reassessment. That’s how we can distinguish it from theology. And the world’s most famous ornithologist is a prime candidate for fresh eyes.

In “The Birds That Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness” (forthcoming, May 7), Kenn Kaufman arrives at the fact of Audubon’s slaveholding and refuses to rush past it. “I can’t move on,” Kaufman writes. “This is too much. No matter how I pretend the Audubons would have been benevolent enslavers (a contradiction in itself), no matter how much John James glossed over reality by referring to enslaved people as ‘servants,’ there is no excusing or condoning this history. He enslaved as many as nine individuals at a time during his family’s years in Kentucky, and a few during later periods, and never expressed the slightest regret about the practice.”

But Kaufman isn’t interested in “canceling” Audubon; instead, he regards him in greater complication, as a man who “often conveyed contradictory or confusing claims about his life, as if he were trying to obscure his own history.” Exploring such contradictions is illuminating, not obscuring.

One of the most curious aspects of Kaufman’s book is that he describes wondering “how John James would have depicted those birds he never saw.” When the covid pandemic struck, Kaufman decided to put his speculation into practice: “I took my first halting steps toward producing my own pseudo-Audubons.” It’s a process of artistic imitation that brings him closer to the birds and the man.

Amy Tan’s charming new field memoir, “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” describes her relationships with dozens of feathered creatures flying around her home in California. Like Kaufman, the novelist finds that drawing and painting birds allows her to know them on an entirely different level. Her book includes more than 130 of her own original illustrations (read an excerpt).

If you’d like to start paying more attention to birds, but the Audubon and Sibley guides look too intimidating, try “How to Look at a Bird,” by Clare Walker Leslie. This compact new book, filled with the author’s rough sketches, offers gentle, introductory instruction about identifying birds, listening to their songs and maintaining a feeder. You may not spot a Madagascar Pochard, but Leslie will help “open your eyes to the joy of watching and knowing birds.”

Despite reading Eric Carle’s picture books for years when my kids were little, I never realized how many “avian friends” he drew. Now through Aug. 25, the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst, Mass., is running a show called “Birdwatching.” It includes feathered creatures from more than two dozen of Carle’s books, such as the stunning pink flamingo in “Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?” and the psychedelic peacock from “Do You Want to be My Friend?” (details).

And, finally, if you’ve got bird lovers coming home to roost, get “Around the World in 50 Birds,” a 1,000-piece puzzle that comes with a large explanatory poster by nature writer/photographer Mike Unwin (Laurence King, forthcoming May 23).

Note to Mom: Don’t let Dad read this issue of the newsletter because he’s getting all these books and the puzzle for Father’s Day.

The great thing about a book is that it’s never more or less than a book. But reading a novel on my iPhone always feels like a concentration test devised by haunted-house clowns. No matter how engaged I am in the story, I know that emails, texts and Slack messages can jump out at any moment. And what novel can compete with breaking news alerts about the bird flu virus in milk or six ways to make a small bathroom look larger?

Which explains the persistence of “dedicated” black-and-white e-reader devices: Their limited function is their best feature. The market is dominated by Amazon’s Kindle, but Barnes & Noble offers its Nook, and Rakuten sells the Kobo. E Ink devices from these three competitors are small, lightweight, glare-free and sport batteries that last for weeks.

On April 30, Kobo will jump ahead of the pack by releasing E Ink e-readers that can display images in full color. The company loaned me two upcoming models to test out.

The Kobo Libra Colour ($219.99) has a 7-inch, glare-free screen with two page-turning buttons on the side. It’s waterproof, easy to hold and lighter than a physical book. What’s most striking, though, is its remarkable screen, which shows book covers as you know them: in color. Comic books appear as they should, too. (Technical details: The screen is 1264 x 1680. Black-and-white content appears in 300 PPI; color content in 150 PPI.)

With the Kobo Stylus 2 ($69.99), you can write on these pages, underline and highlight passages and — my favorite — scribble notes in the margins. (The tip is pressure sensitive to draw thin or thick lines, and there’s an eraser on the other end.) In the My Notebooks section, you can also create journals, add illustrations and equations — again, all in color. And you can share documents with Dropbox and Google Drive.

Meanwhile, the Kobo Clara Colour ($149.99) has a 6-inch E Ink screen and, by dispensing with the page-turning buttons, an even more compact design. It can’t be used with the Stylus 2, but you can still highlight passages with your finger and add notes using the pop-up keyboard. Like the more expensive Libra, Clara plays Kobo audiobooks over Bluetooth, and you can easily check out library books using OverDrive.

In fairness, the colors on these new Kobos are not exactly the brilliant, crisp hues you know from the screens on your phone, computer or Kindle Fire. This is E Ink color, which means the shades are softer, reminiscent of an old timey photograph that’s been painted. I found it quite pleasing, really, and what’s more, E Ink screens are easier on your eyes — and your sleeping habits — than your laptop.

You can buy essentially any e-book you want through Kobo, and its e-readers are compatible with more than a dozen file formats — except for Amazon’s. For some people, remaining outside the Everything Store will be a dealbreaker. For others, a dealmaker.

No one knows exactly when William Shakespeare was born, but his baptism was recorded in the parish register at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon on this day in 1564.

Which reminds me that the most delightful thing I heard this week was New Yorker editor David Remnick interviewing Judi Dench (listen). She’s just published a memoir, with Brendan O’Hea, called “Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent” (review). Throughout their conversation, Remnick is astonished by how effortlessly and effectively 89-year-old Dench can recite passages from Shakespeare.

Such memorization is a lost art, and much substance was lost with it. In high school and college, I used to memorize hours of stage dialogue and long passages from the Bible, which were a great comfort to me in times of stress. These days, only the stress remains. Most nights, staring at the ceiling for hours, my mind is a tangle of bits of string, and all I can come up with is something like: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Won’t you lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff?”

But take heart, fellow amnesiacs. As someone once said, “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!” If you’re determined to exercise a little more of your infinite faculty, get a copy of “Shakespeare for Every Night of the Year,” edited by Colin Salter.

This stately new anthology is organized like a date book, starting on Jan. 1 and running till Dec. 31. For each day, Salter presents a relevant passage by the Bard — a sonnet, a soliloquy or a page or two of dialogue. Today, for instance, to celebrate Shakespeare’s baptism, we find the prologue from “Henry V”: “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / the brightest heaven of invention.” On June 21, the first day of summer, Oberon celebrates the forest in “Midsummer Night’s Dream”: “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows.”

This is a perfect and perfectly doable way to infuse each day with a few lines by the greatest writer in the English language. And who knows — you might even memorize some of them.

Why not get the kids involved, too? Candlewick Press is about to release a children’s edition of the First Folio — that foundational collection of Shakespeare’s 36 plays published in 1623. But this isn’t another anthology of tender summaries written in modern-day English. No, Anjna Chouhan, a lecturer at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, has condensed each play by 90 percent while (mostly) preserving Shakespeare’s original language. So, here’s Hamlet asking, “To be or not to be” in a play that runs 20 minutes instead of five hours.

If you know the plays, reading Chouhan’s radically shortened versions might sound like chipmunks performing at the Globe. But brevity is the soul of wit, and for children 8 - 12 years old experiencing Shakespeare’s canon for the first time, these scripts — with condensed cast lists, too — are perfect for productions in the basement or the backyard. Emily Sutton’s gorgeous illustrations make this anthology even more irresistible. Truly, this is a volume that will leave you gasping, “How far that little candle throws his beams!”

Lend me your ears: The remodeled Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington won’t reopen until June 21, but last Saturday night, a sold-out crowd gathered in the library for a fancy dinner, an exclusive preview of the new exhibits and some Shakespearean entertainment. In the Folger Theatre, John Douglas Thompson and Antoinette Crowe-Legacy delivered passages from “Twelfth Night” and “Romeo & Juliet.”

The $80.5 million renovation has transformed the renowned research library into a destination for the general public. Treasures long cloistered away — starting with the library’s unparalleled collection of 82 First Folios — will be on permanent display.

Folger director Michael Witmore, who plans to step down later this year, told the audience, “I remember standing here at the podium in 2013 thinking, ‘It will take five years — max — to complete this.’ That was almost exactly 11 years ago. ‘Hamlet’ says that the problem with plans is that they are like twigs: When they start carrying the weight of more fruit, they often break. Well, this place is stronger now than it’s ever been, and our plans have held.”

More than a year ago, a manuscript by Cuban Peruvian writer Sara Daniele Rivera won the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. This month, Rivera has published “The Blue Mimes,” and we can see just how richly she deserved that $5,000 honor.

This collection, sparingly enhanced by Rivera’s line drawings, pulls us into the travails and joys of family members treasured and lost. Her treatment of politically engineered tragedies in the U.S. — as in this poem about immigration — make “The Blue Mimes” piercingly timely.

Papi, Papá

I catch my head again.
I expect to see my father
entering a room. I catch
my head starting to turn

and I'm on the disappearing end
of an island, thinking of
the girl from El Salvador
whose sentences

are polite in a recording
from migrant detention.

They identify countries
of origin, not names. A crying
boy from Guatemala

says Papi, Papi, Papá. Dad, Daddy,
Father, I miss you. Please walk

through the door again.
Please inhabit your body.

Does he construct
a memory or a daydream

where his father, wearing the last
outfit he was seen in, enters
from the other side of a cage?

When I try to rebuild my father
it's his hair first, his shoulders, scenarios
of posture. I couldn't look at

the last thing he wore. I had
the chance I could not do it.

A child doesn't understand
separation. Absence is

transformed into a game: disappearance,
reappearance, a face
behind hands. I was there

the morning my father
crossed an undeniable border
and a boy is at the border now.

He catches his head
turning, looking

to the door and back, Papi,
Papá and the country beyond

the facility is desert and
wire and everything, everything

in this wide, cold
place is a pale-yellow polo,
tucked in at the waist.
A shirt his father wore.

P.S. This year, Graywolf Press turns 50. To celebrate that milestone, the legendary Minneapolis publisher invited 50 of its poets to select poems by other Graywolf poets and write short appreciations. These poems and essays have now been collected into an illuminating anthology called “Raised by Wolves.” You’ll find Nick Flynn on Mary Jo Bang’s “No More,” Tracy K. Smith on Linda Gregg’s “Too Bright to See,” Diane Seuss on D.A. Powell’s “Boonies” and many more. This isn’t just a commemorative anthology; it’s a seminar on contemporary poetry you can savor at your leisure. And finally, if you’re in New York, you can attend Graywolf’s 50th anniversary dinner at the Harvard Club with Natalie Diaz, Carmen Maria Machado, Claudia Rankine and others on May 9 (tickets).

Last week, Dawn and I volunteered to take care of Katniss while her owner spent a week in Turks and Caicos. That name — from the dystopian “Hunger Games” — should have been a clue. Just as Katniss’s owner headed out the door, she looked around our living room and said, “Oh, I love all your bookcases. I could never have those because Katniss eats books. Bye!” My soul momentarily left my body.

Our first full day together was a struggle of wills. No one else has ever panted so hard — or at all — for me to finish a book review. I imagined that walking Katniss every morning I would feel like Anne Lamott floating around the neighborhood with her border collie communing with the Holy Ghost. Mostly I tried to keep Katniss from ripping my arms off whenever she saw another dog or a squirrel or a bird or her shadow.

There’s still so much black hair around the house that we could weave eight Katniss sweaters. (A romp through humanity’s greatest friendship — with dogs.)

I don’t miss her at all. That’s just pollen irritating my eyes.

Meanwhile, send any questions to ron.charles@washpost.com. You can read last week’s issue of the newsletter here. Please tell your friends who might enjoy this free newsletter that they can get it every week by clicking here. (No, they don’t have to be subscribers of The Washington Post.) And remember, you can find all our books coverage, updated every day, here.

Interested in advertising in our bookish newsletter? Contact Michael King at michael.king@washpost.com.