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A grand jury decision announced Monday not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown was preceded by a wave of shuttered doors in Ferguson, Mo. Expecting an eruption of protests over the decision, the city's public schools and many public services quickly declared they would be closed on Tuesday.

The Ferguson Public Library, however, remained open.

We are open 9-4. Wifi, water, rest, knowledge. We are here for you. If neighbors have kids, let them know teachers are here today, too.

— Ferguson Library (@fergusonlibrary) November 25, 2014

Scott Bonner, the library's director and its only full-time librarian, kept the building open to provide programming for local students and to offer adults a safe place in the midst of the tumult. The decision marked a renewal of the library's work in August, when it opened its space to impromptu classes during local schools' long closures during protests this summer. On Tuesday, Bonner said, it was tough to gauge just how visitors were reacting to the news.

"I'm seeing a mix of moods," Bonner told Library Journal. "Our volunteers are excited and optimistic, and here to help, and then I have patrons who come in and literally hold my hands and cry — they just needed someone to hold onto and talk to. And everything in between, including people who are doing the regular walk-in, walk-out stuff."

News of the Ferguson Public Library's opening also prompted an outpouring of donations. Partly spurred by social media support from Neil Gaiman, Rachel Maddow and even the show Reading Rainbow, Bonner told CNNMoney that the library's received donations "in the five digits" since the grand jury announcement. And they continue to flood in.

"I think that when there's all these negative stories," Bonner said to NBC News, "seeing a story where a community comes together unified behind a common cause ... it makes people remember that, you know, we're all human beings and we're in this together."

A Folio Found: A small-town library in the north of France contained a curious, and exceedingly rare, find: a copy of William Shakespeare's first folio. Printed seven years after Shakespeare's death in 1623, the first folio features 36 plays, many of which — including Macbeth — would not be known if not for the folio's survival. The newly unearthed copy, discovered this past fall, joins a list of only about 230 copies of the folio still known to exist. It's believed to have sat untouched in the library, miscataloged for some two centuries before a librarian stumbled across it.

"This is huge," Shakespeare expert Eric Rasmussen told The New York Times. "First folios don't turn up very often, and when they do, it's usually a really chewed up, uninteresting copy. But this one is magnificent."

Cosby Biographer Reverses Course: Amid an onslaught of sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby in recent weeks, the comedian's latest biographer has stayed silent. Mark Whitaker, a former editor-in-chief at Newsweek, had come under criticism for failing to address the accusations in his book Cosby: His Life and Times, released in September.

That silence ended Monday, though, as Whitaker took to Twitter to respond to a column by New York Times media critic David Carr.

@carr2n David you are right. I was wrong to not deal with the sexual assault charges against Cosby and pursue them more aggressively.

— Mark Whitaker (@Marktwhitaker) November 24, 2014

@carr2n I am following new developments and will address them at the appropriate time. If true the stories are shocking and horrible.

— Mark Whitaker (@Marktwhitaker) November 24, 2014

Jacqueline Woodson Responds: In Jacqueline Woodson's first major interview since picking up the National Book Award for Young People's Literature — and since enduring a firestorm over jokes made after her win — Woodson says she wants to offer children of color stories that she often couldn't find herself when she was young.

"In writing about all kinds of families, all kinds of people, writing across socioeconomic class and race, and gender and sexuality, you know it's hard not to come to a book and find some part of yourself in it," she told The Guardian. "If the people who need it can find it then, I've done what I needed to do."

A note to readers: Book News will be taking a brief break for the Thanksgiving holiday. But don't worry: Look for the weekly books forecast when we return on Monday.

Darren Wilson

Ferguson, Mo.

michael brown

William Shakespeare

public libraries

Bill Cosby

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency unveiled new rules today to reduce emission levels for smog-causing ozone, which is linked to asthma and other health problems.

The proposed rules would lower the threshold for ozone from 75 parts per billion to between 65 ppb to 70 ppb. The agency said it would take comments on an ozone level as low as 60 ppb.

"Bringing ozone pollution standards in line with the latest science will clean up our air, improve access to crucial air quality information, and protect those most at-risk," EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said in a statement. "It empowers the American people with updated air quality information to protect our loved ones - because whether we work or play outdoors – we deserve to know the air we breathe is safe."

The Clean Air Act requires the agency to review standards every five year. The ozone levels were set at 75 ppb in 2008 by President Bush.

The new rules are likely to draw opposition from industry groups as well as Republicans. Critics say the standards will hurt jobs and adversely affect an economy that is only just recovering from the Great Recession.

Jay Timmons, the president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, said today that the new rules jeopardize the manufacturing sector.

"This new standard comes at the same time dozens of other new EPA regulations are being imposed that collectively place increased costs, burdens and delays on manufacturers, threaten our international competitiveness and make it nearly impossible to grow jobs," Timmons said in a statement. "Before the Obama administration moves the goalposts with yet another set of requirements that will make it more difficult for manufacturers across the country, they need to allow existing ozone standards to be implemented and give time to American businesses to meet those already stringent and onerous requirements."

Rep. Pete Olson, R-Texas, told the Los Angeles Times that the current ozone standard was healthy and the new levels would hurt the economy.

"The law as it stands now says [the EPA] can't look at jobs," Olson told the newspaper. "But if you don't have jobs, you don't have healthcare, and that is a public health issue."

The EPA's McCarthy rejected those claims in an op-ed article on CNN.com. She said states will have until 2020 to 2037 to meet the new standards, depending on how severe the area's ozone problem is.

"Critics play a dangerous game when they denounce the science and law EPA has used to defend clean air for more than 40 years," she said. "The American people know better."

smog

ozone

EPA

Many years ago, Laurie Colwin began an essay she wrote about the magic of roast chicken like this: "There is nothing like roast chicken. It is helpful and agreeable, the perfect dish no matter what the circumstances. Elegant or homey, a dish for a dinner party or a family supper, it will not let you down." Substitute the phrase "Laurie Colwin's writing" for the words "roast chicken," take some poetic allowances with the word "dish," and you'll have an approximate description of Colwin's own elusive magic.

Home Cooking

A Writer in the Kitchen

by Laurie Colwin

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Her writing "will not let you down." It's never fussy or "literary," but rather, under an unassuming surface: It's smart, droll, and emotionally complex. I re-read a lot of Colwin's work recently. She started out in the 1970s to write her novels and stories about contemporary life and manners, as well as her essays about food. The amazing thing is that so few of her observations — especially about her characters' emotional lives — feel dated. Clearly, those difficult-to-master basic elements of style never go out of fashion.

The digital publisher Open Road Media has just put out a bounty of Colwin in e-book format: four of her novels, three short story collections and her first collection of cooking essays called, simply, Home Cooking. The e-books are attractively packaged with bright watercolor paintings on their covers and appendices featuring a short biographical essay on Colwin and family photographs.

In the opening of Home Cooking, Colwin tells her readers: "I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology [course in college], it is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it." She goes on to describe a fondly remembered meal of "beef stew and buttered noodles, runny cheese, and plain green salad with wonderful dressing." That same attentiveness to "the daily things," suffuses Colwin's fiction, where, in addition to plots about frustrated love and ambition, we hear a lot about the slumped brownies and salted almonds eaten by her characters — many of them well-heeled Wasps and German Jews who live in Manhattan.

“ If you haven't read Colwin before, her 1982 novel, Family Happiness, would be a good one to start with. ... There's always some startling ingredient in Colwin's otherwise domesticated world.

- Maureen Corrigan

If you haven't read Colwin before, her 1982 novel, Family Happiness, would be a good one to start with. It's about a young wife and mother named Polly who is terrified of letting herself acknowledge how very smothered she feels by the constant enforced company of her large socially prominent family. Polly thinks of her domineering parents as being "medieval in their outlook" and building, through their children and grandchildren who are mostly scattered on Manhattan's Upper East Side, "a network of fortified castles close to one another." The surprise here (and it appears in Chapter Two so I'm not spoiling anything) is that Polly-the-dormouse has an adoring lover.

There's always some startling ingredient in Colwin's otherwise domesticated world — a freak accident that cuts short a marriage, as in the opening of Shine On Bright and Dangerous Object or a difficult marriage with an emotionally remote spouse, as seen from the male point of view in Happy All The Time.

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Laurie Colwin was a counselor at Camp Burr Oaks in Wisconsin. She had also attended as a camper in earlier years. Courtesy of Open Road Media hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Open Road Media

Laurie Colwin was a counselor at Camp Burr Oaks in Wisconsin. She had also attended as a camper in earlier years.

Courtesy of Open Road Media

The novel whose premise is, potentially, the real credibility strainer is Goodbye Without Leaving. There, our heroine, Geraldine, abandons grad school in English at the University of Chicago to go on the road for two years as the sole white back-up singer for Vernon and Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes — an Ike and Tina Turner-type revue. Married and "settled" when the novel opens, Geraldine itches to recapture the thrill of days gone by when she danced onstage in tiny fringed dresses of chartreuse and electric blue. She tells us: "The kind of ecstasy people found in religion, I found in being a Shakette. It was not an out-of-body experience, it was an in-body experience."

Rather than preposterous, Colwin's light hand as a writer renders Geraldine's yearnings plausible and, more than that, affecting. Colwin had the power to make her readers believe in life's possibilities — whether they came in the form of a crispy baked chicken or minor fame as a booty-shaking, back-up singer. Her books still have that power. Their reappearance in a form that Colwin herself — who died in 1992 at the age of 48 — couldn't have envisioned is yet another testament to the possibility she always celebrated.

Police in Hong Kong fired pepper spray and arrested scores of protesters overnight Tuesday into Wednesday as they cleared part of a pro-democracy protest camp, NPR's Frank Langfitt reports.

The Associated Press put the total number arrested at more than 116, including Joshua Wong and Lester Shum, highly visible student-leaders of the protesters.

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After 2 Months, Hong Kong Residents Want Protesters To Head Home

Hong Kong Protesters Make Solemn Retreat As Authorities Move In

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The camp being cleared was blocking a road in the Mongkok section of the city, a working-class neighborhood, The Associated Press reported, and local media said more than 4,000 officers were employed in the court-ordered removal, which had been requested by the city's taxi drivers.

The main protest camp in the city's downtown still holds more than 2,000 tents, Frank reports, despite the recent removal of a section of the camp that was in front of a major office building.

After two-months and with little change, many protesters now agree with the majority of Hong Kong's citizens that the demonstrations should end, Frank reports, but a vocal minority is pushing the movement on.

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Protesters pack their belongings Wednesday ahead of an expected clearance by bailiffs and police at a pro-democracy protest site in the Mongkok district of Hong Kong. Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

Protesters pack their belongings Wednesday ahead of an expected clearance by bailiffs and police at a pro-democracy protest site in the Mongkok district of Hong Kong.

Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images