macsbacks's blog

Reading Leonora Carrington’s books is akin to walking through a gallery of her paintings - strange, unsettling, surreal, and baffling, yet with a wild, color-saturated beauty.

“The book was better.” We hear this axiom every day at the store, with the plethora of books being adapted into films and series. I can’t begin to understand the challenges of taking several hundred pages of text and realizing it on the screen. What to retain? What to leave out? How much can you change without betraying the author’s intent or making those who have read the book howl in protest?

This month, I’ll be judging books by their covers. It may or may not come as a surprise, but as booksellers, we do this all the time. We often find that a pretty face does not always signify a vacuous read; often it’s quite the opposite. Each of the books below hits the sweet spot of gorgeous cover art with great writing behind it.

Happy (?) Pride Month! 

I don't usually focus on a single author in these monthly posts, but our book club recently discussed Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and it got me thinking about other books by this amazing author that I have loved over the years. Read on - 

April is Earth Month and Poetry Month, and what better time to revisit the work of nature writer and poet Gary Snyder, specifically his 1990 essay collection The Practice of the Wild. While there have been countless books dealing with nature and the climate crisis in recent years (a few of which are recommended below) it is edifying to reread Snyder’s compassionate, philosophical, mythopoetic take on the interaction of humans with nature.

In celebration of Women's History Month, the I'm focusing on some of my favorite reads from the past year or so. We begin with a new/old book by a feminist icon. Read on - 

This month - celebrating fiction and poetry by trans writers and the best of recent Black literature. Read on -

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Detransition, Baby is, in the best way, a tangled mess of a book. Tackling issues of gender, race, status, and motherhood, it glories in the complexities of living in the 21st century.

Happy New Year! We’re going meta this month, focusing on books set in bookstores and libraries. If there is a unifying theme in most of these books, it is the high quirk factor that accompanies life in a repository of literature. Award-winning author and bookseller Louise Erdrich’s new one is a salute to booksellers wrapped in a horror story wrapped in social commentary. A turbooken, if you will.