McNally Robinson NYC

All this budding life and seeping mud and spring air making you feel inferior? A bit too mortal, perhaps? Gravebound? Put down that Roethke and remember, friends, nature is our victim. We, in our plastic might, are strangling it. You personally may be to blame! There now. Isn’t tepid guilt better than ancient terror? Even better, why not cultivate that guilt by buying one of the bevy of books we have on offer about green living? All genuinely helpful, I’m sure. Something about compost and bicycling, likely. Anything to remind us that we are villains to be feared, and not just more moist grist for the mill..

Let February be set aside for history alone - here at McNally Robinson we’re celebrating the current African-American experience (and by extension an insistent history) throughout March and April, apropos of nothing more than our love for great contemporary fiction. We asked our staff for some of their favorites by current African-American novelists and came up with a list large enough to overwhelm our literature section. They’re all marked down, too, because we honestly want you to read these books. So come by and browse through the work of over a dozen novelists, at least one poet, and one powerfully diverse literary culture..

by Richard Wolin
(Routledge, $24.95)
While useful as an introduction to and critique of the work of the Frankfurt school of thinkers, Wolin’s true project over the course of these essays is an examination of the continuing validity of the social-democratic project, post-Enlightenment thought and, by extension, an indictment of many un-reflexively radicalized trends in current philosophy. A deft and engaging treatment of difficult and divisive topics..

Translated by A.C. Graham
(Random House, $14.95)
It’s a measure of how crass my tastes have grown, perhaps, that the natural imagery in these poems, the persistent arch detail, is less surprising than how very personal they can be. They discuss lechery, decrepitude, helplessness, doubt, and, above all, poetry itself. At their most casual these poets sound strikingly like mid-century American writers; at their most formal they have no peers..

ed. Henry Gee
(TOR, $24.95)
Some of the most widely read science fiction writers in the world brush elbows here with upstarts and unknowns in one hundred short stories from the pages of Nature magazine. The best are indelible, the worst, if too cute, are at least imaginative. Together they serve as an amazing reminder of why any of us are still reading this stuff. Try especially the offerings from Reynolds, Klages, and Rosenbaum..

If our consumption, our commodified desires, must be what defines us as a society, then doesn’t it behoove us to put the same thought into the process - how we buy - as we would the object - what we buy?

This month in McNally Robinson we’re displaying some of our favorite books about what it means to buy local, and why it’s so important to us as individuals, certainly as a business, and as a community.

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Selected and Introduced by Barry Lopez
(Milkweed Editions, $18.00)
One of the casualties of the increasing, and increasingly heard, rhetoric of environmentalism has been our nation’s literature of nature. Orion magazine has become one of the few places to find the contemporary likes of Thoreau, Muir and McPhee.These essays are urgently political, quietly personal and, despite some questionable anthropomorphism of salmon or trees, deeply human discussions of our place in the world around us..

by Daniil Kharms
(Penguin, $29.95)
Kharms may be the only true absurdist I’ve ever read. His stories (and poems, and plays, though they all feel of a piece) are about hunger and sex, vodka and bread beer, Pushkin and Gogol. They are absurd in the most mean and magnificently human way imaginable, full of squabbling and butter..

by Paul Scheerbart
(Ugly Duckling Presse, $5.00)
A tract, written in 1909, about the inevitable obsolescence of ground forces in the upcoming age of zeppelin warfare, whose tone ranges from overawed to technical to gossip-column chatty, newly translated and in a cartoonish letterpress binding. It scratches one of the most obscure itches I’ve ever felt..

Be constructive with your book-buying compulsion. At McNally Robinson we’re now collecting donated books for prisoners, in affiliation with ABC No Rio’s Books Through Bars program.

Books Through Bars is an all-volunteer group that sends free books to people incarcerated all over the country. They ask that you donate new or slightly used paperbacks only, specifically books in the following categories: (Read more...):