Bookshop of the Month, April 2018: Milkweed Books
Many readers will know that we’re a UK-based publisher with tenacious tentacles stretching across the Atlantic to bring our books to US readers via our ever-inspiring stateside distributors Consortium. Well, Consortium are based in Minneapolis, a city that’s become a real literary hub over the last few decades. Not only is it home to Coffee House Press (with whom we’ll be publishing Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder in October 2018) and Graywolf Press, it’s also the location of the wonderful indie press Milkweed Editions - based at Open Book, the largest literary arts centre in the US. They share the building with Milkweed Books, an excellent, indie-focused bookstore. We wanted to find out a bit more, so we caught up with bookseller Daley Farr to ask some essential bibliophile questions:
And Other Stories: What do
you think is special about Milkweed Books?
Daley Farr: Bookstore manager Hans and I joked recently that
“all killer no filler” is our defining philosophy, but it is a little bit
true––all four staff members participate in buying for our very small store, so
we surround ourselves with books we love and books we want to read. For us,
this means that our inventory leans heavily in favor of small and independent
presses, along with books that are pretty, weird, and hard to find. But instead
of a shop that feels arty and alienating, I think we have done exceptionally
well creating a space that balances curated inventory with old school customer
service. We all read widely and are committed to making the store an inviting
place where anyone can ask questions and receive excellent, personalized help,
with no judgement. And I’m proud of our prolific shelftalker habit––in any
genre, in any section of the store, you can find something we are eager to
share with our customers.
AOS: If money was no object, what changes
would you make to your bookshop?
DF: More shelves! And custom display tables. The
store was a little more gallery-like when we first opened, and now that we have
grown into the space and understand it better, I long for some proper fancy
bookstore fixtures. I don’t want it to be bigger, I don’t want our own coffee
shop, we have a big event space upstairs—I just want to display and sell more
books!
AOS: How / why did you get into bookselling?
DF: Mine is a pretty classic trajectory: I was an
English major who worked as barista for a long, long time, until I took an
internship with Milkweed Editions. While I was there, I started working author events
at Magers & Quinn across town, and when Milkweed was just about to open the
bookstore, Hans brought me onboard. For me, it’s a humble, fundamentally
egalitarian profession based on sharing ideas and good language with other
people, making space for what is seen elsewhere as weird or marginal, and
allowing for radical possibility. How could I resist? I’m grateful every day to
be part of the bookselling tradition.
AOS: What’s
the funniest thing you ever heard anyone say in the shop?
Celia: Clearly the woman who called
proposing to have a date in the bookstore and asked how much erotica we
carry!!! (the answer is none)
Berit: Anything any of us says. We
are four very funny people with very different senses of humor.
Daley: And we all love each other
very much and constantly laugh and bicker about everything
AOS: What’s your favourite And Other Stories
book?
DF: We are proud of that [Yuri Herrera’s] Signs Preceding the End of the World is one of our bestsellers.
Hans really liked [Nicola Pugliese’s] Malacqua recently,
and I just fell in love with Ann Quin [The Unmapped Country]. Brother
in Ice [by Alicia Kopf] is up next in my reading pile! And if some mild cheating is allowed
since you publish these books abroad but not stateside, we also love [Patty Yumi Cottrell’s] Sorry to Disrupt the Peace and [Cristina Rivera Garza’s] The Iliac Crest.
AOS: What book published in the last year do our readers
need to get their hands on?
DF: Though I Get Home by YZ Chin from
Feminist Press. Really sharp, connected stories about imperialism, ghosts, KFC,
political unrest, storytelling itself. I have been evangelizing about it lately.
It’s out in April! And to speak for the whole Milkweed Books staff, Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
(Graywolf) and Nature Poem by Tommy
Pico (Tin House) are two of the most brilliant and vital books of the last
year.
AOS: What would be your desert island book?
DF: Impossible. But maybe To the Lighthouse.
And Rebecca Solnit’s Storming the Gates
of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, even if my island has landscape but
not politics.
