On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Has Ryan Coogler’s recently released horror film “Sinners” got you in the mood for more vampire books? Ben Mayne of Tattered Cover Book Store in Littleton, Colo., recommends “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” by Stephen Graham Jones.

Mayne says the book gives “Interview with a Vampire” vibes. The vampire is a Blackfeet man named Good Stab, and the tale he confesses to a pastor in 1912 is one of revenge. The story shifts between the pastor’s journal entries and a modern reader discovering them.

"Throughout the story, you kind of side with him a little bit, and then you hate him again, and then you kind of realize that he might not be the bad guy in this conversation that they're having,” Mayne says. “It's super emotional, terrifying.

“Steven — he teaches here in Boulder— ties a lot of his Native roots into his storytelling. So he mixes a lot of lore into it and makes his own very creepy, disturbing creature.”

This is one of the rare cases where works by the same author have been recommended on Ask a Bookseller over our nine-year history. Check out this recommendation from 2021 for more: Ask a Bookseller: A love letter to horror films | MPR News

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day. Participating indie bookstores across Minnesota and the country will offer special events or deals.

We celebrate with particular gusto in the Twin Cities metro, where this year, 37 bookstores are participating in the Independent Bookstore Passport created by Rain Taxi.

Pick up your passport and get it stamped at any participating bookstore through Sunday. Each stamp is a future coupon at that store, and with 10 or more stamps, you can unlock additional discounts and chances to win prizes.

Not sure what to read with all those discounts? Check out the Ask a Bookseller podcast for inspiration.

This week, Victoria Ford of Comma, a bookshop in Minneapolis, recommends a historical fiction novel with a dose of magical realism. It’s Karen Russell’s “The Antidote.”

The novel follows five characters living in Nebraska during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Our title character is a prairie witch who calls herself “The Antidote.” Her service? Taking away the painful memories that people wish to forget and storing them for later retrieval, allowing people to go about their lives unburdened by past hurts. The responsibility of memory — and what we lose when we forget — are key themes in the book.

We also follow a government photographer who comes to take pictures of the Dust Bowl and discovers that her camera can capture images from the past as well as potential futures of the land. Meanwhile, a farmer who came to the U.S. after being driven from his land in Poland struggles with the realization that he is a part of that same crime happening to Native Americans in this country.

The other characters are the farmer’s niece and ...

A scarecrow.

Curious? Me, too.

Happy Indie Bookstore Day.

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

We finish up our Books of Hope series with a sweeping novel that interconnects lives across time through a single drop of water. The book is “There Are Rivers in the Sky” by award-winning British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak.

Meghan Hayden of River Bend Bookshop in Glastonbury and West Hartford, Conn., says she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it:

“It just captivates you from the very start as a raindrop falls on the head of an ancient king of Mesopotamia, and he’s contemplating his vast library. And there’s a particular poem that he has on a blue tablet that is the prize possession in his gigantic library.

And we follow this poem, which is lost to time. We follow this raindrop through other characters, as we move from Victorian England to modern-day Syria and Iran, back to modern-day London. It’s vast and sweeping, but also incredibly intimate.

The themes of this book are really around the politics of water, water scarcity, how water is both a life giver and an incredibly destructive force, and how we are all intimately connected by water.

You’ll learn a ton about how rivers and oceans work, how water circles the globe, but all in very personal stories of people’s lives who are revolving around two mighty rivers, the River Thames and the River Tigris.

It really leaves you on a very hopeful note for our own future, as we are reminded that we are all so deeply connected. At this moment, we have an opportunity to look back at our shared history and avoid living some of the same difficult stories over and over.

I felt really inspired by the end of this book.”

— Meghan Hayden