Against Amazon: and Other Essays

A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY BOOK

Good bookshops are questions without answers. They are places that provoke you intellectually, encode riddles, surprise and offer challenges A pleasing labyrinth where you cant get lost: that comes later, at home, when you immerse yourself in the books you have bought; lose yourself in new questions, knowing you will find answers.

Picking up where the widely praised Bookshops: A Readers History left off, Against Amazon and Other Essays explores the increasing pressures of Amazon and other new technologies on bookshops and libraries. In essays on these vital social, cultural, and intellectual spaces, Jorge Carrión travels from London to Geneva, from Miamis Little Havana to Argentina, from his own well-loved childhood library to the rosewood shelves of Jules Vernes Nautilus and the innovative spaces that characterize South Koreas bookshop renaissance. Including interviews with writers and librariansincluding Alberto Manguel, Iain Sinclair, Luigi Amara, and Han Kang, among othersAgainst Amazon is equal parts a celebration of books and bookshops, an autobiography of a reader, a travelogue, a love letterand, most urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive influence of late capitalism.