Against Amazon - (Biblioasis International Translation) by Jorge Carrión (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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 can't 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 Reader's 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 Miami's Little Havana to Argentina, from his own well-loved childhood library to the rosewood shelves of Jules Verne's Nautilus and the innovative spaces that characterize South Korea's bookshop renaissance. Including interviews with writers and librarians--including Alberto Manguel, Iain Sinclair, Luigi Amara, and Han Kang, among others--Against Amazon is equal parts a celebration of books and bookshops, an autobiography of a reader, a travelogue, a love letter--and, most urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive influence of late capitalism.

Review Quotes

Praise for Against Amazon and Other Essays

"This is just the sort of book that bibliophiles--to say nothing of bibliomaniacs--will enjoy ... A subtle pleasure for lovers of the printed word, even if they order books from the leviathan."--Kirkus Reviews

"Against Amazon is an optimistic overall take on books, reading and retailing and an attempt to avoid ending up knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing."--Winnipeg Free Press

Praise for Jorge Carrión's Bookshops: A Reader's History

"The perfect merging of love of travel and literature."--Buzzfeed

"[Carrión's] purpose is to celebrate bookstores. And he does so by wandering the globe in search of those that play--or have played--a special role in the intellectual and social lives of their communities. They become Carrión's personal mappa mundi."--New York Times

"'Every bookshop is a condensed version of the world, ' begins Mr. Carrión's literary and unabashedly sentimental exploration of bookstores around the globe . . . [Carrion] wanders through volume-laden aisles in Athens, Paris, Bratislava, Budapest, Tangier and Sydney, and invokes many other shops, both open and closed, telling stories about writers, readers and literary circles . . . By the end, you may feel poorly read--but well armed with titles and bookshops to visit on your own."--Wall Street Journal

"Carrión explores the fine lines between pilgrimage destination, touristy gimmick, and decent bookshop. This is the perfect book for those who feel compelled to visit every bookstore they see."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Excellent . . . entertaining . . . this quietly intelligent little book speaks volumes."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post

"Sublimely entrancing . . . brilliant . . . [Carrión's] Borgesian book--it can be opened at any point and read forward, or backwards for that matter--is not at all sad. To read is to travel in time and space, and to travel from bookshop to bookshop is an ecstatic experience for Carrión, a joy he conveys page after page."-- Maclean's

About the Author

Jorge Carrión's Bookshops: A Reader's History, published by Biblioasis in 2017, was universally acclaimed and has appeared in thirteen languages. He is the author of three novels, including Los muertos, which won the 2011 Festival de Chambéry Prize for best first novel in Spanish. Carrión's journalism appears in the Spanish-language edition of the New York Times and many other newspapers in Europe and the Americas. He lives in Barcelona, where he is the director of the creative writing program at Pompeu Fabra University.

Peter Bush's recent translations include Teresa Solana's The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and Other Stories, his selection of Barcelona Tales, and Quim Monzó's Why, Why, Why? In press are Josep Pla's Salt Water and Juan Francisco de Dios Hernández's Leonardo Balada: A Transatlantic Gaze; in process, Balzac's The Lily in the Valley and Najat El Hachmi's Mother of Milk and Honey. He lives in Oxford, UK.