Amazon is opening a store across the street from Nashville's Parnassus Books, because Amazon is bad.
Amazon, apparently intent on fostering the illest of will among book lovers, is opening a store directly across the street from Nashville’s Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore founded by Ann Patchett and Karen Hayes in 2011. (Full disclosure: I visited the store for the first time this weekend and can confirm that it is a lovely place.)
Nashville-based writer Margaret Renkl wrote an op-ed in the New York Times today discussing her love for Parnassus specifically, and for the sense of community and culture fostered by independent bookstores, generally. “Perhaps most importantly,” she writes, independent bookstores “follow a business model that supports and sustains authors, whose creative work is the very foundation upon which the publishing ecosystem is built.”
Amazon, meanwhile, is selling off-brand Orwell.
[h/t The New York Times]
Jessie Gaynor
Jessie Gaynor is a senior editor at Lit Hub whose writing has appeared in McSweeney's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Glow was published by Random House in 2023. You can buy it here.
