Writing update (8.13.23)
596 communist book co-ops would be great
If you’re new, welcome. This “Writing Update” is a semi-regular post that collects all the work I managed to finish in the past two weeks. You also get bonus content like a cute pet pic and a witty original post. Pretty great deal. Here’s a link to the previous installment, in case you missed it.
The news that Barnes & Noble is attempting to refashion itself as a chain of charming faux-indie bookstores feels like a dispatch from the other side of a warped looking glass. Let’s not forget that the book retail giant, alongside the now-deceased Borders, decimated actual independent bookstores in the 90s and 2000s by popping up across the street and charging lower prices for a wider selection of titles. It was the rapacious model that Walmart uses to destroy local economies, specialized for books.
But now Barnes & Noble is out here trying to convince us that it’s “That Cool New Bookstore” because the company is giving individual store managers more autonomy to choose books people actually want to buy (a concept!) and replacing drab carpets with hardwood.
I'm no purist. I shop at my local B&N. Until Fort Worth manages to establish a robust independent bookstore, I'll continue to shop there.
I also can’t deny the place is better than it used to be. The tables up front have a better-than-even chance of featuring something interesting; the store stocks local and state-specific books; the aggressive, corporate-mandated sales pitch for memberships at the checkout counter that you could tell the employees hated as much as you did—a mutually distasteful ritual that made shopping at corporate book stores unbearable—is no more.
And yet.
It was grotesque when Amazon started opening brick-and-mortar storefronts on the freshly turned graves of its victim. (And thanks be to Saint George that “America’s worst bookstore chain” went the way of Borders.) But that was such a brazen display corporate ghoulishness that it felt merely evil and soulless, rather than vaguely unsettling — which is how B&N’s rebrand feels.
If the company decides to divest itself of all 596 stores, turn them over to local communities so we can run them as little communist book co-ops, and cease to exist, then I might be impressed. Until that happens, I just won’t accept that anything much has changed. Books, for B&N, will still be just another commodity not a genuine foundation for community.
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Everything I've published recently:
Declarations of literature's impending demise, ranked (Journal of Post American Studies)
A critical review of The People’s Hospital by Ricardo Nuila (Instagram)
A positive review of Ghost World by Dan Clowes (Instagram)