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.
