What did the bookstore clerk say to the customer? What are YOU doing here? The painful truth is that bookstores, and bookselling more generally, have never faced more parlous times than our own. But the business doesn’t lack for diehard loyalists and the battlefronts are many – from the virtual mall of Amazon, to the shopping centers of suburbia, and most recently, to the courtrooms of Manhattan.
“If you’re listening to us today, we can reasonably assume two things – one, you love books, and two, you’ve seen the number of places to buy books in your community shrink,” says Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly features editor. As he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally, the upcoming PW will explore what’s driving the decline in in-store sales.
In her weekly review of reviews, Rose Fox, a PW reviews editor who blogs at Genreville, arrives with praise for the latest thriller by Dennis Lehane: A “masterful” Live By Night that chronicles the Prohibition-era rise of Joe Coughlin, an Irish-American gangster and son of a Boston cop. “This is a mature, quintessentially American story that has appeal beyond fans of crime fiction,” Fox reports.
Listen here.
