Saturday, June 11, 2011

Ann Patchett on her new bookstore

 Shelf Awareness, June 10, 2011

On Wednesday while discussing her new novel, State of Wonder, on the Diane Rehm Show (at about 1:46 in the audio), Ann Patchett spoke about the bookstore she's opening "by Christmas" with longtime Random House sales rep Karen Hayes in Nashville, Tenn., where the two main bookstores, a Davis-Kidd and a Borders, closed in the past six months.

"I don't know if I'm opening an ice shop in the age of Frigidaire," Patchett said. "But I can't live in a city that doesn't have a bookstore."

She added that the store will be about 3,000 square feet in size, a tenth of the size of the stores that closed. "It's kind of this model for what's gone on in our country in so many different ways," she said. "We just supersized. We got bigger and bigger and bigger, and we couldn't sustain it. We can't sustain a 30,000 sq.-ft. bookstore, but we really can sustain a 3,000 sq.-ft. store."

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