Amazon is the antagonist in the stories collected in this book, whose protagonists are writers, bookstores, and libraries from around the world. Authors such as Stanisław Lem, Jorge Luis Borges, Curzio Malaparte, Susan Orlean, Iain Sinclair, and Han Kang. And the book's spaces are both real—the bookstores of Tokyo and Seoul, the National Library of Argentina, and the Gabriel García Márquez Library in Barcelona—and imagined—from the psychogeography of London to the libraries of Don Quixote, Captain Nemo, and the librarians of Babel.
Jorge Carrión has spent twenty-five years reading cities and countries through literature. After publishing Librerías (Bookstores) a decade ago—the internationally recognized book on the subject, translated into fourteen languages—he also began writing about the most important libraries in the cities he visited. This volume selects his best chronicle...read more
