Against Amazon by Jorge Carrión in New York

Spanish writer Jorge Carrión presents his latest translated work, “Against Amazon,” at Book Culture in New York, in conversation with Casey Plett.

Against Amazon, by Jorge Carrión, is the latest English-translated release by the Spanish author. Picking up where the widely praised Bookshops: A Reader’s History left off, Against Amazon and Other Essays explores the increasing pressures of Amazon and other new technologies on bookshops and libraries. In essays on these 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.

Featuring interviews with writers and librarians —including Alberto Manguel, Iain Sinclair, Luigi Amara, and Han Kang— 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.

In this event, Carrión will give a public reading in conversation with Casey Plett, author of A Safe Girl to Love.

This is just the sort of book that bibliophiles—to say nothing of bibliomaniacs—will enjoy… A subtle pleasure for lovers of the printed word, even if they order books from the leviathan.

—Kirkus Reviews

About Jorge Carrión

Jorge Carrión is a writer, cultural critic, curator, and comic and podcast scriptwriter. He holds a Ph.D. in humanities from Pompeu Fabra University and is head of the master’s degree in literary creation at UPF-BSM. Carrión is also a regular collaborator in La Vanguardia and Infobae, and was the cultural critic for The New York Times and The Washington Post Spanish editions.

He has published landmark narrative essays such as Teleshakespeare (2012), Librerías (2013) or Contra Amazon (2019), and the fiction trilogy Los muertos (2019), Los huérfanos (2014), and Los turistas (2015). During the last years he has explored artificial intelligence in several projects –from Solaris, ensayos sonoros (Podium Podcast, 2020-2021; Premio Ondas) to the collective exhibition and book Todos los museos son novelas de ciencia ficción (2022), to his celebrated novel Membrana (2021).

His work has been translated into 15 languages. In North America, Bookshops and Against Amazon have been published by Biblioasis and translated by Peter Bush.

About Casey Plett

Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, A Safe Girl to Love, the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers, and the publisher at LittlePuss Press.

She has written for The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. A winner of the Amazon First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, her work has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She splits her time between New York City and Windsor, Ontario.