Transcript: Ann Bauer
My interview with the American essayist and novelist
With the Canadian federal election now underway, we’re going to have a lot of political content for you in coming weeks. But today, we wanted to change things up a bit and bring you a lighter story about books — and how hard it is these days to find bookstores that stock a range of different perspectives. My guest on today’s program argues that booksellers are locked in a moral contract with their clientele, and it’s resulted in a narrowing of the titles on offer.
Ann Bauer is an American essayist and novelist. Her recent piece for Persuasion is “What Independent Bookshops Really Sell.”
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: I've been wanting to connect with you for a while — since you published an essay for the Persuasion newsletter titled, “What Independent Bookshops Really Sell.” I'm a huge reader. I have found myself heartbroken about the state of bookshops. They seem to be totally dominated by books in a very narrow lane, typically driven by progressive politics. When I travel, I visit bookstores and this trend does seem to hold across North America. I recently got an email from a podcast listener who felt that same sadness about bookstores and asked me to look into this. It's perplexing to me because a lot of the books that I find, they seem pretty dogmatic. Some of them lack literary merit. Nobody that I know enjoys reading them — and that includes progressive friends. What's happened here? What's going on?
AB: I don't know that I'm seeing the very last thing you said. I'm seeing independent bookstores that still curate mostly for quality, that have wonderful books on their shelves. But they are exclusively in that progressive, feel good, “I'm a good person,” liberal lane. There's no questions being raised, no themes that don't cohere to the zeitgeist of the upper class American progressive.
TH: What do you think has happened here? In your essay you trace this back to the rise of Amazon and some of the battles that went on there. Can you walk us through your thinking on that?
AB: I went back and I watched the movie You've Got Mail, which I'd never seen. That was about the big bad Amazon and the quaint independent bookstore. In my memory, which of course could be faulty because memories are, I remember independent bookstores as being places where really interesting, divergent opinions were brought into clash. I think during that period when Amazon grew, independent bookstores had to become something else, and this movie showed what they became: “We’re your third place, this is where we understand you, this is your neighbourhood. This is the cozy, warm, intellectual haven that expresses everything you already think.”
I believe that that's the track that independent bookstores took in order to go up against, “Oh, they have every book known to man.” In a way, I don't blame them. I started that piece — I actually interviewed a woman I've been friends with for a long time. We've had our own friction over her extremely progressive politics and my, what I think of as more centrist, but what I think she might think of as uber-conservative [views]. I interviewed her about the books that she brings into her store. I asked her, “Do you bring in any conservative or books that question these things?” She said, “Who would buy them? That's not who my clientele is. That's not what they want to see on the shelves. That's not what they want to sit around and talk about.” They want a place that underscores what they think and what they believe and what they vote for.
TH: You say this has bent the rules of the free market. I mean, people are willing to pay double the price of a book, which is unusual.
AB: I have a background in advertising. That's how I supported my novel writing, because novel writing pays in magic beans, as I always say. And so, while I was writing novels, I was working for a big advertising agency. I knew the basic rules of what messaging will appeal. The Independent Booksellers Association is one of the best PR firms in the world. Because basically they said to people, “It is the right thing to do to go to your independent bookstore, wait for a book if it's not on the shelves, ask for it to be ordered through your bookstore. Wait two weeks until they get their Ingram delivery and then pay $29 instead of $16.99 on Amazon. And you will do that because you're a good person.”
When I lived in Boston — and this gets to the darker side of things — I was part of a very progressive writing community. We had a blog called Beyond the Margins. We had a consortium of women who would support each other's books. The Independent Booksellers Association in Boston actually published a list of which authors contributed to their association and which authors did not. And it was widely known that if you weren't on the list of contributors, then there was this sense that writers should avoid you because you weren't doing the right thing. So, I knew novelists who were scraping up a thousand dollars to send to the independent booksellers so that their books wouldn't be sidelined.
TH: You say in the piece that there's this bargain that that's being struck here and that it goes both ways. So in your words, “If book buyers must behave virtuously” – and I guess we'd also include authors in that – “and tithe an additional $11 a book, then booksellers must uphold the community's doctrines. They're locked in the moral contract too.” This extends to public talks. As you note, the liberals who patronize indie bookstores, the thinking is they don't necessarily want to see stores “platform,” I guess we'd call them rogue thinkers. I recently had Rob Henderson on the podcast. He was on to talk about his memoir, Troubled, about growing up in foster care and ending up at Yale. He has a lot of fans, a lot of social media followers. He's a huge reader and told me he was so excited about getting to do events in bookstores. But when he went on tour, he discovered no local bookstores would host him. What do you make of that?
AB: Rob was one of the reasons that I wrote this piece, that I pitched it. And the thing about Rob that’s so interesting to me is he was coded — and that's the phrase that I heard from my own agent — he was coded conservative from day one. Which makes no sense. He's a man who grew up in poverty. He's got really diverse thought. He did go into the military, but he also was part of that Ivy League system. And the fact that right out of the gate, his story was put into this box that said, “We can't go there. It's a bootstrap story. We can't have anything to do with him.” I should say, by the way, Rob's own philosophy about, I think he calls them “luxury beliefs” — that of course played into his being shuffled out of the progressive in-crowd. But the fact that he, who was so close, didn't qualify. That he could not get an appearance at an independent bookstore. It was just baffling to me.
It was around the same time that I talked to two other writers, neither of whom want to be named because they said, “I'll be blacklisted going forward.” One of them had a book about a historical figure who was a woman posing as a man. And her book was nearly scuttled by the publisher because of trans activists saying, “She has no right. She is dead naming. This is a story that shouldn't be told.”
The other one was a fairly prominent non-fiction writer who had made one comment during Covid about school closures, and suddenly he was off the list. “You can't appear at our bookstore.” His signings were cancelled last minute. This had been set up for six months. He got an email saying, “Sorry, dude, people don't want you here.” There was a lot of this going on. My own agent had said to me when I sent him something, “I can't really place you anymore. You've been coded conservative.” And so, I think all of these things were swirling around. This idea that we could all be taken from what I thought of as a broad literary world and slotted into this defective box. That's sort of the ecosystem right now of the New York publishing scene and independent bookstores and most progressive literary fiction and non-fiction readers.
TH: Yeah. I should say, too, that I've had experience with this myself. Before 2022, I was very active in the literary communities, both in my city and in the country. I was often asked to moderate events — panels, libraries, and book festivals and that sort of thing. In early 2022, I left the CBC. I published my reasons for leaving. It was very controversial. I have never been asked to moderate a single panel again. I can't say that I especially care. Those things are a lot of work. They don't pay hardly anything. I don't really want to go anywhere that I'm not welcome. I don't really care. But I do think it's an interesting statement of the times right now. I come from the progressive left. I'm a bit frustrated with it right now — and that's an understatement. But I still want to read progressive books. I would just like a more vast array of books available to me. I don't want to have to hunt around for things that don't fit into that slot.
AB: Exactly. And frankly, I care that you're not called to moderate. This is from the point of view of someone who's often in the audience, or used to be. I relied on those sort of shrewd, “But what about? Isn't there an economic cost…” Which we don't get anymore. We get a lot of, “I was just so inspired.” And that is not helpful, smart, literary. So, I think all of this has been accompanied by a real, I'm sorry, dumbing down of the critical process of reviewing. Reviewing, oh so much, and of moderating.
That said, I'm sent a lot of books because I'm on Twitter — I'm sorry, X, rebrand — because I have a somewhat sizable group of people who care about reading. I'm sent a lot of books and people say to me, “Oh, isn't it terrible all the woke trash that's being published.” No, actually, it's not trash. I've read glorious things. Beautiful. I'll tell you, I'm a little bit crunchy about this. I read Dream State middle of last year, and I called every editor I knew and said, “This is a gorgeous novel. It will be huge. Please let me review it.” No. Because I no longer am acceptable either. And then of course it became Oprah's Pick and they're making a television series and it's just as hot as I thought it was. It is beautiful. And it is progressive philosophy from beginning to end. It's a story about climate change. It's a story about gender, it's a story about all the things. And, so yeah, it hits all those bells. Great. It's also a marvelous book.
I'd love to read a marvelous book about a long-term marriage, and about the value thereof. Just this morning, I listened to your latest on marriage. I think those books are no longer making it. And the reason they're no longer making it is because we have 27-year-old activists from Brooklyn as the gatekeepers of all the manuscripts. We have magazines that excerpt … I swear if the Paris Review does another story about “the wonder of I've just discovered” about climate change, trans, polyamory. How can they focus only in this very small arena? The thing that we're losing is the breadth of human experience, the marketplace of ideas, the ability to step into a world other than our own, which used to be what literature was for. Now it's to mirror the world that I choose. And I don't like that.
TH: Neither do I. I'm so glad to hear that you have come across some really spectacular, remarkable books in the progressive arena. That hasn't been my experience. A lot of what I get sent, I just find very dull and dogmatic. But then it depends on which books you're reading, of course, right? So, it's very heartening for me to hear that that's not your experience. I want to talk about where we go from here. You have a wonderful paragraph in your essay: “What I really want is a store where all the ideas are on display, the socialist, capitalist, monogamous, polyamorous, urban, rural, popular and reviled, that has the homely, sacrosanct quality of one of Hemingway's coffee and absinthe bars. With great music, please, and no puppets or cheap pizza.” I love that.
AB: Could someone get on that?
TH: Please! What are our alternatives right now? Where do we go? I read a couple books a week. I love reading. I want to find these books. Where do we go from here? How do we find them?
