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Author Ann Patchett to open bookstore in Nashville?

Ann Patchett is a Guggenheim fellow and the best-selling author of novels such as Bel Canto and Run. According to an interview in the Boston Phoenix, she may be about to add another line to her résumé: bookseller.

Patchett recently told Phoenix reporter Eugenia Williamson that she was helping another woman open an independent bookstore in her home town of Nashville.  When asked, “Why on earth are you opening a book store?” Patchett responded:

We had an independent [in Nashville]. . . . It was bought by Joseph-Beth Booksellers and it became part of their chain, then they moved it to the mall and it went bankrupt. A Borders closed a month later, and now we don’t have a book store. I’m working with this woman, who is a Random House [sales] rep, who is determined to open a small independent book store in Nashville. I don’t know if it’s the craziest idea in the world, but I cannot live in a city without a book store. It is so weird to have a book coming out when there are no book stores here.

I think we’ve got to get back to a 3000-square-foot store and not 30,000. Amazon is always going to have everything “ you can’t compete with that. But there is, I believe, still a place for a store where people read books.

That a market the size of Nashville has no bookstore is indicative of the fact that Patchett’s initiative is either supremely courageous or supremely foolish. Still, as independents close down left and right and big-box chains reduce their dependence on books as sources of profit, her faith that there is “still a place for a store where people read books” is decidedly refreshing.