Prize-winning author Lydia Davis’ new collection of short stories will not be sold on Amazon, with the author saying she does not “believe corporations should have as much control over our lives as they do”.
Our Strangers will be published by Canongate on 5 October, and is the seventh collection of fiction from Davis, who won the Man Booker international prize in 2013, when the award chose a winner based on a body of work, rather than a single book.
Due to be published just before Bookshop Day on 7 October, Our Strangers will only be sold in physical bookshops, Bookshop.org and selected online independent retailers.
Davis said: “We value small businesses, yet we give too much of our business to the large and the powerful – and often, increasingly, we have hardly any choice.
“I am all the more pleased, now, that Canongate, with its long history of independence and its high standards, will be publishing Our Strangers and doing so in a way that puts my book on the shelves of booksellers who are so much more likely to care about it.”
Davis is not the first author to restrict where her book will be sold. Dave Eggers refused to sell the hardback edition of his novel The Every through Amazon in the US when it was released in 2021 to “highlight the vital importance of independent bookstores”.
“Amazon is a monopoly that uses unfair business practices to drive out competition,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “They do not play by the rules and they do not pay anywhere near their proper tax burden. Meanwhile, you can bet your local indie bookstore is paying taxes.”
Canongate said Davis’s decision “will both stand as a sign of her solidarity with independent booksellers, and encourage further conversation about the vital importance of a diverse publishing ecosystem”.
Independent bookshops have spoken in the past about the difficulties of competing with large retailers that can offer big discounts. When Prince Harry’s Spare was announced, a number of small retailers told the Guardian that they would not be championing the book, which had a retail price of £28 but was being offered for £14 on retailers including Amazon.
And both in the UK and the US, Amazon is facing action from workers demanding better pay and conditions; on 16 April, workers at Amazon’s Coventry warehouse began a new round of strike action in a dispute about pay.
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Canongate editor-at-large Ellah Wakatama said Our Strangers was “pure reading indulgence”.
“I was captivated from the start by the playfulness with which Davis approaches form – short, sharp, compact and so satisfyingly complete,” she added. “With each story, the reader is learning the secrets and desires of characters who are as recognisable as they are individual and complex.
“Davis reminds us that even the prosaic contains the unknowable – unless we watch and listen carefully, in which case, we learn so much about ourselves.”
In addition to short stories, Davis is the author of a novel and two volumes of nonfiction. She is also an award-winning translator from French and other languages.