Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
It’s been an incredible ride, but all good things must come to an end… I’ll cherish the memories, the friendships, and even the occasional printer meltdown.
“Season follows season; year follows year” and generations succeed each other leading up to “the Great Hunger” and the novel’s main setting.
For almost two years, the storm that has now engulfed the National Anti-Corruption Commission gathered slowly, unexpectedly and often behind closed doors.
It began with questions about robo-debt. Then came findings of “officer misconduct” against the commissioner himself. After that, scrutiny over Paul Brereton’s continuing ties to Defence. By this week, the pressure had become impossible to contain.
On Monday, Brereton resigned as the nation’s inaugural anti-corruption commissioner three years into a five-year term. Twenty-four hours later, he faced a bruising Senate estimates hearing defending both his conduct and the institution he leaves behind.
By the end of the night, the scandal deepened further when NACC inspector Gail Furness revealed a third investigation into his conduct was under way. For an agency created to restore public faith in politics, it was an extraordinary spectacle: the head of Australia’s integrity watchdog fighting to preserve confidence in his own integrity.
“I accept that I have in some way contributed to this outcome, but I do not accept that my standards have in any way fallen below an appropriate standard,” Brereton told senators. “The press attention is focused on me and my interests. The need to defend that has become a distraction, and that is basically why I have decided that it is in the interests of the organisation that I remove that distraction.”
But the hearing laid bare not just his departure, but a deeper identity crisis inside the NACC.
Investigating the investigators
Four years ago, the Albanese government promised a new era of integrity after a decade of political scandals under the Coalition. Creating a federal anti-corruption commission became Labor’s defining institutional reform – proof that Canberra had finally recognised public trust in politics was collapsing. The expectation was enormous. Perhaps impossibly so.
Then-attorney-general Mark Dreyfus had pushed for stronger public hearing powers, but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and senior NSW Labor figures resisted, wary of potential reputational damage from public anti-corruption hearings.
Mark Dreyfus introduces the National Anti-Corruption Commission Bill to parliament in 2022.ALEX ELLINGHAUSEN
Albanese is a long-time sceptic and originally argued against a federal body internally. He has cited Rudd/Gillard-era cabinet minister Greg Combet in private discussions as being unfairly damaged by publicity after testifying at a 2013 NSW corruption inquiry into disgraced former NSW Labor resources minister Ian Macdonald, despite no wrongdoing.
But with a strong commitment having already been made under previous leader Bill Shorten, the compromise produced a cautious design: public hearings only in exceptional circumstances and where in the public interest.
That structural caution soon collided with culture.
Brereton, then on the NSW Court of Appeal, had been the outstanding candidate of a list presented to government that came largely from Defence and the judiciary – systems built on hierarchy and confidentiality. He was paid $803,440 for his full-time position.
Integrity advocates say those instincts shaped the commission’s early tone: defensive, legalistic and wary of scrutiny.
Critics, such as Greens senator David Shoebridge, say despite receiving thousands of referrals, the public record of serious corruption findings remains embarrassingly thin. An integrity body that cannot or does not produce visible accountability outcomes, they argued, would not retain public legitimacy.
They also point to the time it has taken to reach decisions. It took almost two years after former Liberal senator Linda Reynolds referred Dreyfus in August 2023 over Brittany Higgins’ compensation payout to dismiss it in June last year.
Those kinder to Brereton, say his real failing was the sales job. He didn’t communicate to the public what the body was doing and how it was working. Instead, he was secretive and aloof. An analogue man in a digital world.
The first rupture came with robo-debt, the illegal welfare debt scheme that was the subject of a landmark royal commission. When it referred six officials for possible corruption investigation, the NACC declined to act. The backlash was immediate.
NACC inspector Furness found Brereton had engaged in “officer misconduct” after failing to properly recuse himself from discussions involving former Human Services secretary Kathryn Campbell, an army reserve colleague of Brereton. Campbell was found to have breached the APS code of conduct 12 times by the robo-debt royal commission, and quit the public service before those findings. Furness found the process was affected by “apprehended bias”.
Former High Court justice Geoffrey Nettle later overturned the NACC’s decision, ordering the referrals be investigated. The reversal severely damaged the commission’s credibility.
That gap widened further with scrutiny of Brereton’s continuing Defence ties. While commissioner, he provided what he called “ongoing, very modest informal assistance” to the inspector-general of the Australian Defence Force, where he had previously headed an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan.
The work by the former major general was unpaid and limited. But Defence is a major source of NACC referrals, and critics said the arrangement also risked apprehended bias.
His deputies, Nicole Rose, Kylie Kilgour and Ben Gauntlett, told the parliamentary committee last year they believed Brereton’s recusal was necessary.
At Senate estimates this week, Brereton conceded: “With the benefit of hindsight, it would have been better if I was not involved in that at all.” Officials conceded taxpayers had already spent $204,000 on legal advice connected to the inspector’s investigations into him.
Hours later, Furness revealed to senators that another investigation into Brereton began in April, alongside an earlier inquiry into Defence conflicts nearing completion. She did not disclose any details.
Brereton warned senators about making assumptions about findings, saying Furness’ investigation “might turn out very different” from a draft already handed to him.
Paul Brereton will vacate his position with the NACC in July.BEN APPLETON
But the symbolism was stark: the commissioner departed while under multiple ongoing scrutiny processes overseen by his own watchdog.
“There were no real tears shed for his departure,” one source familiar with NACC discussions within government said.
Rose has also resigned, amid swirling rumours of a souring in the pair’s professional relationship. She this week rejected that and said her decision to move overseas with her family was the reason.
Among government ranks, Rose, a former head of AUSTRAC, was highly respected and spoken about as a future commissioner.
“They will be sadly missed,” NACC chief executive Philip Reed said, adding he thought Brereton had been treated “very poorly” by parliamentarians and commentators.
‘For too long it has operated in secrecy’
The deeper problem for the commission is not just personal conduct, it is legitimacy.
Anti-corruption agencies rely almost entirely on public confidence. The NACC has also faced criticism over secrecy, internal defensiveness, and opaque integrity policies that were only revealed through freedom of information disclosures.
Brereton says the scrutiny has amounted to a commission in which staff are “terrified of making any mistake of fact or law because they fear they will be visited with a finding of officer misconduct”.
But Anthony Whealy, KC, the chair of the Centre for Public Integrity, an independent research institute, said that response summed up the importance of changing the culture at the commission.
“For too long it has operated in secrecy,” he said. “It’s no wonder that its staff are uneasy with calls for robust accountability and transparency. Open accountability must become the norm if the NACC is to fulfil its statutory purpose.”
Independent MP Helen Haines, the deputy chair of the oversight committee, is optimistic about a chance for a reset.
“We have seen some initial problems ... and we don’t want to repeat those, and we want to set ourselves up to succeed in stamping out corruption,” she said. “But it still has work to do on transparency, communication, and public confidence if it is to deliver.”
Independent MP Helen Haines says the NACC has a chance to turn itself around.ALEX ELLINGHAUSEN
She said recent Australian National Audit Office findings on freedom of information failures across government reinforced broader concerns about Australia’s weak transparency culture. She echoed calls to ensure the government was properly funding the Auditor-General’s work.
Attorney-General Michelle Rowland now faces the task of appointing a new commissioner capable of restoring confidence.
“This does give us an opportunity with these new appointments to have a reset,” she told ABC on Friday. “And I will be engaging across the parliament to make sure that that happens.”
She has promised a merit-based appointment, but integrity campaigners want more meat on the bone.
The Centre for Public Integrity warns that the appointment process must be fundamentally reset. In a letter to the attorney-general, the centre called for a public call for applications, published criteria, and an independent selection panel to constrain ministerial discretion. The government said most of these steps are already enshrined in legislation.
“The next commissioner cannot be appointed behind closed doors,” said the letter, co-signed by Whealy, alongside signatories including Michael Barker, KC, Margaret White, professors Allan Fels and Joo Cheong Tham and Geoffrey Watson, SC. They argued anything less would risk “perpetuating the cloud” over the agency.
Professor AJ Brown, chair of Transparency International Australia, said the commission still has enormous potential.
“The NACC is proving it is good at the technical job of anti-corruption investigations. It’s how it addresses its wider purpose, and builds a better relationship with the public, which remains the big challenge,” he says.
Campaigners want a reset to include making it easier to hold public hearings and a tightening of conflict-of-interest laws.
“We need the next commissioner to help restore confidence in the organisation and for it to better fulfil the vision we had for it as a beacon of integrity,” independent senator David Pocock says.
But within government ranks, there are warnings of overcorrection and reminders that public hearings can damage reputations even without findings of wrongdoing. Others say holding them for exceptional circumstances should not mean never.
Brereton leaves behind a $60 million-a-year organisation with more than 200 staff. It has completed assessments of more than 92 per cent of the 7624 referrals received over the last three years. Its 34 current investigations cover former or current parliamentarians and staff, senior executives in the public service, contractors and consultants.
But after years of escalating controversy, one reality is unavoidable. The NACC was created to embody integrity, and it is still trying to prove it.
The chain’s turnaround CEO James Daunt has liberated its stores from the corporate playbook. But his latest comments about AI reveal he’s still every bit a capitalist.
To understand the strategy that’s broughtBarnes & Noble Inc.back from the retail abyss, you first have to understand the pyramid. To a regular bookstore-goer, a pyramid looks like a simple stack of books piled on a display table. But, much like fingerprints or computer-generated passwords, no two pyramids on the dozens of tables inside each of the company’s nearly 750 locations are alike. Each book at a pyramid’s peak is a title chosen by a staff member at the store, intended to draw customers in closer, where the titles around it can intrigue them further. When customers take enough books off the pyramid, a decision must be made: Replace it with the same book or return the remaining copies to the shelves?
The method is now so revered among Barnes & Noble employees, every one of them I interviewed in reporting this story used the word “pyramid” as a verb, including the company’s chief executive officer, James Daunt, who explains that each display of books “has to be pyramided.” “I just want it to look nice and be interesting,” he says.
That might not sound like a radical act, but before Daunt took over leading the world’s largest bookseller chain in 2019, the company was beholden to a far more rigid display shape: the block. The setup was an emblem of Barnes & Noble’s transactional practice of making sweetheart store-placement deals with major publishers, in which blocks of books were stacked with the contractual precision of real estate developers maximizing air rights. Among the many drawbacks of this one-size-fits-all arrangement was that it failed to sell books effectively. The unsold books had to be returned to publishers, which meant fewer sales of other, more attractive books, wasted store space, lost employee time and eroded margins.
Barnes & Noble’s return rate to publishers has since dropped from more than 25% to about 8%. But more important, the merchandising shift is an example of Daunt’s idiosyncratic approach to corporate bookselling: Behave less like a big-box behemoth and more like a book lover. He has largely unshackled staff and stores from edicts and entrusted them to use their judgment to appeal to the specific communities they serve. As a result of that, along with Daunt’s knack for aggressive negotiating and strategic cost-cutting, a chain that seemed all but destined to become a relic in an era of screens and digital commerce is now thriving. It opened more than 120 stores in 2024 and 2025, many in locales that hadn’t had a bookstore in years.
Barnes & Noble CEO, Daunt, in New York.Photographer: Ryan Lowry for Bloomberg Businessweek
This retail experiment was hardly guaranteed to work. When Elliott Advisors, the private equity firm, took the troubled chain private for $683 million in 2019 and appointed Daunt to turn it around, death watches were already underway. Decades of dwindling store counts, dipping sales, a disastrous e-reader saga, more than a billion dollars lost in market value, a halving of its workforce, existential competition from online retailers and diminished cultural relevance left the big bad book beast once villainized in You’ve Got Mail an almost sympathetic victim of the times. Four CEOs had cycled through Barnes & Noble over the previous six years, failing to fix it.
But Daunt’s résumé was unlike that of any of his predecessors. Almost three decades earlier, Daunt left a career in finance to open Daunt Books in his hometown of London. The indie bookstore, with its Old World reading room vibe and clever categorization of books according to country rather than genre, eventually became a tourist destination and literary shrine. (Its tote bags are a status symbol, reselling for a premium on eBay.) As the legend of Daunt’s bookstores grew, he was recruited to run the flailing UK chain Waterstones Booksellers Ltd. when it was bought by the eccentric Russian billionaireAlexander Mamut in 2011. “There’s no way in God’s world that anybody responsible would’ve let me do these things,” Daunt says of his early days at Waterstones. “They took somebody on a whim, because I had six bookstores, and I was coming and saying, ‘We can take over 320 stores with sales cratering and losing serious amounts of money.’” But it worked. Waterstones became profitable by emulating aspects of Daunt’s indie-store playbook, and in 2018 it was acquired by Elliott. As part of the deal, Daunt remained CEO of Waterstones and was then given another full-time job, leading Barnes & Noble, when Elliott bought it in 2019. (Daunt still owns his indie chain.)
Daunt’s arrival coincided with America’s waning reading habits. Last summer a study reported that from 2003 to 2023 daily reading for pleasure had fallen 40% in the US. Recent reports on schools reveal historically low reading scores, fewer cover-to-cover book assignments and shorter attention spans. If educators, pundits, social scientists and publishers are panicking, Daunt isn’t fazed. In December, days after a YouGov time-use survey found that 40% of Americans had copped to not reading a single book in 2025, Barnes & Noble announced plans to open an additional 60 stores in 2026.
Daunt refuses to believe that reading is on the decline. “It’s a lot of nonsense,” he says, noting other historical freakouts, like when the television was invented. “The energy in our stores is young adults, these 16- to 26-year-olds who pour into our stores and create bestsellers that just escalate.” For all the literary headwinds, there are plenty of tailwinds too. BookTok obsessivesare turning old or undiscovered books into hits, while manga,romantasy and other genres have created booming literary franchises with rabid fandoms. Even indie bookstores are experiencing a resurgence, growing by 70% in the US over the last five years.
Onetime Barnes & Noble haters have put aside past grievances against the chain as a crusher of local bookstores to become boosters, arguing that its numerous, wide-ranging shelves keep publishers and the public invested in physical books and physical stores. That the company’s reversal is happening under the watch of private equity, an industry hardly known for letting retailers become more experimental and independent, is even stranger. (Elliott Advisors (UK) Ltd. declined to speak with Bloomberg Businessweek for this article.)
The chain now finds itself occupying a singular middle ground in the bookselling world, somewhere between David and Goliath, says industry observer and indie-bookstore advocate Maris Kreizman over email. “Amazon has changed the landscape of modern publishing forever and it’s so important that Barnes & Noble exists as an in-between space,” she writes, noting that the retailer’s turnaround has been positive for all booksellers. Remarking on the company’s contradictions, she adds that “they may have a CEO who actually reads books, which is a big deal in the book industry, but at the end of the day, they’re still a company owned by a hedge fund.”
That became all the more clear on May 18, when Daunt told NBC News that he would be comfortable with Barnes & Noble selling books written by AI. As new publishers sprout up using chatbots to replace authorsand writers are being outed for using the technology, publishing is the next creative industry contending with tech replacing human talent. “As long as an AI-written book says it’s an AI-written book and doesn’t pretend to be something else and isn’t ripping off somebody else, as long as that’s clearly stated and the customer wants to buy it, then we will stock them,” Daunt told the Today show, acknowledging that it’s possible the chain may already be carrying books penned with help from AI. Predictably, Daunt’s comments did not go over well. “Barnes and Noble CEO saying the store will carry AI written books is a lot like Spotify pushing slop composed songs. These corporations hate artists,” wrote one author on X. “Great reminder to shop at your local independent bookstore or via http://bookshop.org,” posted another writer and book enthusiast with nearly 60,000 X followers.
In a statement to Businessweek, Daunt sought to clarify his remarks, explaining that the company currently doesn’t knowingly sell AI-written books or seek to sell them, but that it “would not ‘ban’ reputable books published by reputable publishers, even if AI generated, should these be published, labeled and there be clear evidence of customer demand.” Even so, he noted, “we think it very unlikely that there will be customer demand for AI generated books, or that reputable publishers will publish them.”
Daunt’s capitalistic impulses may have dinged his bookselling folk-hero status, but that could be because he has Wall Street on his mind. Although the chain doesn’t report its financials, sources within the company have speculated that Waterstones and Barnes & Noble generate about $3 billion a year in sales and $400 million in profits. The resurgence of both companies has Elliott preparing for a possible public offering in 2026 that would include the two booksellers and the stationery chain Paper Source, according to Reuters. Daunt, who has the unusual role of still also running Waterstones and his entirely separate indie book chain, says his formula to freely operate Barnes & Noble, while keeping his Wall Street bosses at bay, is simple. “If you’re delivering the money, they leave you alone,” he says. “If you don’t, they chop your head off.”
It’s shortly after 9:30 a.m. on New York’s Upper West Side, and Daunt is clocking the crowd during the midmorning rush. An older couple with a Zabar’s bag peruses the puzzle books at a New York Times-branded word games table. A small pyramid anchored by the buzzy literary hit The Correspondent by Virginia Evans has customers congregating around it. Pedestrians outside are hustling past window displays of books about Broadway, urban birds and Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Daunt, spotting a shopper who has an impressive stack of books in the crook of her arm, wavers on whether it’s wise for a nearby employee to approach. “He’s thinking, ‘Oh, she’s just doing fine on her end. I’m not gonna interrupt that,’” he narrates in his avuncular, British way.
Daunt among the book pyramids in Barnes & Noble’s Upper West Side store.Photographer: Ryan Lowry for Bloomberg Businessweek
The following day I’m visiting a Barnes & Noble 1,300 miles away, in Mandeville, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans. Small cliques of teenagers splay out in the aisles, while casual dates cozy up in the cafe. Near a large Local Interest section, which includes books about streetcars, famous cocktails, true crime, and Creole and Cajun cooking, a children’s author is signing her book about a girl who makes shoebox Mardi Gras parade floats. Theo of Golden, the 2025 breakout novel that takes place in a fictional Southern city, tops one pyramid, while another table flaunts a sign for the Morally Grey Book Club, a subgenre popular on TikTok that draws younger readers with devious protagonists and ethically complex themes. “Our customers really like specialized stuff, things that aren’t just mainstream as far as graphic novels and sci-fi goes. So it’s what we order,” says Ellie, one of the store’s workers, who declined to give her last name.
When I was with Daunt the day earlier, he predicted: “The Upper West Side better have a pretty good Judaica section. Mandeville? I’m gonna guess not. Their Christian Living section is gonna have to be good, though.” And, boy, was he right. In addition to a few shelves of Christian fiction, the store’s Christian Living section — which rivals its fiction section in size — offers a godly array of Bibles specifically for men, women, journalers, large-print readers, military personnel, gift-givers and Catholics. There are also Bible accessories, which include carrying cases, prayer journals and tumbler cups embossed with verses.
Daunt says his staff is able to flex in all these directions thanks to the company’s shift in how it views talent. The chain once hired store managers and even hourly workers based on prior retail experience, regardless of whether it was at a Staples or a GNC. Now, he says, “we’re trying to run bookstores, so what we care about is, ‘Are we building a bunch of booksellers who understand all of the notions of what it is to run a great bookstore?’” To create a literary bench, the company has tried to hire fewer cashiers and more book lovers who can also manage a register. It’s also lifted pay across the board in part by doing away with manager bonuses, which Daunt argues often rewarded bad managers and overlooked good employees. Now the chain tries to “review everybody equally,” he says, promoting staff on the basis of talent and skills, a dramatic shift “in a very hierarchical place where tenure is exalted.” Even seasonal holiday staff has become a feeding pool for talent. “My assistant managers were both temporary hires,” says Vicki Bailey, a store manager in Visalia, California.
Illustration: Anna Haifisch for Bloomberg Businessweek
The downside of each store pursuing its own local strategy is that performance can diverge greatly. When that happens — say, when books fail to move in a particular store and stock piles up — Daunt has implemented a “cluster” system, which shuttles a leader from a high-performing store to help out at nearby location in need of guidance. “We were just chatting about another store,” Daunt said, back on the Upper West Side, nodding in the direction of Victoria Harty, an assistant manager. “We’ve got one that’s ugh” — though he won’t name the store — “and she’s saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve just been there and spent the day helping them.’ But it’s so much better that she helps them. Wherever it is — Cincinnati — you want someone from Cincinnati helping. You don’t want some nitwit coming from New York who won’t understand.”
Since Daunt arrived, he’s slimmed down corporate head count, relying more on individual store leadership, and opened smaller stores that require less costly real estate. Legacy licensing agreements mean the bookstore still sells Starbucks coffee, and, to the chagrin of management, more than a handful of Barnes & Noble stores have unionized. And this is arguably Daunt’s shrewdest feat yet: The discounts he’s negotiated with publishers rival those of Amazon.com Inc. — minus the same level of criticism. Even with the hard bargains, thin margins and occasional complaints by indie publishers, many publishers much prefer their relationship with Barnes & Noble. “Having the right flow of inventory and being a good publishing partner is more important to me,” says Joe Monti, the vice president, associate publisher and editorial director of Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, over email. “That means taking some risks on a novel or author, with punctuated and impactful promotions, which is largely what B&N has been doing with great success.”
Perhaps some of this affection comes from Daunt’s distaste for certain corporate traditions, such as footfall counters, the instruments used to calculate customer sales conversions by foot traffic. “I removed all the things that could allow anyone to measure us properly,” he says, “because, inevitably, you’ll want Bain or McKinsey or somebody to come in and tell me how to do my job better than I know how to do it.”
Several years ago, people started appearing on TikTok in Barnes & Noble stores across the country armed with a shopping basket, a timer and a game plan for how they were going to hoard as many books as possible. The Birthday Book Challenge, as it was called, grew organically out of a formal partnershipbetween TikTok and Barnes & Noble, and, with the force of the algorithm, the dare went viral. Book lovers everywhere got to stream their literary consumer fantasy, in which they quickly grabbed all the books they wanted, with friends and family members often picking up the bill for their birthday haul.
As much as Barnes & Noble’s resurgence is rooted in the urge for the analog, online book communities are also bolstering it. That includes Goodreads, Reddit threads, book-recommendation apps and influencers, whose devotees increasingly converge on BookTok, the corner of TikTokdevoted to all things books. There, readers find new books by way of personalities instead of traditional reviewers, who tend to focus more on the usual suspects in publishing. “Something that you’ll notice on BookTok a lot is how people kind of gather in little pockets, based on not just the genre they like to read but the tropes that they’re interested in as well,” says Clare Yeo, whose book-related memes, musings and recommendations have drawn more than 200,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram.
Now genres and formats once met with dismissal are finding enthusiastic new audiences. “We turn our noses up at Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight and some of the romantasy, but people are reading books,” Daunt says. “And then the next minute they’re all reading Jane Austen,” nodding to a recent Austen resurgence, partially fueled by the internet crowd. By staying finely tuned to these trends, Barnes & Noble has been able to keep pulling in the terminally online. “It definitely drives me to the store more, because it has more books catered towards my own interests rather than just the typical adult romance books that you would expect a bookstore to have,” says Skylar Phillips, a 20-year-old romantasy fan in the Mandeville store. “It has a lot of self-published authors, too, which is really exciting. You see a lot of them on TikTok, and they post, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m publishing this book.’ So the fact that they have it here makes it so much easier.” It’s a sentiment that’s increasingly important for the retailer, given its competition: More than 70% of books are still purchased online, and well over half of all books are purchased through Amazon. (Only 10% of Barnes & Noble’s overall sales are made through its website.)
The retailer has also found opportunity in bookstore deserts. Visalia is a rural city of 150,000 people that hadn’t had a bookstore since Borders closed in 2011. Getting there from state Route 99, you’ll pass RV parks, fruit orchards, bait and tackle shops, and farm equipment rentals. “It’s California, but not beach California,” Daunt says. “This is inland, this is working-class agricultural California. Dusty. Not too much going on.” He says 700 people were at the store opening in 2024, and sales have since been “twice what we thought they were going to be.” Two years later, the location still appears to be bustling. Barnes & Noble has been able to easily expand to areas such as this, where retail is struggling, because, in Daunt’s words, “occupancies are cheap as chips.” Today the Visalia Barnes & Noble is flanked by two vacant storefronts in a strip mall with palm trees and a brown-brick Hobby Lobby. The two nearest stores that are open for business are also large chains with wider demographic appeal — a Nordstrom Rack and a Sephora.
When the Visalia location opened, it had generic inventory before it homed in on what sells best, whether books or other merchandise, explains Bailey, its store manager. “As your sales increase in one area, you try to pay attention to that, right?” she says. “And you know what sections grow or get smaller or need to move or whatever the case may be.” It turned out that many locals made store trips a family affair, so this location now has a much larger children’s section than most others. Its books about agriculture were (unsurprisingly) also much easier to spot than in Manhattan or Mandeville. But it also places a much larger emphasis on what might be loosely grouped as lifestyle pursuits that go beyond the literary: gifts, games, greeting cards, toys, art supplies, record players and an entire standalone Harry Potter section with Lego and crochet kits, plush figurines and books.
Each Barnes & Noble store, like the one in Visalia, is customized to reflect the literary leanings of the locals.Photographer: Ryan Lowry for Bloomberg Businessweek
Chris Guzman travels 20 miles to the store each week from the town of Woodlake, whose name he has tattooed across his cheek in cursive font. His eyes dart around the store to keep tabs on his three children, who have fanned out. “This store’s pretty new, and, for a while, there weren’t any bookstores around here,” he says. His son likes the toys, his younger daughter gravitates toward Disney, and his older daughter is drawn to manga. “They all have their own little section they can go to.” Like other corporate entities that fancy themselves as third spaces, Barnes & Noble benefits here from a lack of attractive public alternatives. Guzman says there’s a nearby library they don’t often go to, but when they saw Barnes & Noble had come to town, they got an annual membership, which gives them discounts, loyalty points and free shipping. “We get records here, because my daughter has a record player and they even have a section here. So it’s pretty nice, you know?” he says. “My wife just said, ‘They literally have everything here.’”
“There is an existential malaise that can come with chasing your dreams,” says the crime writer, whose new novel is “All the Sinners Bleed.” “After you grab the brass ring, what do you do with it?”
What books are on your night stand?
Right now, there are three: “The Passenger,” by Cormac McCarthy, “The Hunt,” by Kelly J. Ford, and “Blue Like Me,” by Aaron Philip Clark. All three are incredible in different ways. “The Hunt” is an inventive serial killer thriller. “Blue Like Me” is an in-depth mystery that examines what it’s like being a police officer and a person of color. And “The Passenger” is classic McCarthy: inventive, insightful and sometimes surreal.
What’s the last great book you read?
“Everybody Knows,” by Jordan Harper. It’s an instant classic, a harrowing trip through the Day-Glo Technicolor Hades that is Los Angeles, and a thoughtful examination of the price of fame and power, how some people will do anything to hold on to them. Jordan has a sparse but powerful style that feels clinical and musical at the same time.
Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?
There are a few: “A Farewell to Arms,” by Ernest Hemingway, “The Stranger,” by Albert Camus, and “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison. I can’t say why I waited so long to read them, but I’m glad I’ve read them now at this time in my life. I think I understand them better than I would have at, say, 19. At 19, you think you’re 10 feet tall and bulletproof. These books resonate with me now after I’ve learned, through some rather brutal tutelage, how fragile the world truly is.
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
Early morning, on my back deck, rereading the signed, weathered paperback of “Darkness, Take My Hand,” by Dennis Lehane.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
Not enough people have heard of two books set in the mid-1900s: “The Real Cool Killers,” by Chester Himes, and “Provinces of Night,” by William Gay. They’re very different — the former takes place in Harlem and the latter in rural Tennessee — but both are snapshots of a particular moment in American history by underrated masters.
Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?
Walter Mosley, Dennis Lehane, John Irving, Jordan Harper, Jesmyn Ward, Kellye Garrett, Jennifer Hillier, Jericho Brown, Ashley C. Ford, Megan Giddings, Brandon Taylor, Eryk Pruitt, Walter Chaw and Sean Burns. They are all fantastic minds with unique perspectives about the world and the folks who live in it.
What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
How to tan deer hide and turn it into leather, which is as gross and disgusting as you think it is.
Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?
The fear of success and how family members can instill that fear in you. There is this weight that comes with any type of success, and I know no one wants to hear from the lottery winner, but I truly think writers need to examine this and really dissect it. There is an existential malaise that can come with chasing your dreams — after you grab the brass ring, what do you do with it?
Which books got you hooked on crime fiction?
“The Big Sleep,” by Raymond Chandler, “The Chill,” by Ross Macdonald, “The Maltese Falcon,” by Dashiell Hammett, “Devil in a Blue Dress,” by Walter Mosley, and “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I read these at an early age and they have had a profound effect on me and how I view the art of novel writing and specifically crime novels.
What makes for a good mystery?
A good question that only the protagonist can answer. Every mystery should ask that question, and every mystery writer should be prepared to answer it through the protagonist and the protagonist alone.
Who’s your favorite fictional detective? And the best villain?
It’s a tie between Easy Rawlins and Philip Marlowe. They are both tarnished knights in a broken kingdom, men of honor in a dishonest world. In terms of villains, Francis Dolarhyde from “Red Dragon,” by Thomas Harris, is a perfect engine of evil: ferocious, implacable and supernaturally determined.
What’s the most terrifying book you ever read?
“’Salem’s Lot,” by Stephen King, is still undefeated. For me, it’s pound for pound the most frightening book I’ve ever read. King has the innate ability to tap into the most visceral human fears, within the most mundane situations. The scene where the two truckers deliver the conspicuously large crate to the basement of the Marsten House still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
How do you organize your books?
I don’t, haha.
What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
“An American Marriage,” by Tayari Jones. I don’t think people think I read love stories or romance novels, but I just finished “Before I Let Go,” by Kennedy Ryan — I’m fascinated by romance novels and the structure of those stories.
How have your reading tastes changed over time?
They have definitely expanded. I went from reading only horror and mystery as a kid to now reading just about anything I can get my hands on. I find it helps me in my own writing.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
James Baldwin, Anaïs Nin and Donna Tartt.
If you were to write something besides mysteries, what would you write?
I’ve always wanted to write a surrealist novel like “A Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole, something that looks at the absolute absurdity of life.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
I didn’t enjoy “The Human Stain,” by Philip Roth. It just rang false to me. I try to finish books, but some I just can’t connect with. It doesn’t mean they’re bad. Not everything is for everyone.
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
I have not read anything by Eudora Welty, and I have to fix that. Also, I need to read more Larry Brown.
What do you plan to read next?
I’m waiting with bated breath for the new Jesmyn Ward book, “Let Us Descend.” She is one of our most brilliant minds and one of the greatest writers of our generation.
A version of this article appears in print on June 4, 2023, Page 10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: S.A. Cosby. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
By the Book: Ellen Burstyn discusses why she followed up a memoir with “Poetry Says It Better” — and when and why she leans on the “For Dummies” series.
The Book Review Podcast: Each week, top authors and critics talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here.
