Can we please stop the f–king cursing?
I had sworn I wouldn’t step foot in an Amazon bookstore. First the Bezos biz drives just about every brick-and-mortar bookshop into bankruptcy by offering free delivery of anything ever printed. And then, having made bookstores obsolete, what does Amazon do but open bookstores. It’s almost enough to make you cheer Elizabeth Warren’s war on the corporate giant.
But then, a week or two ago, I failed in my resolve. The proximate cause of my weakness of will was the car, which needed new tires. As it went up on the rack, and the pneumatic gunner started zwerling the lug nuts off, I needed to kill an hour. I ankled down the street, and the first storefront I encountered was an Amazon bookstore. I did a bad thing. I went in.
The first thing one notices about an Amazon Books is just how small it is. Online, Amazon insists it’s essential to have everything in the world at our fingertips, the digital universe at the command of our digits, if you will. By contrast, the physical Amazon store is severely limited and ruthlessly curated. What little shelf space the store has is squandered wantonly by facing all the books out so you see covers, not spines. It’s visually appealing, but it means the store, already stingy with its selections, only has room for about a quarter of the books it might otherwise be able to offer.
Wandering the few stacks, one of the first books I encountered was titled The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck. Sarah Knight wrote this work of genius in 2015. Since then, Knight has penned such beloved classics as Get Your Sh*t Together, published in 2016, and Calm the F*ck Down, published in 2018.
With such prodigious output, you’d think she had the naughty-word book market cornered. But it turns out there’s a Calm the F*ck Down by Sasha O’Hara. This second offering distinguishes itself by being “an irreverent adult coloring book.” The highly curated Amazon bookstore somehow found room for both.
The field of potty-mouthed authors has grown crowded these days, and most of them have their full book covers staring shamelessly from the Amazon shelves, just begging for us to be shocked and offended.
For a small shop with inefficiently used shelves, Amazon manages to make space for a surprising number of titles featuring a certain emphatic Anglo-Saxonism otherwise best suited to limericks. One or another letter is routinely excised from the w-rd. What is this nod to vestigial propriety? A recognition that the word is not to be said in polite company, even if there is no such thing as polite company anymore?
A gentleman who answers to the name Mark Manson offers us The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. A No. 1 New York Times’ best-seller no less.
Jon Kim is author of I Used to Be a Miserable F*ck.
Showing a little creativity, or perhaps just cluelessness, is Gary John Bishop, who instead of titling his book Unf*ck Yourself misplaces the typographical fig leaf and gives us Unfu*k Yourself.
For the foodies, there’s F*ck, That’s Delicious by someone called Action Bronson. Zach Golden over-seasons the soup with What the FXXK Should I Make for Dinner?: The Answers to Life’s Everyday Question (in 50 F*@#ing Recipes). And there is the cookbook from the Thug Kitchen that urges one to “eat like you give a f*ck.” It too has hit No. 1 on the NYT’s best-seller list.
And the New York Times’ best-sellers just keep coming, such as F*ck Feelings by psychiatrist Michael Bennett and Sarah Bennett. Their previous title was F*ck Love.
Finally I spotted a book to buy, one I had been meaning to read for ages. And there at the Amazon bookstore it seemed positively demure by contrast. Which is why I’ve been reading A Clockwork Orange.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
