Bookstores Owned by Beloved Authors

When Ann Patchett opened Parnassus Books in 2011, two major bookstores in Nashville had closed and physical bookstores in general seemed endangered as Amazon's share of the market kept growing. Amazon remains the dominant force, but physical, brick-and-mortar stores have rebounded—and stores owned by authors such as Patchett are now a niche unto themselves, found everywhere from Brooklyn to New Mexico. Here's a virtual tour of author-owned bookstores across the US, per the AP:

• Judy Blume: Books & Books, Florida: Blume and husband George Cooper are local fixtures in Key West. They founded the nonprofit, and on a given day you can find her working the register or helping a customer choose a book. Or you can see her greet the many fans who have traveled far to meet the author they say changed their lives.

• Louise Erdrich: Birchbark Books & Native Arts, Minnesota: Founded by Erdrich in 2001, Birchbark is based in Minneapolis and has a mission tied closely to the author's Ojibwe background. Her store specializes in Indigenous literature and bills itself as a meeting point for "literate Indigenous people who have survived over half a millennium on this continent." Birchbark even served as a muse for Erdrich's 2021 novel, The Sentence, narrated by a bookstore employee whose boss just happens to be a woman named Louise.
• Lauren Groff: The Lynx Books, Florida: Groff's store in Gainesville is part of a wave of stores opened in recent years with a larger social mission. Based in a state that ranks among the country's leading book banners, The Lynx is a general-interest bookstore that emphasizes books forbidden in schools and libraries. "One of the purposes is to create a lighthouse, sort of showing ... the rest of the country and world that Florida is not an intolerant backwater," Groff told the Southern Literary Review in 2025.
• Jeff Kinney: An Unlikely Story, Massachusetts: The blockbuster sales for the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series expanded the ambitions of author-owner Kinney to superstore heights. He didn't simply reconfigure an existing building, but had a new one built from scratch. An Unlikely Story is a bookstore housed in a colonial-influenced, three-story building in downtown Plainville that also includes a cafe, event space, and writing-drawing quarters for the author.

• George RR Martin: Beastly Books, New Mexico: The Santa Fe-based Beastly Books is very much an extension of the worldview of the Game of Thrones author. It is a "cozy den" for speculative fiction, according to the store's homepage, and a haven for banned books, locally written works, and rare first editions.
• Ann Patchett: Parnassus Books, Tennessee: A year after the launch of Parnassus, Ann Patchett found herself on The Colbert Report, whose host likened her venture to You've Got Mail, in which Meg Ryan plays an independent store owner driven out of business by a chain. The Nashville-based Parnassus has since become one of the country's signature independent sellers.
• Emma Straub: Books Are Magic, New York: Like Patchett, Straub became a bookstore owner in the aftermath of a local absence: BookCourt, where the author once worked, had closed. The Brooklyn store with the pink murals in front became a local hit and gained national recognition, cited as a personal favorite by Jenna Bush Hager of the Today show.