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Karen Hayes, general manager and co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tenn., will retire from the bookstore later this year. While Hayes and store co-owner Ann Patchett are still working out many of the details, the plan is for store manager Andy Brennan to become general manager while Patchett becomes sole owner.
Hayes, who will turn 65 this year, noted that there is no timetable yet for the transition. There is "a lot to hand over," and everything will "take a little while to untangle." The announcement is happening a bit earlier than she expected, because "Andy and Ann and I had been talking, and we just wanted to let the staff know. We didn't want to keep anybody in the dark."
Everything is "amicable and happy," she continued, adding that she's been thinking of retirement seriously since last year. She's been in the book business since 1978, and she started to feel that "maybe it was time to try something new, even if that's just retirement." Hayes said she didn't have any concrete retirement plans, but she loves to travel, loves to make art and music, and with the demands of owning and operating a bookstore, she had "moved away from a lot of that."
Hayes and Patchett founded the bookstore in 2011, after Nashville's only bookstores at the time, a Davis-Kidd location and a Borders location, closed. Before that, Hayes had been a longtime Random House rep.