Basbanes at Borders
Nick’s new book, About the Author: Inside the Creative Process, has been picked by Borders for its Scholar’s Corner promotion, running now through September 20 in select stores. Shown here at the Borders in New York City’s Columbus Circle, About the Author shares a cozy endcap with Bill Morgan’s The Typewriter is Holy, Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, James Salter’s Dusk, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010, and other literary delights. About the Author was published by Fine Books Press earlier this year, in both a trade edition and a numbered limited edition. The Midwest Book Review highly recommended the book, calling it "a fascinating read from beginning to end."
New from Nicholas Basbanes
About the Author
The final quarter of the last century was a period of extraordinary fervor in American letters—a time when post–World War II authors reached their peak and well before the Internet had eroded book publishing and changed everything. Writer Nicholas Basbanes, acclaimed author of A Gentle Madness, enjoyed the rare opportunity as literary editor of the Worcester, Massachusetts, Telegram & Gazette to interview literally hundreds of authors passing through Boston on publicity tours.
About the Author: Inside the Creative Process collects together more than forty of Nicholas Basbanes’s interviews and essays that grew from this unique period of publishing. The list includes novelists, biographers, poets, historians, and others who were regularly among the best-selling authors. Perhaps no one has been more suited to this kind of reporting than Nicholas Basbanes. Using the skills of an experienced interviewer and the considered analysis of an impartial critic, Basbanes pioneered a new kind of journalism for his weekly column. These pieces collected together paint a remarkable picture of authors at the heights of their creativity.
With the loss of so many of these writers and the imposing behemoth called the Internet, this sort of collection may never again be culled from the morning papers. As alive and refreshing as the day they were published, About the Author explores the creative process that was—and is—the foundation of books and publishing.
Find Other Books by Nick
New Children’s Book Reviews
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Miller, illustrations by Elizabeth Zunon; Dial Press, $16.99, 32 pages, ages 5-8.
Adapted from a bestselling biography, this inspirational story introduces young readers to William Kamkwamba, a Malawian boy who saved his village from starvation by building a windmill from discarded parts found in various junkyards. The resourceful youngster’s ingenious enterprise began in 2001 after a severe drought decimated crops and forced him to drop out of school because his family could no longer afford his tuition. Hungry and bored, William began to visit an American-built library where he was inspired by his research to harness “electric wind” that in time would power the lights and provide water for the crops. Elizabeth Zunon’s oil on cut paper paintings give her full-page illustrations depth and vibrancy, bringing the village and its people to life.
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From the Fine Book’s Blog
‘Double Fold’ at 10
Has it really been ten years since Nicholson Baker shook up the cozy world inhabited by librarians and conservators with publication of Double Fold, his National Book Critics Circle Award-winning examination of the way materials on paper—most notably newspapers—were being displaced by surrogate copies in other, more easily stored media? Not only has it been a decade since Baker made the word “microfilm” a synonym for “leprosy”—and not undeserved, I should add—it has been an eventful decade in the book world to boot, as our own Rebecca Rego Barry reminds us in a splendid overview of Double Fold and its continuing impact. It is featured in the current issue of The Millions, the superb—dare we say indispensable?—online magazine offering comprehensive coverage of books and the arts. Here's a link. Nice going, Rebecca, very well done.