{"id":1182,"date":"2015-07-02T20:16:46","date_gmt":"2015-07-02T20:16:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/?p=1182"},"modified":"2017-07-01T13:12:04","modified_gmt":"2017-07-01T13:12:04","slug":"john-freeman-on-interviewing-the-most-famous-authors-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/john-freeman-on-interviewing-the-most-famous-authors-in-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"John Freeman on interviewing the most famous authors in the world"},"content":{"rendered":"

The universal BFF to the contemporary writer – as he was penned by LA Review of Books<\/a> following his bestseller How to Read a Novelist<\/em> -, John Freeman came late to reading. His summers growing up in Ohio were spent on the basketball court, not with his nose in books. The literary bug caught him years later, after graduating Swarthmore College and moving to New York. He walked into a bookstore one day and found a first edition<\/a> of William S. Borrough\u2019s Naked Lunch with the original jacket. John had written his thesis at university about Jack Kerouac and he was a fan of the Beats, so this made a big impression on him. He couldn\u2019t buy the book because it was too expensive, but he\u2019s definitely made up for it since. \u201cThat was like a whole other education – going to bookshops,\u201d Freeman believes.<\/p>\n

After working in publishing for a while, he became a book critic. Years later, as president of the National Book Critics Circle, he led a campaign to keep book coverage as a vital part of the American print media. \u201cI\u2019m sentimental about paperbacks. My favourite bookstore in the world is City Lights in San Francisco<\/em>, the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States,\u201d the author wrote in Granta magazine<\/a>, after assuming the role of editor. Since then, he\u2019s moved on to publishing his own literary biannual, Freeman\u2019s<\/em>, which launches this October.<\/p>\n

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A photo posted by John Freeman (@freemanreads)<\/a> on