John Freeman (author)

John Freeman
Freeman at New York book signing, 2013
Born	1974 (age 49–50) Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Alma mater	Swarthmore College

John Freeman (born 1974) is an American writer and a literary critic. He was the editor of the literary magazine Granta until 2013, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in almost 200 English-language publications around the world, including The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal.

Early life

John Freeman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, grew up in New York, Pennsylvania and California, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1996.

Career

Freeman's first book, The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your Inbox, was published in 2009. (It was published in Australia under the title Shrinking the World: The 4,000-year story of how email came to rule our lives.) Freeman's second book, a collection of his interviews with major contemporary writers titled How to Read a Novelist, was published in the US in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (It was originally published in Australia in 2012.) The book features profiles of Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Geoff Dyer, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and others. According to a 2013 interview with Newsmax, Freeman profiled a number of female authors (16 total) in How to Read a Novelist and specifically began the book with Toni Morrison because he thinks “the literary culture is often masculinized. But many of our teachers are women. Often times, if you’re a reader it’s because your mother is a reader—as mine certainly was.”

During his six years on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, Freeman launched a campaign to raise awareness of the cutbacks in book coverage in national print media and to save book review sections.

Freeman joined the UK-based Granta in December 2008, became acting editor in May 2009, and was named editor in October 2009. While at the magazine, he edited Mary Gaitskill, Kenzaburō Ōe, Rana Dasgupta, Dinaw Mengestu, Peter Carey, Jeanette Winterson, Natsuo Kirino, Victor LaValle, Herta Muller, Daniel Alarcon, Wole Soyinka, Aleksandar Hemon, Salman Rushdie, Yiyun Li, Tony D'Souza, Colum McCann, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, George Saunders, Marie Darrieussecq, Joshua Ferris, Aminatta Forna, Jim Crace, Richard Russo, Kamila Shamsie, Mo Yan, A. L. Kennedy, Mohsin Hamid, and Chimamanda Adichie. Writers who debuted in Granta during his tenure included Chinelo Okparanta, Phil Klay, Claire Vaye Watkins and Maria Venegas.

Freeman will edit a series of anthologies of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry entitled Freeman's, published in partnership with Grove/Atlantic and The New School. The first anthology is set to appear in October 2015, with new anthologies published twice a year. Explaining his vision for Freeman's, he says: "I want it to be a home for the long form... I hope it introduces new writers, and coaxes great ones to do something other than book-length writing."

His most recent book of poetry, Maps, was published in 2017 by Copper Canyon Press.

Freeman is on the jury for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Personal life

Freeman now lives in New York City.

Bibliography

Books

• The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your Inbox. New York: Scribner. 2009. ISBN 978-1416576730.
• How to Read a Novelist. Melbourne: Text Publishing. 2012. ISBN 978-1921922688.
• Tales of Two Cities: The Best and Worst of Times in Today's New York. New York: OR Books/Penguin. 2014. ISBN 978-1939293633.
• Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation. New York: OR Books/Penguin. 2017. ISBN 978-1682190814.
• Maps. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon. 2017. ISBN 978-1556595233.

Selected poems available online

• "Allowances". The New Yorker. February 13–20, 2012. Retrieved November 14, 2014.
• "Rockland". The New Yorker. May 19, 2014. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
• "Barber". The Nation. December 16, 2014. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
• "The Boy Under the Car". Boston Review. May 22, 2013. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
• "English Hours". The Common. March 16, 2015. Retrieved July 18, 2015.

Sources

• Radhika Jones, "Uncommon Readers - John Freeman and Nicole Aragi’s combined library is the happy merging of bookishness as vocation and avocation", Book Forum, December/January 2008.
• Rosemary Sorensen, "An American in London", The Australian, May 1, 2010.
• Conrad Walters, "Late mail on writing", The Age, November 21, 2009.
• Roy Robins, "An interview with John Freeman", Granta, June 8, 2009.
• Jane Ciabattari, "3 Questions for Granta Editor John Freeman", Critical Mass (National Book Critics Circle), October 12, 2009.
• John Freeman page at Simon & Schuster.
• "From Granta to 'Freeman's'", Washington Post, July 1, 2014.
• Clare Swanson, "Four Questions for John Freeman", Publishers Weekly, August 6, 2014.

External links

• Granta
• National Book Critics Circle