Alex Beam

Alex Beam is an award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe. His writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, Slate, the New York Times and many other magazines. He is the author of A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital, and of two novels.

From a brief Q & A at the New York Times book blog:

Whose books are generally shelved around yours in bookstores? How does it feel to be sitting between them?

My local bookstore, the delightful New England Mobile Book Fair, shelves books by publisher, alphabetically by title. (!) So my last book, “Gracefully Insane,” sits between the “The Gospel According to RFK,” a collection of speeches, and “A Great and Godly Adventure,” a book about Thanksgiving.

Unlike the world at large, my local library has not given up on my youthful novels, which are braced by Will Beall’s “L.A. Rex,” a gritty police tale from South Central, and by a historical novel of Amelia Bean’s, “A Time for Outrage.”

Read the rest of the Q & A.

Visit Alex Beam's column archive at the Boston Globe.

My Book, The Movie: Alex Beam's Gracefully Insane.

The Page 69 Test: Gracefully Insane.

The Page 99 Test: A Great Idea at the Time.

--Marshal Zeringue