Interview with editor & blogger Nikki Lusk

Nikki Lusk is an editor here at Black Inc. In her spare time, she writes the blog The Book Tuner (and also a column on music for Kill Your Darlings.) We chat to her about her blog.

So what is The Book Tuner? 

It’s a blog on which I match books to music, usually one book with one album. My aim is to create the perfect literary ambiance or, alternatively, to expose readers to music that evokes a similar mood to a book they’ve enjoyed. 

Q&A with Eric Knight

We interview Eric Knight, author of Reframe: How to solve the world's trickiest problems.

Can you tell us a little about your book?

Reframe is a book about why we struggle with our trickiest political problems and what we can do to solve them. I take my readers through stories from the last decade: the dot com bubble, the war on terror, immigration, climate change, and beyond. In each case, we make the same mistake: we fixate on what's visually compelling and we miss the bigger picture.

In the end, Reframe makes a surprisingly optimistic case for how we can correct political myopia. We are not necessarily irrational. We just focus on the wrong things. Correction is possible.

What We've Been Reading This Summer

Of course we've been reading our own wonderful Black Inc. books over the break, from David Marr's must-read collection Panic to Mungo MacCallum's entertaining and educational guide to Australia's prime ministers The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely. We've also been busily reading manuscripts and advance copies of our forthcoming books (you can see some of them in our January - June catalogue.)

But we're bookish people by nature and we like reading other publishers' books too. So here's what else we've been reading over the summer:

Q&A with Mungo MacCallum

We interview Mungo MacCallum about his new book The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia's Prime Ministers, which tells the tale of the many men and one woman who’ve had a crack at running the country.

What are three of the most surprising facts or anecdotes you discovered while researching this book?

I like the story about Ben Chifley taking his own onions to a Gundagai café; he knew that otherwise, with rationing, he would be lucky to get them with his favourite steak. But I was intrigued by two others who were ahead of their times. Jim Scullin, beset on all sides as he battled his way through the Great Depression, still found time to set aside land in the Northern Territory to be reserved for Aboriginal Australians. And George Reid, frequently dismissed as a buffoon, turned out to be a lone voice against the harsh laws passed against the Chinese.

Christmas Gift Guide

Books make the best Christmas gifts – everyone knows that. We’ve published some wonderful titles this year that are just perfect for the book worm, political junkie or history buff in your family.

And remember – support your local bookshop this Christmas! Don’t have a bookshop nearby? Then buy online from a great Australian bookseller such as Readings (free shipping and gift wrapping!)

Here are our gift ideas (for more Black Inc. books, visit our website):