Amazon has launched The Back Story, a page promising “author interviews, essays, guest reviews, recipes, and much, much more.”

Amazon has uploaded five videos featuring author interviews with celebrity chef Tom Douglas, bestselling author Joshua Foer, teen fiction writer Holly Black, young-adult novelist Cassandra Clare, and Gossip Girl producer John Stephens. Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell revealed Carrie Bradshaw’s 1980s playlist in honor of her new title Summer and the City.

What do you think? Managing editor Mari Malcolm explained: ”We love these conversations so much that we wanted to share them with our customers. We hope that customers will take the opportunity to submit questions on our Amazon Books Facebook page or through our blog, Omnivoracious. They can also contact us at authorinterviews@amazon.com.”

Taking a break from his role as executive producer on television’s Gossip Girl, writer John Stephens has sold his middle-grade fantasy trilogy to Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers. The trilogy “charts the tale of three siblings, Kate, Michael, and Emma; the ancient prophecy to which they are the key; and the magical world of danger and adventure through which they must journey.”

Entitled The Books of Beginning, the series begins with the publication of The Emerald Atlas in spring 2011. Agent Simon Lipskar of Writers House sold the book to executive editor Michelle Frey. Stephens served as a writer-producer on Gilmore Girls and The O.C. before working on Gossip Girl.

Lipskar had this statement: “The passion and excitement for this book is pouring forth from every corner of the globe … I haven’t experienced such an immediate and overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to a novel in a very, very long time.”