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Barney Saltzberg Visits China
Earlier this year I received an email from the U.S. State Department asking if I would be willing to travel as part of their Cultural Exchange Program.
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YA Author John Green to Sign All First Editions of Next Novel
After revealing Tuesday on a YouTube video that the title of his next novel is The Fault in Our Stars, YA author John Green made a second announcement that has some of his 1,140,780 Twitter followers, 61,714 Facebook friends, 525,676 YouTube subscribers, and other fans buzzing.
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Three YA Authors Bring Online to the Real World
Cake definitely makes a difference. But it is only one of the ingredients that is drawing booksellers and teens to Scholastic's "this is teen," a summer-long online and in-person sales initiative to promote a trio of YA books and authors.
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Q & A with Patrick Ness and Denise Johnstone-Burt
In 2010 Walker Books announced the forthcoming publication of a new book; Patrick Ness, author of the Chaos Walking trilogy, was to complete a novel that had begun as a fragment and an idea written by Siobhan Dowd, who died of breast cancer before the novel was finished.
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Spring 2011 Flying Starts
Spotlights on five children's and YA authors and one illustrator who made notable debuts this spring
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Spring 2011 Flying Starts: John Corey Whaley
In late 2005, on his drive home from Louisiana Tech University, John Corey Whaley heard a story on NPR about singer songwriter Sufjan Stevens. Stevens traveled to a small town where an ivory-billed woodpecker, previously thought extinct, possibly appeared and thousands of people flocked in to see it. Like his main character, Cullen Witter, in his YA novel Where Things Come Back (Atheneum), Whaley had a history of coming up with possible titles that he developed to varying degrees. "And in that 20 minutes, just like that," he says, "after coming up with book ideas that never really went anywhere since I was 12 years old, suddenly I knew this was the plot of a novel that I could finish."
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Spring 2011 Flying Starts: Cathleen Daly
Cathleen Daly has been writing since she was a kid. "In fourth grade, I used to get blank journals," she says. "One of my best friends and I used to write books together in the library. I write poetry, too. It's become a career only more recently."
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Spring 2011 Flying Starts: Veronica Roth
On a long drive from her home near Chicago to Carleton College in Minnesota—which she attended as a freshman before transferring to Northwestern—Veronica Roth saw on a billboard an image of a person leaping off a building.
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Spring 2011 Flying Starts: Jenny Hubbard
Novelist, playwright, stage actor: when it comes to arts and letters, Jenny Hubbard is something of a triple threat. And that doesn't even take into account her 17 years as an English teacher, both at the college level and at an all-boys boarding school, one similar to the fictional Birch School of her first novel, Paper Covers Rock (Delacorte), which has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Horn Book. The young adult novel went on sale just last week—one day before a play Hubbard wrote, Pinocchio's Sister, debuted on stage in her hometown of Salisbury, N.C. And later this summer, Hubbard will herself appear on stage in a production of August: Osage County in Charlotte, N.C.
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Spring 2011 Flying Starts: Matthew Myers
All Matthew Myers had to do to get the attention of Writers House agent Steven Malk was send him a link to his Web site. ("Paintings so good you'd swear he's dead," the splash page says.) In another sense, though, he'd been preparing for the introduction for years.
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Spring 2011 Flying Starts: Thanhha Lai
When Thanhha (pronounced TANG-Ha) Lai decided to fictionalize the story of her own early life in Vietnam and immigration to Alabama after the war, she wrote her novel Inside Out & Back Again (HarperCollins) in six months. "It was shockingly easy to write," she recalls. "Because it is my story and I'd already been processing it for years and years."
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Q & A with Tomi Ungerer
Tomi Ungerer's name is instantly recognizable to those who grew up reading his books in the 1960s and '70s. But Ungerer's catalog was allowed to go out of print when his outspoken political views and ribald erotic drawings alarmed U.S. publishers.
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Read, Kiddo, Read: James Patterson
James Patterson, the bestselling author on Earth, doesn't want to talk about writing today. He wants to talk about reading. For a man with scores of blockbuster books under his belt (it might be north of 70, but even the author isn't sure how many he's written at this point), Patterson is now fascinated with a new challenge: hooking kids on books. And his latest effort, "Read, Kiddo, Read," aims to do just that.
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Q & A with Anthea Bell
Anthea Bell is a translator who has won many top awards, and whose work has appeared on many bestseller list, yet many outside of the publishing industry don’t know her name.
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Q & A with Elise Broach
Elise Broach follows her E.B. White Read Aloud winner, Masterpiece, with another kid-pleasing mystery, Missing on Superstition Mountain, the first in a trilogy set in the American southwest.
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Sandra Boynton Demonstrates App, Signs Books--and a Few Nooks
Monday night’s Sandra Boynton book event at the Barnes & Noble on Manhattan’s Upper East Side looked like a pretty normal book signing--normal for Boynton, the bestselling children’s book author, anyway. Toddlers and slightly older kids, some dressed in pajamas, crammed into the event space, shepherded in by college students wearing pajama pants and Boynton Moo Media t-shirts.
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Q & A with Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
Author-illustrator team Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler have been topping the U.K. bestseller charts over the last decade and a half, with such titles as A Squash and a Squeeze, Room on the Broom, Tabby McTat, and, most famously, The Gruffalo, which recently added to its many honors when the animated movie based on the book was recently nominated for an Oscar.
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Q & A with Malinda Lo
Malinda Lo is the author of Ash and the just-released Huntress, both from Little, Brown. Lo will be crossing the country with Cindy Pon, author of Fury of the Phoenix, to celebrate the publication of their new novels.
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PW Select: Self-Published Children's Books Thrive in the Mainstream
Tales of self-published kids' books that have become backlist staples for trade houses are familiar publishing lore. Two are titles written by young readers themselves: Christopher Paolini's Eragon, first published by his family, then found a home with Knopf in 2003, and Alec Greven's How to Talk to Girls, which grew out of a school report and was picked up by Collins in 2008.
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PW Talks with Franny Billingsley
Franny Billingsley, a former bookseller, is the author of three much praised novels: Well Wished, The Folk Keeper, and, most recently, Chime. We spoke to the author about her two careers, her writing process, and her new novel.
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