Spring 2008 Flying Starts: Ingrid Law

Remember your 13th birthday? Chances are it wasn't anything like the ones in the Beaumont family, whose members usher in their 13th year by receiving their “savvy,” or supernatural ability. Such is the magical premise of Ingrid Law's Savvy (Dial/Walden Media).

Spring 2008 Flying Starts: Sarah Prineas

Sarah Prineas has a young reader of the children's magazine Cricket to thank for the impetus that led to her very splashy debut—a three-book contract, two starred reviews for the first volume, and 13 foreign rights sales. Prineas had written only three lines of a story—A thief is a lot like a wizard. I have quick hands. And I can make things disappear—when she came across a letter to the editor in Cricket from a reader who wanted “more stories with wizards and magic.”

Spring Flying Starts

Fall 2007 Flying Starts: Katherine Marsh

Soon Katherine Marsh will have more to celebrate than her debut novel, The Night Tourist (Hyperion), with her first child due February 1. “It's exciting because this is who I'm writing for,” she says. “I'm creating my audience.”

Fall 2007 Flying Starts: Jonathan Bean

In 2002, when Bean was a senior at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, he had an idea that he wanted to be an illustrator. A professor there, Stephen Fieser, who taught illustration, put him in touch with Wes Adams, an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “I sent him some illustrations,” recalls Bean, now 28, “ which he politely rejected. But he wrote me a really long email critiquing them.”

Fall 2007 Flying Starts: Jake Wizner

At Manhattan's Salk School, a prestigious public middle school for the scientifically minded, the best-read book this fall has nothing to do with physics. It's Spanking Shakespeare (Random House) a bawdy, faux memoir about a high school senior in search of a sex life, written by Jake Wizner.

Fall 2007 Flying Starts: Jenny Downham

When you ask writers how they came up with the idea for their first novel, some might say that it came to them in a flash. Or that they based the main character on someone they knew. Not Jenny Downham, the 43-year-old British author of Before I Die, a luminous story about a feisty 16-year-old girl who is dying of leukemia. She, in fact, heard voices.

Fall 2007 Flying Starts

Jenny Downham When you ask writers how they came up with the idea for their first novel, some might say that it came to them in a flash. Or that they based the main character on someone they knew. Not Jenny Downham, the 43-year-old British author of Before I Die, a luminous story about a feisty 16-year-old girl who is dying of leukemia.

Spring 2007 Flying Starts: Melissa Marr

To the list of authors with eyebrow-raising credentials, add Melissa Marr, whose Wicked Lovely was published by HarperCollins: in high school, she was voted “most likely to end up in jail.” And she has the yearbook picture to prove it.

Spring 2007 Flying Starts: Lizabeth Zindel

Lizabeth Zindel grew up in a literary family that included father Paul Zindel, a former high school chemistry teacher who became a Pulitzer Prize—winning playwright and young adult author.

Spring 2007 Flying Starts: Siobhan Dowd

Siobhan Dowd styled herself as a writer from the age of seven, when she began embroidering biblical stories as a Catholic school student in London. After university she went into publishing, and then to work for PEN, along the way writing columns, articles, and short stories, and editing two anthologies.

Spring 2007 Flying Starts

Three fresh voices make their YA debuts.

Happily Trapped in Borges' Labyrinths: PW Talks to William Gibson

Sci-fi writer William Gibson--author of the forthcoming Spook Country--wrote the preface to New Directions reissue of Jorge Luis Borges' classic Labyrinths. PW talks to Gibson about pretending to be Borges' butler, ghost stories, and why Borges' is good for troubled times.

Friendly Ghosts: Peter Gizzi

According to Peter Gizzi, being a poet is about "responding to a large sense of dislocation on a daily basis."

Ramblin' Man: Tom Bissell in Rome

At work in Rome on a book about the afterlives of the apostles, and about to publish the memoir 'The Father of All Things,' Tom Bissell was a hell of a tour guide, slaloming through the frenzied streets like an expert.

Fall 2006 Flying Starts: Joseph Helgerson

Bullies should be warned never to step foot in Joseph Helgerson's imaginative town of Blue Wing, Minn., along the Mississippi River. They may find themselves transformed into a rhinoceros, which happens to be the meal of choice of a rock troll named Bodacious Deepthink. In Horns & Wrinkles (Houghton), Helgerson's first novel, fiesty heroine Claire must use her wits to save her mean cousin Duke from just such a fate.

Fall 2006 Flying Starts: Mei Matsuoka

A hamburger boy on the run? Illustrator Mei Matsuoka simply could not resist the artistic possibilities she first saw in the manuscript for Burger Boy (Clarion), Alan Durant's cautionary picture-book tale of junk-food excess. "It really grabbed me as quirky, funny and a little out of the ordinary," she says. "I loved the wacky side of it and as soon as I read [the manuscript] I had images in my head."

Fall 2006 Flying Starts: Ellen Klages

In 2002, Ellen Klages was not an aspiring novelist; she had never written a novel. Her metier was science fiction short stories—for grown-ups, not kids. So when Viking editor Sharyn November, who had read some of her published work, approached her at an SF convention and said, "You are a children's writer. You need to write me a children's book," Klages was, understandably, taken aback. "I found myself thinking, 'An editor at Viking wants me to write a book for her? What part of that should I ignore?'

Fall 2006 Flying Starts: Barry Lyga

Barry Lyga fell in love with reading through comic books. Although some grownups told him comics would rot his brain unless he outgrew them, neither thing happened. Lyga went to Yale, where he majored in English, then worked for 10 years in comic book publishing. Lyga credits the comics form with teaching him about plotting and character development, lessons he put to use in writing his first book, The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl (Houghton).

Fall 2006 Flying Starts

Three authors and one illustator who made notable children's book debuts this fall