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Past Meets Present: PW Talks with Kit Bakke
In Dot to Dot, Kit Bakke’s self-published first book for children, 12-year-old Dot comes to terms with her mother’s recent death with some across-the-centuries help from Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Dorothy Wordsworth.
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Q & A with Maggie Stiefvater
Maggie Stiefvater, who has her second big release of the year with The Scorpio Races, which hits bookstore shelves later this month, spoke with Bookshelf in a brief window between traveling on book tours and finishing her next manuscript.
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On My Nightstand: M.T. Anderson's Nighttime Reading
The bedroom in my apartment is far too small to hold a nightstand. There is, however, this bookshelf. Yes, I stow whatever I'm reading on the lower shelf, but more importantly, it's where I keep a collection of ghost books.
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Q & A with Meg Wolitzer
Acclaimed novelist Meg Wolitzer (The Ten-Year Nap; Sleepwalking) returns to writing fiction for younger readers with The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman, a tale of three teens from very different families who find themselves immersed in the world of competitive youth Scrabble.
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Q & A with Carmen Agra Deedy and Randall Wright
A talk with Carmen Agra Deedy and Randall Wright, co-authors of The Cheshire Cheese Cat: A Dickens of a Tale, set in an actual, centuries-old London inn.
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Q & A with Maile Meloy
Los Angeles-based author Maile Meloy has received plentiful critical kudos for her work as a writer of short stories and novels for adults; now she has written her first novel for a younger audience. Bookshelf caught up with Meloy upon her return to L.A. from a New York City dinner event with booksellers.
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Q & A with Brian Selznick
Brian Selznick follows his 2008 Caldecott Medal-winning novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, with Wonderstruck, which clocks in at 640 pages, 100 pages longer than Hugo, and looks like it's going to be just as big a hit.
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Obituary: William Sleator
Renowned science fiction writer William Sleator, a master of the macabre who wrote primarily for young adults, died on August 3 at age 66. Sleator was best known for creating an offbeat blend of real science, horror, and psychological suspense.
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YA Authors Kick Off Tour of Rural South
Starting Thursday, August 4, at Asheville, N.C.’s Malaprop's Bookstore, three Southern YA authors will be touring together in support of small-town book lovers, the kind perennially overlooked by author tours.
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Q & A with Lane Smith
Lane Smith's latest book, Grandpa Green, is about as far away in tone from his last, It's a Book, as is possible. He spoke with Bookshelf about memory and mortality from his home in Connecticut.
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Kadir Nelson: The Accidental Historian
Kadir Nelson is at an enviable point in a brilliant career. Two-time Caldecott Honoree, he is the go-to illustrator for an array of Hollywood stars with picture book projects—Will Smith, Spike Lee, Debbie Allen. He's worked on films with Steven Spielberg, designed an album cover for Michael Jackson, and a stamp for the U.S. Postal Service.
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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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