What to make of Joel Stein? He’s a humor writer who (sometimes) makes serious points, and as a result, his readers sometimes miss the argument beneath the humor, or miss the humor on top of the argument. His latest essay, “Adults Should Read Adult Books,” in the New York Times, is causing quite [...]

Did you encounter The Mysteries of Harris Burdick when you were a kid? If so, you probably remember Chris Van Allsburg’s eerie black-and-white illustrations and the evocative sentences—each the merest sliver of a story—that accompanied them.
When I was in fifth grade, my teacher asked us to choose a picture and write a story [...]

What do the 2011 Japanese Tsunami, the Cuban Missile Crisis and one family’s personal heartbreak have in common? For Ellen Prentiss Campbell the answer lies in Pearl S. Buck’s 1948 young adult novel The Big Wave and the individual acts of creative defiance that help survivors not only carry on, but value life’s beauty more highly because they know it will not last.

A bookish fifteen-year-old breaches taboos in the small New England town of Wick. Poet Rebecca Wolff’s masterful first novel is an Appalachian folk ballad rendered gothic–full of sex and ghosts, mixing caution and temptation, obsessed with origins but somehow timeless.

The appeal of Jo Ann Beard’s coming-of-age novel In Zanesville transcends both age and gender.

What if an agent agreed to represent your book–IF you changed the main character from gay to straight?
That’s what happened to writers Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown and their YA novel, Stranger, according to a post they wrote in Publisher’s Weekly:
Our novel, Stranger, has five viewpoint characters; one, Yuki Nakamura, is gay [...]

Which came first, the moody teen, or the YA fiction that moody teens often gravitate towards? Linda Holmes of NPR responds to a recent Wall Street Journal editorial that criticized YA fiction for being “too dark”:
I’m more intrigued by the aspirational nature of the quaint but sad idea that teenagers, if you don’t give [...]

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve seen a bunch of stories lately about fiction appearing in unusual places. And I like it.
First, the Standard Hotel in New York City plans to provide every guest room with an American classic during during the PEN World Voices Festival (April 25 to May 1). Author Salman [...]

A couple of months ago there was an online kerfuffle after Bitch Magazine posted a list of 100 feminist YA books, and then removed three books from that list after a few commenters complained about them, for various reasons. Then other commenters cried censorship, including some other authors on the list who asked to be [...]

Once again, fiction becomes reality—sort of. The wizard sport Quidditch, from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series1, has made its way into the real world. The International Quidditch Association “serves to promote Quidditch as a new sport and lead outreach programs to increase athletic participation among children and young adults and bring magic to [...]