“My characters find ways to go on, even if they wind up in more trouble. They’re like plants that seek the light even if they have to twist themselves out of shape to find it:” Mary Ann McGuigan sits down with Jolene McIlwain to discuss the lines between stories and novels and YA and adult fiction, as well as Pieces, out from Bottom Dog Press.
This illustrator, YA wunderkind, and all-around czar of imagination has more irons in the fire than a kleptomaniacal leprechaun could steal. Read on.
Wit, passion, fatal cancer, and true love. Green’s big risks pay off.
With her latest novel, Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein pushes the limits of the YA genre.
This summer some dear family friends gave us a few antique German children’s books for our son. They included a huge and heavy tome of Wilhelm Busch’s work for children – author of the savagely funny and come-uppance-heavy Max and Mortiz (look it up, it’s worth it) – and a curious little volume of (what do I call them?) morality tales for children called Der Struwwelpeter, which roughly translates from the German as “Shaggy Peter.” I’d seen a copy on my husband’s grandmother’s shelf, and even the cover illustration–fingernails like tentacles and ominous scissors–creeped me out a bit. Heinrich Hoffman […]
My desk totem is a hundred-year-old children’s book. As a child, I knew its magic was true—the characters were too sharp not to be real. “What on earth is it?” Jane said. “Shall we take it home?” The thing turned its long eyes to look at her, and said: “Does she always talk such nonsense, or is it only the rubbish on her head that makes her silly?” It looked scornfully at Jane’s hat as it spoke. Meet the Psammead, a creature with stem-like eyes, found by five siblings on a country escape from London’s grit. It grants wishes by […]
What if you could flip a coin and change your life?
Summers, my dad took his two weeks’ vacation from the bank and drove our family southeast through corn and tobacco fields to Emerald Isle, North Carolina. We stayed on the sound-side of the island, in a small cottage on stilts, and each morning we hauled our chairs, coolers, and my mom’s heavy beach bag through a vacant lot, spiked with sandspurs, to the ocean. While dad unfolded our chairs and cracked open his day’s first beer, mom rummaged through her bag and passed out library books she’d picked for the family. I remember entire vacations spent reading, moving only with […]
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 a kerfuffle: I have no idea what “The Hunger Games” is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character. Maybe there are Pynchonesque turns of phrase. Maybe it delves into issues of identity, self-justification and anomie that would make David Foster Wallace […]
