Kudos and thanks to the judges for the W. Y. Boyd Award for Excellence in Military Fiction:  Chair Robert Schnare, Naval War College, Newport, R.I.; Lawrence Clemens, United States Naval Academy, Nimitz Library, Annapolis, Md., James Schenkel, Library of Congress, Washington DC; Nancy Davenport, Washington, D.C.; Maxine Reneker, Monterey, Calif.; and Ronald Steensland, Panama City, Fla. Why? Because they selected Richard Bausch’s beautiful novel Peace  for the 2009 winner of an award that honors outstanding fiction set during a period when America is at war. Established by W. Y. Boyd, author of a trilogy that includes A Rendezvous with Death, the award recognizes the service of American veterans. Bausch, a writer of profound empathy and clarity, has written about honor and sacrifice with artistry and insight in Peace, and I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly with the jury’s choice.

My favorite novelist is Anthony Trollope, and for that reason I take a lot of ribbing from my Booklist colleagues.  Trollope seems to be  the poster boy for fiction that is stuffy, boring, and old fashioned.  So imagine my delight when I opened my copy of Newsweek yesterday–the one with “What to Read Now” on the cover (at least on the cover of the magazine sent to subscribers; the copies on the newsstand feature Michael Jackson instead)–and discovered that the number one recommendation  from the Newsweek panel is Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.

At the center of the plot is a swindling financier who, as Newsweek points out, is a Bernie Madoff for the Victorian age. All of Trollope’s novels deal in one way or another with  money (he often tells us precisely how much money his characters have, and his novels are tutorials in what kind of  lifestyle that money could buy), but The Way We Live Now, in particular, is scathing in its examination of  greed.

If you decide to follow up on Newsweek’s recommendation (and mine) to read The Way We Live Now and it gives you a taste for Trollope, you have lots of great reading ahead of you.  He wrote almost 50 novels.

Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go was far and away my favorite YA novel published in 2008, which is saying something considering the absolute murderer’s row of impressive YA novels unleashed last year. I’ve just finished the second book, The Ask and the Answer, and will have a review for it coming up in the August issue of Booklist (hint: it’s good. supergood.). And while that one won’t be released until September (though already out in the U.K.) you can whet your appetite by trawling over to the Booktrust Writer in Residency page to gobble up a brand new short story (”The New World“) that takes place immediately before Knife.

I’ll admit, thinking about all the myriad online extras of the various media that I ingest makes me a little bit crazy, knowing that I’m missing what I’m sure are all sorts of crucial tidbits just because I wasn’t savvy enough to watch season three of Whatever Hot Show and then rush to the internets to catch up on all the backstories and character vital stat sheets and mini-webisodes. I’ve even seen commercials try to goad me into following them down the virtual wormhole to special director’s cuts and outtakes. Really? Has that worked on anyone?

But, I can get behind this kind of online extra. As the writer in residency, Ness provided a whole set of tips for aspiring writers, and then followed and broke them to come up with this short story. Is it crucial to the understanding of his Chaos Walking universe? Nope. Is he trying to sell me more books by writing it? Not directly. He’s just putting his pen where his advice is, and we get some neato bonus information that answers a couple of the bucketloads of burning questions we have about his universe. It’s more of a gift than a ploy, which is awfully refreshing.

Last week, the UK’s Carnegie Medal for Literature (not to be confused with that other Carnegie Medal) was awarded posthumously to Siobhan Dowd, who died of cancer three months after Bog Child was completed. With only three novels under her belt and a fourth on the way, Solace of the Road (to be released Oct. 2009),  The London Eye Mystery (2008) and A Swift Pure Cry (2007), Dowd was relatively new to world of children’s lit, leaving many to grieve the loss of an author just getting started. However it’s clear that illness did not stand in the way of her impeccable writing. Librarian Joy Court, chair of the judging panel said the following of Dowd:

“To be able to write like that when she was going through what she was going through is just astonishing – the sheer beauty of the language, the descriptions of the environment; she has such an amazing sense of place.” (”Carnegie medal posthumously awarded to Siobhan Dowd,” by Alison Flood, the Guardian)

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It used to hold that one of the reasons you became a writer was that you were the sort who ducked out of photographs and preferred to communicate through quill-written correspondence. These days, though, these Salingeresque avoidance techniques won’t win you much love from your publisher–and probably won’t push many books, either.

So Penguin’s the Screening Room has launched Penguin Storytime and YA Cafe. I was particularly taken by the latter, which takes advantage of some pretty slick production values while grilling a few of the publisher’s heavy hitters. The first three interviewees: Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, and Lauren Myracle (who I video-interviewed right here on Likely Stories). Though the videos are long-ish, I’m really digging the supplements. In the case of Anderson, in addition to the 7-minute interview, you get an original poem read by the author, the Wintergirls book trailer, and a 26-minute discussion of Wintergirls between Anderson and five real live teens–apparently escaped from the wild! I found this last video the most interesting, as sometimes we in the youth book racket need a reminder of what real teens look and talk and act like.

Bravo, Penguin. Now all we need is an uninterrupted live feed of John Green’s living room and we’ll be good.

The Children’s Literature Association bestowed the Phoenix Award on Rosemary Sutcliff’s novel, The Shining Company (1992). Wondering why the Phoenix award is named the Phoenix? Behold:

The Phoenix Award is named after the fabled bird that rose from its ashes with renewed life and beauty. Phoenix books also rise from the ashes of neglect and obscurity and once again touch the imaginations and enrich the lives of those who read them.

The award is given to a noteworthy English language book that hasn’t won any major awards, some twenty years after its original publication.

Meanwhile, Junot Diaz is somewhere doing a dance of joy. According to The Millions blog, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has, with the IMPAC Dublin Award nomination, become one of the most highly praised novels in the last 15 years. Wao is in the top four modern classics, with the  No. 1 slot is occupied by Edward P. Jones’  The Known World. Titles quickly scaling the  list include: The Secret Scripture, Olive Kitteridge, Home, The Lazarus Project, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Animal’s People.

The Chicago Tribune reports on a case of book-phobia that’s not all that far from ALA headquarters: Antioch, Illinois (”Some parents seek to ban ‘The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian’,” by Ruth Fuller). According to the story:

Some parents of incoming freshmen at Antioch High School want an assigned summer reading book pulled from the school’s shelves and the curriculum because it uses foul, racist language and describes sexual acts.

You can read Ian Chipman’s review of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian to see how unimaginative these parents are being. I don’t link to these stories too much anymore, partly because American Libraries and AL Direct do a better job of it, but partly because the stories seem so depressingly similar. Often it feels as though you could change the proper nouns and republish the story.

This one, though, had a quote from one of the parents that jumped out at me:

Anderson said she read the book because she wanted to be able to help her son understand it.

“I began reading, and I started to cross out sections that I didn’t want him to read,” she said. “Soon I thought, ‘Wait, this is not appropriate; he is not reading this.’ “

I love how blase this is, as if the act of helping your child understand a book involves crossing out the parts you don’t even want to talk about. As the chairman of the English department so sensibly states, the book is exactly about the kinds of things that the high-schoolers-to-be will encounter in high school; it’s exactly the kind of book to help them with it.

Parents, of course, should always be part of their children’s learning experiences, but they should act as transmitters of ideas, not censors. In this case, the teens would be better off without their parents’ “help.”

Final thought: the reading list apparently already includes an alternative title, quoted as “Down River,” although they probably mean Will Hobbs’ Downriver, not John Hart’s Down River. But does it hurt a YA author’s street cred to be the safe alternate for a controversial book? Just asking.

When I first saw Rushmore, I identified closely with the protagonist, Max Fischer, a kid who attempts to enact adult-sized dreams in a playground-sized world. And his stagings of feature films under the proscenium arch evoked something I can only call the shock of recognition: my own sixth-grade magnum opus was a five-reel Super-8 movie called “A Day to Die,” in which I directed myself as an Indiana Jones-type hero called ”Rick Hawk.” I even wore a bandolier.

As I’ve gotten to know Daniel Kraus, I’ve found that we have some similar touchstones. And I’m guessing that if, for me, Rushmore was startling, for him, it must have been mind-blowing. As part of the lead-up to the release of his first novel, The Monster Variations, he’s digging up video of movies he made with his friends while growing up in Iowa and screening them at Francis Ford Iowa. And, yes, some of them were remakes of movies that he really liked.

Unlike me, Daniel grew up to be an honest-to-god talented filmmaker. But, as you’ll see from the apologetic annotations that accompany his clips, it wasn’t always obvious that things would turn out that way.

As most followers of all things Harry Potter know, J.K. Rowling brought a copyright infringement lawsuit last year against Steven Jan Vander Ark, the author of The Harry Potter Lexicon, which has since been published in a much-altered version. Now it seems that J.K. Rowling, her publisher, and her formidable team of lawyers may be facing another court battle. This time, though, it is Rowling’s publisher who is the defendant as a 2004 accusation of plagiarism resurfaces. David Itzkoff reported on the  New York Times Web site yesterday:

The British publisher Bloomsbury denied on Monday that J. K. Rowling copied substantial parts of another children’s book to write “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” Reuters reported. The estate of Adrian Jacobs, an author who died in 1997, has said it seeks a trial in the London High Court against Bloomsbury for copyright infringement. The estate said that Ms. Rowling’s 2000 novel, the fourth entry in her wildly popular Harry Potter series, was plagiarized from Jacobs’s 1987 book, “The Adventures of Willy the Wizard — No 1 Livid Land.”

Even if her book shares some plot points with Goblet, Jacobs clearly didn’t have Rowling’s knack for fantastic monikers, which raises that age old question: What’s in a name? Would the HP books have been quite so wildly popular if Willy the Wizard, and not Harry Potter, had flown off to “Livid Land” instead of Hogwarts each year?

Who doesn’t love dueling book covers? Not me! (That is, I don’t not love them–although I really could have said this more clearly, couldn’t I?) Anywho, Kaite Mediatore Stover, our “She Reads” columnist and Book Group Buzz blogger, brought the following to my attention:

Still Life, by Joy Fielding, was published by Atria in March, while Keeper of Light and Dust, by Natasha Mostert, was published by Dutton in April. So Fielding beat Mostert to store shelves–but which book wins the battle of the Booklist reviews? Writing about Keeper of Light and Dust, Allison Block calls it a “mild tale of modern romance”–but Mary Frances Wilkens calls Still Life a “heart-pounding mainstream thriller.” Winner: Still Life.