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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 [...]

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 [...]

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), [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Fiction is often a conduit to the underlying forces driving the chaos of unfolding events. While watching the turmoil over the contested presidential election in Iran, I keep thinking about the first novel to be published in English by the Iranian writer Shahriar Mandanipour,  Censoring an Iranian Love Story, which received a starred review in Booklist in [...]