Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

Nine authors were honored last night at a banquet in New York and took  home a bust of Edgar Allan Poe. Writers usually have no problem knowing what to do with a cash prize, but a few will probably feel ill at ease with their creepy little statuette. The uncertain would do well to turn to last year’s Best Young Adult Book winner John [...]

Top honors for the Children’s Book Award were named by the Jane Addams Peace Association. Elizabeth Partridge’s Marching for Freedom:  Walk Together, Children, and Don’t You Grow Weary won in the older readers category and Nasreen’s Secret School: A True Story from Afghanistan,  by Jeanette Winter, took the younger readers category. For a complete list [...]

This May marks the tenth anniversary of the release of Battlefield Earth, one of my very favorite bad movies. If you haven’t seen it, here are Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper chatting about it: I agree with everything they say about the movie, but I still love it, the same way I love Plan 9 [...]

(Via Galleycat.)

Vampires, serial killers, faeries, romances–if you want book trailers for these subjects, I’d like to introduce you to a website called YouTube. Say goodbye to the rest of  your work week. But trailers for series nonfiction books for youth? Inconceivable! Despite being one of the few segments of publishing that seems to keep growing, their [...]

The third time is a charm, as were the first and the second time, for China Mieville. He is the first ever 3-time winner of the Arthur C. Clark award, on this occasion for The City & The City. Some wonder if his book really qualifies as science fiction, being more fantasy than sci-fi, and [...]

Joel and Ethan Coen, as you probably know, are the talented writing-directing team behind such great movies as Blood Simple, Fargo, No Country for Old Men (based on the Cormac McCarthy novel), and Burn After Reading. If you’re one of the millions who didn’t see that last one, by the way,  go out and rent it immediately [...]

Ten titles, in ten categories, have been named as winners of the L.A. Times Book Prize: Biography Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, by Linda Gordon Current Interest Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers Fiction A Happy Marriage,by Rafael Yglesias Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction American Rust,by Philipp Meyer  Graphic Novel Asterios Polyp,by David Mazzucchelli History Golden [...]

The news last week of the death of 98-year-old Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, recalled for me the March 22 blog “Black Church Women and Other Ordinary People.” I meant the title to be ironic, still, Height was anything but ordinary. The NCNW, with more than 4 [...]

So Sam Raimi is making a movie out of Dennis Lehane’s 2008 novel The Given Day. You know Raimi from the Spider-Man movies, the Evil Dead movies, and Darkman, but wait: you think of those as horror or fantasy movies, but all of them feature well-drawn characters and stories that revolve around the characters. Raimi also [...]