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

One of the oddest books to receive a Booklist star this year is Gus Twintig’s The Clock without a Face, a picture-book (kind of) mystery (kind of) that’s a head-scratcher on more levels than you have fingers to scratch. To boil it waaaaaaay down, the Emerald Khroniker, a clock of incalculable value, has been stolen, [...]

Sound the alarms: The e-books are coming! The e-books are coming! In his Booklist review, Andrew Medlar writes that Lane Smith’s It’s a Book “throws down the gauntlet in the ongoing debate over digital versus print.” Andrew’s correct, but it’s an awfully gentle gauntlet–in his cute ode to two friends and a single, curious, power [...]

M.T. Anderson, that titan of YA lit behind Feed (2002) and The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (2006), is a pretty engaging speaker. Perhaps you saw his Printz Honor speech from 2009? So when he embarks on a video tour of his Vermont homeland (the setting for his new book The [...]

Okay, you’re an author – is it a good idea to put yourself in a trailer? Maybe. Maybe not. Especially dull, though, would be to sit yourself down a stool and simply describe the plot of your book. Unless, of course, during the course of that description, your face began to, well . . . [...]

Larry Doyle’s very funny Go, Mutants! takes place in an alternate American past, where chicks in poodle skirts and punks in black leather jackets share the high school hallways with all sorts of gooey, tentacled aliens, who landed on the planet and were assimilated 20 years earlier. Doyle is an acolyte of the sci-fi shockers [...]

Let’s say you don’t know a thing about making a video. You don’t have a fancy camera. You don’t know any actors. You couldn’t light a shot if your life depended on it. Heck, you’re a writer–the whole visual medium thing should be left to the James Camerons of the world, anyway, amirite? I can’t [...]

If you weren’t able to join us for our webinar last Thursday, “Crime Fiction Past and Present,” you missed a good one. David Wright of Seattle Public Library kicked things off with a fascinating selection of little-known, forgotten, and cult favorite mysteries (what an old-school DJ might refer to as “dusty tracks from the stacks [...]

(Via Galleycat.)

All month long, I’ve been meaning to check out WGBH’s videos for National Poetry Month, made for the “Poetry Everywhere” series airing on public television. I thought it might be nice to embed a few of them throughout April. Then I watched the videos and changed my mind — and not only because they’ve disabled embedding. It’s not [...]

The publishers of  The Name of the Nearest River knew they had something in Alex Taylor. He doesn’t look like your typical 29-year-old author,  he doesn’t dress like one, and certainly doesn’t sound like one. His volume of short stories doesn’t lend itself to the typical book trailer treatment; the novelty and authenticity of someone [...]