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Now before you say, “Wait a minute, I thought I was the World’s Strongest Librarian!,” give Josh Hanagarne a chance. After all, can you deadlift 600 pounds?

In all seriousness, our reviewer calls Hanagarne’s memoir “an excellent and uplifting story on accepting and coping with lifelong disabilities, of particular interest to librarians.” Check out the trailer, and watch that small boulder get uplifted, too.

I could really respect a man called “Bob Stake.” It’s a surname that conjures up the manliest of pursuits: eating a steak, staking a vampire, that sort of stuff. But you throw an extra “a” in there? Then you end up with Bob Staake, some dude who draws pictures. (He probably doesn’t even like steak.) This Staake fellow has illustrated over 60 books, among them such fonts of foolishness as Don’t Squish the Sasquatch! and Look! Another Book! His latest, Bluebird, is an apparently beautiful book about apparently deep stuff that’s getting all sorts of acclaim.

Until Mr. Staake slays a vampire, though, I remain unimpressed.

Actual photograph. Poor guy.

Just who do you think you are?

Apparently, I’m that kid who would obsessively draw, cut out paper silhouettes, and eat paste—and then found a way to apply those useless skills to his adult job. I’ve been doing this for 35 years now, so every day I live in trembling fear that the Art Police will knock down my door, wrestle the Fountain Pentel out of my hand, and haul me off to jail in a fit of jealousy—and because I’ve just been waaaaay too lucky. Don’t get me wrong, if I’ve had any success in Kid Lit, it is greatly due to my myopically focused work ethic, and it doesn’t hurt to be able to draw with one hand and write with the other. If I could just grow a third hand, I might finally be able to turn on the coffee maker.

Where do you get off?

Usually 57th and Broadway—and then it’s a three-block walk to Random House. Luckily, most of my days are spent in complete isolation in my Cape Cod studio, which is a grueling 45-foot commute from my home. I wish I could say that while working 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, I’m in there finding a cure for cancer, but I’m not. I’m really just trying to make kids laugh, think, and become inspired in some small way through my art and writing. My books are also known for being filled with little visual puns, hidden surprises, and graphic asides that are put there to entertain me—and the adults who find themselves reading my stories to their kids. The problem is that clever book reviewers often discover them—and then waste 15% of their allotment of 200 words proudly pointing out the specific things they found that I sneaked into my busy artwork. I hate when they do that because it takes all the fun and subversiveness out of my hiding things in my books.

What’s the big idea?

Hopefully, my new picture book, Bluebird. Not only do I refrain from using words in this story, but I limited my palette to blues and grays when creating the artwork. This is the most atypical of any picture book I have ever produced, but more importantly, the story’s finale can be interpreted in many different ways by both kids and adults. I “wrote” the wordless story 10 years ago, but never showed it to anyone because I feared it needed a clear, obvious, and unwavering conclusion. I was so wrong. The magic of the book is that it elevates the importance of the reader in the literary experience—and as they comfortably resolve the conclusion in their own way, the story takes on an almost ethereal dimension. Needless to say, that’s a tricky thing to pull off in any book, so I’m looking forward to just relaxing and writing a “medium-sized idea”—a silly story in groan-worthy rhyme.

What is your problem, man?

You mean beside the fact that I’m completely incapable of comprehending fractions without the visual aid of actual pie slices? Happily, children’s picture books rarely require math, heavy lifting, or dangerous moving metal parts, so you won’t find me complaining. That said, my biggest problem might be my inability to jump. At 6′ 3″, you’d think I could slam dunk, but I can’t. Sendak couldn’t either, so I don’t take it too personally.

Haven’t you done enough?

I have never been diagnosed, but I’m certain I have ADD—and while that can cause problems for many people, for me it has been a true blessing. My problem has never been coming up with a story—it’s been deciding which one of 25 stories that I want to turn into a book. I typically produce four picture books a year and I could write what I think is a wonderful story today. But if my agent doesn’t place it with a publisher right away, chances are good that I’ll lose interest in it—and I’ll be on to the next story I want to tell, and the next, and the next. I’ve never understood writers and illustrator who may have this ONE story they’ve written—and then spend the next 16 months retooling, tweaking, and obsessing over it as they see it turned down by one house after the next. I’m considered pretty prolific, but there are just so many stories to write, there will never be enough time, so if I get 15% of my books published, that’s enough for me. Still, you’d think I could slam dunk!

What’s that? “Silent Night” in April? Something’s not right– or make that a lot of things. I’m not sure if Joe Hill betrays his desire to send readers “careening deliriously off into a la-la land of horrifying absurdism” in this author-interview style trailer for NOS4A2, but we have Dan Kraus’s review to warn us of that.

Hill throws a snowball so we know to fear the book and not its author.

Little-known fact: Before Sara Zarr became the beloved National Book Award-finalist author of Story of a Girl, How to Save a Life, and The Lucy Variations, she was a pirate known only as “Sarazar,” and the southeastern seaboard was interminably terrorized by her jolly band of peg-legged buccaneers. Even during her dastardly life of crime, Sarazar was renowned for her deep, sympathetic insight. Legend says that even those poor souls at the end of her cutlass could not help but hand her starred reviews for her cunning swordplay and swearing.

Ay, me hearties, it will take a mighty force indeed to scuttle this bilge-sucking scalawag!

          I wouldn’t pay a cent over 4 cents!!!

Just who do you think you are?

It depends. Sometimes during the Winter Olympics I watch the competitive snowboarders and think: “I could do that.” Other times, I might be walking through the subway and see a busker and think: “I know at least five chords on my guitar and can sing in tune; I could do that.” I like to give lots of advice to friends and pretend I’m a semi-pro psychologist. I also suspect I could probably win some kind of race for political office or at least a church chili cook-off. But if action is reality, I’m just a writer and thinker and obsessor who tweets too much.

Where do you get off?

The people in my head with whom I’m having imagined anxious relationships scream this at me all the time, sometimes in dreams. As a semi-pro psychologist, I can say that this question comes from within because none of my friends or acquaintances are actually asking me this (except you). Like many writers, I have a deep-down suspicion that I’m a fraud always on the brink of being found out, that all my success is a terrible administrative error and I am to be pitied above all mankind for buying into the delusion that anything I do is of interest to anyone but me and my husband and my parakeet, Peanut, who really only wants more millet. So, yeah, where do I get off?

What’s the big idea?

Okay, here’s the big idea that can sound like a little idea in scope–i.e. it is not High Concept, as we say in the biz–but in consequence I believe it’s everything. Are you sitting down? The big idea is that everyday life holds extraordinary meaning. That the accumulation of all the little things that make up our common experience and the tiny and bigger connections we make with others all matter. Ordinary life is… ordinary life, and it’s enough. There’s beauty and drama and epic triumph and pain and failure and joy and redemption. It’s all right here. You don’t have to be a published writer or a reality TV celebrity or a high-achiever or rich or look like a model or be a pre-teen YouTube sensation or have all your teeth to be a part of it. That’s a big idea. I didn’t come up with it, though. I just kind of noticed it.

What is your problem, man?

My main problem is the reality of the space-time continuum in tandem with my limitations as me in a human body. I would love to be able to write for six or eight or ten hours a day, six days a week, with great focus, and still be a sane person who is not slowly getting heart disease and alienating everyone around me. My body and soul are high-maintenance. I need eight or nine hours of sleep and there’s all this stuff I can’t eat and I have to do my back exercises and get fresh air and sometimes I get anxious and waste whole days crying over imagined conflicts with people I love or the well is dry and I just need to sack out on the couch and watch a season of Mad Men and YOU KNOW, WHO HAS THE TIME?? I also have a major problem with commercials that feature children doing voiceovers that are obviously scripted for adults. And car exhaust.

Haven’t you done enough?

No! I’m 42, and figure I have only 20-30 good working years left if I’m very lucky. Even with the best habits, I don’t think…hey wait a minute, that’s actually a really long time. I haven’t done enough yet, but maybe there’s hope that I will.

Normally I wouldn’t take dating advice from people missing so many prominent teeth, but there’s something oracular in the impeded speech of these small humans. Pick up Get the Guy: Learn Secrets of the Male Mind to Find the Man You Want and the Love You Deserve for further anthropological study.

It’s a red-letter day: Hostile Questions’ 1st birthday and our 50th interview. And if there’s a man begging to be brought up charges of Un-Author-like Conduct over past year, it’s none other than John Green. John Green. John Green. (I keep repeating his name cuz that’s what you’re supposed to do with John Green, right? Oh, snap!!)

Your Honor, the evidence is insurmountable. Exhibit A (The Fault in Our Stars) became an instant Amazon #1 bestseller when it was merely announced. Mr. Green then compounded the problem with an insidious stunt involving signing the entire 150,000 first printing. What’s wrong, Mr. Green? Couldn’t bring yourself to sign the nearly one million copies currently in print? Guess you were too busy lining up bus tours and gigs at Carnegie Hall and sit-downs with famous celebrity interviewers. “Objection”?! But, Your Honor, I’m just getting started!

OK, fine. Maybe–just maybe–we here at Booklist kinda miss our former colleague. We knew him before he was an “Experience” and was just a guy with a really, really, really disgusting office. Perhaps we should withdraw our formal complaint. Yes, I think we should. Especially since I see an army of shiny-eyed (and probably armed) nerdfighters about to attack. Court adjourned!!! DFTBCDWA or whatever!!!

                 John Green’s secret skin problems revealed!!!

Just who do you think you are?

I’m a novelist with a day job making YouTube videos. I used to be a novelist with a day job being an editorial assistant and then a production editor at Booklist Magazine. Anyway, I don’t like to think too much about who I *think* I am, because it leads down this endless spiral of self-consciousness and doubt and self-reproach that 1. feels pretty dark and hopeless, and more importantly 2. is ultimately mere self-indulgence. Better to turn outward when possible, I think.

Where do you get off?

Usually at the corner of Hoover and 73rd, although the Indianapolis bus system is so woefully underfunded and underutilized that I often have to disembark whenever the bus just stops running or whatever and make my way home. I remember the places I’ve lived by the public transport stops, though: The Division Blue Line stop; the 86th street stop on the 1 line; the Western Brown Line stop; the Spui Square tram stop; and now, Hoover and 73rd in sunny Indianapolis.

What’s the big idea?

The big idea is to pay attention. That’s the thing that humans get to do: We get to be observers of the universe, but it’s very hard to pay attention to the universe’s majesty and elegance in a sustained way, because Kim Kardashian had an amazing sandwich for lunch and you’re worried that the twinge in your knee might be a tumor, and there is a mortgage to pay, and so on. We live in a world supersaturated with distractions, and so even though there are more opportunities for paying attention, it’s still very difficult to do. This is why books are so important to me: They demand (and compel) my attention, and pull me out of myself so that I can pay attention for a little while.

What is your problem, man?

Well, hypochondria, probably, but the underlying problem with hypochondria is that it might be some actual terrible illness. I have other problems, too, though. I remember in college, my girlfriend at the time asked me, “What’s your biggest fear?” And I was like, “Probably abandonment, but I’m also really afraid that I’m just a complete imposter, and I fear that if there is no outside order to the human experiment that it’s all totally meaningless, and I fear suffering in every form. What’s your biggest fear?” And after a second, she said, “Geese.”

Haven’t you done enough?

Nah, most of the pleasure of writing for me is inside the work itself, and my favorite book of mine is always the next one. I like making stuff. It helps me to pay attention.

It’s Friday afternoon, the perfect time for looking at  cat pictures, discussing weekend plans, and eating doughnuts for lunch while counting down the minutes until quitting time. You’ve got a while until you can skedaddle, though, so how about spending the  next 5-10 minutes chuckling over the winner of this year’s Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title? Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop, by Reginald Bakeley, has the combined appeal of fantasy, home repair, animal husbandry, and grammatical exactitude (I’m looking at you, One’s) to capture the attention of a blobby Venn-diagram of the reading public. If Bakeley’s title was a cozy mystery with a touch of romance, he’d be likely to skyrocket to the top of the charts. For now, though, he’ll have to settle for a mere rosy feeling of accomplishment (and perhaps a boost in sales). Find the glorious short-list of nominees below with, in what is a Booklist first for this particular prize, links to reviews where available.

How Tea Cosies Changed the World, by Loani Prior (Murdoch Books)
God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis, by Tom Hickman (Square Peg)
How to Sharpen Pencils, by David Rees (Melville House)
Was Hitler Ill? by Hans-Joachim Neumann and Henrik Eberle (Polity Press)
Lofts of North America: Pigeon Lofts, by Jerry Gagne (Foy’s Pet Supplies)

With more gut-drops than your average, this week’s book trailer for Hidden Cities: A Memoir of Urban Exploration attempts to, like the book it’s hawking, challenge our ideas of forbidden spaces. For me though, who thinks the subway is a pretty undesirable place even when I’m swiftly moving through it on a train, it only confirms that I’ll happily stay an Urban Boundary Prisoner for life.

We had no beef with Megan Abbott back when she was plugging away at hard-nosed noir (Bury Me Deep) or sensuous coming-of-age-ness (The End of Everything). But then she had to go suck all the oxygen out of the publishing universe with Dare Me, an official Big Book that found Shakespearean drama in the world of high-school cheerleading. Overnight, agents and editors around the globe began making their authors miserable: “Could you maybe set your epic postwar immigrant saga in the world of cheerleading?” “Could you somehow situate your philosophical text of experimental mathematics within the world of cheerleading?”

It was hell, Abbott. Hell. Time to take that toe-touch double-jump left-hurdler herkie into oblivion!

Not who you want to see on Day One of cheerleading camp.

Just who do you think you are?

A Midwestern gal who spent far too much of her childhood reading true crime, watching 1930s gangster movies and dreaming of moving to New York City. I imagined it just like Manhattan and I would live with Woody Allen, eating Chinese food and watching W.C. Fields movies on the late show.

I did move here, after college. Lacking Mariel Heminway’s bone structure, I had to make do with what I had. So, many years later, I’m a Midwestern expat, living in Queens and writing novels.

Where do you get off?

I’m just barely hanging on, I tell you. But I love books, desperately. I want to live in them. For all of us who were readers from a young age, we learn how to exist in the world thanks to books. They help us understand life, the murkiness of the heart. We feel less strange because of them, less alone. So the more I get to sneak into that world, the better.

What’s the big idea?

Right now, it feels like complicated heroines are having their moment—in fiction, film, TV, music. Troubled women, bad girls. Driven, unpredictable, complex. Roxane Gay wrote this piece for The Millions about how books in 2012 were filled with women or girls finally allowed to be “dark and dangerous.” There’s, of course, a long history of damaged heroines in fiction (where would the Gothic novel be without it?), but it does feel like there’s something happening now that hasn’t happened in some time, or at least hasn’t happened so brazenly. All the sudden we have Gone Girl and Homeland and Hunger Games and Enlightened. The unconscious became conscious. Or we suddenly all admitted that we secretly loved female characters whom, a few years ago, we might have called unlikable, unrelatable. Scary. Now we can call them strong (and sometimes still scary).

What is your problem, man?

David Lynch doesn’t make enough movies fast, Donna Tartt’s new book doesn’t come out until the fall, Buffy is no longer saving the world, and I can’t seem to stop getting into fights about the brilliance of Brian DePalma movies.

Haven’t you done enough?

Not until I write that book on sexual politics and the art and mysticism of Ke$ha. I really want to write that book. I might not stop with Ke$ha, but she’s a start.

“Move over puppies, kittens, and piglets,” editor Ann Kelley warns. Sloths are the molasses-movin’ new game in town, subjecting us to their lazy yet indefatigable cuteness at every turn. All aboard the Bucket Express! (But please, take your time. Wouldn’t want anyone to pull a muscle.)