March 2012
19 posts
“A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.”
– —E.B. White, An American Comedian
Why More Adults Are Reading Books For Teenagers
It wasn’t always this way. It used to be that when you were a teenager, after you’d read your way through CHARLOTTE’S WEB and BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA and THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA and you were ready for books that weren’t sold in the kids section of the bookstore, you headed right for your favorite part of the “grown-up” section. Romance, science fiction, mystery, horror…there were whole new worlds...
6 tags
Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers
“Roy Acuff had triggered our love for country music. He was, of all things, true to his music. But, still, maybe we could do some of them a little better.”
Even at sixteen and thirteen-years old, respectively, the Louvin Brothers knew they could do them. From Sacred Harp renditions of “Mary of the Wild Moor,” bleeding cotton pickers’ hands, their papa’s beatings and their mama’s sweet potato...
5 tags
In Memory of Walt Whitman
Six years before the onset of the Civil War, in 1855, the American poet Walt Whitman released a book of poetry that included work from the entire span of his career. Having labored over poems like “Song of Myself,” “I Sing the Body Electric” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” for much of his life, Whitman was finally ready to publish a full collection, tentatively titled simply Leaves of...
On Diana Wynne Jones
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since we lost Diana Wynne Jones… We remember her through her brilliant storytelling and award-winning books, from Dark Lord of Derkholm and Howl’s Moving Castle, to the just-released Earwig and the Witch, and everything in between.
Read the first two chapters of INSURGENT... →
epicreads:
The first two chapters of INSURGENT are in the back of the paperback of DIVERGENT, and also on the Divergent Series Facebook page for the first time today…. ENJOY! Let us know what you think.
“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the...”
– —Steven Levitt, co-author (with Stephen J. Dubner) of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Do You Know How to Write a Sentence? Professor and...
“Like a long periodic sentence, this book rumbles along, gathers steam, shifts gears, and packs a wallop.” —Roy Blount Jr.
“Language lovers will flock to this homage to great writing.” —Booklist
“A guided tour through some of the most beautiful, arresting sentences in the English language.” —Slate
“[Fish] shares his connoisseurship of the...
2 tags
On the Evolution of Publishing
In 2009, a year after the worst financial crisis since 1929 took a bite out of America’s income, the landscape of employment for young people and recent graduates looked a lot like a set-piece from a late-90’s disaster movie. On Craigslist, Idealist and other popular job boards, employers who posted open positions got hundreds of responses, many of them from people with decades of experience...
Memories of Harold and the Purple Crayon
There’s a memory from my childhood that remains crystal clear: a very young me, sitting on the tiled floor of my local library (the Spuyten Duyvil branch of the NYPL in the Bronx), between wooden bookcases, reading Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson. It’s one of those books that I read over and over. There was something so magical about the thick purple lines he drew,...
Celebrating the Life and Work of Ursula Nordstrom
Ursula Nordstrom was the director of Harper’s Department of Books for Boys and Girls from 1940 to 1973. She has been credited with being the “single most creative force for innovation in children’s book publishing in the United States during the twentieth century.” Some of the classics Nordstrom edited include The Runaway Bunny, The Carrot Seed, Stuart Little, Goodnight...
