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By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 9/27/2015
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A few months ago I received an invitation from one of my very favorite people in all of young people's literature, Jennifer Brown. If our friendship has evolved over time, my respect for Jenny was immediate. As a
Shelf Awareness reviewer, prize adjudicator, discussion leader, Bank Street visionary, and all-around children's books advocate, Jenny's opinions have mattered. She has welded intelligence with kindness and become a force. Today she serves as vice president and publisher of Knopf Books for Young Readers at Random House Children's Books—a position that is such a perfect fit for her myriad talents (and soul) that one imagines it was waiting for her all along.
Before Jenny took on that new role, she designed the
2015 BookFest@Bank Street and extended the invitation I noted above. Featuring Rita Williams-Garcia in a keynote, the day will include insights from scholars and writers Leonard S. Marcus, Adam Gidwitz, Elizabeth Bluemle, Cynthia Weill, Christopher Myers, Shadra Strickland, Raul Colon, Sara Varon, Joe Rogers, Jr., Laura Amy Schlitz, Jeanne Birdsall, Kat Yeh, Liz Kessler, and Monica Edinger. BookFest will also feature a panel titled "Pushing Narrative Boundaries in Teen Literature," moderated by the reliably smart and provocative Vicky Smith, the reviews editor of
Kirkus.I'm thrilled to be joining Tim Wynne-Jones and Daniel Jose Older on that boundaries-pushing panel. I was thrilled even before I'd read their new novels,
The Emperor of Any Place and
Shadowshaper, respectively. But now, having spent the last few days immersed in both, I'm even more eager. This will be a conversation. The kind of conversation that I crave like I crave a perfect peach or a ripe Bartlett pear.
The Emperor of Any Place is a work of supreme art. A nested story within a story (and, one might suggest, within another story) that carries the reader in and out of history. There's the present-day reality of a teen named Evan who has lost his father and must now endure (within the knot of his grief) the arrival of his once-estranged grandfather. There is, as well, the story inside the book Evan's father was reading when he died—the diary of a Japanese soldier stranded on a small Pacific island during World War II. The soldier is not the sole inhabitant of that island, nor is he the only one who ultimately writes inside those diary pages. As Evan reads the book, many mysteries emerge. Why was his father obsessed with this story? Why is his grandfather obsessed, too? And what is the truth inside these diary pages that were annotated, later on, by another visitor to that island?
Emperor is grounded in the fear of war and the haze of solitude and the ingenuity of survivors, both contemporary and historic. It is wholly conceived and executed, yet it trembles with mystery and a touch of magic. It is brilliantly structured but its power does not rest on its conceit. Tim may have pushed the narrative boundaries but he has not taken a single short cut, not expected the readers to follow just because he's feverently hoped they will. Every element adds to every element here. There are rewards for those who ponder, and, indeed, you could ponder all day and never find a fault line in this complex novel's execution.
Shadowshaper casts its own marvelous spell, builds its own mystique, is the sort of original work you would expect from an author who is also a musician who is also an EMT who is also a commentator on social order and disorder. Daniel has built a book about a young girl who discovers within herself a legacy power—and who must learn to harness it for a greater good. Sierra Santiago is a painter who can see, within the art of others, shadow lives and shapes, art that fades, murals that shed real tears. She is a daughter and a granddaughter in pursuit of hidden grace. She chases, and she is being chased. She rises to the challenge.
Sierra does all this within language steeped in salsa rhythms and Brooklyn gaits. She does this while pondering the color of her skin, the explosive nature of her hair, the discrete borders inside the border lands of race. Daniel is not just weaving a magical story here. He is telling his readers something about how it feels to live today within the fractures of society. About how it is to hope, despite the noise of now.
Authors of books that break the rules must know, to begin with, what the prevailing rules have been. They have a special obligation to steer their projects toward a higher grace, so that the strange ultimately does collide with a deep emotional truth, so that the fiction feels real, so that the experience of reading the story goes beyond admiration and straight into embrace. Fiction comes from a human place. The best fiction elevates the idea of the humane.
We'll talk about this and much more, I'm sure, at Book Fest. I'll learn; I'm sure of that, too.
Registration information for Book Fest is
here.
A few months ago, I was generously invited to write a Book Brahmin column for
Shelf Awareness, which appears
here, today.I loved that assignment. I still do.
Weeks have gone by since I set down my words. Nightstand books have been read and reviewed. Many new books have been bought and loved. To all of you whose books I've danced with in the interim, know that they matter deeply to me, too. And so do you.
Do you - or someone you know - love cookbooks? Check out today's Shelf Awareness for Readers. Oh my! YUM!
Seriously! Everyone who is anyone in the cooking world - well, a lot of them anyway - has a new book coming out. Even Portlandia (see above)!
Even if cookbooks leave you lukewarm, check out Shelf Awareness for Readers for the most current book releases.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 4/2/2014
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Oh, those beautiful pottery ladies. There I was, minding my own clay business, when I saw Karen the Good, who also goes by Queen of Wayne, sneak by. What is that lady doing? I wondered, then went back to trying to figure out how to make my latest project stable.
The next time I looked up, the ladies had gathered around and they were singing. They were singing a birthday song.
How I love them all.
(Bill, the honorary pottery lady, took the photo of the group, but I love him, too.)
So a huge thank you to my friends, and to Karen, for remembering—and for singing—so poignantly well. And the timing is—well—something else, for just this morning I had been remembering a surprise party my mother had thrown for me when I was sixteen years old. Somehow she'd gotten Jim Clancy, Radnor High basketball star, to my basement, along with ice skaters and other friends. I had not had the slightest inkling that something was in the works. I miss my mother on many days, and always on my birthday, and there were the ladies, on this day, stepping in.
So who was the teen me? I write of her here, on
Dear Teen Me, today. The piece begins like this:
You do not have to be good. You don’t have to try so hard. You don’t have to stay so very still inside that box that you have built up for yourself.
Life is meant for living.
Listen.
On a day in which so much kindness overflows that I hardly know what to do, or how many ways I can say thank you, I share these beautiful things as well:
Shelf Awareness shared the
Going Over trailer as the Trailer of the Day,
here. Sarah Laurence reviewed
Going Over so incredibly beautifully
here.And Melissa Firman very kindly makes room for, and say such nice things about,
Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, here.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 3/14/2014
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Sometimes, a whole lifetime's worth of specialness happens in a few short days.
Those few short days were these past few days. That Handling the Truth/Meredith Vieira moment in New York City, that trip to see old friends and make new ones in South Carolina. And the gifts leading up to the release of Going Over.
First, today, I want to thank the extraordinary Chronicle team—for everything, really. But in particular, today, for the trailer, above. I had no idea a trailer was in the works. It just arrived one day. It is perfect, in my eyes, in everyway.
The news is here, below:
School Library Journal Pick of the Day
Junior Library Guild Selection
iBooks Spring’s Biggest Books
An Amazon Big Spring Books
“A stark reminder of the power of hope, courage, and love.”—Booklist, starred review
“An excellent example of historical fiction focusing on an unusual time period.” —School Library Journal, starred review
"Going Over carefully balances love and heartbreak, propelling readers through the story."— Shelf Awareness
"Readers will finish the book and continue to think about how effective one wall can be in separating a country and in fashioning attitudes toward life." —Reading Today
"At once compelling and challenging... this gripping effort captures the full flavor of a trying time in an onerous place." —Kirkus Reviews
“A profound read meant for discussion.” —VOYA: Voice of Youth Advocates
"Gritty, painful and lovely."--Emma, age 17, SLJ Teen, Young Adult Advisory Councils Reviewer
Some very generous bloggers have agreed to participate in a blog tour that will kick off when the book officially launches on April 1. I've written pieces about history, graffiti, titles, editing—and I'll be answering questions—throughout it all.
We woke to a deep mist here, a roiling fog. It seems the skies understand, that they, like us, are weeping.
It will be difficult for any of us to move forward. To stop putting our imaginations elsewhere, and grieving. And maybe that's okay. Maybe we do just need to stop.
On this necessarily quiet day, I want to thank two extremely generous people for kindness—an attribute more important to me than any other. The first is Michael G-G, always a smart writer and blogger, always a dear soul, who read two of my books at the same time and had
this to say. Michael understands my relationship to the color blue. His words on this and on so much more touched me so deeply—and arise out of the mist.
The second is Jennifer Brown, a former school teacher and now the woman I love to call (because it is so true) "the ambassador for children's books." She was a terrific panel moderator at the Publishing Perspectives conference held a few weeks ago, just after the storm Sandy stopped us all in our tracks. She reports on the conference
today in Shelf Awareness in the meaningful way that she does all things.
Love, and (somehow) healing.
See that pretty lady up there? The one
beside the Olympian in purple (Kristi Yamaguchi)? That is my friend, Jenny Brown, though if I claim her as my own friend this morning, it is not to negate her friendships with and toward the entire world of children's publishing. Jenny has done it all in her publishing life—teacher, editor, mentor, reviewer, Twenty by Jenny-er, and (I like to call her this) crusader. You most recently know her as the children's book editor of Shelf Awareness, but as of today you will also know her as the part-time Interim Director of the Center for Children's Literature at the Bank Street College of Education, a position which she describes as "an organic evolution of my work on the Children's Book Committee, where we read books together as reviewers, social workers, teachers, librarians, historians, and art directors." Jenny calls the Center a think tank and she will have an opportunity to play a big role in shaping the reading life of children.
Who could be better for this position? No one. Jenny loves good books, she loves the people who make them, she loves the people for whom good books are made. She's also a very fine writer—and singer—as I found out when I interviewed her for
Publishing Perspectives. Here's
that piece, in case you somehow (how
could you?) missed it.
Congratulations, Jennifer M. Brown!
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 9/19/2012
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Today, another short note, a simple reminder:
I have the great privilege of joining David Levithan, Ellen Hopkins, Eliot Schrefer, and Jennifer Hubbard this coming Friday, 7 PM, at
Children's Book World in Haverford, PA. CBW is billing us as the Fab Five, and I have Philomel publicist (every author's dream publicist and my good friend) Jessica Shoffel to thank for making me Feel So Fab.
I hope that you will join us. The photograph above was taken during the Publishing Perspectives "What Makes a Children's Book Great?" conference held earlier this summer, where I had so much fun joining moderator Dennis Abrams on the author panel. The smart and savvy notables from left to right are Roger Horn (The Horn Book), Pamela Paul (New York Times), David Levithan (Scholastic editor and author phenom), and my good friend Jennifer Brown, a former school teacher, editor, reviewer, and jury panelist (not to mention head of children's books for
Shelf Awareness) whom I always rightly refer to as this country's ambassador for children's books.
Within every story there are stories, and this morning I am deeply blessed by the chance, in
Shelf Awareness, to remember my grandmother and to reflect on the passion I have for creating young adult stories in which time works differently. Jennifer Brown, the children's book review editor for
Shelf Awareness, opened this door to me.
Her kindness toward me and Small Damages has been remarkable.
Pictured above is my beautiful grandmother, whom I lost on Mischief Night when I was nine. She sits beside my grandfather, who holds my brother on his lap. I am sitting with my beloved Uncle Danny. My mother's family. Sweet memories.
Thank you, Jenny Brown and
Shelf Awareness. These are the opening words of my Inklings essay. The rest can be found
here:
My books for young adults are frequently shaped by relationships between those who have so much wanting yet ahead and those looking back, with pain and wonder. Time works differently in books like these, and so does memory.
Twenty by Jenny is home to some of the most thoughtful reviews of books written for children and teens—anywhere. That is because Jenny Brown, its creator, has cared about youth literature for all of her adult life—as a teacher sharing stories, as an editor producing them, and as a critic and enthusiast writing for countless publications, including
Shelf Awareness. Jenny Brown trails golden light.
But I did not know, until late last night, that Jenny Brown, who had written the exquisite
Shelf Awareness review of Small Damages, had also taken the time to reflect on
Small Damages in Twenty by Jenny. Her essay is called
"Regeneration." It is, in every way, stunning. It taught me about my own book, made me step back with new understanding. This kind of reflection is built of love. And I am so grateful, Jenny Brown. I am.
I am so grateful, too, to the ever-vigilant Serena Agusto-Cox, for letting me know.
Okay, so that doesn't
quite mean I'm on TV or anything (I wish). But I made an author video, and the kind people at Harper put an ad up at Shelf Awareness for
Double Vision that links to it.
You can see the video to the right, so you can watch me babble about the book.
Later this week, I'll share with you (since many of you are writers) how I managed to make this video, despite my infamous dinosaur status.
Let me know what you think of the video! And be kind, since I'm not Julia Roberts or anything...
When I mentioned to friends that I had seen Kristi Yamaguchi at the BEA, I heard a collective sigh. Yamaguchi is that kind of loved—a talented athlete, a dedicated artist, a philanthropist, a wife, a mother, the sort of celebrity one hears only good things about. I had grown up figure skating, which means I had grown up watching Kristi. And when she danced with Mark on Dancing With the Stars, I—a lover of ballroom dance (if not precisely a ballroom dancer)—watched with special fervency.
The tremendous Jennifer Brown, the children's book editor for Shelf Awareness and a very dear soul, had the honor of interviewing Kristi at the BEA about Kristi's second Poppy book. I was on hand to write the story for
Publishing Perspectives. You can find the piece
here.
My friends: I'll be at the
BEA on Tuesday, June 5, 2012, working for
Publishing Perspectives, the fabulous book news pub for which I have written about Pamela Paul (
New York Times Book Review children's book editor), Jennifer Brown (
Shelf Awareness children's book editor), Lauren Wein (Harcourt Houghton Mifflin editor), Alane Mason (WW Norton editor, not to mention my first editor), and others. I'll be getting the inside scoop on some important stories. But I'll also be looking for you.
If you'll be there, let me know?
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 2/29/2012
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This morning
Shelf Awareness serves up this
quote of the day, and it stops me. I think I might just move on, but I can't.
Because Parks' assertion that reading the e-book frees us from "everything extraneous and distracting" ... "to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves" in no way jibes with my experience. Yes, I have downloaded dozens of books onto my iPad. Sadly, I've left many of them stranded. Unable to scribble in the margins, dog-ear the pages, underline emphatically—unable, in other words, to engage in a physical way with the text—I grew distracted, disinterested, bored. Yes, Michael Ondaatje will always keep me reading. And so will the work of my friend Kelly Simmons, and the words of Julie Otsuka, Leah Hager Cohen, A.S. King, Timothy Schaffert, Paula Fox, and Justin Torres—though I wish I owned all of that work on paper. But here on my iPad—stranded, unfinished—sit Jesmyn Ward's
Salvage the Bones, Andrew Winer's
The Marriage Artist, Margaret Drabble's complete short stories, and many other tales. These are, most likely, extremely good books, and yet, I find myself incapable of focusing on them in their e-format. I need to interact—physically—with the texts before me. I can't do that, in the ways I'd like to do that, with a screen.
I am also, as a footnote, intrigued by Tim Parks' final lines, when he speaks of moving on from illustrated children's books. With the rise of the graphic novel and the increasing insertion of images back into teen books (and I suspect we'll see that illustration encroachment continue), I wonder if we have really moved away from illustrated texts. I wonder, too, if we should. Art is not just for juveniles, after all.
Here is the quote at length, as excerpted by
Shelf Awareness."The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children's books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups."
--
Tim Parks in his post headlined "E-books Can't Burn" at the
New York Review of Books blog
Not long ago, I wrote a piece for
Shelf Awareness, that fantastic e-newsletter for the publishing trade, about
the future of young adult books—underscoring trends, suggesting new possibilities. Publishing the essay was, of course, a privilege. But the greater privilege was all that went on behind the scenes, as I worked with Jennifer Brown, the SA children's editor. It wasn't just a back-and-forth about a story's shape and timing. It was a conversation—wide-ranging, funny, thoughtful, perpetually kind. I frankly couldn't get enough of Jenny, and when I asked Ed Nawotka of
Publishing Perspectives if I might interview her for a profile, he said (thank you, Ed) yes.
Here, then, is
Jennifer Brown—editor, reviewer, advocate, enthusiast—whose impact on children's books is the stuff of which legacies are made. She could, I've often thought, write
the definitive book on the history of books written for the young. For now, though, she's focused on brightening the future.
A brief side note. Yesterday, Laura Geringer, who asked me to write for teens in the first place and edited five of my YA titles, mentioned in a note that an animated short with which she had been involved had been nominated for an Oscar. The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (which is glorious, and can be watched
here) is dedicated to Bill Morris, a man who mentored Jenny for many years. Paths cross and tangle in publishing. I am grateful to be knotted in.
My previous
Publishing Perspectives stories can be found here:
Unglue.it: Changing the future of e-books....
The Value Rubric: Do Book Bloggers Really Matter?
The Attraction-Repulsion of International Literature: My conversation with Alane Salierno Mason
Transforming Children's Book Coverage at the New York Times: My conversation with Pamela Paul
Success is when the world returns your faith:
My conversation with editor Lauren WeinBetween Shades of Gray: The Making of an International Bestseller
I found this quote on Shelf Awareness - love that newsletter - and they found it on the blog Brain Pickings, as you will see. (And Brain Pickings got it from a book of Ursula Nordstrom's letters that I now MUST read.) This is a great answer to all those people who wonder - out loud - why I "still" read children's books. As my hero might have said, it's what I do.
"I was taken out to luncheon and offered, with great ceremony, the opportunity to be an editor in the adult department. The implication, of course, was that since I had learned to publish books for children with considerable success perhaps I was now ready to move along (or up) to the adult field. I almost pushed the luncheon table into the lap of the pompous gentleman opposite me and then explained kindly that publishing children's books was what I did, that I couldn't possibly be interested in books for dead dull finished adults, and thank you very much but I had to get back to my desk to publish some more good books for bad children."
--
Ursula Nordstrom, who was head of Harper's department of books for boys and girls from 1940 to 1973 (from the book
Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, which was showcased by the
Brain Pickings blog).
Last summer I began to forge a theory about the what-next in young adult books. In time the 2011 National Book Award finalists were named, the 2011 Best Of lists were put forward, and the 2011 Printz and Newbery slates were unveiled. Throughout it all, the theory held. Today I am grateful to
Shelf Awareness for sharing my thoughts in a story that begins like this:
For reasons both maddeningly obvious and impossibly elusive, young adult literature is particularly prone to categorization and trends--fenced in by labels, discriminated for or against, sold according to headline. Teeth sink. Wings ascend. Murderous games hold court. Landscapes are annihilated, and then annihilated again. It's a package deal.
Please read the whole
here. I'm interested in your thoughts, of course. Where do you think the future lies?
So, we are powerless yet again, after Saturday's Epic October Snowstorm. I'm posting from my town's municipal center. (Free wifi and Starbucks, yay!) No worries. Other than the heartbreak of seeing so many beautiful old trees destroyed, none landed on our house, fortunately. And, we have a generator and wood stove. Water and heat rock! (We also managed to polish off all the Halloween candy ourselves, since they cancelled trick or treating. Well-deserved chocolate, I say!)
I'm thrilled to be posting a few lovely reviews for Maggie & Oliver. One from last week's Shelf Awareness, (scroll down), and one in the November/December issue of The Horn Book Magazine! Here's a snippet:
"This is Victoriana with no steampunk shenanigans and no tongues in cheeks, just well-orchestrated, straightforward storytelling for newish readers– with a bonus of warm pencil drawings reminiscent of Lois Lenski."
Wow. (Lois Lenski!) Just wow. Thank you, Shelf Awareness and Horn Book!
Yesterday, on Facebook, I was talking about how much I love
Shelf Awareness—the rightness of tone, the clean-ness of look, the clarity of opinion, the depth of coverage. It's a very fine publication. We readers are lucky it's out there. If you don't already subscribe, please subscribe. It's free, and it's a happiness feeling.
Today, I'm singing the praises of
Publishing Perspectives, the brainchild of one Edward Nawotka. This internationally focused bastion of up-to-the-minute publishing news is really quite fascinating and feels (is there another way to say this?) delightfully new.
Today, for example,
Publishing Perspectives has stories with titles ranging from "The Power of Innovation in Publishing" to "What Role Does Social Networking Have in Scholarly Publishing?" to "Building Online Communities for Teen Readers." The voices of agents, publishers, editors, and technocrats can all be found here, and (again) the slant is decidedly global.
My thanks to the entirely fantastic Ellen Trachtenberg of Braintree PR for pointing me toward this magazine. Sometimes you just make the right decisions in your life, and having Ellen along on this publishing journey has most assuredly been a right one.
These brilliant words on historical fiction—what it should do, why it matters—come by way of
Andrew Miller, by way of the Guardian, by way of Shelf Awareness. In all that I write that looks back, I am, like Miller, looking at now. He says it better than I ever could:
As a boy I understood perfectly that history is not something apart from us, sealed off. It is in our blood, our music, our language, the buildings we pass on the way to work. And at its best, historical fiction is never a turning away from the Now but one of the ways in which our experience of the contemporary is revived. Janus-like, such books look both to the past and to the present, and there is no need to laboriously draw out the parallels for they suggest themselves, inevitably and plentifully.
I found out from my daily infusion of book news on Shelf Awareness (sign up for the new twice weekly readers' newsletter to find out what's new on bookstore and library shelves!) that a book on why we must settle Mars will be discussed tomorrow on Science Friday on NPR. My visceral reaction was "Why can't things be the way they always were?" And then my brain adjusted and my second thought was, "How is that - the way things always were - when nothing stays the same?" There is the sum and total of my profound thoughts for the day.
I've discovered that if you do something the same way twice and it is successful, everyone involved remembers it as "we always had marshmallow fluff fights on the Summer Solstice!" Oh wait! That is a brilliant idea. Plans are underway for a Marshmallow Fluff "fight" for June 21st, 2012! Mark your calendars, NOW, boys and girls! Details to be announced.
Now where was I? Oh yes, profound thoughts... My brain is wired to be nostalgic for the oddest things, sunlight on the hillside where a house now stands. I will never relive that particular day, when I was twelve, and I looked out the kitchen window and saw the late afternoon sun on the tall grasses on the hillside. So much has changed since then. There is an addition on my parents' house that blocks the view from that window. Someone built a house on that hillside. I am a little taller, much heavier and a whole lot grayer than I was decades ago.
But someday someone else will look out the window of that addition and become nostalgic for the way the light reflects in the windows of that "new" house.
 |
| The class of 2001-02 pose! |
Last week, my husband and I visited an old grist mill -
Illicks Mill - not far from our home. It is being rehabilitated as an "environmental education center" by the students of Liberty High School. When I was in high school, teens, mostly from Liberty, and a handful of adults who led and motivated us, rehabbed that very same building as a coffee house and entertainment venue. Bob Thompson was our guru and the driving force behind this movement.
Back then (in the late 1960s) we felt like heroes because we cleaned out years and years of pigeon poop and we put in safe floors and windows. Back then we could not believe that we collected enough money to put in bathrooms on the ground floor. The mill race and its entrance and exit were still in place all those many years ago. We planned on using hydroelectric power from the water wheel.
 |
| Trains pass on the OTHER side! |
By: Maryann Yin,
on 3/7/2011
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Bethanne Patrick (pictured, via) has joined Shelf Awareness. According to the publishing site, Patrick will serve as “editor of our upcoming consumer publication.”
We reached out to the site, but no more details were offered about the new publication. Patrick is known as The Book Maven on Twitter and has written two books for National Geographic. Her book reviews have appeared in a number of publications, including O the Oprah Magazine and The Washington Post.
Here’s more from Shelf Awareness: “From 2008 until early 2011, Bethanne hosted The Book Studio for WETA-PBS, an online author interview show. She was a contributing editor to Publishers Weekly, editor of AOL Books from 2004-2007 and from 2001-2004 was an editor for Pages magazine, where she wrote the ‘Global View’ column.”
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
By: John Mark Boling,
on 1/30/2009
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As the excitement mounts over next month's publication of Sima's Undergarments for Women , Shelf Awareness featured a Q&A with the author, Ilana Stanger-Ross, in today's Book Brahmin piece:
Ilana Stanger-Ross grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. She holds an undergraduate degree from Barnard College and an M.F.A. from Temple University and is currently a student midwife at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine. She has received several prizes for her fiction, including a Timothy Findley Fellowship, and her work has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Lilith magazine, the Globe and Mail and the Walrus magazine, among others. Her new novel, Sima's Undergarments for Women, is a February Overlook Press publication.
On your nightstand now:
I covet a nightstand. But on the floor between my bed and my bedroom door is a more or less upright stack of books, including John Updike's Pigeon Feathers, Tony Horowitz's A Voyage Long and Strange, Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and Maureen Freeley's Enlightenment. I read a few of the Updike stories while watching my daughters in the bath the other night, and they're incredibly rich and almost unbearably sad. The others are all still in the good-intention stage.
Favorite book when you were a child:
If I'm Lost, How Come I Found You? by Walter Olesky. It's hard to pick one favorite, but that was the first chapter book I read on my own. It was a Christmas gift from my second grade teacher--we all were given one book to read over the holidays, and I chose that one out of the grab-bag. I loved it. I no longer remember the plot other than it involved a lost child and some heartwarming adventures, but I do remember the enormous sense of pride in reading a chapter book entirely on my own.
Book you've faked reading:
Oh, I don't fake. But I have perhaps let on that I liked certain experimental books more than I did. Barthes comes to mind. Also Moby Dick--I skipped the whaling detail parts.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen. If you haven't read it--go read it right now. Now. It's a slim novella--you can be through it in an hour, easy, though you'll want to sit and savor it if you can. There's an Alice Walker blurb on my paperback edition. She writes, "Every time I read Tell Me a Riddle it breaks my heart." I can't say it better.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Vox by Nicholas Baker. I was in seventh grade and found myself drawn to the hot-pink cover. Or maybe that's just the excuse I gave myself after devouring the first few pages in the chain bookstore near my junior high. Pretty shocking material for a seventh grader--the hot pink meant something on that one.
Book that changed your life:
Our Bodies, Our Selves by the Boston Women's Health Collective. As a 13-year-old at summer camp, I pored over it along with all the other pre-teen campers. It was my first introduction to women-centered care, healthy sexuality, queer-positive thinking, etc. I'm currently studying to be a midwife, and I can trace my interest in women's health at least in part back to those bunk bed study sessions.
Favorite line from a book:
In To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Ramsay is trying to remember a poem. And the line she remembers, which apparently comes from a poem written by a not particularly well-regarded poet Woolf knew, is "And all the lives we ever lived, and all the lives to be, are full of trees and changing leaves." Isn't that lovely and true? I first read To The Lighthouse in high school, and that little rhyme has stayed with me. (Though, like Mrs. Ramsay herself, I am forever doomed to not remember the rest of the poem.)
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. I read it over a few days while sitting in a rocking chair in our Toronto apartment, my then-infant daughter Eva asleep across my lap. I loved the novel and couldn't put it down, but more than just the wonder of that story I want to revisit the moments during which I read it: winter outside, warm inside, my first baby (now four) asleep against me, and nothing to do but rock and read the most wonderful adventure.
By:
Aline Pereira,
on 12/7/2008
Blog:
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This morning while I was catching up on email, there was a post on Shelf Awareness that stopped my coffee cup in midair. Quoting from Molly Flatt’s question posed on the Guardian Book Blog, it asked “What was your favorite book before you learned to read?”
And here was mine–although there were many others read aloud to me that I loved, The Saggy Baggy Elephant by Kathryn and Byron Jackson and illustrated by the inimitable Gustaf Tenggren is the one that I pored over, took to bed with me, “read” aloud from memory, and it still delights me when I see it. What was your favorite (or favourite?) pre-literate book?
Okay, I really intended to try to write up some book reviews today (it's been a long time, have you noticed?) -- but that may have to wait until next week, as time is of the essence as usual. But I can't resist pulling this data from today's Shelf Awareness:
Bookstore sales in November were $1.186 billion, up 7.5% from $1.103 billion in sales in November 2006, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. For the year to date, bookstore sales have been $14.654 billion, up 0.8% from $14.532 billion in the first 11 months of 2006. This marks the fifth month in a row that bookstore sales were up over the same period last year--and the second month in a row that year-to-date sales have topped last year's comparable figures.
Okay, it's a small increase, and a short-term trend. But it does seem to me to challenge the idea that things are just eternally spiraling downward for the book industry, and especially for bookstores. Note that "under Census Bureau definitions, bookstore sales are of new books and do not include "electronic home shopping, mail-order, or direct sale" or used book sales." So this is just brick and mortar stores, with sales this year better than the year before. Hooray!
Friday I'm in Poughkeepsie at BookStream (and keep an eye out for some cool announcements from there soon!) I'll be back with some book reviews on Monday. Happy reading!
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Beth, thank you. Your incandescent writing is a gift to me and many others. Thank you for sharing your gifts.