Allow me to present a hypothesis: Dan Brown is the Anne Hathaway of authors. Hard-working, serious about his craft (even if others aren't), with lots and lots of money to show for his work. And people love to hate him as much, and sometimes even more, than they love to love him.
The final movie in the Twilight series is out this week, and the eldest of the four books is now going on 7 years old. My how they grow up fast! What has the equally maligned and adored—yet, either way, incredibly successful—series left us? And what might be next in hyper-popular Y.A.?
Along with Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons and Matt Groening's Life in Hell series, which of course pre-dates The Simpsons, there is a special place reserved in my heart for Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, syndicated from November 18, 1985, to December 31, 1995, and the books that compiled them.
There's a bookish love letter from writer Lois Leveen in The New York Times this week. It is an ode to her adored thesaurus, or, as she titles it, "the king of writerly tools."
"At the C.I.A., [adultery] can be a security issue, since it can make an intelligence officer vulnerable to blackmail, but it is not a crime," write Scott Shane and Charlie Savage in the New York Times. Adultery can also sell books, particularly when the book is a gushingly reverential ode to the subject with whom the writer is said to be having an affair.
As weather gets weirder (yes, Sandy. Yes, a nor'easter in November), here are a few of the Y.A. and middle-grade books we've relied on in the past for guidance and clarity when our environment appears to go off the rails.
In the book publishing industry, Sandy's impact has been felt, with downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn stores closed, tens of thousands of dollars in damages sustained, and struggles to regain basic functionality and get things moving again in the business of publishing in general. And then there are the writers.
There may be one small upside to the power going out. You can finally sit down and read the books you've been studiously ignoring.
Rupert Murdoch doesn't want to let the rumored Penguin and Random House merger happen so easily, so he's put in a last minute bid to buy Penguin for $1.6 billion. In Cash.
News of a potential Penguin-Random House merger has birthed a "binders full of women"-level meme on the literary Internet. In a (very unscientific) Twitter poll on which absurd name the new company should adopt, Random Penguin wins by a landslide.
In the lead-up to that scariest of holidays (no, not Thanksgiving with the family), I canvassed some of our favorite authors and writers and book lovers for a trip down Memory OMG I AM SLEEPING WITH ALL THE LIGHTS ON Lane—to find out their favorites.
Publishing's Big Six might soon be consolidated to a Big Five. Representatives from Pearson have confirmed that they're in talks to sell Penguin to Bertelsmann, which frightens industry professionals already battered by sweeping layoffs.
Pippa Middleton is kind of the best, right? But not everyone likes Pippa! Not everyone is approving of her new status as writer, a party-planning and advice writer, to be precise.
There's a new book out this week from bestselling memoirist Julie Klam, and this one diverges a bit from her two recent books, You Had Me at Bark and Love at First Woof. For one, it's about human friendships, not interspecies ones.
Speak, a Y.A. novel written by Laurie Halse Anderson and published by Farrar Straus Giroux in October of 1999, tells of the aftermath of the rape of Melinda Sordino, who, in her freshman year in high school, nearly stops speaking altogether in her struggle to deal with what's happened to her.
Fifty Shades of Grey, according to The Guardian's Paris correspondant Kim Willsher, is not enamoring the French un iota of its alleged sexiness.
Y.A. author Mary O'Connell plans to feature J.D. Salinger's most-famous character, Holden Caulfield, in her upcoming book for adults, In the Rye. How would Salinger have felt about this?
Today, Charlotte's Web, the most famous book by the masterful E.B. White, has turned 60. It is no worse for wear in terms of readability and resonance, even amid a world of dystopias, fantasies, and futuristic plots and themes.
Just a handful of the Y.A. and middle-grade books I read while growing up in the '80s featured overweight or obese characters. Usually they weren't the protagonists. Since then, things have changed a bit, but Skinny, by debut Y.A. novelist Donna Cooner, promises to bring some new conversations to the category.
Jane Austen fans are hardly wilting wallflowers but instead an avid array of people who dress up in period costumes and talk passionately about favorite books and miscellany from their beloved author despite it being nearly 200 years after her death.
Writer Kate Milford and I sat down to talk with beloved children's author Lois Lowry upon the release of her latest novel, Son, the final book in The Giver quintet.
Jessica Grose's debut novel, Sad Desk Salad, featuring the character of Alex Lyons, a writer for "Chick Habit, an increasingly popular women's website" (a la Jezebel and Slate's Double X, both sites at which Grose blogged), is out this week from William Morrow/Harper Collins.
Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR's Fresh Air and an author herself, exemplifies the reading life. For her, that means limiting her online reading and getting up as early as 4 a.m. to tackle the more than 100 books delivered to her house weekly.
On this very Friday 25 years ago, The Princess Bride, a movie featuring the beautiful Robin pre-Penn Wright and the dashing Cary Elwes (whom hordes of teen girls would go on to have enormous crushes on), was released.
There is no end to what the erotic Fifty Shades book series might do, even as we thought or rather hoped the fervor had faded, as least somewhat, for other fare. Still, there are 32 million copies sold in the U.S. They're not going anywhere, yet.
Until J.K. Rowling's new novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, comes out on Thursday at its worldwide on-sale time of 8 a.m. GMT (so 3 a.m. ET and 12 a.m. PT), it is strictly guarded by her publisher's non-disclosure requirements. But the A.P. has released their review of the book anyway.
Drinking Diaries is an essay collection based on the blog of the same name started by Leah Odze Epstein and Caren Osten Gerszberg in 2009. The common thread for the stories within is booze.
Did you hear that Monica Lewinsky is getting an eight-figure book deal for her juicy tell-all? We'd take that with a grain of salt.
As Teen Lit Rocks' Sandie Angulo Chen puts it, "To be honest, some of the sexiest books -- to me -- don't necessarily go all the way."
The chorus of "poor Monica Lewinsky"—alone and miserable, a memory of something indecent and tawdry in America, a soiled Gap dress, a beret, something-something to do with the commander-in-chief, that man, Bill Clinton—is going to change with her tell-all. But can it ever change for the better?
Inspired by Edwards' popular Tumblr, Fake Science, his recent book Fake Science 101 follows in the ever-growing trend of parodies and blogs-to-books. "Science is the beginning of a conversation," he writes. We talked to him to find out what the fake stuff can teach us about the real—in science, of course, but also in the broader book world.
According to a new study from Bowker Market Research, adults make up the majority of people buying young adult fiction, and most of those grownups are buying the teen-targeted books for themselves. This doesn't surprise me—after all, I write a column called Y.A. for Grownups.
It's funny that with all the recent talk of book criticism having grown too nice, and reviews potentially being faked (or sometimes too mean), we haven't spent much time discussing the strange business of book blurbs.
That old aphorism, "You can't judge a book by its cover," it turns out, is completely and totally untrue. We took a look at a few of our most adored childhood reads and compared the covers we pored over then with earlier covers and some current ones, too.
Ten years after someone first wrote a Wikipedia entry for Philip Roth's best-selling novel The Human Stain, published in 2000, the great author has discovered the latest entry and he is not happy. As with many Wikipedia articles, this one includes details that are not wholly agreed upon by all—or, necessarily, any—of those involved.
One of the highly anticipated Y.A. novels this fall is by 22-year-old debut author Jessica Khoury. Out this week from Penguin's Razorbill imprint, it's called Origin, and, with the film rights acquired by Scott Steindorff, it's getting a lot of buzz. It may even be your Hunger Games replacement read of the season.
Just as Amazon's event to announce its new products got underway on Thursday, a federal judge approved a settlement with three major e-book publishers accused of colluding with Amazon's competitors (namely Apple) on prices.
Judy Blume, formative author for generations of girls and boys, is 74. She's still writing and she's still teaching us lessons, this time, about breast cancer in the form of a blog post, that went up today, titled !@#$% Happens.
September brings some shifts in the world of women's magazines. Joanna Coles, Marie Claire's editor in chief since 2006, has been named the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, replacing Kate White, who helmed the world's largest women's magazine for 14 years and is leaving to focus on her established writing and speaking career.
We spoke to Sophie Morgan, the pseudonymous author of the book being described as the "real" Fifty Shades of Grey, about the inevitable comparisons to the best-selling trilogy and what she hopes to accomplish with her memoir, Diary of a Submissive.
Enough of you have gotten in touch to admit your own book-reading characteristics that we feel the Diagnostics Guide deserves an addendum. Herewith, many more types of book readers. Let us know if we left you out.
Shulamith Firestone, the author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, has died at the age of 67, apparently of natural causes, The New York Times' Margolit Fox.
We've been reading review copies all summer, and with the help of some bookseller friends, have compiled this fall preview of teen-and-younger books you won't want to miss.
Paramount Pictures and the son of Mario Puzo, the creator of The Godfather, are in a turf war over the literary rights to the franchise, reports the Associated Press.
The New Yorker's Page-Turner blog includes a book-reader coinage that got us thinking about our reading styles. There, Mark O'Connell confesses his dirty little reading secret: He doesn't finish books; he's a "promiscuous reader." We can think of some other types of book readers, too. Which are you?
Vogue's September issue is so legendary they made a movie about the 840-page September 2007 doorstopper and its 727 ad pages, so the fact that this year's 916-page issue includes 658 pages of ads ought to tell us something, right?
On the Internet, everyone can have an opinion. It is in this place, where backlash can beget backlash on both sides, for those criticized as well as those doling out the negative comments, that the book review now exists. Call it the new equality, for good or for bad. It's not nice and it's not mean, but it is a free for all.
Random House of Canada has launched Hazlitt, a new online magazine that's part of the publisher's revamped digital strategy. This is no Fox News Magazine.
The Giver is one of the books you probably read as a kid, somewhere between late elementary or middle school and early high school, depending on your school and curriculum. Two of us hadn't, though, and finally did.
What's better, the book or the movie? Can the movie ever be as good as the book? The debate is an age-old one, probably existing since the very first screenplay was derived from a popular work, because when we fall in love with books we typically fall hard.
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins has surpassed J.K. Rowling's seven-book Harry Potter series as the best-selling books of all time on Amazon.com.
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