- Anindita points to all the best places to get the lowdown on good SXSW panels to vote for.
- This is entirely awesome: Fantasy author Alma Alexander is enlisting the help of teens to rewrite a 500-page novel she wrote when she was 14 years old. The project will be chronicled here.
- Great post from Kiersten White about why she writes YA: "Everything is huge and new and important, but you still get to be silly, you still get to screw up, you still get to goof off. I love the raw emotions of adolescence, the slipperiness of self, the angst of trying to figure out where you fit and where you want to fit."
- The divine Andrea Seigel is running a giveaway competition for a copy of her new novel, The Kid Table, which will be out from Bloomsbury in September. (It's fabulous. And Andrea is one of my favorite, favorite writers working today.) All you have to do to win is write about what one of her tattoos means to you–it's a pear wearing a thong. You also win a personalized Perler figurine. Contest open until Aug. 24.
- Follow along as our favorite Colleen Lindsay vanquishes Murray, aka stage-one breast cancer. Leave sappy comments over there at your peril. What I want to know more about is her awesome new job at Penguin.
- The Washington Post has a piece on pseudonyms–which doesn't really go into the forced pseudonym to revive a career or ditch a bad sales record phenom, more and more common these days–from which I learned that JD Robb sometimes outsells Nora Roberts, and The Bell Jar was originally published under the name Victoria Lucas because Plath feared her mother's reaction.
- I really need to catch up on Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels. I haven't read one since Sarah picked Case Histories for the LitBlog Coop back in the day.
- Professor Nana linked to this list of starred review children's and YA titles up through July from PW, with how many stars each has received. Looking at this, I begin to understand the conventional wisdom that floats around regarding how many stars a book needs before it really starts to matter. (I have heard three bandied about often. –Obviously, any starred review is excellent, though; this is purely in crazy business terms.)
- I finally got around to YS Lee's A Spy in the House, the first in her YA series about Mary Quinn, a girl saved from the gallows, schooled and starting life as an operative in a secret women's detective agency in Victorian London. The second, A Body at the Tower, released last week, and Lee went on a great blog tour where she talked about should-be-more-famous ladies of the period and writery topics; you can find links to all the posts at the final Book Smugglers stop.
3 thoughts on “Sunday Hangovers”
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I just curious..why not link to the original PW article on starred reviews? Professor Nana doesn’t have a list, she has a link………..
Because I was too lazy to search it out and she had the list rather than the link to the source when I put up this post? Will correct.
Oh, I love the Jackson Brodie novels so much. They’re just shot through with this really elegant tension, this sense that even the bright and lovely moments are hanging on the verge of something dark, but even then they’re not depressing books, just… apprehensive, maybe. And so beautifully written.