A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Tag: Young Adult Literature
When the Writing Takes Over the Writer
Louise Fitzhugh, author of Harriet the Spy, and the poet James Merrill were joined by friendship, craft, and graphomania: the compulsion to write.
Beverly Cleary Forever (1916–2021)
Working as a children’s librarian in a “one-library town,” Cleary, age 23, found bored boys asking, “Where are the books about kids like us?”
E. B. White’s “Plain Style” @75
It might seem self-evident that White the author practiced what Strunk and White the style gurus preached, but the truth is more complicated.
Digging up Whiteness
We may imagine that young people are innocent of the implications of race and class in American culture, that they can grow up in a kind of bubble of protection, safely insulated from the vexed and ...
Baldwin’s Children
James Baldwin’s recently reissued picture book, Little Man, Little Man, positions itself within a larger textual world. In this sweet and lively story of four-year-old TJ and his friends on a summer ...
Power, Poison, Pain, and Joy
Sitting atop a police car beneath an oversized American flag, Kendrick Lamar opened the 2015 BET awards with his single “Alright.” “We hate the po-po ...
The Earnest Elfin Dream Gay
The guy behind the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” phenomenon has regrets. In a 2007 review of Elizabethtown, film critic Nathan Rabin coined this term to contextualize ...
On Our Nightstands: July 2018
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is ...
We All Must Play “The Westing Game”
In the beginning was Sunset Towers. By which I mean, at the beginning of what I quickly came to think of as my reading life: whatever came before, whether read ...
On Our Nightstands: June 2018
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is ...
Harry Potter’s Scar, or Book Recs from a Columbine Grad
I graduated from Columbine in 1999; I was a senior at the time of the shooting, 19 years ago today ...
Queer Your Own Adventure
“BEWARE and WARNING!” So heralds the front page of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, wildly popular in the 1980s and 1990s. “This book is ...
The YA Resistance
With tedious regularity, cultural commentators turn up their noses at Young Adult fiction, grumbling that it allows readers who should know better to indulge in “escapism, instant gratification, and ...
Coming of Age with Philip Pullman
People really like Philip Pullman’s characters. One of my best friends gave his daughter the middle name Lyra after Lyra Belacqua, the heroine of Pullman’s His ...
The 90-Second Newbery: An Interview with James Kennedy
“Trade and plum-cake forever, huzza!” So said John Newbery, the 18th-century ...
Empathy Is Not Enough
Almost 30 years ago, education researcher and children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop introduced an analogy that has been widely embraced by the librarians, teachers, artists, and scholars ...
Body Projects: The Killer Makeover in Recent YA Dystopias
As the Hunger Games begin, the makeover—that staple of reality television—is itself made over from dream into nightmare. Forced to fight to the death against other teens on live TV, contestants such ...