YA Lit
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Honest About the Body
At the Guardian, Sarah Hughes profiles young adult author Louise O’Neill, whose novels Only Ever Yours and Asking For It have received acclaim for embracing “dark themes” surrounding body image, sex, and social media: When I wrote Only Ever Yours it was at a time when I was…
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The Rumpus Interview with Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Producer Jeff Sommerville, director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, and the cast of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl discuss their movie that went to Sundance and beyond.
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Would You Rather Babysit Cathy Ames or Christine Hargensen?
What do Yukio Mishima, Tana French, Shirley Jackson, and John Steinbeck have in common? They’re the masterminds behind a couple of the most evil fictional youngsters of all time, according to a list compiled by British bookstore Abebooks. The list…
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The Rumpus Interview with Matthew Baker
“Master fictioneer” Matthew Baker talks about his new middle grade novel, If You Find This, artists as tricksters, his favorite comic strips, and why children are still capable of believing in impossible things.
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Conversations with Literary Ex-Cons: Jack Gantos
Jack Gantos discusses the sense of “delusional invincibility” he had in 1970s New York that led him to prison—and then on to a career as an award-winning children’s book author.
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The Rumpus Interview with Daniel José Older
Author Daniel José Older talks about his new novel, Shadowshaper, noir influence in urban fantasy, gentrification, white privilege and the publishing industry, and why we need diverse books, now more than ever.
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Where We’ve Been
It’s hard to enjoy reading Pride and Prejudice for the umpteenth time when the stack of books on your bedside table keeps reminding you of all the cultural capital you have yet to consume. Flavorwire’s Sarah Seltzer wonders why we…
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YA’s Last Taboo
Sex scenes in YA, the kind that (gulp) turn us on and make our cheeks flush and get our hearts racing, have never been more important than they are now. Stories that give protagonists flesh and bone and heart and…
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The Fault in Our Sentences
Hit young adult novels may spread like wildfire, but they don’t grow on trees. The Times profiles Julie Strauss-Gabel, a YA editor known for whipping her writers into shape: The last thing you want is an author saying, ‘That’s what’s…
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Autism on the Page
Even if we already know our identity, proper representation helps us accept that identity. It’s well-established that negative/no representation has awful effects on self-esteem. When we see no one like us—or when we’re only ever the troubled sibling, never the…
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Girl Not in Your MFA
That Guy in Your MFA is neither a guy nor a student in an MFA program. He’s actually a woman, Dana Schwartz, a Brown University undergraduate. Schwartz also runs the twitter Dystopian YA Novel that satirizes series like Divergent. She tells…
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The Freedom of Fiction
At Booth, Susan Lerner interviews Jonathan Franzen about a range of subjects including the influence of the YA novel, social media, and the different “forms of exploration” associated with essays and fiction. On the latter subject Franzen says: I think fiction…