young adult literature
-
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…
-
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…
-
Not-So-Young Adults
Good news! Early reports show that book sales are up 4.9 percent in 2014. Who can we thank for this Christmas miracle? Adults who read e-book versions of YA novels, that’s who. Sales are up by a dramatic 53 percent…
-
The Rumpus Saturday Essay: Stain
It’s hard to remember why I was silent. Maybe, like some of the women only now reporting they were raped by Bill Cosby decades ago, I was afraid I wouldn’t be believed.
-
The Rumpus Interview with Maxwell Neely-Cohen
Maxwell Neely-Cohen discusses smart teens, furious parents, the apocalypse, and how our screens change how we see the world.
-
The Birth of the Young Adult
For the New Yorker, Jon Michaud reveals how S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, a staple in middle school and high school classes, came to define the young adult genre: “The Outsiders died on the vine being sold as a drugstore paperback,”…
-
Henry James & The Great YA Debate
Responding to the ongoing debate about whether or not American literature is saturated with young adult fiction (and if adults should read these novels), Christopher Beha, in the New Yorker, addresses A.O. Scott’s recent essay in the New York Times…
-
YA Television
This summer’s debate over young adult literature has raised questions ranging from whether adults should read YA to what even counts as thee genre in the first place. The New Yorker’s television critic Emily Nussbaum extends these questions to the…
-
All Grown Up
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has a creepy new book cover presumably intended to attract older readers, giving another stir to the pot of YA literature that may or may not be OK for adults to read. In the New…
-
YA Shaming
Young adult fiction has never been more popular among grownup-adults—more than half of YA books are sold to people over the age of 18. There isn’t anything wrong with the occasional guilty pleasure, or even in indulging in topics that…
-
Queer Characters of Color in YA Novels
As a queer woman of color who writes young-adult fiction, Malinda Lo “was a little bit taken aback by the sheer paucity of books I could find about queer characters of color.” If you, too, have been seeking those sorts…
-
A Reader’s Guide to YA Novels
Upworthy has an exhaustive (but not at all exhausting) list of young-adult books besides the Harry Potter series for the teenager in your life (or you—no judgment!). Historical fiction (The Book Thief, Island of the Blue Dolphins), utopian/dystopian fiction (The Giver, The House…