As a curio, I read Melissa de la Cruz’s Blue Bloods, the first of the Blue Blood YA vampire series. I’m certainly not in the right market (wrong sex, too old) but the book does worry me slightly. The blue is not so much royal but a paler shade…
Don’t get me wrong; fast reading fluff [...]
A list I’m on had a link to this interview with Ursula le Guin on the Oregon Live website. Le Guin talks about the Google books settlement which she calls the “Google books grab” but the thing which shocked me was:
“There seems to be nothing to follow at this point except poetry … I do [...]
AS Byatt has an interesting article on Alice in the Guardian as the film opens in the UK on March 5th. As she muses, she comes up with the idea that Alice and her other favourite childhood books are so popular because they encourage the reader to recreate themin their own mind.
The story of Alice [...]
Just a quick note to mention that the new term list for the Oxford Children’s Literature and Youth Culture Colloquium series of seminars has now been posted. I’ve presented and been to a couple of these and they really are good. Shame their not online afterwards though.
I’ve started catching up on some favourite authors who I’d put down whilst trying to finish my own book and finally got around to reading Makers by Cory Doctorow. Right from the top, I think this is Cory’s best novel to date and his most accomplished. Makers is a generational musing on the idea of [...]
Catching up at the moment and heard that Russell Hoban has a new children’s novel coming from Walker books in 2011 called “Soonchild”. The Ocelot Factory website has further details and carries a very brief extract (three paragraphs) but it appears to a fable. Bloomsbury are publishing Angelica Lost and Found next year.
I read Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (Fourth Estate, London 2007) which I’ve had on the reading pile since it came out. There are many elements that I perhaps don’t understand or see yet but the abiding reference is where Bina compares life to the cartoon characters running in the air whilst thinking [...]
Just a quick note but I’ve just finished Jesse Bullington’s The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart for review in Interzone. Although I don’t want to pre-empt what I’ve just written for the review before it appears, this is one of those books which more than makes the reader just think. It is one of [...]
Just finished, at long last, the first draft of my first book. Now on to the second draft (after a short break)
I’ve raved about Michelle Zink’s Prophecy of the Sisters before on the blog as one of those really pleasant surprises. She kindly answered some questions about the book and future plans having just come off tour in the US.
What inspired you to write Prophecy of the Sisters?
Many of my ideas begin with an old myth [...]