“I believe that just as much as teens fear time, adults do as well. It would be selfish of us to think that they can understand and accept our evolution into adulthood much easier than we can. Maybe in reality, teenagers and parents are scared of the same things.” The LARB runs a 15-year-old reader’s honest review of The Fault in Our Stars.
Another Perspective
PEN World Voices Festival
I spent last weekend as a correspondent for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. As such, I covered two events for the organization: Friday night’s ninth annual Translation Slam and Sunday afternoon’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture featuring Sonia Sotomayor. (I also submitted a pretty sweet author photograph, if I do say so myself.) For full multimedia coverage of the entire festival, check out the PEN Live Tumblr.
●
●
Langewiesche on the Chilean Miners
The Outlaw Sea author William Langewiesche has a new ebook out in the “Single” format, Finding the Devil: Darkness, Light, and the Untold Story of the Chilean Mine Disaster, about the 2010 disaster that left 33 miners trapped for nearly two months.
●
●
I Want YOU to be the Next Tournament of Books Judge
Do you have what it takes to be a judge in The Morning News’s annual Tournament of Books? If so, your application better be in by midnight Friday.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Hadley, ESPN, Gladstone
New Yorker darling Tessa Hadley has a new novel out this week, The London Train. Also out is the controversial oral history of ESPN, Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, which reportedly offers up ample doses of insider gossip and bad behavior. And finally, there’s The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media, in which contemporary journalism is explored in a graphic novel format. Here’s a taste.
●
●
Time to Grow Up
What’s behind the rise of the new-adult genre of fiction? You could blame the rise of Millennials, but that would be, as Emily Landau argues in a piece for the Canadian magazine The Walrus, too cheap and reductive to really answer the question. Instead, she says that we should look at NA as fundamentally similar to YA, with the main difference being that NA books portrays characters on the cusp of independence. (Related: we polled a group of high school students to find out their favorite YA books of 2013.)
●
●
We at The Millions Now Trademark “Zuckerberg”
Sorry, everyone who works in publishing. Looks like it’s time to call it quits. Per Facebook’s new user agreement, the firm asserts trademark on the word “book.”