utilicon:

Alvin Schwartz’s collection of haunting tales Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is an important gateway drug into the world of the supernatural. And as terrifying as the stories about brides locked forever in an attic trunk truly are, it’s the artwork by Stephen Gammell that kept you up at night.

Are you shitting me? It’s the wicked illustrations that got my 10yr old apathetic ass into reading more books; WTH people?!

Recent outrage in the tumblrverse!

So this was from Jan 10 of last year. Anyone have guesses for what will win this year?

By the way, the above-mentioned book sounds marvelous -

“A young adult novel about a transgender girl—told from the perspective of the straight boy who falls for her—“Almost Perfect” is exceptional. The writing is sensitive, haunting and revelatory,” said Stonewall Children’s and Young Adult Award committee chair Lisa Johnston.

- I definitely want to read it!

It’s the Huffington Post, buuut it’s still a solid meditation on how time, age, memory, and expectation can affect the experience of re-reading the book.

Interesting - at the end of the blog, he encourages others to share their experiences in re-reading old favorites… and it looks like he’s responded to pretty much everyone’s comments!

Long-term followers of this blog know that I love to blog/reblog art & writing BY young adults!

bibliofeminista:

Our novel, Stranger, has five viewpoint characters; one, Yuki Nakamura, is gay and has a boyfriend. Yuki’s romance, like the heterosexual ones in the novel, involves nothing more explicit than kissing.

An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us.

The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.

Rachel replied, “Making a gay character straight is a line in the sand which I will not cross. That is a moral issue. I work with teenagers, and some of them are gay. They never get to read fantasy novels where people like them are the heroes, and that’s not right.”

The agent suggested that perhaps, if the book was very popular and sequels were demanded, Yuki could be revealed to be gay in later books, when readers were already invested in the series.

We knew this was a pie-in-the-sky offer—who knew if there would even be sequels?—and didn’t solve the moral issue. When you refuse to allow major characters in YA novels to be gay, you are telling gay teenagers that they are so utterly horrible that people like them can’t even be allowed to exist in fiction.

LGBTQ teenagers already get told this. They are four times more likely than straight teenagers to attempt suicide. We’re not saying that the absence of LGBTQ teens in YA sf and fantasy novels is the reason for that. But it’s part of the overall social prejudice that does cause that killing despair.

We wrote this novel so that the teenagers we know—some of whom are gay, and many of whom are not white—would be able, for once, to read a fun post-apocalyptic adventure in which they are the heroes. And we were told that such a thing could not be allowed.

This is SO troubling! Props to the authors for speaking out about this since I can’t imagine this is the first time something like this has happened.

I thought this site looked kind of paparazzi-ish at first, but then i realized it was just MTV.

Anyway, a ton of this Young Adult stuff has been littering up my YA tracked tag, but I picked this one because the comments from the YA authors were actually pretty funny. And contradictory.

Also: PATTON OSWALT!?