Publishing News reports that the UK supermarket chain, Sainsbury's, has signed a deal with Jacqueline Wilson and Nick Sharratt to sell an exclusive range of stationery - The Best Freinds range - from September.
ACHUKA: July 2004 Archives
Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Blurring the boundaries
From a Guardian article about the ways a few authors are using the internet creatively:
Ned Vizzini, 24, whose teen novel Be More Chill has just been published in the UK. Faust re-mixed for the age of invasive teen marketing, it casts Mephistopheles as a sentient quantum computer, known as a "squip", which takes up residence in the mind of a dorky teenage boy and advises him how to be cool. To publicise his novel, Vizzini worked with a friend to create websites that pretend squips are real. Google the word squip and you will see links to 15 or so sites with names such as SquipNews and Mothers Against Squips, which was created by a fan. In other words, Vizzini hasn't just extended his novel online, he's opened it up, so readers can add to the story. "It's a little world we've created - the squipiverse," says Vizzini.
Squip News
Celebrity Squip
I Want To Be Cool
Squip Works
SquipFest
News: Weasley dad won't be Minister; Tom Riddle not 'Prince'
JK Rowling has updated her website to address pressing questions about Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince...
Salon.com Books | The funniest children's book ever
Philip Pullman nominates the funniest book ever for Salon:
"The Magic Pudding" is the funniest children's book ever written. I've been laughing at it for 50 years, and when I read it again this morning, I laughed just as much as I ever did.
You'll have to be a Salon subscriber to read the full piece...
Portuguese author Jose Saramago, a Nobel literature laureate, said Sunday he believed the world would be a better place if adults were forced to read children's books.
ACHUKA was subjected to its third hack in as many weeks last night. Key files were removed from the server and replaced with others carrying a cryptic(?) message in Russian(?):
Каучуковые чукакабры захватили мир!!! :)
[Linguists, please translate]
I'm advised that the script which powers the ACHUKA calendar is the most vulnerable part of the site's architecture, and that script has therefore been temporarily disabled. All other parts of the site should be A - OK; if not, please report.
I was intending to rethink the EVENTS Calendar listing this summer anyway, as it has not developed into the resource that I hoped it would provide, with only a small number of users actively entering event details. I have even had publishers objecting to publication of party/event details, on the basis that it puts them in an embarrassing position with people who do not receive invitations. There's little point in maintaining a section of the site which is not seen as useful and, moreoever, considered by a few to be a positive nuisance.
The Sunday Times - The Boy With No Shoes by William Horwood, extract
William Horwood, children?s writer, recalls an inspirational teacher who helped drag him out of the darkness of failure, bullying and family rejection... ...
The Boy With No Shoes by William Horwood published August 2nd
J.K.Rowling Official Site - Harry Potter and more
J. K. Rowling has reasssured fans that the sixth Harry Potter title 'remains well on track' in the wake of news that she is pregant with a third child.
This is a piece about a Brian Wildsmith Exhibition in Taiwan:
The works hail not from the UK where Oxford University Press publishes them, nor from Castellaras, France where the Wildsmith family live, but from the Brian Wildsmith Museum in Izukogen, Japan, founded in 1994 to preserve and display his illustrations of famous European fairy tales, nursery rhymes and learning aids.
The New York Times > Books > 'Harry Potter' Inspires a Christian Alternative
Long New York Times piece on G. P. Taylor:
G. P. Taylor, an Anglican vicar, onetime roadie for the Sex Pistols and former all-around sinner, was roaring across the Yorkshire moors on his Yamaha XV1100 in a lightning storm when the idea for his hit Christian children's book, "Shadowmancer," came to him.
Recommended
A feature interview with Eva Ibbotson by Nicholas Tucker in The Independent...
Highly recommended
Times Obituary - Paula Danziger
Paula Danziger - London Times Obituary
The opening paragraph gives the flavour of this peculiarly disdainful obit.
HOLDEN CAULFIELD, in The Catcher in the Rye, has a lot to answer for. Certainly he was not the first American adolescent to commune with his readership about the weight of his woes, but his arrival in 1951 was to inspire a new generation of writers to the exploitation of tales told in a teenage demotic. The lucrative literary sub-genre of young adult fiction became fashionable, and prominent among its exponents, and with an eye fixed upon girl readers, was Paula Danziger.
ACHUKA is not as hot-off-the-press with this news as we would have liked (blame it on end-of-term distractions) but during the splendid Walker Books summer party last night (the picture gallery will be posted tonight) we learnt that Kate Wilson (who has been in charge at Macmillan Children's Books for the entire life of ACHUKA) is moving to Scholastic.
More on this anon.
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | The Bookseller
The Guardian's Bookseller column observed yesterday that the paperback edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has been kep off the #1 spot in the weekly sales chart:
It is a surprise when a JK Rowling novel performs like any other successful title. That is what the paperback of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Bloomsbury) did on its first day in the shops last week, selling 37,000 copies in adults' and children's editions, and just failing to overtake the weekly sales of the two editions of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Vintage/Red Fox).
It is a surprise when a JK Rowling novel performs like any other successful title. That is what the paperback of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Bloomsbury) did on its first day in the shops last week, selling 37,000 copies in adults' and children's editions, and just failing to overtake the weekly sales of the two editions of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Vintage/Red Fox).
ic Wales - Illustrator's solitary paradise
Feature about illustrator Jackie Morris.
A bright-eyed woman with a jolly laugh, Attenborough started her career in publishing, rising eventually to run children's books at Penguin and to a seat on the board. In 1995, she packed it in to take up a portfolio of jobs with charities and committees. One such job was to run the National Year of Reading, established in accordance with Labour's 1997 manifesto commitments, and the contract was granted to the National Literacy Trust whose director Neil McClelland put Attenborough in charge.
A long piece about Liz Attenborough's new campaign to boost young children's speaking and listening skills.
Highly recommended
Roger McGough marks Liverpool becoming European Capital of Culture with a new acrostic. 'The Independent' asks other poets to follow suit...
"...a different kind of fairy tale is making its way to the stage, courtesy of New York-based composer Charles Wuorinen and British poet/librettist James Fenton: Salman Rushdie's "Haroun and the Sea of Stories."
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Drawn to the story
Shirley Hughes, winner of this year's Kate Greenaway Medal, on the importance of illustration...
There is a rich tradition of English illustration. The skill is acquired at the outset by applying yourself assiduously to life drawing, lurking about a lot with a sketchbook and then letting your imagination run riot. If you are attempting to engage an audience with a story, good draughtsmanship has to underpin even the most uninhibited colour technique; it is the muscular framework that holds you up as you trip a light fantastic.
Essential reading...
"Frank Beddor, the American producer of the gross-out movie There's Something About Mary, has transformed Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland into a dark and violent tale of murder and war.
Beddor said his novel, The Looking Glass Wars, was prompted by his hatred of the "terrible girls' book" he was forced to read by his mother and grandmother as a child.
Several of Britain's best-loved children's authors, and the Lewis Carroll Society, are questioning the wisdom of reworking the greats of English literature, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass."
From The Independent, July 5th. Includes comments from Michael Morpurgo, Judith Kerr and Jacqueline Wilson.
News: Harry Potter author receives second honorary university degree
J K Rowling accepted an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh yesterday afternoon.
David Belbin, UK YA author, has written a brilliantly userfriendly guide to buying and sellling on eBay.uk - The eBay Book
Billed as 'The only UK guide to eBay!' I've already noticed that chain booksellers are stocking multiple copies. Belbin is appearing on the Jeremy Vine show, Friday, to promote it.
Piccadilly Press celebrated 21 years in the publishing business last night at a party held at the Savile Club.
Brenda Gardner said that the company's history could be divided into three seven-year phases. The first phase, the 1980s, saw the new company growing rapidly and making healthy profits from its mainly picture book list. On the back of this success the company moved into new offices. Then the bottom fell out of the picture book market and out of the economy generally, making the new decade a period of financial anxiety. (ACHUKA understands that things got bad enough at one stage for Gardner to sell her house and move into the office.) But during the last seven years the company has managed to pay off its debts and to grow again, having established a niche market with its brand of popular teenage fiction.
I've just come hotfoot from ACHUKACHAT where Ingrid Magalinska (the designer of our ACHUKACHICK logo) has asked for advice on how to proceed following the discovery that someone in America has stolen the template for her own webpage and used it as his own...
Have just uploaded ACHUKA's interview with Mal Peet, winner of the Branford Boase Award, together with a short extract from the novel, Keeper.
Long piece by Peter Shawn Taylor on the changing themes of children's literature.
The Scotsman - Critique - Terry's diner
Here's another feautre I missed from the middle of last month - an interview with Terry Pratchett who, though a sponsor of the Brandford Boase Awards, was unable to attend the event earlier this week.
Recommended
ic Newcastle - Learning is a Fine thing
Anne Fine - on Adult Education
I managed the stride across Vauxhall Bridge and up to Victoria station in quick time following the Branford Boase presentations and arrived home an hour earlier than expected, in time for Alan Yentob's documentary (in the BBC's Imagine series) about the 'suitability' of books for older children.
Yentob's films are always enjoyable and any film composed mainly of author interviews cannot fail to make absorbing viewing but, considered as a documentary which had a title something like 'Suitable for children?', the prgramme was infuriatingly messy, jumping about from one thing to another. As if it didn't trust the likes of Pullman and Mark Haddon to have sufficient audience appeal, it gave unnecessary space to a routine sequence about the Victorian view of childhood and Lewis Carroll's 'Alice' and substantial chunks of Salmon Rushdie speaking generally about 'storytelling' but not shedding much light on the question raised by the programme title. The result was that the other interviews - particularly those with Malorie Blackman, Melvin Burgess and a selection of young readers - were both too perfunctory and too erratically distributed in the programme's timeline to amount to anything substantial.
As so often with TV about children's literature - a great opportunity more or less wasted.
Headline news from Sky News - Witness the event
Actual 6th Harry Potter title revealed:
The new book, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, will be the sixth in the multi-million-selling tales of the schoolboy wizard. Author JK Rowling showed visitors the title on her official website just as hoaxers tried to hoodwink fans into believing the new book would be called Harry Potter and the Pillar of Storge.
Rowling's own comment, from her official website...
