Graham Marks reports from Bologna:
While US and UK publishers are working in harmony everywhere you look, there is an element of disbelief from across the Atlantic at our retail trade’s discount policy... ...
ACHUKA: March 2006 Archives
Questions for Naomi Wolf - Young Adult Fiction - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times
Naomi Wolf responds to questions (not from ACHUKA readers who have been strangely, if familiarly, eticent about responding) about her essay in The New York Times Book Review (blogged below) about a controversial genre of novels aimed at teenage girls.
Highly Recommended
Telegraph | Arts | Who scares wins
Telegraph feature on Darren Shan
Horror is the hottest genre in children's fiction, and Darren Shan's guesome stories sell by the millions. James Delingpole plucks up the courage to meet him...
Recommended
The ever-inventive author-illustrator Shoo Rayner is inviting people to think early for Christmas, and giving them the opportunity to present someone with a book personally dedicated to them.
Rayner is just about to start work on the artwork for a series about a boy whose family are the only humans on the planet Hammerhead. All his school friends are aliens, so there's lots of scope for misunderstanding and inter-species faux pas!
The dedication is up fro grabs on eBay. Rayner wirtes: "This is your chance to get a book dedicated to yourself or someone else. Could this be the perfect Christmas present? The book is scheduled to come out later this year."
Young Adult Fiction: Wild Things - New York Times
Naomi Wolf weighs in with a lengthy New York Times critique of three series aimed at young teenage girls:
Gossip Girl, A-LIst and Clique
while the tacky sex scenes in them are annoying, they aren't really the problem. The problem is a value system in which meanness rules, parents check out, conformity is everything and stressed-out adult values are presumed to be meaningful to teenagers. The books have a kitsch quality — they package corruption with a cute overlay.
...
The great reads of adolescence have classically been critiques of the corrupt or banal adult world. It's sad if the point of reading for many girls now is no longer to take the adult world apart but to squeeze into it all the more compliantly. Sex and shopping take their places on a barren stage, as though, even for teenagers, these are the only dramas left.
Highly Recommended
please comment - here or on ACHUKACHAT
Guardian Unlimited Arts | Film & Music | We're jammin': Benjamin Zephaniah
We're jammin': Benjamin Zephaniah
'I get rhythms from kung fu, boxing ... even car indicators'
Guardian feature about Benjamin Zephaniah, with link to mp3 file...
Scotsman.com News - Features - Drawing up a world of fun and adventure
[Fardell's] debut novel, The 7 Professors of the Far North, followed the adventures of 11-year-old Sam Carnegie as he arrives in Edinburgh for a holiday with Professor Ampersand and his great-niece and nephew and ends up on the ride of his life. Published two years ago by Faber & Faber, it sold more than 32,000 in the UK (a debut paperback is said to be doing well if it hits 6000) and 13,000 in the US thanks to its mix of inventions, secrets and eccentric geniuses...
Guardian Unlimited Arts | Arts news | I should be so literary...
Kylie Minogue follows in Madonna's footsteps as children's author
Visions of a little girl's utopia - Education News - theage.com.au
Feature about the author of the Milly Molly Mandy stories
If I say that Joyce Lankester Brisley is the author of a series of children's books that have never been out of print since the first book was published in 1928 and have been translated into many languages, most readers will be puzzled. "Who is she? Never heard of her." That's because over time, Brisley has been paid perhaps the greatest compliment for a writer; she has become invisible, if not as anonymous as the unknown individuals who first narrated the stories of Cinderella and The Three Bears. Her books live on, though their author died in 1978 and her name is rarely recognised.The Milly-Molly-Mandy books began almost by accident...
The Jakarta Post - 'Parents just let their children watch TV'
Children in Indonesia are not acquiring the reading habit because books are too expensive and parents are too busyto read to them, according to this brief article:
Much to the consternation of observers, few children here seem to spend much time reading. These same observers like to blame parents for failing to instill the reading habit in their children at an early age by providing them books or reading to them. Parents respond by saying there is a lack of quality children's books here, and books that are good are simply too pricey. The Jakarta Post spoke to residents about the issue....
Here's a link to an mp3 download of a talk given by Adele Geras at a Guardian World Book Day event...
one of the high points of the day was a talk from acclaimed children's author Ad? Geras (whose latest novel, Ithaka, is longlisted for this year's Carnegie Medal) on her own experience of writing for children. Click here to listen to her fascinating - and extremely entertaining - talk on your computer (MP3; 18), or paste http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/podcast.xml into the Podcasts bit of iTunes or your RSS reader, to subscribe to the Culture Vulture feed and receive all the Vulture's podcasts as they become available.
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Google's literary land-grab
Bloomsbury Publisher Nigel Newton calls for a boycott of the Google search engine in protest at its plans to scan books
I call upon internet users worldwide to boycott the Google search engine until it ceases to scan books in America without prior permission, and desists from its mission to place ambient advertising on the great literary works. Switch your search engine from Google to MSN or Yahoo today, until you hear Google has withdrawn from the type of activities that have been described in another context as acts of "kleptomania".... ....
ACHUKA will continue to link to the Google search engine for the time being.
The Alien Online - Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror News, Reviews, Articles and more...
Profile of Hand Of The Devil author, Dean Vincent Carter, with link to his website.
Recommended
Mr & Mrs Smith my idea: author - Film - Entertainment - smh.com.au
A New Zealand author wants to sue the makers of the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie movie Mr and Mrs Smith for stealing the story idea from his children's book. Children's author Gavin Bishop said the film's plot was very similar to a book he wrote for schools in 1997 titled The Secret Lives of Mr and Mrs Smith...
Telegraph | News | Third of children are never read a book at bedtime
More than 20 years after children lost Listen With Mother, new research suggests that the end may also be in sight for reading with her. One in three parents do not read to their children before tucking them up each night, and one in 10 admits that they never read a bedtime story, according to a study released yesterday....
