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Spring 2007 Flying Starts: Lizabeth Zindel
Lizabeth Zindel grew up in a literary family that included father Paul Zindel, a former high school chemistry teacher who became a Pulitzer Prize—winning playwright and young adult author.
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Spring 2007 Flying Starts: Siobhan Dowd
Siobhan Dowd styled herself as a writer from the age of seven, when she began embroidering biblical stories as a Catholic school student in London. After university she went into publishing, and then to work for PEN, along the way writing columns, articles, and short stories, and editing two anthologies.
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Spring 2007 Flying Starts
Three fresh voices make their YA debuts.
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Happily Trapped in Borges' Labyrinths: PW Talks to William Gibson
Sci-fi writer William Gibson--author of the forthcoming Spook Country--wrote the preface to New Directions reissue of Jorge Luis Borges' classic Labyrinths. PW talks to Gibson about pretending to be Borges' butler, ghost stories, and why Borges' is good for troubled times.
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Friendly Ghosts: Peter Gizzi
According to Peter Gizzi, being a poet is about "responding to a large sense of dislocation on a daily basis."
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Ramblin' Man: Tom Bissell in Rome
At work in Rome on a book about the afterlives of the apostles, and about to publish the memoir 'The Father of All Things,' Tom Bissell was a hell of a tour guide, slaloming through the frenzied streets like an expert.
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Fall 2006 Flying Starts: Joseph Helgerson
Bullies should be warned never to step foot in Joseph Helgerson's imaginative town of Blue Wing, Minn., along the Mississippi River. They may find themselves transformed into a rhinoceros, which happens to be the meal of choice of a rock troll named Bodacious Deepthink. In Horns & Wrinkles (Houghton), Helgerson's first novel, fiesty heroine Claire must use her wits to save her mean cousin Duke from just such a fate.
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Fall 2006 Flying Starts: Mei Matsuoka
A hamburger boy on the run? Illustrator Mei Matsuoka simply could not resist the artistic possibilities she first saw in the manuscript for Burger Boy (Clarion), Alan Durant's cautionary picture-book tale of junk-food excess. "It really grabbed me as quirky, funny and a little out of the ordinary," she says. "I loved the wacky side of it and as soon as I read [the manuscript] I had images in my head."
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Fall 2006 Flying Starts: Ellen Klages
In 2002, Ellen Klages was not an aspiring novelist; she had never written a novel. Her metier was science fiction short stories—for grown-ups, not kids. So when Viking editor Sharyn November, who had read some of her published work, approached her at an SF convention and said, "You are a children's writer. You need to write me a children's book," Klages was, understandably, taken aback. "I found myself thinking, 'An editor at Viking wants me to write a book for her? What part of that should I ignore?'
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Fall 2006 Flying Starts: Barry Lyga
Barry Lyga fell in love with reading through comic books. Although some grownups told him comics would rot his brain unless he outgrew them, neither thing happened. Lyga went to Yale, where he majored in English, then worked for 10 years in comic book publishing. Lyga credits the comics form with teaching him about plotting and character development, lessons he put to use in writing his first book, The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl (Houghton).
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Fall 2006 Flying Starts
Three authors and one illustator who made notable children's book debuts this fall
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Spring 2006 Flying Starts: Charlie Price
"Mental illness and addiction and writing—don't they go together? Seems like a perfect fit to me," says Charlie Price when asked how the idea for Dead Connection (Roaring Brook/Brodie) came about. His debut novel, which revolves around the disappearance of a high school cheerleader, is peopled with characters from society's fringes: a borderline psychotic 22-year-old, who may have seen the cheerleader leaving school the day of her disappearance; an alcoholic cop; a loner teen who spends his days in the local cemetery communicating with dead children.
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Spring 2006 Flying Starts: Catherine Murdock
The idea for Catherine Gilbert Murdock's first novel came in a dream. She saw a girl playing football against a boy she was in love with. "It was such a graphic image—I saw her in that three-point stance which, at the time, I didn't even know was called a three-point stance—and their eyes met across the line of scrimmage," Murdock recalls.
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Spring 2006 Flying Starts: Sara Varon
Sara Varon never really aspired to having a children's book published. So she's doubly surprised these days that her picture book, Chicken and Cat (Scholastic Press) has attracted a number of admirers in the children's book world.
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Spring 2006 Flying Starts: Dana Reinhardt
When Dana Reinhardt set out to write A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life (Random/Lamb), she knew she wanted to write something about Jewish identity that didn't have anything to do with the Holocaust or anti-Semitism. "I knew I wanted the novel to be about an adopted girl who discovers her biological mother is Jewish, and I knew that sometime during the course of the novel the mother would die. But that's all I knew," the author reflects.
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Spring 2006 Flying Starts: Frances Hardinge
Frances Hardinge's Fly by Night (HarperCollins) is a fantasy/comedy, centering on plucky heroine Mosca Mye and her passionate love of words. That passion is no coincidence, as Hardinge herself is a firm believer in the very real magic of the printed page.
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Spring 2006 Flying Starts: Frank Portman
Imagine this scene. You're in a rock band that has a cult following. Some passionate young corporate rep comes to one of your New York City club gigs and offers you a… book contract? That's pretty much what happened to Frank Portman. Welcome to the true story of his rock and roll road to publishing his first YA novel, King Dork (Delacorte) about a teenage kid obsessed with forming his own band, scoring with girls, attacking the high-school cult of The Catcher in the Rye and unraveling the mystery behind his father's death.
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Spring 2006 Flying Starts
Profiles of six authors making their children's book debuts this spring.
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Lost in Beijing: Peter Hessler
Peter Hessler insists that he doesn't write books about China.
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Spring 2005 Flying Starts: Cecil Castellucci
Andy Warhol had a 15-minute theory; Cecil Castellucci has "a 10-year theory." Not about getting fame, exactly, but about getting a chance.
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