Mark Flowers
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The National Book Critics Circle Award
Just a quick note of congratulations to Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, which was announced as the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction on Thursday. This blog has been a huge supporter of Fountain’s novel, giving it a starred review and naming it one of the best Adult [...]
Phone Phreaks and Intellectual Property
On January 11, a young computer programmer and internet activist named Aaron Swartz was found dead of an apparent suicide. For those not familiar with him, Swartz, just 26 at his death, was involved in a huge array of groundbreaking information tools, such as RSS (which he helped design), Reddit, the Open Library, and the [...]
Omnibus Mystery Review Post
Back at the end of last year, I posted a link to VOYA’s top adult mysteries for teens. Since, as I said at the time, this blog hadn’t gotten to many (read: almost any) of them, I thought I would take a closer look at the books on VOYA’s list. But since I am somewhat [...]
Thoughts on Alex: One Shot at Forever
Chris Ballard’s One Shot at Forever is one of the three books on the Alex Awards this year that we declined to review. In the comments of our Alex Reactions post, John Sexton explained why: I believe the last time a sports themed book received Alex recognition was in 2007 when the committee i served [...]
Thoughts on Alex: Quick Picks
Our astute reviewer Amy Cheney noticed on Facebook that two of the ten Alex Award titles this year were also on the Top Ten Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, and said: This might be the first year EVER that two books made both the Alex Awards and Quick Picks. Ross’ book [Juvenile in [...]
Weekly Reviews: New Look Snow White
Today we have two brief books, each a “fractured fairy tale” version of Snow White. First up, Catherynne Valente’s Six-Gun Snow White shares connections with a couple of recent posts on this site. As the first half of the title should make clear, it shares with Six-Gun Tarot a Western setting, but also partakes of the same intense genre-blending [...]
Thoughts on Alex: My Friend Dahmer
We review a lot of graphic novels around here (thanks in large part to super-reviewer Francisca Goldsmith) so, as we said on Monday, Angela and I were very happy to see a GN on the Alex Awards list this year. As I somewhat embarrassingly indicated, though, I hadn’t read Derf Backderf’s My Friend Dahmer, so I [...]
Alex Award Reactions
MARK: Congratulations to all of the 2013 Alex Award winners, and to the wonderful committee. Later this week, Angela and I will probably be dissecting the list in a little more detail, but for now, we just want to get up some first reactions. First, and most importantly to me, in your face, Angela! I [...]
More on Nonfiction–Now With (possibly dubious) Statistics!
Back in December, I wrote a post in which I wondered why we don’t see more nonfiction books recognized in awards for teens, and in particular, why memoirs and biographies are so dominant among the nonfiction titles that do show up. Commenter Meghan suggested: My own experience as a public librarian has shown it’s easier [...]
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