On the Road Again: Empire State Book Festival
If you live in the vicinity of Albany, New York, you might want to come into town tomorrow for the inaugural Empire State Book Festival. I’m delighted to be taking part in two panels towards the end of the day-long conference sessions—first, I’ll be moderating a conversation about romance fiction with Lisa Dale, Kellyann Zuzulo, Jackie Kessler, and Hope Tarr. (Full disclosure: Hope is one of the co-founders of Lady Jane’s Salon, the monthly romance reading series I emcee here in New York City, and Jackie’s YA fiction is published by my employers at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.) Then, immediately following and in the very same room, I’ll be a participant in a conversation about “the future of the book” led by Don Linn, with additional input by Guy LeCharles Gonzales, Jennifer Gilmore, and Andrew Albanese. I’ll be wearing my marketing cap for that session, but I’ll probably have something to say as a blogger as long as I’m there…
And we’re just a handful of the several dozen authors who will be on hand, talking about all sorts of stuff and signing our books afterwards! I’m planning on having fun, and if you have an opportunity to join us, I hope you will.
9 April 2010 | events |
Read This: Prime Baby
I became a fan of Gene Luen Yang after reading his National Book Award-nominated graphic novel, American Born Chinese, back in 2006, so I was thrilled to see his latest, Prime Baby, turn up in my mailbox last week. Actually, “latest” is a bit misleading—this serial strip originally ran in The New York Times Magazine in 2008 and 2009, although I understand it’s been modified somewhat in the collecting. In any event, it has everything I love about Yang’s storytelling: the depiction of a child’s perspective on the world without condescension or excess sentimentality, a clarity and economy of line that can still bear complex emotional characters, and deadpan delivery of the absurd.
I actually had not followed this strip in the Times, as I’m not a particularly close follower of the magazine, so my experience of the story was fresh—and I’ll confess, what I thought at first was going to be a goofy but realistic take on sibling resentment took a genuinely wacky turn about 1/3 of the way through, and stays wacky but still manages to stay grounded emotionally. And it’s pretty much suitable for any reader from 8 to 80—if you buy it for a child you know, don’t be embarrassed to give it a reading before you hand it over!
8 April 2010 | read this |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
