Too Graphic? 2014 Banned Books Week Celebrates Challenged Comics

Repeat Offender: Dav Pilkey created artwork for Banned Books Week featuring his frequently complained-about hero, Captain Underpants.

 By Lynn Neary

Comics and graphic books are flourishing these days — writers and illustrators are taking on increasingly sophisticated topics and children’s authors are finding just the right balance between naughty and nice. But a number of the books have come under fire from critics who would like to see them banned from schools and libraries. That’s why comics and graphic books are the focus of this year’s Banned Books Week, an annual event that calls attention to challenged titles.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Peter Matthiessen, Co-Founder Of The Paris Review, Dies At 86

Peter Matthiessen, shown here at his New York house in 2004, was a Zen Buddhist priest, a spy, an activist and a well-respected writer of both fiction and nonfiction.

By Tom Vitale.

Author Peter Matthiessen has died in New York at the age of 86 from acute myeloid leukemia. Matthiessen, a novelist and naturalist, wrote 33 books; among his best-known works are The Snow Leopard and the novels Far Tortuga and At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was made into a Hollywood film.

He is the only writer to ever win the National Book Award in the categories of Fiction (for Shadow Country) and General Nonfiction (for The Snow Leopard, which also won for Contemporary Thought). He was also a political activist, a Buddhist teacher, co-founder of The Paris Review and, briefly, a spy.

In his first nonfiction book, Matthiessen staked out the territory he would revisit the rest of his life — the destruction of nature and natural peoples at the hands of mankind. Wilderness in America, published in 1959, is a history of the extinction of animal and bird species in North America.

Click here to read the rest of this story

NPR’s Book Concierge

Our Guide To 2013’s Great Reads

by Jeremy Bowers, Nicole Cohen, Danny DeBelius, Camila Domonoske, Rose Friedman, Christopher Groskopf, Petra Mayer, Beth Novey and Shelly Tan

Choose your own adventure! Use the categories below to search through more than 200 standout titles selected by NPR staff and critics. (You can also combine categories!) Then click on the books’ covers to find out why we love them.

(But wait! No best-of lists this year? Here’s why we decided to try something new.)

Click here to read the rest of this story

Mining Books To Map Emotions Through A Century

By Alix Spiegel

Were people happier in the 1950s than they are today? Or were they more frustrated, repressed and sad?

To find out, you’d have to compare the emotions of one generation to another. British anthropologists think they may have found the answer — embedded in literature.

Several years ago, more or less on a lark, a group of researchers from England used a computer program to analyze the emotional content of books from every year of the 20th century — close to a billion words in millions of books.

This effort began simply with lists of “emotion” words: 146 different words that connote anger; 92 words for fear; 224 for joy; 115 for sadness; 30 for disgust; and 41 words for surprise. All were from standardized word lists used in linguistic research.

The original idea was to have the computer program track the use of these words over time. The researchers wanted to see if certain words, at certain moments, became more popular.

 

Click here to read the rest of this story

Reading 125 Titles A Year? That’s ‘One For The Books’

Joe Queenan reads so many books, it’s amazing that he can also find time to write them. Queenan estimates he’s read between 6,000 and 7,000 books total, at a rate of about 125 books a year — (or 100 in a “slow” year). “Some years I just went completely nuts,” Queenan tells NPR’s Robert Siegel. “A couple years ago I read about 250. I was trying to read a book every single day of the year but I kind of ran out of gas.”

Queenan is the author of nine books on a diversity of topics: from Closing Time, a memoir about his childhood in a Philadelphia housing project, to Imperial Caddy, a humorous takedown of Dan Quayle. His latest work, called One for the Books, is a meditation on his lifelong obsession with reading. He talks with Siegel about what he reads, why he reads and how he loves books but hates book clubs.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Bookstore-sitting gig: Not so charming?

By Carolyn Kellogg

News that Tales of the Lonesome Pine bookshop in Virginia is looking for a bookstore-sitter this fall has been embraced by everyone from Jacket Copy to NPR as a charming idea. In exchange for room and board, the sitter gets a rustic setting, a couple of pets to care for and a bookstore to watch over. Who wouldn’t want to give it a try?

Scott Brown, for one. He’s one of the owners of Eureka Books, an antiquarian bookstore in Eureka, Calif. He slams the idea of leaving a bookstore in the hands of an unpaid volunteer. “If after five years, you don’t sell enough books to pay yourself — let alone an employee — and you have to get a teaching job for the benefits (as Ms. Welch did), you aren’t a bookseller, you are a hobbyist.”

Brown notes that Wendy Welch and her husband, owners of the Tales of the Lonesome Pine bookstore, are leaving it behind to promote her memoir, “The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap.” The book extols the joys of running a small community bookstore, while admitting that it’s not much of a living. On the bookstore’s blog, she compares booksellers to nuns and monks.

That’s not how Brown sees it.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Your Favorites: 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels

Harriet Russell

It’s almost a cliche at this point to say that teen fiction isn’t just for teens anymore. Just last year, the Association of American Publishers ranked Children’s/Young Adult books as the single fastest-growing publishing category.

Which is why we were only a little surprised to see the tremendous response that came in for this summer’s Best-Ever Teen Fiction poll. A whopping 75,220 of you voted for your favorite young adult novels, blasting past the total

And now, the final results are in. While it’s no surprise to see Harry Potter and the Hunger Games trilogy on top, this year’s list also highlights some writers we weren’t as familiar with. For example, John Green, author of the 2012 hit The Fault in Our Stars, appears five times in the top 100.

Selecting a manageable voting roster from among the more than 1,200 nominations that came in from readers wasn’t easy, and we were happy to be able to rely on such an experienced panel of judges.

Click here to read the rest of this story

In The E-Book World, Are Book Covers A Dying Art?

Chip Kidd, an associate art director at publisher Alfred A. Knopf, has written a new graphic novel called Batman: Death by Design.

In the olden days, a reader might pick up a book because the cover was exciting, intriguing, maybe even beautiful. But in the brave new world of e-books and e-readers, the days when an artist named Chip Kidd could make us reach for a book may be gone.

Kidd, an associate art director at publisher Alfred A. Knopf, has designed book covers for the past 25 years for authors like Cormac McCarthy, John Updike, David Sedaris and Michael Crichton. Remember the menacing Tyrd gave a TED talk on the art of designing books. He told the audience that while e-books offer convenience, theannosaurus rex skeleton on movie posters for Jurassic Park? The original version was Kidd’s cover design for the novel.

Earlier this year, Kidd gave a TED talk on the art of designing books. He told the audience that while e-books offer convenience, the growing digital publishing world risks losing “tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness, [and] a little bit of humanity.”

Click here to read the rest of this story

Your Picks: Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books

Chris Silas Neal

More than 5,000 of you nominated. More than 60,000 of you voted. And now the results are in. The winners of NPR’s Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy survey are an intriguing mix of classic and contemporary titles. Over on NPR’s pop culture blog, Monkey See, you can find one fan’s thoughts on how the list shaped up, get our experts’ take, and have the chance to share your own.

A quick word about what’s here, and what’s not: Our panel of experts reviewed hundreds of the most popular nominations and tossed out those that didn’t fit the survey’s criteria (after — we assure you — much passionate, thoughtful, gleefully nerdy discussion). You’ll notice there are no young adult or horror books on this list, but sit tight, dear reader, we’re saving those genres for summers yet to come.

So, at last, here are your favorite science-fiction and fantasy novels.

…read more

This Pig Wants To Party: Maurice Sendak’s Latest

Buy this

Bumble-ardy, the latest from author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, is dark and deeply imaginative, much like his classic works Where the Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen.

Bumble-ardy is an orphaned pig, who has reached the age of 9 without ever having a birthday party. He tells his Aunt Adeline that he would like to have a party for his ninth birthday, so Aunt Adeline plans a quiet birthday dinner for two. But Bumble-ardy instead decides to throw a large costume party for himself after his aunt leaves for work — and mayhem ensues.

When his aunt returns she says, “Okay smarty, you’ve had your party but never again.” Bumble-ardy replies, “I promise, I swear, I won’t ever turn 10.”

Sendak tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that those two lines — his favorite in the book — sum up his life and his work.

“Those two lines are essential. ‘I’ll never be 10’ touches me deeply but I won’t pretend that I know exactly what it means,” says Sendak. “When I thought of it, I was so happy I thought of it. It came to me, which is what the creative act is all about. Things come to you without you necessarily knowing what they mean. … It comes at a time when I am getting ripe, getting old — and I want to do work that resonates.”

Sendak says that he worked on Bumble-ardy while taking care of his longtime partner, Eugene Glynn, who died of lung cancer in 2007.

“When I did Bumble-ardy, I was so intensely aware of death,” he says. “Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did Bumble-ardy. I did Bumble-ardy to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live as any human being does. But there’s no question that the book was affected by what was going on here in the house. … Bumble-ardy was a combination of the deepest pain and the wondrous feeling of coming into my own. And it took a long time. It took a very long time.”

…read more