The Places You Will Go

Hot Stuff

By DAPHNE LEE

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

CONSIDERING how excited teenage girls got over Edward Cullen's habit of creeping into Bella Swan's room to watch her sleep (sicko!) while swearing never to have sex with her, they should be in a frenzy over Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mallark chastely sharing the same bed.

In The Hunger Games, both Katniss and Peeta survived the State of Panem's twisted reality-TV event. The blossoming of the young couple's love affair was seen by some as an act of defiance in the face of tradition, rules and tyranny. In Catching Fire, the second book of the planned trilogy, we learn that their victory has inspired rebellion.

Picture Book of the Month: Breasts by Genichiro Yagyu

January 2010

Breasts

Author: Genichiro Yagyu
Illustrator: Genichiro Yagyu
Translator: Amanda Mayer Stinchecum
Publisher: Kane Miller, 28 pages
My Body Science series approaches bodily functions and body parts in a matter of fact and humorous way that one would probably not encounter in books published in the United States and Britain. Nevertheless, Breasts and its companion books like Everyone Poops, The Gas We Pass and All About Scabs have a loyal following on both sides of the Atlantic. The English translations are published by Kane/Miller, an American imprint that specialises in multicultural books.

RIP: J. D. Salinger, Enigmatic Author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ Dies at 91 - Obituary (Obit)

via nytimes.com

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J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.

Evening Standard/Getty Images (left)

Mr. Salinger’s literary representative, Harold Ober Associates, announced the death, saying it was of natural causes. “Despite having broken his hip in May,” the agency said, “his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.”

ALA Awards 2010: Newbery, Caldecott Medal Award Winners & Finalists

Source: ala.org

via nowpublic.com

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American Library Association announced the winners of ALA awards 2010 today for the top books, audiobooks, and video for children and young adults.

Rebecca Stead won the John Newbery Medal for most outstanding contribution to children's literature - When You Reach Me. Jerry Pinkney won the Randolph Caldecott Metal for most distinguished American picture book for children - The Lion & the Mouse. 

Before the award winners were officially announced, news of Rebecca Stead winning this year's Newbery award was leaked via Twitter.

 Here is a list of ALA Awards 2010 winners:

• John Newbery Medal

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

• Randolph Caldecott Medal

The Lion & the Mouse illustrated and written by Jerry Pinkney

• Coretta Scott King (Author) Book Award

Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal written by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, illustrated by R. Gregory Christie

• Coretta Scott King (Illustrator) Book Award

My People illustrated by Charles R. Smith Jr., written by Langston Hughes

• Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Author Award

The Rock and the River by Kekla Magoon

• Coretta Scott King – Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement

Walter Dean Myers

• Pura Belpré (Illustrator) Award

Book Fiesta!: Celebrate Children’s Day/Book Day; Celebremos El día de los niños/El día de los libros illustrated by Rafael López

• Pura Belpré (Author) Award

Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez

• Schneider Family Book Award

Django written and illustrated by Bonnie Christensen

Anything but Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin

Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork

• William C. Morris Award

Flash Burnout by L.K. Madigan

• Odyssey Award (Audio Book)
  

Louise, the Adventures of a Chicken written by Kate DiCamillo and narrated by Barbara Rosenblat

• Theodor Seuss Geisel Award (Early Reader)
  

Benny and Penny in the Big No-No! written and illustrated by Geoffrey Hayes

• Margaret A. Edwards Award

Jim Murphy

• Michael L. Printz Award (YA Fiction)

Going Bovine by Libba Bray

• Robert F. Sibert Medal (Non-Fiction)
  

Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream by Tanya Lee Stone

• YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award

Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman

• Andrew Carnegie Medal (Children's Video)
  

Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! produced by Paul R. Gagne and Mo Willems of Weston Woods

• Mildred L. Batchelder Award (Translated Book)
  

A Faraway Island originally published in Swedish as En ö i havet, was written by Annika Thor, translated by Linda Schenck

• Mary Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award

Lois Lowry

For details and Alex Awards winner, as well as the honor awards, visit American Library Association.

Recognized worldwide for the high quality they represent, ALA awards guide parents, educators, librarians and others in selecting the best materials for youth.  Selected by judging committees of librarians and other children’s experts, the awards encourage original and creative work.

Judith Kerr, talking tigers and tea | Books | guardian.co.uk

'If it's not going well, I think, why did I ever think I had talent?' ... Judith Kerr. Photograph: Doug Hall

Judith Kerr is blaming the rhymes. It's their fault, she says, that her latest picture book is somewhat surreal, featuring flying elephants, lions plucking rabbits from hats and a crocodile and a kangaroo setting off on a bicycle.

1. One Night in the Zoo
2. by Judith Kerr
3. 32pp,
4. HarperCollins Children's Books,
5. £5.99
6. 

1. Buy One Night in the Zoo at the Guardian bookshop

Author of the much-loved children's picture books The Tiger Who Came to Tea and the Mog series, about a cat with a mind of its own, Kerr has taken a "quite different" approach for One Night in the Zoo. Speaking on the phone from her long-time home in Barnes, west London – she's lived there for more than 40 years – she says it's unlike anything she's done before.

"Whereas all the other books started with a story, this one started with an idea of pictures. I always say this and it sounds so pretentious – I love Chagall: there's absolutely nothing of him left in the book but that's where I started to think about it," she says. "And I wanted to do animals doing surreal things, really wild stuff ... I could see these images. It's never quite like what I've had in my head but the idea of doing these wild moonlit pictures – once I'd thought of it I had to do it."

'I kept telling it and telling it until it was totally solid in my head' ... The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Photograph: © Kerr-Kneale Productions

So she began with an elephant "who jumped in the air and flew". Coming up with a charmingly cheery elephant taking off against a purpling sky, she knew she was heading in the right direction when she risked showing the picture to her then seven-year-old grandson. "He looked at it and laughed and said 'elephants don't fly ... I think this is going to be a good one'. That was hugely encouraging, because it's quite hard to do, to have the picture in your head of some absurd narrative – you never quite get it as you want it. I was very pleased."

Confident she was on the right path, the rhymes began to take hold. The crocodile – as gentle-looking as Kerr's better-known tiger, the one who came for tea – departs with the kangaroo on a bicycle made for two, "three lions did tricks which astonished a gnu [and] four bears cooked a squid and squidgeberry stew".

"It rhymes, which makes it even more surreal, in a way. The rhyme leads to something you wouldn't otherwise get to," Kerr chuckles. "It was quite hard to find all these rhymes with 'oo'." She recites some of the book to me. "I've loved doing it," she says. "It's rather nice at my great age [she's 86] to do something different, something new."

Despite Kerr's huge success (the Mog picture books and The Tiger Who Came to Tea have collectively sold more than 9m copies), this brand of gentle self-deprecation twists and twines its way through much of our conversation. Talking me through how she works – in a room at the top of her house, surrounded by books, she'll start around 10.30am and keep going as long as there's light – provided she's happy with what she's producing. "Sometimes I'm just producing rubbish so I have to stop. If it's not going well, I think 'why did I ever think I had talent?'"

She worried terribly about the retrospective exhibition celebrating her life and work that launched late last year in Newcastle, at Seven Stories. "I was in a total tizz about it," she says. "They had all my stuff, and I thought, suppose they choose all the really dreadful ones – there are always some – and then suppose they enlarge them … Then I saw it and it was wonderful: so imaginative, beautifully done and very moving. There's a lot about my life – they've even got a photo of my father which I'd never seen."

She is clearly moved by this. Her father, the German drama critic and writer Alfred Kerr, had a price on his head throughout the second world war for speaking out against the Nazi regime (his books were burned by the Nazis). Kerr was just nine years old when the family left Berlin in 1933, the day before the authorities came to arrest them; they passed through Switzerland and France before settling in England in 1936. Kerr wrote about the experience in her vivid, child's-eye memoir, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.

"I remember saying to my father a very long time ago, 'I want to draw – that's what I want to do'. He said, you have to be very very good, because they're very very good in this country," she remembers. Initially, therefore, she took a job in television, which she left to have children. Her first book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, started life as a story she would tell her two-year-old daughter at bedtime. "She wanted it again and again – although I tried others, that was the one she liked. I kept telling it and telling it until it was totally solid in my head," she says. "But I didn't think of doing anything until almost five years later when the children [she also has a son, the novelist Matthew Kneale] were at school. Then I had the day free from nine to three, and I could do something about it."

'They're very funny creatures' ... Mog on the roof. Photograph: © Kerr-Kneale Productions

She showed The Tiger Who Came to Tea to the publisher Collins who, to her amazement, agreed to publish it. The Mog series, too, was drawn from her home life – an amalgamation of the silly antics of the family's cats. "[The original] Mog didn't miaow; she thought the children were making so much noise it wasn't necessary. Instead, she'd make terrible faces outside when she couldn't use the cat flap. So the first Mog book was all about the things she did," she says. "I hadn't meant to do any more Mog books, but we kept getting more cats – the children wanted kittens. And they all started doing odd things. One was afraid of heights and got stuck on the roof, another was frightened of the Christmas tree ... They're very funny creatures. My present one goes for walks with me."

More than 40 years after her enigmatically smiling tiger first captured the imaginations of the nation's children, Kerr insists that she's "still very surprised it worked out like this". "My practical brother and mother were very worried about me – I never had any money and always looked awful," she remembers. "I think an awful lot of it is down to my husband [the late Nigel Kneale, scriptwriter and creator of Quatermass]. I was painting and got the odd prize, but it was a bit of a slog. Once I met him, everything fell into place. He encouraged me always, made me feel I was alright. I don't know if I would ever have done anything much if it hadn't been for him. He was a terrific help, a great delight."

Kneale, known by the family as Tom, died in 2006, and his loss is obviously still raw. As a result, Kerr has thrown herself into work, and hates not having something lined up to do. "When I did the last little bit of One Night in the Zoo I panicked," she says. "I thought 'now what? What am I going to do next?' I don't think I minded when Tom was alive; it was nice not to be working for a little while, particularly if he wasn't – we'd go out and do things together. But now I'm on my own I hate not working."

So she's already two-thirds of the way through a new book – due out in 2011 – about an old lady. "It's ridiculous, too, but a little more about something – for children, but maybe of interest to old ladies, too, I suppose," she says, before ending with a typically Kerr-ian piece of diffidence: "I hope I live long enough to see it published."

via guardian.co.uk

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Mother inspired to write by disabled daughter makes Waterstone's prize shortlist | Books | guardian.co.uk

'Being a first novel, you never know how good it is' ... Laura Summers

The debut novel by a mother who turned to fiction after struggling to find literature that spoke to her disabled daughter has been shortlisted for the Waterstone's children's book prize.

Laura Summers decided to write Desperate Measures when she realised that very few children's books featured protagonists with learning disabilities. "I've got a daughter with a learning disability [and] I felt there weren't any role models for children with disabilities and their siblings," said Summers, a Bafta-nominated scriptwriter for children's television. "But I didn't want to write a story which was just about disability – I wanted an adventure story too, which was exciting, so it would appeal to as many children as possible."

Desperate Measures stars a pair of twins – one of whom was brain-damaged at birth – and follows their lives after they are told their foster parents can't cope and the family will have to be split up. Waterstone's called it "affecting, honest, and totally gripping".

Summers wrote the book in the first person, alternating between the voices of the two girls, so readers "would be able to put their feet in the characters' shoes and realise what it felt like". "My daughter without a disability read it and said 'it's not bad, mum'. My daughter with a disability said 'she's like me'. Although it isn't her – and I don't want anyone to think it is my daughter – there are things there she can understand and empathise with," said Summers, who called the shortlisting "fantastic". "It was a surprise – being a first novel, you never know how good it is, if the writing is any good, so I'm really excited," she said.

The £5,000 Waterstone's prize is voted for by the chain's booksellers, with nine titles shortlisted for this year's award. Intended to celebrate new and emerging children's authors, the shortlist ranges from Lucy Christopher's story about a girl who cannot face the fact that her father is dying, Flyaway, to a young girl's attempt to look after herself when she is left alone in Suzanne LaFleur's Love, Aubrey.

"Horror and the supernatural often dominate children's fiction but this year we're seeing that balanced with serious, believable stories, proving that sometimes real-life drama hits closest to home," said Waterstone's children's buying manager Sarah Clarke, calling the line-up a "really strong shortlist".

One of the shortlisted titles, Victoria Forester's The Girl Who Could Fly, has been endorsed by Twilight author Stephenie Meyer who called it "the oddest/sweetest mix of Little House on the Prairie and X-Men"." I was smiling the whole time (except for the part where I cried). Prepare to have your heart warmed," Meyer said.

Waterstone's booksellers are currently voting for the winner, who will be revealed on 10 February. Previous winners of the prize include Sally Nicholls's story of a terminally ill 11-year-old, Ways to Live Forever, and The Diamond of Drury Lane by Julia Golding.

The shortlist in full:
1 Flyaway by Lucy Christopher
2 The Great Hamster Massacre by Katie Davies
3 The Girl Who Could Fly by Victoria Forester
4 Seven Sorcerers by Caro King
5 Love, Aubrey by Suzanne LaFleur
6 The Toymaker by Jeremy de Quidt
7 Desperate Measures by Laura Summers
8 Superhuman: Meteorite Strike by A.G Taylor
9 The Crowfield Curse by Pat Walsh

via guardian.co.uk

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Potter for the New Generation

By DAPHNE LEE

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

BEATRIX Potter's tales are going to be "re-vamped" for the present generation of children. An animated TV series featuring beloved characters like Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddleduck, Jeremy Fisher and Tom Kitten is due out in 2011, along with the inevitable merchandise like stationery, toys and, probably, new "as-seen-on-TV" books.

In an interview with The Guardian, a spokesperson from Chorion, the licensing agent of Potter's publisher, Frederick Warne, declared that the children's classics are bought chiefly by "posh to middle class" people on both sides of the Atlantic. The new TV series is supposed to widen the appeal of the stories and characters. One way is for the stories to be updated so that they are "appropriate" for the present-day kids.

RIP: Susan Einzig obituary | Art and design | The Guardian

Susan Einzig and the artist John Minton. He had a great influence on her.

Susan Einzig, who has died aged 87, was one of the 20th century's key British book illustrators, and a central figure in the postwar London art scene. Best known for her illustrations for the children's novel Tom's Midnight Garden (1958), by Philippa Pearce, she illustrated for a range of authors and publishers and was a regular Radio Times artist during its black-and-white heyday in the 1940s and 50s. She continued to paint, draw and exhibit until well into her 80s.

Born in Berlin, Einzig grew up in a Jewish middle-class family, in a spacious building that is now part of the city's university. Her father owned a garment factory and encouraged his daughter's artistic ambitions. She began art school at the age of 15 in a climate of growing antisemitism. In the spring of 1939, Einzig found herself on one of the last Kindertransport trains to reach Britain before the outbreak of war. Later she would learn of her father's death at the Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt; her mother managed to escape.

Enrolling as a student at London's Central School of Arts and Crafts, Einzig learned wood engraving under Gertrude Hermes and John Farleigh, and was taught drawing and illustration by Bernard Meninsky, William Roberts and Maurice Kesselman. After an unhappy evacuation to Yorkshire, she moved to Northampton, where the London art schools were temporarily resettled.

After the war she began to receive illustration commissions. "There was an upsurge in work and no one to do it," she told me. "I didn't feel that I could do it either but I was on the crest of a wave of optimism." Her first commission, in 1945, came from Noel Carrington and his Transatlantic Arts publishing venture. Norah Pulling's Mary Belinda and the Ten Aunts was illustrated by drawing directly on to lithographic plates for each of six colours. Carrington had pioneered the use of this process, known as autolithography, using it with his hugely successful Picture Puffin series. Einzig recalled the sense of privilege that she felt as she was sent to the special "artists' room" at Cowell's printers in Ipswich, where a team of skilled lithographers were put at her disposal in the production of this charming little book.

Needing to support herself with a "proper job", she took a part-time teaching post at Camberwell School of Art, in south-east London, courtesy of the principal, William Johnson, who had taught her in Northampton. Among her students were Euan Uglow and Terry Scales. She was also put to work teaching ex-servicemen at Camberwell who had been given grants to retrain. These included the musicians Humphrey Lyttelton and Wally Fawkes.

It was at Camberwell that Einzig met the person who would be the greatest influence on her life, the charismatic, mercurial illustrator and painter, John Minton, who, along with Keith Vaughan, was also teaching there. "I was quickly drawn into this group," she said. "We all used to meet at weekends and draw each other. We went to the cinema and discovered the films of Jean Renoir, René Clair and Marcel Carné. We jived and jitterbugged to Humphrey Lyttelton's jazz band every Monday evening. We also got sucked into the drinking scene in Soho. It was all over within two or three years, but in my memory it seems to have been much longer."

Einzig took on numerous illustration commissions over the ensuing years, her distinctive black-and-white drawing style gradually shaking off the Minton influence and asserting its own elegant, literary identity. A lifelong love of theatre is often evident in the stage-like construction of many of her drawings.

Susan Einzig's cover illustration for Tom's Midnight Garden

The commission to illustrate Tom's Midnight Garden came about by chance: "I had been to see the children's book editor at Oxford University Press, who looked at my work and seemed very unsure about it. However, she gave me Philippa Pearce's manuscript to try to see if I could do it. I did two or three drawings and took them to show her, and then she asked me to do the book ... I was paid just a hundred pounds for the whole thing." Among the other titles she illustrated were Alphonse Daudet's Sappho: A Picture of Life in Paris, for the Folio Society in 1954, and E Nesbit's The Bastables, for Franklin Watts in 1966.

She joined the teaching staff of Chelsea School of Art, under Lawrence Gowing, continuing to teach there for more than 30 years. The list of her former students is long, and includes artists such as Sue Coe and Emma Chichester Clark, and the actor Alan Rickman.

Throughout her life she remained highly political and fiercely opposed to injustice in all its forms – she could never walk past a beggar without reaching for her purse. She was a loyal friend and an inspiring teacher.

She is survived by her daughter, Hetty, and two grandchildren.

• Susan Einzig, illustrator, painter and teacher, born 16 November 1922; died 25 December 2009

via guardian.co.uk

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Through the eyes of a migrant - Arts - Entertainment - smh.com.au

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Through the eyes of a migrant

Elissa Blake
January 6, 2010

Magical paper birds, boats made of old suitcases and giants squashing terrified citizens - these are just three of many strange and wonderful images in Red Leap Theatre's production of The Arrival, which opens as part of the Sydney Festival next week.

Adapted from the graphic novel by the Perth artist and author Shaun Tan, The Arrival is the story of a man who leaves behind his wife and child in search of a better life. He arrives in a strange land where everything is odd yet weirdly familiar.

Favourite Books in 2009

I asked some people I know to name ...

1. The book they enjoyed reading most in 2009, regardless of when it was published.

2. The book(s) published in 2009 that they most enjoyed.

Those who replied said ...

Janet Tay, editor

(On both counts) The Professor and the Housekeeper (English translation) by Yoko Ogawa.

Linda Lingard, publisher

Favourite book read in 2009: Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

Favourite book published in 2009: 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up

Priya Kulasagaran, reporter and poet

Favourite book read in 2009: Non-Violence: The History of A Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

Favourite book(s) published in 2009: 1) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith and Jane Austen - got zombie, got Austen; I'm sold

ii) Matanya Teleskop, Hatinya Kapal Dalam Botol Kaca by Sufian Abas - I'm a sucker for stories about cats who fall in love with rainbows, and men who have hamsters instead of hearts.

Andrea Sim, 14-year-old romantic and budding violinist

Favourite book read in 2009: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Favourite book(s) published in 2009: 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Nesa Sivagnanam, sub-editor and bookstore assistant

Favourite book read in 2009: Fudoki by Kij Johnson
This book combines several of my favourite things ... cats, myth and folklore. In this case the myth and folklore of Japan. The story is set in the past when cats had just been introduced to Japan and were a mystery and curiousity even for the the Japanese gods. So they turn a small cat into a woman and watch. The story is well researched and flows like a river.

Favourite book(s) published in 2009: 1) Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
I would have loved this book even if gave me only me the Cemetary of Forgotten Books. I dream of being its custodian. But it has so much more. Here is a tale set in old Barcelona about books and reading and the very old art of story-telling.

2) The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman
This tale is whimsical and lyrical. Two people are struck by lightning. One becomes icy cold and the other fiery hot. One day, they meet ...

3) If On A Winter's Night a Traveller
I love this one even if it did mess with my head. It's a Chinese Box of a book with stories within stories within more stories. In the end it's all about the relationship between writer and reader. I went out and got copies for friends and recommended it to everyone else. Madness needs company after all.

Chet Chin, freelance editor

Favourite book read in 2009: Wesley the Owl by Stacey O'Brien

Favourite book published in 2009: The Vagrants by YiYun Li

Selina Lee, Manager, Scholastic Press

Favourite book read in 2009: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson

Favourite book published in 2009: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Dina Zaman, author

Favourite book read in 2009: Sex with Kings by Eleanor Herman

Favourite book published in 2009: What Your Teacher Never Told You by Farish Noor

Tan Twan Eng, author

Favourite book read in 2009: Gerontius by James Hamilton-Paterson

Published a few years ago, this novel is a fictionalised account of Sir Edward Elgar’s sea voyage from England to the Amazon just after the end of the First World War. Elgar is in his 60s. He is unable to compose anything new and he feels his best works are behind him. There is nothing for him to look forward to.   The book has a sad, elegiac air, an adagio unwinding into the caverns of his memories.  The novel won the Whitbread Book of the Year and deservedly so.

Favourite book(s) published in 2009:

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selena Hastings

Nothing To Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ahnaf Azmi, student

Favourite book read in 2009: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Raymond, artist

Favourite book read in 2009:Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
I've grown particularly obsessed with Wallace lately because he addresses lots of dilemmas that are fundamental to my sense of being, which is how to be a sincere human being in cynical times.

Favourite book published in 2009:The Complete Jack Survives by Jerry Moriarty
A collection of the “Jack Survives” comic strips which ran in RAW accompanied with other paintings and drawings. “Jack” is a stand-in for the author's father, and through a painterly approach he brings him through mundane trials of daily life.

If RAW were the “high brow” counterpart to MAD magazine, Jerry Moriarty would be a poetic Dave Berg (a friend said the strips reminded him of Walt Whitman).  Instead of showing the lighter side of middle-class america, Jerry's approach is more personal, closer to 'mental archeology' (to borrow the wording from Chris Ware in the books introduction). What is really beautiful about these comics is how you can see through layers of white paint used to wipe out certain words, people etc... It's like you can see ghostly, pre-existing memories under the surface.

Me

Favourite book read in 2009: The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

Favourite book(s) published in 2009: 1) Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco Stork

2) Matanya Teleskop, Hatinya Kapal Dalam Botol Kaca by Sufian Abas

3) The Professor and the Housekeeper (English translation) by Yoko Ogawa

4) After the Moment by Garret Freymann-Weyr