She’s YA and she’s OK
Margo Rabb, whose novel Cures for Heartbreak is another one on our radar but not yet available* in Australia, has an essay in the New York Times about crossover titles and the stigma against YA literature in the US. Titles published as YA just don’t sell as well, which means that publishers are often tapping into older markets with different covers and marketing. But not always.
Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) nicely nabs the snobbery in an email comment to Margo Rabb:
... he recalled “a number of people looking down their noses at me when I explained what I did for a living, as if I painted watercolors of cats or performed as a clown at parties.”
The CMIS Resource Bank is developing a growing list of titles that will appeal to adults and teens alike, and the ALA’s Alex Awards are all about adult books that appeal to teens.
* We know we can easily import international titles that take our eye, but as a rule we wait until there is an Australian publication date before reviewing in Fiction Focus. Titles we review need to be readily available for purchase by schools through their usual suppliers.
July 20th, 2008 at 11:50 am
The latest edition of Locus mag (US) has a huge write-up on YA/Teen fiction in the Fantasy/SF genre. It’s outselling adult stuff by a wide margin and is getting bigger and bigger.
In fact, they suggest that Fantasy & SF IS the mainstream for the YA/Teen market.
It’s a good article, and worth getting hold of. The issue I’m talking about has Garth Nix on the cover, and he’s also the feature interview for the month. http://www.locusmag.com for more.
July 25th, 2008 at 7:33 am
[...] to her NY Times essay about YA literature, Margo Rabb interviews Markus Zusak on her blog Books, Chocolates, [...]