CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

Stephenie Meyer’s incredibly successful vampire series that began with Twilight and moved onto Eclipse and New Moon, has become a much anticipated film and the cover story of Entertainment Weekly.

This is a publishing phenomenon being likened to the J. K. Rowling empire.

For a few days in May, the YALSA listserv was having a spirited discussion about Mormon readings of these works, so it’s interesting that The Guardian has picked up on the influence of Meyer’s beliefs on the series.

For those wanting to pursue the discussion, look in the the YALSA archives under the thread ‘Issues with Twilight’.  If you subscribe to this active but informative ALA list, be prepared for quite a few additional emails.

What a good idea - a group of UK authors has come together to create a joint blog. New to the blogosphere, An Awfully Big Blog Adventure brings together fourteen writers from The Scattered Authors Society to share the blogging load.

Contributing YA authors are:

• Anne Cassidy
• Charles Butler
• Katherine Langrish
• Marie-Louise Jensen
• Nick Green
• N. M. Browne
• Sally Nicholls and
  
• Susan Price

as well as a few others who write for a younger readership.

Just a reminder that there is more to this blog than meets the eye.  Some people have told us that they didn’t realise we have four pages of additional information that can be accessed from the tabs:

• The About tab leads to information about our print journal Fiction Focus and how to subscribe.
• FF Weblinks was created yesterday.  The tag cloud leads to sites we are bookmarking on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us, under the user name CMIS_FF. If you are already a del.icio.us user please add us to your network and feel free to send us sites you think will be useful to add to the cloud.
• The YA Author blogs tab is just that - links to YA author blog sites (currently 23 Australian and 23 international authors are listed).
• And the YA Authors and Illustrators tab currently takes you to 140 author / illustrator websites (53 Australian and 87 international).

The addition of a Google search button will make access to older blog entries easier.

We are always pleased to receive suggestions for any additions to any of these pages.

It has been announced that West Australian writer Diana Chase has died after collapsing suddenly last week while on holiday in Vietnam. Author of more than 50 fiction and non-fiction works, Diana’s most recent YA novel, No More Borders for Josef (2006) was shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Award in 2007.

Other titles include The Lighthouse Kids and Surf’s Up, which was also shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Award and won the West Australian Young Readers’ Hoffman Award (WAYRBA) in 2000.

Her contribution to the literary life of Western Australia will be sadly missed.

Imagine Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman in the one room! This is as close as we are likely to get as Neil talks to Terry in this penetrating interview that honours the 25 years of Discworld and the 24-year friendship of the two. It does not shy away from talking about Terry’s recent diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease, nor would Terry Pratchett want it to - his advocacy has created enormous media interest in the condition, and therefore public awareness. The good news is that he still has books to write.

The July/August 2008 Horn Book magazine has been published and some of the articles are already available online. The profiles of Newbery and  Caldecott awards winners Brian Selznick and Laura Amy Schlitz will interest Australian readers.

Unlike Zoe in the previous post, this performance will be happening at the Sydney Opera House - on 20 July. And elsewhere in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, too, throughout the month.

Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree has been realised in performance at last. The Australian Chamber Orchestra and youth choir Gondwana Voices are on tour to those cities with this new production that also has the powerful combination of Shostakovich and The Arrival on the program.  Tour dates and venues here and you can also watch Richard Tognetti talk about the production and view stills from the book.

Shaun’s latest nominations for The Arrival are for two Hugo Awards: Best Related Book and Best Professional Artist. These Science Fiction awards will be presented in Denver, Colorado early next month.

Libby Gleeson talks about the story behind Mahtab’s Story, her latest work, in this Radio National podcast, which will be available for a week.

The dedicated Allen & Unwin site has teacher’s notes and additional information.

Neil Gaiman was the guest on the Radio National’s Book Show yesterday. In conversation with Michael Sherrifs, he talks about graphic novels, his two-decade-long collaboration with Dave McKean and classic YA literature.

It is for online listening only, but the transcript is also available.

Speaking of books of a bygone era, the Fine Lines blog revisits some loved titles of the ’70s and ’80s with a more critical eye. The latest post is about Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, now an astonishing 39 years old! This weekly blog is worth a nostalgic visit.

• Melina Marchetta is guest author on the OzProjects Beware of Books site next week. Students are invited to submit questions to Melina on the forum.
• House of Many Ways, Diana Wynne Jones’s newest title set not long after the events in Howl’s Moving Castle, is due here in August. This interview with the author sets the scene.
• A discussion guide has been released for Life as We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer’s grim and scary tale of the consequences of a meteor hitting the moon. The sequel, the dead and the gone (the author’s preferred punctuation) has just arrived on our desk and will be reviewed shortly. It has been published here in paperback as The Dead and the Gone and the cover is not nearly as attractive as the American hardback. Pity.
• Literature teachers might like to follow this link from the Teaching Literature to Adolescents blog. Peter Smagorinsky, from the University of Georgia, is creating a growing list of titles to support conceptual themes such as Utopias and Dystopias, Conflict and  Justice. It’s a long list, and yes, the bias is American, but Smagorinsky is accepting suggestions for additions to the links, novels, poetry, drama, short stories, non-fiction titles, songs and films he is compiling for each theme.