CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

The author describes it as ‘Gladiator meets Project Runway’: the dystopian reality-TV spectacle that is the premise of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, along with its sequel Catching Fire.  Book Three, The Victors,  is due to be published towards the end of 2010.

Australian and UK cover. Copyright rests with the publisher, Scholastic

The author

• Suzanne Collins’s website
• Biography (Scholastic USA)

The text

• The Hunger Games website
• Chapter 1 (PDF)
• Audio extract (mp3)
• Suzanne Collins reads Chapter 11 (mp3)
• Reading group guide
• Mitali Perkins – video discussion starter: Race in The Hunger Games

Reviews

• Fiction Focus
  
• Entertainment Weekly
• School Library Journal
• Time Magazine

Articles and Interviews

• Author Q & A from Scholastic
• Interview from Teenreads
• Borders Book Club, Part 1 (video)
• Borders Book Club, Part 2 (video)
• Borders Book Club, Part 3 (video)
• Borders Book Club, Part 4 (video)
• Borders Book Club, Part 5 (video)
• Wikipedia article (anything missing? can it be improved?)

Awards

• New York Times Bestseller List (Children’s Books)
• A Horn Book Fanfare 2008 (Fiction)
• A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2008 (Children’s Fiction)
• A School Library Journal Best Book of 2008 (Fiction)
• A Booklist Editors’ Choice 2008 (Books for Youth)
• A New York Times Notable Book of 2008 (Children’s Books)
• A Kirkus Review Best Book of 2008
• A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice 2008
• And while many readers consider it Best. Book. Ever, does it meet Newbery Medal criteria? Discussion on the Mock Newbery blog.
• Added 7 November 2009: More from the Mock Newbery blog 5 November) , this time  in praise of The Hunger Games

Dystopian fiction

• Utopian and dystopian fiction (Wikipedia)
• Dystopia and Science Fiction : Blade Runner, Brazil and Beyond (or, Who’s Dystopia Is It?) (or, Dystopia is in the Eyes of the (frightened) Beholder). Notes from the Digital Cultures Project (University of California, Santa Barbara) with a definition, comments on the cultural and political sources of dystopian fiction and what we can learn from reading it.
• Dystopias in contemporary literature (eNotes)

The film

• IMDB – in development for proposed 2011 release
• Lionsgate gets Hunger Games (FusedFilm blog)

Read more dystopian fiction: a list from the CMIS database.

Great gallery of SF covers from Penguin. Thanks to the Articulate blog for the heads up.

Ursula K. Le Guin and Ysabeau Wilce were among the winners at the Nebula Awards presentations in Los Angeles at the weekend. These annual awards are presented by SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Best overall novel: Powers, by le Guin. This is the third title in the Annals of the Western Shores series.

And Wilce, for the next in her Flora Segunda series (too long to type so it’s CtrlX and Ctrl V and hang the formatting) : How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room), took the Andre Norton Award for YA Science Fiction and Fantasy.