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Happy Publication Day to Jacqueline West

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Today is the official publication day of Jacqueline West’s riveting YA novel, DREAMERS OFTEN LIE. Jacqueline is author of the NYT bestselling middle grade series, The Books of Elsewhere, and DREAMERS is her first foray into the YA genre, and she’s done a smashing job of it, too.

“Engrossing . . . A dizzying new twist on one of the Bard’s most famous plays.”

DreamersOftenLie_cv copyDREAMERS is Black Swan meets Shakespeare–a twisty, enthralling story of one girl’s brush with madness:

After a skiing accident that fractures her skull, Jaye is left with a splitting headache and strong delusions. Jaye must keep these delusions secret from her family, doctors, and everyone at school in order to keep her starring part in the school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — even though visions of Shakespeare and … [more]

Andrew Brumbach, The Eye of Midnight, and getting “the call”

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I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Upstart Crow client Andrew Brumbach over at the Literary Rambles blog, where we discussed the release of his debut novel, THE EYE OF MIDNIGHT the harrowing submissions process, and the joy of getting “the call”. Pop over the blog for the full interview, and do be sure to put THE EYE OF MIDNIGHT on your “to read” list today!

The Eye of Midnight

 

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Ballad of a Thin Man: David Denby Doesn’t Get It

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DenbyJonesAt the New Yorker, tetchy old fogey and mediocre former film critic David Denby has published a lament about how few teens are reading books these days. He has one great overheard line—a student saying “Books smell like old people”; and a few careful caveats (“It’s very likely that teen-agers, attached to screens of one sort or another, read more words than they ever have in the past”); but mostly he is describing a decline of western civilization via smartphone. “If teachers can make books important to kids … those kids may turn off the screens,” he wraps up, making clear his real issue here: a favored primacy of one form of technology (ink on paper) over another (e-ink or pixels on screens).… [more]

White Writers: Don’t Write Diverse Books. Instead, Read Them.

There have been some great posts this week about the diverse books movement. Jacqueline Woodson’s 1998 article in the Horn Book, titled Who Can Tell My Story has been revived. Ellen Oh’s salient post Dear White Writer takes on diverse books and white privilege. There are numerous other articles and posts I could point you to; the discussion about diverse books is wide, intense, difficult, eye-opening, enraging, encouraging, and exciting.

In the last year, as the conversation about diverse books has picked up steam, a noticeable shift has taken place in my query box. It’s a shift that happens each time the trends change in publishing. Paranormal gave way to dystopian, which gave way to horror, which gave way to contemporary, which has recently given way to…diverse books?

The We Need Diverse Books campaign … [more]

Congratulations to the 2016 ALA Award Winners

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It’s a grand day for books, and we’d like to extend our warmest congratulations to the extremely talented 2016 ALA award winners! 37801-2… [more]

Cover Reveal: DIG TOO DEEP by Amy Allgeyer

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It’s a cornucopia of cover reveals at Upstart Crow this week!

Today, we are thrilled to share the cover for Amy Allgeyer’s riveting debut novel, DIG TOO DEEP (Albert Whitman, April 2016). The good folks at YA Books Central did the official reveal yesterday, and you can hop over there to enter to win a free advance reading copy. b2ap3_thumbnail_Dig-Too-Deep_CvrReveal

It’s not just that Liberty Briscoe feels like an outsider in Ebbotsville, Kentucky. She expected it wouldn’t be easy to move from the city to her granny’s place for her last year of high school. Still, Liberty can’t shake the feeling that something’s not quite right. Everyone says the water’s safe, yet nobody drinks it. When Granny becomes sick, like so many others in town, Liberty starts to wonder about the water, the people who

… [more]

Read an excerpt of Leah Konen’s THE LAST TIME WE WERE US

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We are so very excited about Leah Konen’s steamy contemporary romance, THE LAST TIME WE WERE US (Katherine Tegen, May 2016). Last Time We Were Us_FINAL

Liz Grant is about to have the summer of her life.

She and her friend MacKenzie are getting invited to all the best parties and, with any luck, Innis Taylor, the most gorgeous guy in Bonneville, will be her boyfriend before the Fourth of July.

Jason Sullivan wasn’t supposed to come back from juvy. A million years ago, he was Liz’s best friend, but that was before he ditched her for a different crowd. Before he attacked Innis’s older brother, leaving Skip’s face burned and their town in shock.

Liz always found it hard to believe what they said about Jason, but all of Bonneville thinks he’s dangerous. If word gets out she’s seeing

… [more]

Congratulations to the 2015 National Book Award Winners!

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[Winners in boldface, but it was a particularly strong field of nominees this year.]

FICTION
Karen E. Bender, Refund
Angela Flournoy, The Turner House
Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

NONFICTION
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Sally Mann, Hold Still
Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus
Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran
Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light

POETRY
Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn
Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus
Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things
Patrick Phillips, Elegy for a Broken Machine

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
Ali Benjamin, The Thing About Jellyfish
Laura Ruby, Bone Gap
Steve Sheinkin, Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and … [more]

Goodreads Ratings and How to Read Them

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goodreads Unlike a lot of people in the publishing industry, I regularly review the books I read on Goodreads, and it has sometimes gotten me into trouble. I’ve been a Goodreads member since shortly after it was founded, and I have a lot of friends there whose opinions I follow. And who follow me. Some people in publishing feel no one in our industry should be on Goodreads at all; one editor noted that he won’t buy books from people who have given a negative review to one of his books. Others see it as a betrayal of our small community, that we should all be cheerleaders all the time, and to ever be otherwise is to be an Enemy of Books.

Well, I think that’s a lot of malarky, as Joe Biden might say. Goodreads … [more]

Cover reveal for Christina Mandelski’s THE SWEETEST THING

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We are so very excited for today’s cover reveal! THE SWEETEST THING by Christina Mandelski is a fantastic contemporary YA novel about love, loss, and cake, and it’s soon to be re-released on Amazon with this gorgeous new package and some yummy bonus materials.

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When it comes to cake, Sheridan Wells is a true artist. She’s happiest working in the back of her family’s bakery, dreaming of the day her mom will come home. But when her dad makes an announcement that threatens to change their lives, Sheridan launches a desperate plan to find her mother before it’s too late. Add to that a school art project that she can’t seem to start, a moody best friend and the fact that she may or may not have been asked out by the cutest boy in

… [more]
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