I don't know. You turn your (still extremely jet-lagged, just in the opposite direction) back for one moment and the tabs to be closed are already breeding...
First, the big sadness: Cody's Bookshop has closed completely. http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/21/codys-books-of-berke.html
I've loved doing signings and events with Cody's over the years, thought they were special and will miss them very much. It makes me glad that Kepler's is still in business,
I'm a Hachette author in the UK and much of the Commonwealth. I see that, from an Amazon-selling point of view, this might not be a good thing to be.
I guess I'll start finding other places to link to when I want to point to books. Amazon is always the easiest way to link, so it tends to be the place I default to.
I got a bit puzzled last year when my name got left off the National Theatre of Scotland production of "The Wolves In The Walls" at the New Victory (it was there as writer of the book the thing was based on, but not as co-adapter or as writer of most of the extra lyrics). Still, I felt that things had swung a bit far the other way when I saw this article from Variety on The New Victory winning the National Award for Excellence...
Here's the second part of a two part interview with Alan Moore at the Forbidden Planet blog (where you can learn what he thinks about Gordon Brown being petitioned by the public for an honour on Alan's behalf ):
The door to Hell. It's in Darvaz in Uzbekistan.
Weird Tales is blogging an entry a day on its 85 weirdest storytellers of the last 85 years.
I was thrilled by
Sandman, the whole thing, being on the
Entertainment Weekly top 50 new classics of the last 25 years, and baffled why, when they did the entry on what the longest work on their list was, they only listed the first volume of
Absolute Sandman, rather than the whole thing. And googled to make sure that my friend Marc Bernardin was still working there to ask him (not that it's anything to do with him of course) and found myself reading this:
I met Miriam Berkeley on a plane in late 1988, on my first professional trip to the US, I think. She's a photographer who photographs authors -- here's an interview with her, along with some of her great author photos:
http://goodbooksguide.blogspot.com/2008/04/eyes-of-miriam-berkley.html
Hi, Mr. Neil!
Thought you might enjoy this:
http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/07672/I_Believe...
--JuliaThat's cool: Turning wordclouds into art. I have to go and play with Wordle, don't I?
why do the characters in your children's book "The Dangerous Alphabet" look so very similar in appearance (hair color, eyes, clothing - even, somewhat, the shapes of their faces) to Al Columbia's beloved underground cartoon characters, "Pim and Francie"? The similarities are pretty uncanny. Are you and your illustrator very big fans of Al Columbia, or is it simply a very big co-incidence?
thank you for your time.
regards,
brent higginsI'm not sure I've ever seen anything Al Columbia's drawn, apart from a promo piece for
Big Numbers about 18 years ago, but I googled Pim and Francie,
found a picture, and can't figure out what they have in common with the brother and sister in
The Dangerous Alphabet apart from being male and female children, and his hair being lighter than hers. So it's a mystery to me too.
Sent some
pictures of me taken for Time Out Sydney...
And here's a scan of the
Entertainment Weekly photo page with my top ten on it. A photo almost unique in the history of pictures of me in magazines, for actually looking like me...
In my head
Eddie Campbell whispers, "Ah. Righht. Another picture from the Neil Gaiman School of Looking at You Sideways.")
...
STOP PRESS: "The Witch's Headstone" (which will, later this year, be Chapter 4 of
The Graveyard Book) won the Locus Award for best novelette. Thank you to all who voted for it, and to Gardner Dozois who accepted the award on my behalf. It's a really terrific list of winners, too.
From
Locus:
Locus Awards Winners
Winners of this year's Locus Awards, voted by readers of Locus Magazine in the annual Locus Poll, were were announced this afternoon at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel in Seattle, at an event led by Master of Ceremonies Connie Willis.
- SF NOVEL
- The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)
- FANTASY NOVEL
- Making Money, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins)
- YOUNG ADULT BOOK
- Un Lun Dun, China Miéville (Ballantine Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
- FIRST NOVEL
- Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill (Morrow; Gollancz)
- NOVELLA
- "After the Siege", Cory Doctorow (The Infinite Matrix Jan 2007)
- NOVELETTE
- "The Witch's Headstone", Neil Gaiman (Wizards)
- SHORT STORY
- "A Small Room in Koboldtown", Michael Swanwick (Asimov's Apr/May 2007)
- COLLECTION
- The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, Connie Willis (Subterranean)
- ANTHOLOGY
- The New Space Opera, Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Eos)
- NON-FICTION
- Breakfast in the Ruins, Barry N. Malzberg (Baen)
- ART BOOK
- The Arrival, Shaun Tan (Lothian 2006; Scholastic)
- EDITOR
- Ellen Datlow
- MAGAZINE
- F&SF
- PUBLISHER
- Tor
- ARTIST
- Charles Vess
I am delighted to welcome Linda Silver to my blog. Linda is a specialist in Jewish children's literature. A retired librarian, Linda has worked in school and public libraries as well as in synagogue and Jewish educational libraries.
Her professional activities include leadership positions in the Association of Library Service to Children (ALSC/ALA) and in the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL). She has been a member of the Newbery-Caldecott Committee, an ALSC board member, president of the School, Synagogue, and Center Division of AJL, president of the Cleveland AJL chapter, and chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee. In 2004, Linda received the AJL's Fanny Goldstein Merit Award in recognition of her contributions to the Association and to the profession of Judaic librarianship. She teaches workshops and gives talks on Jewish children's literature and writes about it extensively as a reviewer and co-editor of children's book reviews for the AJL Newsletter and as editor of the online Jewish Valuesfinder,www.ajljewishvalues.org.
Linda's most recent publication is a book published in 2008 by Neal-Schuman entitled The Jewish Values Finder: A Guide to Values in Jewish Children's Literature. Past publications include Jewish Classics for Kids (AJL, 2006), Excellence in Jewish Children’s Literature: A Guide for Book Selectors, Reviewers and Award Judges (AJL, 2003), and Developing a Judaic Children’s Collection (AJL, 2001) as well as many magazine, journal, and newspaper articles. Her current writing project is a guide to Jewish children's literature for the Jewish Publication Society. Linda lives with her husband in Cleveland, Ohio.
Linda’s contribution to children’s literature is inspiring. I’m honored that she was able to spend some time to share her knowledge and experience.
Tell me a little bit about the history of Jewish Values Finder and how parents, educators and librarians can access the information.
The predecessor of the Jewish Valuesfinder was Marcia Posner's Juvenile Judaica, a print publication that listed books of Jewish content, briefly described them, and gave their subjects and themes. After the first edition, which was published in 1985 and sold by AJL, several supplements were issued. Publication was suspended around 1995. In 2002, Marcia asked me to create a new publication that would continue her work in some form. She contributed the funds needed to develop the online guide, which was launched in 2003 and is accessible to anyone with a computer at www.ajljewishvalues.org. The publishing director at Neal-Schuman read an article about the Jewish Valuesfinder and contacted me, asking if I would write a book.
What drew you to create such a database?
Although more and more books of Jewish content for kids were being published, there was very little written about them. Individual reviews and short bibliographies existed but nothing that compiled all of that burgeoning literature on a continuous basis or evaluated it or identified it by the Jewish values embodied in it. As a Judaic librarian in synagogues and a bureau of Jewish education, I was very aware of how often parents and teachers looked for literature that was rich in Jewish values and how there were no guides to help find it.
This month the Jewish Values Finder was published in book form. How does the book differ from the web site? Will there be updated versions available every year?
The book contains information that the online does not, including a history of Jewish children's literature in America, selection criteria for books of Jewish content, collection development guidelines, and a list of Jewish publishers. While the online guide identifies books by more than 100 separate values, The Jewish Values Finder book organizes books by eighteen different values - each one conceptualized rather broadly. The chapter on mitzvot, for example, includes books that would be identified by many different mitzvot in the online guide. The book is portable; the online guide is not. The book is finite in the number of titles it contains whereas new titles are always being added to the online guide, which already contains books published in 2008. As for updates, I don't know what the publisher's plans are and suppose they depend on how well this book does.
If an author or publisher wants a book considered for inclusion in the Jewish Values Finder is there a submission process?
Anyone who wants a book for children or teens considered for the Valuesfinder can send me a copy for review. First, they should read about the criteria for selecting titles for inclusion in the Valuesfinder by going to www.ajljewishvalues.org. They can also email me at [email protected].
Do you see any significant trends in Jewish literature for children?
There's more Jewish "chicklit" being written and more novels for teens in general. Overall, they make me cringe: “chicklit" celebrates the very traits which sexist adult novels have always associated with women, traits that brand women as petty, materialistic, narcisistic, concerned mainly with their looks and how much money they can spend. The focus in most books for teens is on the self - on the main character and her or his personal, often narrow, concerns. There is very little sense of peoplehood or of being a part of the nation of Israel. In this sense, they are anti-Jewish.
Are there any books “missing” from the genre that you would like to see published?
The art of the picture book is one of the highest achievements in modern children's literature but there's little evidence of that among picture books of Jewish content, whose illustrations are usually banal or at best, pretty. I'm also struck by how conservative, how safe most books of Jewish content are. By this, I don't mean I yearn for the vulgarity that is so commercially successful in secular books for kids but I do wish there was more off-beat or experimental writing, more mischief, more fantasy. For this to happen, reviewers are going to have to be more welcoming of the off-beat and publishers less risk-averse.
Linda, thank you for your commitment to children’s literature!