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Kids’ books: This ‘March Madness’ is literally playing by the book
“School Library Journal is sponsoring a “Battle of the Kids’ Books.” Patterned after the wildly popular NCAA March Madness, the “Battle of the Kids’ Books” pits 16 topnotch children’s books against each other and asks popular children’s-book authors to choose a winner.”

10 of the best: heroes from children’s fiction
Don’t miss this photo essay featuring 10 heroes and heroines from children’s fiction including Huckleberry Finn, Anne Shirley and Petrova Fossil.

All-New Shel Silverstein Poetry Collection Due in 2011
This week HarperCollins Children’s Books announced the fall 2011 release of a collection of never-before published Shel Silverstein poems and illustrations.

Alabama youth reading Mark Twain to promote literacy
Throughout Alabama, children, big kids and families are reading or re-reading Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ event The Big Read.

Author Name Pronunciation Guide
Ever wondered how you pronounce tricky authors’ names? This site offers a collection of brief recordings of authors & illustrators saying their names. Check out the recording from Adam Rex, a favorite of First Book staff member and author Erica Perl.

I was chatting with some writer friends, and as only writer friends can, we got into a debate. The kind of debate that can bring nations to the brink of war, gives employment to divorce attorneys, and makes us ask, "how could I ever be friends with that person?"

Luckily, we stopped soon after we started. But my friends, this bears more discussion.

The debate?

Anne Shirley vs. Pippi Longstocking. Who's better?

Now, we could spend endless hours on this. And if you are an Anne or Pippi fan, feel free to fan the fires and post your comments. Personally I think we just say Anne was created decades before Pippi and leave it at that. *Harumph* Can you tell which side I'm on?

But let's be sporting. Anne, Pippi, we're solving this the old-fashioned way: smackdown.

Anne, of course, is the beloved red-headed girl in braids, created by Canadian author L.M. Montgomery. Why would Anne win? Well, she's a streetfighter: she smacked Gilbert Blythe so hard with a slate, it shattered. Despite her completely understandable fear of a certain dairy cow, Anne has chased off ghosts in orchards and mice in porridge. Wait. I think the mouse drowned. But still! She's tough and those boots she wears could crush a certain Swedish moppet into the red Prince Edward Island clay!

What about Pippi, our other beloved red-headed girl in braids, created by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren? Why might she win? Well, she can lift a horse with one hand. That's impressive. And given that Anne is quite thin, she could probably heft her with a finger. She'd excel at the trash talk too. Also, she could summon the subjects of Kurrekurredutt Isle to aid her in the fight.

As a red-headed girl who aspires to braids, I must first say that I give equal red-head pride and love to both girls. Now... ring the bell and let the fight begin!

Bernard du Bucheron's The Voyage of the Short Serpent is reviewed in Sunday's New York Times Book Review: "Tackling the gruesome and the grotesque with gleeful abandon, The Voyage of the Short Serpent is an eccentric, slightly maddened and often brutally funny tale of a colony of Roman Catholics marooned in medieval Greenland by the encroachment of a new ice age. Much has been made in France of the fact that its author, Bernard du Boucheron, was 76 years old when “Voyage,” his first novel, was published, and there’s something oddly triumphal about the way the narrative takes direct aim at death — which, despite its omnipresence (the bodies pile up rapidly) is never entirely conceded to."

Bernard du Bucheron's The Voyage of the Short Serpent is reviewed in the Houston Chronicle book section. Critic Robert Zaretsky says "the novel reads as if Cormac McCarthy had channeled Jack London, or better yet, Dostoyevsky . . . a compelling and well-crafted tale."

In the Los Angeles Times "Discoveries" column, Susan Salter Reynolds takes note of The Voyage of the Short Serpent by Bernard du Boucheron, translated from the French by Hester Velmans: "The the cardinal-archbishop sends a fledgling Bishop on a mission to New Thule to save the colonists from heathendom: "You will ferret out and punish heresy, apostasy, infidelity, neglect of religious practice, perjury, gluttony, lusts both simple and sodomitic." But nothing prepares the bishop or his crew for the voyage through ice, the hunger that forces them to eat the corpses of their shipmates, the devastation and desperation they find. "To describe the poverty of these wretches is to wish to share it," the bishop reports back. And nothing prepares him for his own heresy. The settlers have mixed with the Inuit, and the bishop is hordfled by the local sexual practices — fornication in public, sharing of wives, trading of women for supplies. It is not long before he fathers a child (although he denies it) and is punished by the settlers for his hypocrisy. The Voyage ofthe Short Serpent is more than a story of survival in the frozen north; it's a parable on the perils of excessive morality, colonization and religious tyranny."

Bernard du Bucheron's award-winning novel, The Voyage of the Short Serpent, gets a rave review in Booklist: "A medieval bishop travels to the most desolate, forgotten regions of Iceland to investigate reports of paganism among the wretched settlers, whose major choice in life is to die of starvation, freezing, or, once the bishop arrives, torture (for the salvation of their souls, naturally). The story comprises mostly a report from the bishop, whose matter-of-fact tone is so ridiculously incongruous to the atrocities that he encounters (“the crew had partaken of human flesh, even on fish days”) and that he perpetrates (burning a fallen priest at the stake slowly in seal-oil, wood being too scarce for the task) that it is laugh-out-loud funny and revolting at once. With touches of Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies, du Boucheron’s stark tale raises questions of how far we have really traveled from such barbarism, or how quick the fall back might be. Despite all the awful and gruesome happenings, though, the writing is splendid, and this is a strangely pleasurable and completely riveting read, if you’ve got the stomach for it. Fans of post-apocalyptic waste-land tales might be surprised to find them in the past as well." The Voyage of the Short Serpent will be available in bookstores next month!

Coming to bookstores in January 2008, The Voyage of the Short Serpent is an extraordinary work that Robert Littell has called "a novel of staggering originality." Written by Bernard du Boucheron, and translated from the French by Hester Velmans, The Voyage of the Short Serpent was an international bestseller and winner of the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Academie Francaise when published in France a few years ago. Finally available to American readers, The Voyage of the Short Serpent is a modern masterpiece about human morality in inhuman conditions, a parable of truth, obsession and the myth of utopia.

Check out what Publishers Weekly has to say about The Voyage of the Short Serpent by Bernard du Bucheron, due out in January 2oo8.

"A spare, cunningly ironic novel set in the wilds of medieval Iceland.

While Iceland has been nominally Christianized, hibernal adversity and distance from the mainland have conspired to turn the native population toward a more primitive, primeval (read "debauched, pagan") existence. The novel begins with an archbishop's official directive to Bishop Insulomontanus in which he lays out what the bishop must do: to "investigate the Christian folk…and to offer them the comfort of the Word, while not neglecting to castigate sin, if need be, by sword or by fire." The bishop takes this advice literally, and much of the rest of the novel consists of his report back to the archbishop about what he has done to reassert Christian order and hegemony. After an arduous journey through ice and snow, the bishop arrives at Gardar in New Thule to discover ten recently slaughtered corpses. The local chieftain, Einar Sokkason, is of no help, nor is the one remaining priest, a "porcine monster" living openly with a "scarce-pubescent female." The bishop wastes no time with his first decision: to have the priest burned at the stake for "heresy, apostasy, sacrilege and sodomy." In his continual struggle against heresy amongst these primordial people, the bishop resorts to increasingly desperate and even sadistic strategies to maintain his ecclesiastical authority, including having ears torn off and eyes gouged out as punishment for apostates. (He also resorts to beheading, which, considering the alternatives, is something of a blessing.) Eventually the bishop develops a sexual relationship with a local woman, Avarana, although he disingenuously hints in his report to the archbishop that she is a liar and thus not to be trusted. The occasional intervention of a third-person narrative puts the bishop's growing derangement and hypocrisy into perspective.

Sparse, rawboned and fascinating."