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The world’s biggest book fair is opening its doors soon and, as a native “Frankfurter” working in the publishing industry, it's the time of year that my colleagues start asking me about my hometown. Sadly, the most common thing I hear is that there is little that they know beyond Frankfurt airport and the exhibition centre.

The post Beyond business and the book fair: exploring Frankfurt appeared first on OUPblog.

The Anne Frank Fonds, a Switzerland-based foundation, has decided to name Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank, as the legal co-author of his daughter’s famous diary. In the past, Otto was acknowledged as an editor, the writer behind the diary’s prologue, and the man who had the book published. This controversial change allows the organization to retain copyright to the Diary of a Young Girl until 2050.

Here’s more from The New York Times: “Six years ago, the foundation asked legal experts in various countries for advice on its copyright, according to Yves Kugelmann, a member of the foundation’s board. They concluded, he said, that Otto ‘created a new work’ because of his role of editing, merging and trimming entries from her diary and notebooks and reshaping them into ‘kind of a collage’ meriting its own copyright. Merely declaring Otto the ‘co-author’ on copyright filings extends the copyright, legal experts said, though such a stand could be tested in the courts. Readers would not see any changes on the books themselves, foundation officials said.”

Generally speaking, European laws dictate that copyright ends approximately 70 years following an author’s death. Anne passed away in a concentration camp back in 1945 while her father lived until 1980. Within the United States, the copyright for the diary will not end until 2047. The book was first published in this country back in 1952. (via The Seattle Times)

Dreams of Freedom: In Words and Pictures
edited by Janetta Otter-Barry, designed by Judith Escreet, with a Foreword by Michael Morpurgo
(Amnesty International/Frances Lincoln, 2015)

All royalties donated to Amnesty … Continue reading ... →

The "Waltz with Bashir" director has been experimenting with a combination of 2D animation and stop-motion.

VICE has launched a new literary series called ​”Behind the Bars: Guantá​namo Bay, Stories From the World’s Most Notorious Prison.” The editors behind this series have posted recipes, essays, poems, satire pieces, a fable. One of the sections in this series explores the books that may have been banned from the prison library.

According to the editor’s letter, an assortment of writers, scholars, and public figures have been brought on to examine “the list of books that are reportedly banned from GTMO—including their own—and tried to figure out why.” Some of the titles that can’t be accessed at this institution include The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass, and The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. The New Yorker staffer Ariel Levy looked into Frank’s famous Holocaust memoir; here’s an excerpt from her article:

“The starkest difference between the captivity of Anne Frank and those in Guantánamo Bay is that Anne Frank and her family were in hiding. It must be so surreal for those in Gitmo to know that the whole world knows they’re there. We all know and it doesn’t seem to matter. Anne and her family’s whole plight is to remain invisible, to remain secret. In that sense it’s confounding that the book is banned at Guantánamo—the family couldn’t be making any less trouble. What more could you want from a prisoner than invisibility and silence?”

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I’ve hit an academic dilemma at summer camp this year. For the past three years at this gifted students’ camp, my lead instructor has chosen to teach The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank). Yes, the book provides an entryway into a very difficult historical topic; yes, it’s pretty amazing to watch Anne’s growth; and yes, she is a role model and a hero for multiple reasons. But I’m so tired of reading and teaching Anne’s diary year after year. Though it’s new to my students every time, it’s become monotonous to me. I’m bored!

I encountered the same problem with another lead teacher during the school year, except she couldn’t stand Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell.  Having been raised in California, I read this book in elementary school because the narrative explained so much about Native American daily life in California. My lead teacher had used the text for over ten years, so it was understandable why she was simply sick of the book. As her assistant now given the task of teaching Island of the Blue Dolphins, I asked her why she didn’t switch Island of the Blue Dolphins out for another book. Her reasoning was that she saw the value in teaching it despite her feelings.

My solution so far is to find suitable replacements (Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, in case you were wondering) but recognize that this isn’t feasible for most teachers on a regular basis. To choose a replacement means taking the time to find a book that matches what you find value in the original (now boring) book, write a whole new curriculum, and figure out how to teach it. It’s much easier to pull out familiar curriculum.

So what to do about Anne Frank? I still haven’t decided if I want to say goodbye to her forever. But the question still stands: what do you do when you have a book of value and you don’t have the passion for teaching it anymore? Do you continue to teach it because of its merit, or shelve it?

The post Frankly, tired of reading Anne Frank appeared first on The Horn Book.

Describe your latest book. My Salinger Year is a memoir about my sojourn as the assistant to J. D. Salinger's agent, a job that involved answering his fan mail, typing letters on an ancient IBM Selectric, mastering an archaic device known as a Dictaphone, and generally coping — or trying to decipher — the odd, [...]

Enter to win a Who Was? book from Grosset & Dunlap's leading biography series. Giveaway begins March 21, 2014, at 12:01 A.M. PST and ends April 20, 2014, at 11:59 P.M. PST.

Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!
~Anne Frank

My friend (and the wonderful artist) Sara Angelucci has a question for you lovers of children’s books. Please read about her newest project below and get in touch with your memories of “a book you always carry with you.” I’d love to hear your comments here as well!

♦

Hello,

I am looking for children’s books suggestions (from YOUR CHILDHOOD) for an upcoming project I am preparing for the Koffler Gallery in the fall of 2013 entitled We’re in the Library. As one of the participating artists I have been asked to create a work in response to the idea of the school library.

For my project, I’m interested in knowing which books from childhood (approximately age 6-14) have been IMPORTANT ones and had a long-lasting impact into your adult life. In essence, a book you always carry with you deep inside.

Perhaps by way of example, I will share my story. When I was 14 I entered the school library and the librarian said, “oh my goodness Sara, you look so much like Anne Frank.” As a Catholic girl raised in a small town, I was unfamiliar with Anne Frank’s story. And my response was “who is Anne Frank?” She immediately took Anne Frank’s Diary off the shelf and said, “you should read this.” So I did, and of course, the impact was profound. Not only did I look like Anne Frank, I was her age when she started writing the diary. And, I shared many of Anne’s feelings as a young burgeoning adolescent woman. Of course, her life circumstances were beyond my comprehension, and to discover Anne’s ultimate end was devastating. Her story changed me. Perhaps it was the real shift from childhood to adulthood. 

If you should care to, I would love to hear about your most important book. I will not be able to use all of the books suggested to me, I’m searching for a short-list of ten. But if you would like to share your story, please write to me at:

sara@sara-angelucci by MAY 27, 2013.

Many thanks

Sara Angelucci

This week is Banned Books Week, an annual event celebrating our freedom to read whatever we like. It’s not that we want to celebrate the banning of books, of course. What we celebrate is the power of books to convey ideas, even ideas that are shocking, controversial or unpopular.

Sponsored by the American Library Association and many others, Banned Books Week is an important way to shine a light on these books. Many of the books highlighted during Banned Books Week were only the target of attempted bans; a powerful reminder of the importance of staying vigilant about protecting our First Amendment right to read any books we like.

At First Book, we like to walk the walk, so we make a special effort to ensure that the schools and programs in our network have access to high-quality books – including many that have been banned, or the target of attempted bannings.

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.
• The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank.
• Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, by Benjamin Franklin
• The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
• Fighting Ground, by Avi
• The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
• Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
• Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
• Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer

Check out these books (and more) on the First Book Marketplace, and make sure the kids you serve have the chance to read them all, and make up their own minds.

It’s not too late to join this year’s Reading the World Challenge if you haven’t already – just take a look at this post for details.

In our family we have all joined together and read picture books set in Mongolia, which is our current focus on PaperTigers. I had to hunt around a bit but we came up with a good selection. I’m not going to go into a great deal of detail here as they are all gathered up in my Personal View, Taking a step into children’s books about Mongolia. We have really enjoyed delving into the culture and heritage of Mongolia and these picture books have been read all together and individually.

One bedtime Older Brother read Horse Song: the Naadam of Mongolia by Ted and Betsy Lewin (Lee and Low, 2008) to Little Brother – quite a long read and they were both engrossed. Watching them from the outside, as it were, I came to an added appreciation of the dynamics of Ted and Betsy’s collaboration, both in the energy of their shared enthusiasm and participation in the events surrounding the famous horse-race, and also of being struck by a busy, crowded scene one page and then giggling at the turn of expression on an individual study’s face the next.

And I’ll just share with you Little Brother’s reaction to Suho’s White Horse, which you can read about in a bit more detail in my Books at Bedtime post earlier this week:

It was a moving story. The governor made me angry because he broke his word and was cruel to Suho and his horse.
[Listening to the musical version played on the Mongolian horsehead fiddle, the morin khuur] Once you know the story, you can tell which part of the music is telling which part of the story. How do they make that music with just two strings? It fills me with awe.

I also read The Horse Boy: A Father’s Miraculous Journey to Heal His Son by Rupert Isaacson (Viking, 2009), an amazing story of a family’s journey to Mongolia in search of horses and shamans to seek healing for the torments that were gripping their five-year-old autistic son’s life: as Isaacson puts it with great dignity, his “emotional and physical incontinence”. If you have already read this humbling, inspiring book (and even if you haven’t), take a look at this recent interview three years on from their adventurous journey. Now I need to see the film!

And talking of films (which we don’t very often on PaperTigers, but I can’t resist mentioning this one), The Story of the Weeping Camel is a beautiful, gentle film that takes you right to the heart of Mongolian life on the steppe. Who would have thought a documentary film about a camel could be so like watching a fairy tale? Don’t be put off by the subtitles – our boys love this film. Take a look at the trailer –