THE STARS OF THESE YOUNG ADULT BOOKS SWEAR, STRUGGLE, AND GENERALLY ACT LIKE REAL TEENS
In the new novel Aspen by Rebekah Crane, the teenage title character is an awkward, artsy kid who gets into a car accident that kills the most popular girl at school. The book traces the bizarre fallout in her Boulder, Colorado, community, as well as Aspen’s relationship with her stoner mom. But unlike the typical after school-special YA fare, the drug part of the tale isn’t entirely cautionary.
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the lack of diversity in books for children and young adults. Here’s a look at publisher In This Together Media of Denver, whose mission is “offering more diverse, realistic, unwhitewashed representations of kids, especially girls, in YA and middle-grade literature.”
8 Actors Who Brought Our Favorite Book Characters to Life
The following list is composed of male characters in literature that have been brought to the screen by some of the greatest actors of all time. While this list represents a group of wildly different men — good guys and bad guys, heroes and antiheroes — all of these compelling characters address complicated issues regarding masculinity while taking on the delicate task of transferring a character from the page to celluloid.
See if you agree with the following choices:
- Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon
- Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird
- Tyler Durden, Fight Club
- Stanley Kowalski, A Streetcar Named Desire
- Randle “Mac” McMurphy, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Rhett Butler, Gone With the Wind
- Sherlock Holmes
- Tom Joad, Grapes of Wrath
22 Strong Female Characters In Literature We All Wanted To Be
The editors at BuzzFeed choose the first strong female characters they related to as illustrating Nora Ephron’s directive “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
How Tom Robbins’ childhood turned him into a storyteller
Tom Robbins, the hyperimaginative author of “Another Roadside Attraction,” “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Still Life with Woodpecker,” discusses his new memoir, “Tibetan Peach Pie.”
Robbins discusses life’s epiphanies and the influence of his southern childhood.
Journeys into the autistic mind
We’ve hit a turning point in our understanding of autism, but I think it comes from literature, not science. Not to downplay the science: The newest studies on amino acid deficiencies, faulty neurotransmitters, and disruptions in the cortex may shine light on the whys of the disorder. But to find out the whats — what it’s like to be autistic, from the inside — there’s now a critical mass of books written by those on the spectrum. They are extraordinary, moving, and jeweled with epiphanies.
In The Boston Globe, Katharine Whittemore discusses these books:
- The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism by Naoki Higashida, translated into English by K.A. Yoshida
- Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin
- Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s by Augusten Burroughs
- Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism by Ron Suskind
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
- The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
- Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant by Daniel Tammet
