Tag
Young Adult Literature
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Deracialized Discos: On “Discomania” and “The Pepsi-Cola Addict”
It’s common for teenage fantasy to find an engine in fiction. But teenage fantasy runs out.
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Digging up Whiteness
We may imagine that young people are innocent of the implications of race and class in American culture, that they can grow up in a kind of bubble of protection, safely insulated from the vexed and terrible realities of injustice. But young people know better. Children see race as a category before they learn to…
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Baldwin’s Children
James Baldwin’s recently reissued picture book, Little Man, Little Man, positions itself within a larger textual world. In this sweet and lively story of four-year-old TJ and his friends on a summer …
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Power, Poison, Pain, and Joy
Sitting atop a police car beneath an oversized American flag, Kendrick Lamar opened the 2015 BET awards with his single “Alright.” “We hate the po-po …
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The Earnest Elfin Dream Gay
The guy behind the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” phenomenon has regrets. In a 2007 review of Elizabethtown, film critic Nathan Rabin coined this term to contextualize …
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On Our Nightstands: July 2018
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is …
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We All Must Play “The Westing Game”
In the beginning was Sunset Towers. By which I mean, at the beginning of what I quickly came to think of as my reading life: whatever came before, whether read …
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On Our Nightstands: June 2018
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is …
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Harry Potter’s Scar, or Book Recs from a Columbine Grad
I graduated from Columbine in 1999; I was a senior at the time of the shooting, 19 years ago today …
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Queer Your Own Adventure
“BEWARE and WARNING!” So heralds the front page of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, wildly popular in the 1980s and 1990s. “This book is …
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The YA Resistance
With tedious regularity, cultural commentators turn up their noses at Young Adult fiction, grumbling that it allows readers who should know better to indulge in “escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia.”1 These complaints overlook the aesthetic inventiveness and political engagement evident in the work of contemporary YA authors such as Kristin Cashore, Daniel José Older, and…
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Coming of Age with Philip Pullman
People really like Philip Pullman’s characters. One of my best friends gave his daughter the middle name Lyra after Lyra Belacqua, the heroine of Pullman’s His …
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The 90-Second Newbery: An Interview with James Kennedy
“Trade and plum-cake forever, huzza!” So said John Newbery, the 18th-century …
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Empathy Is Not Enough
Almost 30 years ago, education researcher and children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop introduced an analogy that has been widely embraced by the librarians, teachers, artists, and scholars involved in the #weneeddiversebooks movement. Stories featuring underrepresented minorities, Bishop observed, can function as both mirrors and windows. Members of marginalized groups can see themselves represented as…
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Body Projects: The Killer Makeover in Recent YA Dystopias
As the Hunger Games begin, the makeover—that staple of reality television—is itself made over from dream into nightmare. Forced to fight to the death against other teens on live TV, contestants such as sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen must first give themselves up to a team of stylists at the “Remake Center.” Rather than depicting this beautification…
