The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

What Was It Like to Be a Sweet Valley High Ghostwriter?

Ask Amy Boesky.

From her piece in the Kenyon Review...

Imagine, superimposed on the gray-and-grainy screen of a floundering, slightly depressed twenty-something, the shimmery outlines of an idealized adolescent world. All drawn—I just had to color it in. I could pick any colors, as long as they were pastel! The characters were already invented. They had “histories,” personalities, but I could add nuances. The plots were already there. Who could have dreamed of such adventures? A plane crash in a Cessna. Hysterical paralysis following a bad break-up. The rich posing as poor and the poor as rich. The tennis star that longed to be ordinary, the ordinary girl that longed to be a starlet. Differences smoothed away by the sameness-machine of narrative. The teachers with secrets, the students with secrets, the secrets revealed, the revelations turned into new secrets. The core secret—the one I knew, and harbored myself, and saw in those around me—the bland central core of “sameness,” of normalcy. How different were any of us, despite our attenuated lives as graduate students, from anybody else? The darkest of dark secrets: how much I hadn’t read, and didn’t know. How little I felt I had to say that was different, or new, or mattered.
Your task, my thesis advisor in Oxford told my tutorial partner and me, is to be original. Your thesis won’t pass otherwise.

I haunted the bookshops, certain my argument had already been written. Afraid to ask him: is original the same thing as different? As important, or relevant, or even good?

Writing for Sweet Valley High, I wasn’t supposed to be original. Or different. My job was to pick up somebody else’s thread and follow it: just write the story. Spice it up with dialogue, add a toss of a blond curl here, a sparkle of a blue-green eye there. Create a subplot and weave it through the narrative.

Sick Lit

Is it a symptom of the book industry's decline?

From a piece in the Globe & Mail...

 Literary media have been abuzz about the “sick-lit” controversy: novels written for teenagers with themes of death, fatal disease and psychological disease such as anorexia. Apparently these are very popular with girls in the U.K. and North America. Detractors say they are dangerous because they romanticize these things, especially cancer; they encourage wallowing in depression and may actually encourage vulnerable children to harm themselves.

The 10 Best Books with a Teenage Narrator

The list, care of the Guardian.

The Hunger Games - A Bad Lip Reading

A Reading List for Teenagers

Compiled by University College London.

The Next Hunger Games?

Following 'Twilight' and 'The Hunger Games,' a slew of young-adult and middle-grade novels have been optioned for possible films. The Los Angeles Times offers a guide.

Why Do Women Authors Dominate Young-Adult Fiction?

That's the question explored recently by Salon.

From the piece...

Ask anyone in the book business if Lewit is right, and they’ll probably agree; with a few exceptions, the most successful and prominent contemporary YA writers are women. Furthermore, the cultural infrastructure supporting their books — from agents and editors to librarians, teachers and that formidable new force in the YA world, bloggers — is predominantly female. Some observers blame this state of affairs for the drop-off in boys’ reading habits as they reach their teens; it’s a system ill-suited to producing books that will interest boys, they argue. But if YA has indeed become a gynocracy, few ask why.

The answer, I believe, is prestige. YA is a prestige-free zone, or at least it has been for most of the decades of its existence as a self-identified genre. Perhaps this is changing, now that we’ve seen certain very popular YA series bestride the bestseller lists: Harry Potter, Twilight and the Hunger Games. Yet I don’t think the prestige of YA has changed all that much, not really. Unfortunately, I can’t prove it.

That’s the maddening problem with prestige: It can’t be measured. Immaterial and unquantifiable as it may be, it still lies behind many of the ongoing debates among book lovers. The pitched battle waged by genre fans against literary fiction is largely about the allocation of prestige. So is the campaign to highlight the gender imbalances in literary journalism. Even Jonathan Franzen vs. Oprah, a face-off that’s beginning to fade from the collective memory, was ultimately about prestige.

100 Best Teen Novels Ever

The list, care of NPR.

10 Greatest YA Series of All-Time

The list, care of Flavorwire.

Should Young Adult Fiction Have Age Ratings?

That's the question recently posed.

From a piece in the Christian Science Monitor...

“All you have to really do is read what teenagers write themselves, and I've judged competitions for teenagers writing, and it's darkness beyond anything I would come up with,” Ness told BBC Breakfast. “Teenagers look at this darkness all the time, and I always think if you're not addressing it in your fiction, then you're abandoning them to face it themselves.

“It's not as if books exist in a vacuum and that's all the input teenagers are getting,” he continued. “Teenagers look at the Internet, they look at the news, they look at pornography on the internet, they look at violent movies on the Internet. So if children's literature is not addressing that, if it's addressing the world as it should be rather than as it is, then why would a teenager read you?”

What’s more, Ness argued, ratings systems for young adult literature simply don’t work. “If it's got an 18 certificate for adults, then younger children will look it out when their parents are not around … Children are great self-censors. They know what they can read and they know what they want to read, and if you don't give it to them, they'll find it somehow.”

To Lure Teens, Classics Get Bold New Looks

Will teenagers reading "Twilight" read "Emma" if the cover looks cool? Book publishers hope so.

From a piece in the New York Times...

The covers are intended to tap into the soaring popularity of the young-adult genre, the most robustly growing category in publishing. In the last decade, publishers have poured energy and resources into books for teenagers, releasing more titles each year. Bookstores have followed suit, creating and expanding special sections devoted to them.

After the “Twilight” books by Stephenie Meyer became a sensation, paranormal romances boomed. In the last several years, the “Hunger Games” trilogy has inspired dozens of dystopian novels.

Some of the redesigned jackets are clearly inspired by the “Twilight” series. HarperCollins released a cover for “Wuthering Heights” with a stark black background, a close-up of a red rose and an inscription that reads, “Bella & Edward’s favorite book.” (Critics sneered that it was a “Twilight” rip-off.)

Are Young Adult Novel Book Covers Racist?

Looks like it.

From a piece in the Huffington Post...

Kate Hart is a Young Adult (YA) writer with a complaint about her own genre. More specifically, she has a problem with the design of the covers of YA books.

She recently compiled a survey of the covers of 624 "traditionally published" YA books, and noted, among other things, the representations of minorities - or rather, the lack of them.

She found that 90% of covers featured a white character, 10% featured a character of ambiguous ethnicity, 1.4% featured a Latino/Latina character, 1.4% an Asian character, and 1.2% a black character.
Of the black models featured, two were "behind a white girl", two had their face obscured, three were without heads and featured alongside two white friends, and only one is featured front and center.

Welcome to the 2012 Hunger Games

Rebecca Solnit discusses The Hunger Games for Guernica.

From the piece...

That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like—and yet not exactly like—high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” website, film, and books aspire to reduce.

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. The Hunger Games reminds us of that. Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1 percent, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles, and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1 percent, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen—Annie Oakley, Tank Girl, and Robin Hood all rolled into one—who refuses to be disposed of.

Now, in our world, gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey, and other contact sports that regularly result in brain damage, and sometimes even in death). But while the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia? It has a war or two on, if you hadn’t noticed.

American Icons: The Outsiders

S.E. Hinton chats with Studio 360 about her classic teenage novel, here.

The Next J.K. Rowling Is...

Samantha Shannon.

Who?

From a piece on Jezebel...


The next J.K. Rowling has been discovered and she's not you with your fifteen hundred-page manuscript about a cat named Larry Cotter who finds out that he, a seemingly ordinary house cat, can play piano and so joins a community of feline jazz musicians that play in speakeasies throughout prohibition-era America — she's a 20-year-old Oxford student named Samantha Shannon and her first novel, The Bone Season, helped garner her a multi-book, seven-figure deal with Bloomsbury.

Considering that the real J.K. Rowling is still writing, it might be a little premature to start looking for the "new" Rowling. Still, Bloomsbury editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle — whose name seems like that of a rough-draft Harry Potter character— was so impressed with Shannon's debut novel that she committed to an entire series based on the adventures of a 19-year-old clairvoyant named Paige, who escapes from a criminal underworld in the not-too-distant future only to be sent to the secret city of Oxford by the repressive future government. "The book," said Pringle, "is an utterly consuming adventure and we are committed to the seven." That's seven books, right from the get-go, coupled with lofty expectations to duplicate the success of a once-in-a-generation phenomenon. But hey, no pressure or anything.

The Greatest Girl Characters in Young Adult Literature

The list, care of the Atlantic.

Sweets Literary Quiz

A quiz, based on sweets in kid lit. Don't forget to brush after.

The Power of Young Adult Fiction

How did it get so popular? Why is it so well-read among those that are no longer young adults?

From a story in the New York Times...

If "Harry Potter" made it safe for grown-ups to read kids’ books, "The Hunger Games" has made it cool.

Why are so many adults reading young adult books? No need to page Dr. Freud. This isn’t about the guilty pleasures of communing with one’s inner child. It doesn’t signify a huge baby boomer regression. It isn’t even about nostalgia.

It’s because adults are discovering one of publishing’s best-kept secrets: that young adult authors are doing some of the most daring work out there. Authors who write for young adults are taking creative risks -- with narrative structure, voice and social commentary -- that you just don’t see as often in the more rarefied world of adult fiction.

The Making of a Blockbuster

How did The Hunger Games get so huge?

From a piece on Salon...

The Hunger Games franchise, with Oscar-nominated actress Jennifer Lawrence in the starring role, aims for a spot in a select but very sweet pantheon: movie adaptations of bestselling children’s book series that have become box office juggernauts. The Harry Potter movies set the pattern, and the Twilight films proved that it could be replicated. So far, the Hunger Games’ chances look good; according to a poll conducted by MTV’s Nextmovie.com, the film version of Collins’ dystopian young adult novel is even more eagerly anticipated than “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2.”

Being made into a movie can do a lot for a book. But consider the boost a book this popular can give to the movie. The Harry Potter and Twilight series delivered up obsessively devoted audiences who speculated about casting for years before the films were released, who debated and pored over every still, poster, teaser, trailer — in short, every shred of news about the forthcoming cinematic realization of their favorite characters and stories. They loved those books as only kids can, with an intensity that makes for sprawling fan sites and mobbed midnight release parties at your ordinarily sleepy neighborhood bookstore.

The Hunger Games is that kind of series, if for a more serious-minded, science-fiction-loving breed of teen. And then there are the adult fans. The actress Kristen Bell (star of the cult-TV series “Veronica Mars”) recently told the Huffington Post that “The Hunger Games” is “all I think about.” Bell threw an elaborate Hunger Games-themed party for her 30th birthday: “All my friends dressed as the characters and I dressed as Katniss [Everdeen, the books' heroine].”

As of this writing, the first book in the Hunger Games series has been parked on the USA Today bestseller list for 132 weeks; the second, “Catching Fire,” for 131. There are more than 24 million copies of all three books in print.