Oct 22 2007

Norbert!

Fantasy fans take note: there's a new book out from Robin McKinley entitled Dragonhaven. Here's the publisher's description:"Jake Mendoza lives at the Makepeace Institute of Integrated Dragon Stu...

More »

Oct 20 2007

Rowling shocks the easily shockable (and thrills legions of fanfic writers)

...by announcing over the weekend that beloved wizarding icon Dumbledore was gay!GO, J.K. ROWLING! Hell, if your books are going to be banned left and right anyway, why not strike a blow for equa...

More »

Oct 19 2007

M.T. Anderson Speaks! (Part II)

(Here's the link to Part I of this interview. Again, the High School TV reporter is referred to in this interview as "HSR", the interviewer from George Mason University is referred to as "GMU", a...

More »

Oct 18 2007

Furuba

And speaking of manga...Fans of Natsuki Takaya's massively popular Fruits Basket series can now buy the "Fruits Basket Ultimate Edition". It's a compilation of the first two volumes, complete wit...

More »

Oct 17 2007

John Feinstein

John Feinstein is a former Washington Post reporter, an occasional contributor to NPR, and the author of a number of best-selling sports books. He has also written a trio of well-received childre...

More »

Oct 17 2007

Cover-Up: Mystery at the Super Bowl, by John Feinstein

2007-10-17-coverup-mystery-at-the-super-bowl-by-john-feinstein

John Feinstein’s Cover-Up: Mystery at the Super Bowl offers an appealing alternative to the majority of books aimed at preteen male readers (most of which seem to feature wizards, spies, and/or laser-toting aliens). While Cover-Up includes its fair share of armed thugs and sneering bad guys, it’s basically a thoughtful, entertaining novel about the world of sports journalism...

More »

Oct 17 2007

Whoa.

What is this?While I've never been a fan of Christine Feehan's novels, I'm intrigued by this "re-imagining" of one of her short stories as a manga. Ms. Feehan has always struck me as a mediocre w...

More »

Oct 16 2007

Celebrities reading, part II

It's not as deliciously apropos as Paris Hilton carrying around a copy of Valley of the Dolls, but trainwreck-at-large Britney Spears was recently photographed reading a copy of The Lion, the Witc...

More »

Oct 15 2007

Bookseller news

Barnes and Noble is currently featuring a video interview with Terry Pratchett. (I'm finding that their new site is about 20% slower and fifty times more irritating than their old one. Is any on...

More »

Oct 12 2007

Awards season

Well, the National Book Awards finalists have been announced, and—surprise!—we've read exactly one of 'em. (And it's a picture book: Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, in case you wer...

More »

Oct 11 2007

Mine Till Midnight, by Lisa Kleypas

2007-10-11-mine-till-midnight-by-lisa-kleypas

Lisa Kleypas’s Victorian romances are always first-rate, so it comes as no surprise that her most recent effort, Mine Till Midnight, is beautifully written, precisely plotted, and filled with appealing, fully developed characters. Kleypas cannibalizes some of her earlier stories for this book, but Mine Till Midnight is more than entertaining enough to rise above a few familiar plot twists...

More »

Oct 10 2007

M.T. Anderson Speaks! (Part I)

Behold again: here's the first part of my interview with the fantastically awesome M.T. Anderson! The second part will be posted soon. Please note that this interview includes questions from a s...

More »

Oct 10 2007

Pie!

We try to meet every bibliophile’s entertainment needs here at Wordcandy, and that includes fans of recreational cookbook reading. Check out Stephanie Anderson’s Killer Pies: Delicious Recipes fr...

More »

Oct 9 2007

Great news for manhwa fans...

We've been complaining for a while about the demise of ICE Kunion, the English-language publisher of several of our favorite manhwa titles. (Hey, the idea that we'd never find out what happened i...

More »

Oct 8 2007

Ms. Black Speaks!

Behold, my interview with the fantastically awesome Holly Black, author of the Wordcandy Featured Book pick Ironside:1. Can you give us any news on your upcoming story The White Cat? Does it hav...

More »

Oct 5 2007

Heyer done wrong

I have limited bookshelf space for my Georgette Heyer collection, and if I was smart, I'd save it for the beautiful Sourcebooks editions of her books. But life is uncertain, and I fret. What if ...

More »

Oct 4 2007

National Book Festival

Encouraged by Julia's belief that I would be found wandering around the National Mall, hopelessly lost, I headed out to join the other tens of thousands of book lovers at the Library of Congress's...

More »

Oct 3 2007

Something to look forward to...

Two of our favorite Wordcandy YA authors have new books scheduled for the spring:Peter Abrahams has announced that the third book in his excellent Echo Falls mystery series will be called Into the...

More »

Oct 2 2007

Lisa Shanahan

Lisa Shanahan is an Australian children’s author. Ms. Shanahan trained as an actor, and she’s heavily into drama—and (for once) we mean that in a straightforward, non-Oprah-esque way. Her book T...

More »

Oct 2 2007

Hooked, by Jane May

2007-10-02-hooked-by-jane-may

As our longtime readers know, we here at Wordcandy rarely turn down a re-told fairytale, even when it’s just another teen-girl-friendly version of Cinderella. We’re particularly excited when the fairytale in question is an unusual one, which is why we were all a-flutter over Jane May’s Hooked, a modern retelling of The Fisherman and His Wife...

More »

Oct 1 2007

The Sweet, Terrible, Glorious Year I Truly, Completely, Lost It, by Lisa Shanahan

2007-10-01-the-sweet-terrible-glorious-year-i-truly-completely-lost-it-by-lisa-shanahan

I don’t know much about Australian entertainment. My knowledge of their popular culture is limited to Strictly Ballroom, a single episode of Kath & Kim I caught in England, and an Australian romance novel that I read a few years ago, which featured such outdated sexual politics that I originally thought it was written in the sixties...

More »

Oct 1 2007

It's that time of year again

Welcome to Banned Books Week!Looking for a banned book to read? Lucky for you, there's no reason to leave the house: half the childhood classics on your bookshelf have been banned or challenged ...

More »

Sep 28 2007

Shindig!

If you're going to be in the D.C. area tomorrow, be sure to check out the seventh annual National Book Festival. It's free and open to the public, and will feature such Wordcandy-approved authors ...

More »

Sep 27 2007

Michael A. Stusser

Michael A. Stusser is a Seattle-based journalist, writer, and game inventor. His (semi) non-fiction book The Dead Guy Interviews is one of our Featured Book titles.

More »

Sep 27 2007

The Dead Guy Interviews, by Michael A. Stusser

2007-09-27-the-dead-guy-interviews-by-michael-a-stusser

I still have my battered middle school copy of DK Publishing's Chronicle of America. It’s held together with duct tape and prayers, but I’m going to keep it forever. The Chronicle was a massive ...

More »

Sep 27 2007

Stay gold

The New York Times is currently featuring an essay about S.E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders, which is enjoying its fortieth anniversary this year.While Hinton's West-Side-Story-esque melodrama has ...

More »

Sep 26 2007

Odds and ends

Please note that if you missed out on the season premiere of Gossip Girl last week, don’t worry: iTunes has the pilot episode available for free download.CNN.com is featuring a list of strange and...

More »

Sep 25 2007

Manga releases galore

I’ve been having some irritating manga experiences lately, so I'm happy to see that there will be volumes of all three of my favorite mangas coming out in the next few weeks:1. Volume 13 of The W...

More »

Sep 24 2007

Sequel news

We've had about a zillion search string hits this month from people looking for information on the sequel to Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy. So here's a compilation of what (little) we know:1. T...

More »

Sep 21 2007

History Lesson for Girls, by Aurelie Sheehan

2007-09-21-history-lesson-for-girls-by-aurelie-sheehan

Aurelie Sheehan writes with delicate, lyrical precision, her characters are memorable and three-dimensional, her sense of time and place imbues every page... and if she'd shown the tiniest bit of self-restraint...

More »