Grumpy Cat at BEA!

Chronicle Books Encourages BEA Attendees to “Get Grumpy”

Media Star Grumpy Cat to Greet Visitors at Chronicle Booth #739

Book Expo America attendees will get a chance to meet Grumpy Cat, the Internet’s leading cat curmudgeon and first-time author during a photo-op scheduled on Friday, May 31st at 3:00pm. Grumpy Cat will likely find something unpleasant about the event that will promote her forthcoming book, Grumpy Cat: A Grumpy Book (October 2013), which features classic quips, snarky put-downs and lots of fun activities for Grumpy Cat’s many fans. The photo-op will take place at the Chronicle Books booth, located at space #739 on the lower level of the Javitz Center in New York City.

Grumpy Cat is a small cat with a big frown who has inspired a hugely popular meme. With a sour expression that could stop traffic, she has garnered over 300,000 fans on Facebook, more than 85,000 Twitter followers and was named the #1 Most Important Cat by Buzzfeed.

Chronicle Books will also produce a 2014 Grumpy Cat Wall Calendar, to ensure that no day goes by without the disapproval of Grumpy Cat.

Phantasmagoria; Collected Essays on the Nature of Fantasy and Horror Literature

Phantasmagoria; Collected Essays on the Nature of Fantasy and Horror Literature
Author Roger C. Schlobin
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN-10: 1-4819-4608-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-4819-4608-7

Dr. Roger C. Schlobin is a retired Professor Emeritus of Purdue Universty, among other credits. He has written six scholarly works and edited over fifty, including “The Literature of Fantasy: a Comprehensive, Annotated Bibliography of Modern Fantasy Fiction” (1979). The essays in this self-published collection span over thirty years of his career. “The original purpose of this collection”, he says in the Preface, “was to publish it with a prestigious university press as a study of the invaluable place that secondary, archetypal characters hold in literature. However, teaching four classes of first-year writing a semester stalled my research in 2006. The working bibliography is published here in an appendix for someone, hopefully, to build upon. Then, retirement and back surgery made the tedious steps of publishing with a university press superfluous.”

These essays have been published previously in such scholarly reviews and books as “Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature”, “J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth”, and “The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts”. Sample titles are “The Irrelevancy of Setting”, “Prototypic Horror: The Book of Job”, and “In Search of Solitude: The Fascination with Evil”.

Have Your (Cup)Cake and Read It Too

BEA’s Book Bliss in partnership with Huffpost Books has this great new series on books and cupcakes.  Reading and cupcakes – how perfect!

Check out the following videos and then stay tuned on their site for more upcoming in the series:

The Great Gatsby

The Life of Pi

The Fault in Our Stars

BookExpo America’s Global Market Forum 2013 Highlights Mexico

Bringing the Growing Mexican Book Market to New York
BookExpo America’s Global Market Forum 2013 Highlights Mexico

Norwalk, CT, April 24, 2013: BEA officials have today announced that BEA’s annual Global Market Forum will focus on Mexico. The Global Market Forum, which honors countries from around the world by providing educational panels and cultural exchange opportunities, has become a cornerstone of BEA’s international outreach. Last year’s initiative, which focused on Russia, included a wide range of activities throughout New York City. BookExpo America is North America’s leading book industry event and will take place in New York City at the Jacob K. Javits Center, May 29 – June 1, 2013.

Mexico is a book market worth 10,084 million pesos ($830 million) in 2011, and it has grown 2.7 percent in volume and 13.2 percent in value since 2010. Mexico, the 13th largest economy of the world, with a growth in GDP of 5.5% in 2010, occupies a significant position among today’s emerging economies, and – not the least through the NAFTA agreement – is a privileged trading partner of the USA. 45 million people in the US speak Spanish as their first or second language.

When it comes to books and publishing, however, the picture is more complex.

Ribbit!

Ribbit!
Author:  Rodrigo Folgueria
Illustrator: Poly Bernatene
Age Range: 3 – 7 years
Hardcover: 32 pages
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers; Reprint edition (March 26, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307981460
ISBN-13: 978-0307981462

This is one of the most charming books I’ve had the pleasure of reading in a while.  I fell in love the story of a pink pig who just wanted to make friends.  The illustrations on textured paper are big, colorful and comical.  Children, both in the age group it targets and a little older, will adore it.  The book shows that making friends isn’t always easy, but worth the trouble.  It also shows children that just because someone is different, that’s no reason to be suspicious of them.  Sometimes, people do just want to be your friend.  In a world gone a little mad lately, this simple message of friendship is very welcome and assuring.

The illustrations really are beautiful.  The expressive faces of pig and frogs are wonderful.  They say it all and the text/story provides a little extra detail.  The pig’s rather large face is completely lovable and cute.  I can see small children falling in love with it.  The text is wonderful too – it grows larger as the ribbits do and provides emphasis to the story.

When the pig ends up in a tree with lots of little bird friends my middle-grade grandchildren laughed aloud in pure enjoyment.

Lovely, charming and highly recommended.

Book Description from the publisher:

A group of frogs are living happily in a peaceful pond, until they discover a surprise visitor: a little pink pig. Sitting contentedly on a rock in the middle of their pond, the pig opens his mouth and says: RIBBIT! The frogs are bewildered at first, and then a bit annoyed—”What did that little pig just say?”, “Does he think he’s a frog?”, “Is he making fun of us?”

Soon the pig draws the attention of all the nearby animals; everyone is curious to know what he wants! After much guessing (and shouting) and a visit to the wise old beetle, the animals realize that perhaps the pig was not there to mock them after all—maybe he just wanted to make new friends!  But is it too late?  This is a warm, funny, and beautifully illustrated story of friendship, with boisterous RIBBIT!s throughout—perfect for reading aloud.

About the Author & Illustrator

RODRIGO FOLGUEIRA studied art at Buenos Aires National School of Fine Art and works as an author and illustrator, specializing in children’s books. He lives and works in Argentina.

POLY BERNATENE graduated from Buenos Aires Art School and has worked across many different genres including advertising, animation, and comic books. He has published more than 60 children’s books all over the world. He lives and works in Argentina.

E.L. Konigsburg, RIP

A great voice in Children’s Literature and two-time Newbery Award-winner E.L. Konisburg has died.   I found out on Facebook, via a post from Jane Yolen.

I loved her books.  For years, The View from Saturday was read, re-read and re-read yet again until it fell apart, then I’d run out and find a new one.  She touched my life and my heart with her books and she lives on in them.  My granddaughter now reads and re-reads From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler much as I did The View from Saturday.  I am positive, because her books are so enduring, that my granddaughter’s grandchildren will one day be lying in a window seat with a well-loved, almost falling apart book by Ms. Konisburg in their hands.

She will be greatly missed.

Her list of work is here on her author page at Simon and Schuster.

Her biography is here at Scholastic.

I am sure there will be a lot of blogs about her shortly and I’ll do my best to get the links all posted here.

In the meantime, read this great review from Elizabeth Lund done back in 2007.

NEW:  Bookshelves of Doom has a wonderful round up of links from blogs and news.  Do visit and read away.

Comics About Cartoonists: Stories About the World’s Oddest Profession

Comics About Cartoonists: Stories About the World’s Oddest Profession
Editor:  Craig Yoe
Publisher:  IDW Publishing
Language:  English
ISBN-10:  1-613-77346-3
ISBN-13:  978-1-613-77346-8

This is indeed an odd tome.  It is a 229-page anthology of newspaper and comic book cartoonists drawing about their profession.  Not “how to draw” lessons, either.  Editor Yoe has combed the archives of old newspapers and comic books from roughly 1910 to 1960 and found “funny drawings” in which the cartoonists (sometimes working with scripts by others) have depicted stories about the cartooning profession.  The reprinted newspaper strips are usually in black-&-white as they were published; the comic-book reprints are in full, garish color.

Many of the comic-book stories are about cartoonists who draw themselves into their own stories.  These range from realistic art – the “Inky” Wells cartoonist who falls in love with his model, from a 1955 romance comic, looks just like comic-book artist Jack Kirby, whose photograph is well-known – to the fanciful – surely funny-animal cartoonist Al Stahl (1958), who draws himself falling asleep at his drawing board and falls into his world of talking rabbits and policeman lions, did not really look like something out of a carnival funhouse’s distorted mirror.  Most of the comic-book stories are six or eight pages.  Famous newspaper cartoonists Milton Caniff (“Terry and the Pirates”; “Steve Canyon”) and Chester Gould (“Dick Tracy”) are present in one-page promo autobiographies in which they have drawn themselves in the style of their heroes.  Bud Fisher (“Mutt and Jeff, 1919) draws himself getting contradictory demands from his editors for six panels (“More Republican jokes; No, more Democratic jokes; Ridicule the Bolsheviks; Lay off the Russians); in the seventh panel he commits suicide.

Scholastic Discover More: World War II

Scholastic Discover More: World War II
Author: Sean Callery
Publisher: Scholastic Reference (March 1, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0545479754
ISBN-13: 978-0545479752

I’m quickly learning to love the Scholastic Discover More series of books. The grandchildren love them and for me, they are a wealth of information.

In World War II, a visual history of the world’s darkest days, there are plenty of full color photographs, as well as some stunning black and whites and infographic type pages laid out in a way that is appealing to most children. Also provided is a free digital companion book that kids and parents can access either on Mac or PC through Scholastic’s Discover More website.

The Originals

The Originals
Author: Cat Patrick
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (May 7, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0316219436
ISBN-13: 978-0316219433

Trust Cat Patrick to write something wild and crazy, told in the most normal of voices.  I first came into contact with her work when I read Revived and was completely blown away.  When I saw The Originals, I knew I just had to read it.  I wasn’t disappointed.  The Originals tells the story of three sisters who are not triplets…they are clones.  Because their scientist/geneticist mother is on the lam and the FBI is searching for girls of their age masquerading as triplets, they are forced to live a sort of half-life; rather a third of a life.  Each girl takes a part of the day and has to be careful in how they wear their hair, clothes, etc.  One heads to school in the morning, then rushes home at lunch to switch.  The third sister takes over the evening.  Occasionally, they switch to accommodate illness or other issues.  Needless to say, it’s kind of nuts, but they take it in stride.

Conflict and Costume: The Herero Tribe of Namibia

Conflict and Costume: The Herero Tribe of Namibia
Photographer: Jim Naughten
Introduction: Lutz Marten
Publisher: Merrell Publishers (February 19, 2013)
ISBN-10: 185894600X
ISBN-13: 978-1858946009

It’s always interesting to learn about cultures and people from far away lands. That’s one of the reasons I read so much and I am well used to being swept away in time or place, but not as stunningly as with Conflict and Costume: The Herero Tribe of Nambia. I must confess, the images were so stunning – bright colors against a pale sky and desert sand; that I just had to pore over them for hours before I read the introduction or any of the text. The most striking and what keep me gazing into the photographs, were the faces. Such strength and history in the expressions. It moved me profoundly and I found myself wanting to go to Namibia and meet these people.