You want car crashes? Yes, you do.

Katie Roiphe's Wall Street Journal article about dark days in YA literature is deja vu all over again and again. We last had major hand-wringing over the alleged bleakness of YA about a decade ago with the publication of books such as Norma Fox Mazer's When She Was Good and Brock Cole's The Facts Speak for Themselves. Roiphe seems to have missed this moment; more eccentrically, when she does acknowledge that YA has always had its dark side, she reaches back to Catcher in the Rye and over to Little House on the Prairie for her examples. As Elise Howard points out in a comment on the WSJ site, what about such YA evergreens as Lisa, Bright and Dark and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden? It seems that Roiphe has missed the fairly essential point that YA was at first defined by its darkness; without any apparent irony she writes that "it may be no coincidence that the dominant ambiance of young-adult literature should be that of the car crash about to happen." The road of YA lit is littered with car crashes, a signal event of just about every problem novel published in the 1970s.

We should be used to journalists painting in broad strokes; the real gap in Roiphe's essay is its lack of any acknowledgment of the enduring popularity of books about problems, death, evil, etc. among everybody--look at any bestseller list. When Frances FitzGerald was writing a similarly themed piece for Harper's a few years ago, I kept hammering her to understand that teens--and kids--read for the same reasons adults do. As Thumb points out to his friend Susan, in Ken Roberts' excellent new Thumb and the Bad Guys, "without bad guys, Harry Potter books would just be stories about school."

When I was a lad,

Boston Latin was where the smart kids went. No more.

[Update] The Boston.com story has been updated and now makes a lot more sense.

Hands Across the Wire

Betsy Bird, aka Fuse #8, did us the very great favor of reviewing The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

In lieu of a gift

I'm guessing they're too busy to read this but maybe you're not.

Join the Cool Kids!

We're on Facebook now. Really, I have no idea what this means. But come play with us!

Frontlist becoming backlist

Hearing Norma Jean Sawicki talk (see Tuesday's entry) about the massive debt behind the publishing industry's mergers and acquisitions made me feel much better about my Visa bill. It also made me think about how much more company is on top of what I personally see at most houses--I might know the editor in chief, the children's publisher, occasionally that publisher's boss, but most often a company goes up up and away into corporate dimensions we just don't see on the ground. Norma Jean and I had a good time talking about what that can mean for which books get published how.

The question that only came to me today is about how much frontlist becomes backlist, and how long it stays there. For example, what percentage of, say, juvenile hardcover fiction published five years ago is still in print? Ten years ago? What percentage of first-novelists get a second crack, and has this figure changed? When I look at the piles of new novels rolling in, I wonder how long an attention span any one of them can command. I worry about those forlorn first-in-a-projected-but-abandoned-trilogy books, their characters left at the breath of the Fire Dragon or in the mouth of the Imponderable Cave. How many books disappear, and how quickly? This is not to say that many of them shouldn't, and not soon enough, but have our expectations of a "normal" literary lifespan changed?