Last night I finished reading Bridget Zinn’s excellent novel Poison. Poison is silly and funny and features both a bad-ass heroine and some excellent kissing as well as first-rate pig and dog characters. I suppose Poison is a book for kids and teens, in the Harry Potter sense, but one is never too old to live inside another world for a while, and this book really did transport me. Poison’s author, Bridget Zinn, died in 2011 of colon cancer. She was 32. It was a huge loss for kid lit—although I didn’t know how huge until I read this excellent first (and sadly last) novel.  These days publishers depend a lot on authors to market their own work. You’ve gotta tweet and tumbl and facebook and pinterest and set up school visits and signings and attend festivals. Sadly, Bridget isn’t here to share her excellent book, but I hope it still finds the many readers it deserves. Check it out.
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Last night I finished reading Bridget Zinn’s excellent novel Poison.

Poison is silly and funny and features both a bad-ass heroine and some excellent kissing as well as first-rate pig and dog characters. I suppose Poison is a book for kids and teens, in the Harry Potter sense, but one is never too old to live inside another world for a while, and this book really did transport me.

Poison’s author, Bridget Zinn, died in 2011 of colon cancer. She was 32. It was a huge loss for kid lit—although I didn’t know how huge until I read this excellent first (and sadly last) novel. 

These days publishers depend a lot on authors to market their own work. You’ve gotta tweet and tumbl and facebook and pinterest and set up school visits and signings and attend festivals. Sadly, Bridget isn’t here to share her excellent book, but I hope it still finds the many readers it deserves. Check it out.

I reviewed the extraordinary new novel ELEANOR AND PARK in the New York Times Book Review

If you read a lot, you can get jaded. You can forget how a reader has to be generous to a book as much as a book has to be generous to its reader. You feel like maybe everything worth doing has been done, and nothing will ever blow you away ever again.

And then you read a book like Eleanor and Park, and you are shocked out of your complacency and grateful to be alive. As you can tell from my review in the New York Times Book Review, I really love this book. Months later, I’m still thinking about it.

You’re gonna love it, too. Read it. 

You can find it at indiebound, or bn.com, or amazon.

The great Toni Morrison, the U.S.’s only living winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is 82 today.  I love all of Morrison’s books, but Song of Solomon (which I first read in high school) and Sula (which I first read as a freshman in college) have been particularly important to me. Both those books have done so much to shape my feelings about what fictions can accomplish, and how much they can matter in the real lives of their readers. A couple lines that have stuck with me through the years: “What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?” Pilate, in Song of Solomon. “Love is never better than the lover,” -Claudia, in The Bluest Eye
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The great Toni Morrison, the U.S.’s only living winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is 82 today. 

I love all of Morrison’s books, but Song of Solomon (which I first read in high school) and Sula (which I first read as a freshman in college) have been particularly important to me. Both those books have done so much to shape my feelings about what fictions can accomplish, and how much they can matter in the real lives of their readers.

A couple lines that have stuck with me through the years:

“What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?” Pilate, in Song of Solomon.

“Love is never better than the lover,” -Claudia, in The Bluest Eye

thecrashcourse:

Language, Voice, and Holden Caulfield: The Catcher in the Rye Part 1

In which John Green examines JD Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye. John pulls out the old school literary criticism by examining the text itself rather than paying attention to the biographical or historical context of the novel (that’s for next week). Listen, words matter. The Catcher in the Rye has managed to endure without a movie adaptation because a lot of its quality arises from the book’s language. Find out how Holden’s voice, his language, and his narrative technique combine to make the novel work. Also, Thought Bubble gives us a quick rundown of the plot, in which Ikea Monkey may or may not appear.

Let us now begin to discuss J. D. Salinger’s great novel.

Barnes and Noble is releasing this sweet limited collectors edition of The Fault in our Stars on January 3rd. It features a letter about the book’s creation, more than 30 pages of Q&A (mostly adapted from onlyifyoufinishedtfios), and some discussion questions written by Julie and me. And the cool silver cover and sweet endpapers designed by Rodrigo Corral. No need to buy this if you already have the book, of course. But if you don’t, or if you’re thinking of giving it as a gift (thanks!), then definitely check it out, because it’s a beautiful book, and also currently less than $11.00. You can preorder it here.
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Barnes and Noble is releasing this sweet limited collectors edition of The Fault in our Stars on January 3rd.

It features a letter about the book’s creation, more than 30 pages of Q&A (mostly adapted from onlyifyoufinishedtfios), and some discussion questions written by Julie and me. And the cool silver cover and sweet endpapers designed by Rodrigo Corral.

No need to buy this if you already have the book, of course. But if you don’t, or if you’re thinking of giving it as a gift (thanks!), then definitely check it out, because it’s a beautiful book, and also currently less than $11.00. You can preorder it here.

duttonbooks: Just another reason why we love Jon Stewart. And per hour of entertainment, books are the cheapest thing going. Except Angry Birds. Angry Birds is cheaper, but then once you’ve unlocked all the achievements, you feel things yawning canyon open inside of yourself that does not feel anything like achievement.
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duttonbooks: Just another reason why we love Jon Stewart. And per hour of entertainment, books are the cheapest thing going. Except Angry Birds. Angry Birds is cheaper, but then once you’ve unlocked all the achievements, you feel things yawning canyon open inside of yourself that does not feel anything like achievement.
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duttonbooks: Just another reason why we love Jon Stewart. And per hour of entertainment, books are the cheapest thing going. Except Angry Birds. Angry Birds is cheaper, but then once you’ve unlocked all the achievements, you feel things yawning canyon open inside of yourself that does not feel anything like achievement.
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duttonbooks: Just another reason why we love Jon Stewart. And per hour of entertainment, books are the cheapest thing going. Except Angry Birds. Angry Birds is cheaper, but then once you’ve unlocked all the achievements, you feel things yawning canyon open inside of yourself that does not feel anything like achievement.
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duttonbooks:

Just another reason why we love Jon Stewart.

And per hour of entertainment, books are the cheapest thing going. Except Angry Birds. Angry Birds is cheaper, but then once you’ve unlocked all the achievements, you feel things yawning canyon open inside of yourself that does not feel anything like achievement.

(via authorsarahdessen)

Source: sofuckingbeautifulbaby

effyeahnerdfighters: boohoodbravery submitted: I took the train yesterday and some girl to my right read a newspaper. I looked over to her and thought something like “wow that politician looks a lot like John Green”. Then I looked again and it actually was a huge picture of John Green above an ad for the german version of The Fault In Our Stars. This totally made my day.  Das Schicksal Ist Ein Mieser Verrater is an astonishing success in Germany (it has made the Spiegel bestseller list three times, even though that list includes all hardcover books, including books for adults). Also, German critics have been obscenely generous to the book, comparing me to Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth. (Really.) There is only one possible explanation for all this: My translator, Sophie Zeitz, is a much better writer than I am. So thank you, Sophie!
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effyeahnerdfighters:

boohoodbravery submitted:

I took the train yesterday and some girl to my right read a newspaper. I looked over to her and thought something like “wow that politician looks a lot like John Green”. Then I looked again and it actually was a huge picture of John Green above an ad for the german version of The Fault In Our Stars. This totally made my day. 

Das Schicksal Ist Ein Mieser Verrater is an astonishing success in Germany (it has made the Spiegel bestseller list three times, even though that list includes all hardcover books, including books for adults). Also, German critics have been obscenely generous to the book, comparing me to Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth. (Really.)

There is only one possible explanation for all this: My translator, Sophie Zeitz, is a much better writer than I am. So thank you, Sophie!

On Self-Publishing and Amazon

From Amy: “Seeing your facebook posts in relation to self-publishing today, i’m very curious as to why you seem to be so upset when continuously you encourage self publishing of other media. Just look at Vlogbrothers itself. In fact, you addressed this in Hitler and Sex. What about all of the amazing musicians that DFTBA Records picked up. The internet enabled these people to get out there and start something big. Why are books not okay?”

I haven’t sorted my feelings out, and I may be inconsistent/wrong. But to be clear: I did not intend to attack or criticize self-publishing itself. Many great books are being self-published, and that has been the case for centuries.

I wanted to criticize Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, because I felt that in his introduction of the new kindles, Bezos repeatedly peddled the lie that a book is created by one person, and that therefore a book’s author should be the sole entity to profit from the sale of the book. (Aside, of course, from Amazon itself.)

Bezos and Amazon are consistent in their promotion of this lie, because it encourages the idea that the publishing landscape today is bloated and inefficient and that there is a better, cheaper way to do it—a way where all books can cost $1.99 with most of that $1.99 going to the author. Readers and writers both win then, right?

Well, no. Because the truth is, most good books are NOT created solely by one person: Editors and publishers play a tremendously important role not just in the distribution of books, but in the creation of them. Without my editor, there would be no great perhaps in Looking for Alaska, no Augustus Waters in The Fault in Our Stars, and no Agloe, New York in Paper Towns. Without copyeditors and proofreaders, my books would be riddled with factual and grammatical errors that would pull you out of the story and give you a less immersive reading experience. Publishers add value, and lots of it, and without them the overall quality and diversity of books will suffer.

There is lots of room in this world for indie publishing, and I’m excited about all the reading opportunities that the Internet has given us, from blogs to fan fiction to direct-to-ereader novels. But comparing publishing to music or TV is really troubling to me, because people listen to a lot of music: In an average week, I probably listen to 200 songs. I probably watch 5 hours of television or YouTube. But in an average week, I read one book (and that puts me on the far end of the reading bell curve among Americans). Given how few books are read—perhaps 500 million a year—the current publishing landscape does an astonishingly good job of making sure there are plenty of books available to a wide variety of audiences. There are books about little people who survived the Holocaust and the Islamization of the Uzbeks and how to swing a golf club.

My fear is that if there are only two or three voices in the publishing retail landscape—say, Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon—that diversity will dramatically decrease. Only a few dozen books a year will be available at large retailers like Wal-Mart; the rest of literature will exist only in the kindle store. Those books will have difficulty being discovered, because there are so few readers and so many titles. (You are starting to see a similar phenomenon on YouTube right now, actually, but in publishing it will be far worse, because it usually only takes a few minutes to watch a YouTube video.)

Here’s my concern: What will happen to the next generation’s Toni Morrison? How will she—a brilliant, Nobel-worthy writer who doesn’t have a huge built-in audience—get the financial and editorial support her talent deserves? (You’ll note that there’s no self-published literary fiction anywhere near the kindle bestseller lists.) Amazon will have absolutely no investment in that writer, and they won’t need to. Over time, I’m worried this lack of investment will hurt the quality and breadth of literature we actually read, even if literature remains broadly available.

So my issue is not with self-publishing. My issue is with Bezos profiting from this false narrative that an Amazon monopoly will benefit both readers and writers. In truth, I don’t think it will benefit anyone. In the long run, I don’t even think it will benefit Amazon, because if they succeed in destroying publishers, the quality of the books they sell will suffer, and even fewer people will be inclined to spend their evenings reading.

I have updated the Q&A blogs about my books…

DO NOT click these links if you haven’t read the book in question, as there are massive spoilers.

Only if you finished TFiOS

Only if you finished Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Only if you finished Paper Towns

Only if you finished An Abundance of Katherines

Only if you finished Looking for Alaska

I do stand by the massively unerotic blow job.  In a related story, I’ve answered many new questions over at the Q&A blogs for people who’ve read my books. DO NOT click these links if you haven’t read the books in question, as there are massive spoilers, but here they are: Looking for Alaska: onlyifyoufinishedalaska.tumblr.com An Abundance of Katherines: onlyifyoufinishedkatherines.tumblr.com Paper Towns: onlyifyoufinishedpapertowns.tumblr.com Will Grayson, Will Grayson: onlyifyoufinishedwgwg.tumblr.com The Fault in Our Stars: onlyifyoufinishedtfios.tumblr.com If you’re interested in submitting a question, please do so, but take a moment to read through all the previously answered questions, because your Q may have already been A’d. Thanks!
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I do stand by the massively unerotic blow job. 

In a related story, I’ve answered many new questions over at the Q&A blogs for people who’ve read my books. DO NOT click these links if you haven’t read the books in question, as there are massive spoilers, but here they are:

Looking for Alaska: onlyifyoufinishedalaska.tumblr.com

An Abundance of Katherines: onlyifyoufinishedkatherines.tumblr.com

Paper Towns: onlyifyoufinishedpapertowns.tumblr.com

Will Grayson, Will Grayson: onlyifyoufinishedwgwg.tumblr.com

The Fault in Our Stars: onlyifyoufinishedtfios.tumblr.com

If you’re interested in submitting a question, please do so, but take a moment to read through all the previously answered questions, because your Q may have already been A’d. Thanks!

In Defense of Symbolism

(I thought I’d post this here as well as the Paper Towns Q&A blog. It contains no spoilers. Thanks to Tamar for making it possible for me to post this publicly.)

Where did the strings metaphor inPaper Towns come from?

Someone said it to me once, after a friend had attempted suicide, that “maybe all the strings inside him broke,” and I liked that image a lot because 1. puppets, and 2. We are all aware that there is this emotional/psychological life inside of us, right? But it’s very difficult to talk about, because it doesn’t have a physical location.

When your back hurts, it’s relatively easy to address this problem using language: You say, “My back hurts,” and I can understand what you mean, because I also have a back, and it has hurt before, and I remember that pain, which makes it easier for me to empathize with you.

It is much harder for me to empathize with you if what hurts is abstract. When people are imagining sadness or despair, they often try to render it in terms we find familiar. You often hear, “My heart hurts,” for instance, or “My heart is broken.” This problem, of course, is not actually in the heart.

(I do think a lot of people feel emotional pain physically near the solar plexus, but it’s not the physical manifestation of emotional pain that makes it so difficult: It’s the emotional/psychological/spiritual/whatever pain itself, which you can’t describe easily in concrete terms.)

To talk about emotional pain (and lots of other emotional experiences), we are forced to use abstractions. (“My heart is broken,” is a symbolic statement.) And many people feel, in this world driven by data and statistics and concreteness, that abstractions are inherently kind of less valid than concrete observations. But emotional experience is as real and as valid as physical experience. And the fact that we have to use metaphor and symbolism to describe that pain effectively does not make it less real—just as abstract paintings are not inherently inferior to representational paintings.

You often hear in high school English classes, for instance, that thinking about symbols is dumb or useless or “ruining the book.” But underneath it all, this is why we have language in the first place. We don’t really need language to share the news of your back pain: You can point at your back and grimace to tell me that your back hurts, and I can nod sympathetically. 

But to explain to you the nature and nuance of my grief or pain or joy, I need abstractions. I need symbols. And the better our symbols are, the more clearly we’ll be able to communicate with each other, and the more fully we’ll be able to imagine each other’s experience. Good symbolism makes empathy easier.

So why the strings? The strings inside a person breaking struck me as a better and more accurate abstract description of despair than anthropomorphized symbols (broken heart, etc.).

And this is very important to remember when reading or writing or painting or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use.

On Having Figured Out the Twist

“Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening. Look at a point of land over which the sun is certain to rise, Coleridge said. If the moon rises there, so what? The senses are startled, that’s all. But if we know the point where the sun will rise as it has always risen and as it will rise tomorrow and the next day too, well, well! At the beginning of “Hamlet” there can be no doubt that by the play’s end, the prince will buy it. Between start and finish, then, we may concentrate on what he says and who he is, matters made more intense by our knowing he is doomed. In every piece of work, at one juncture or another, a writer has the choice of doing something weird or something true. The lesser writer will haul up the moon.” -Roger Rosenblatt, How to Write Great

There seems to be a feeling among readers these days that if they see an event coming, the book is less than it might’ve been. I couldn’t disagree more.

I stand with Rosenblatt in celebrating anticipation over surprise. Even when reading mystery novels, the pleasure for me is never in the feeling of, oh I didn’t see THAT coming. The pleasure is living with another’s dread and pain and yearning and hope. All of that is a hell of a lot more fulfilling than being surprised by the killer’s identity.

This is the whole reason foreshadowing exists. Foreshadowing, at its best, is not a trick demonstrated to brag about what a fancy writer you can be. It’s about building anticipation, so that the reader can more fully empathize with the characters in the story: I want s/he to battle and hope against the inevitable while reading just as we all do while living. When it works, anticipation is far more fulfilling than surprise, because we are reminded that a sunrise is precisely as magnificent as it is inevitable.

Your Favorite YA Novels Ever

NPR.org is running a poll about the best-ever young adult novels. You get to choose 10 titles from among a very impressive list. It’s fun and easy and you should do it.

And yes, my books are among the books you can vote for, but certainly don’t feel obligated. There are a lot of great books on that list, and when I voted, I didn’t vote for myself!

…is an example of something I could say if I were a better person. I did vote for myself.