I just returned from a dinner on the UES with an emerging young author who has written a young readers' novel that might remind readers of Gaiman's Coraline, where a young girl travels into a different world while living within the realm of a strange house belonging to a strange family. Of course, there is an adversary in the world within, and this particular brand of magic gave me a serious case of the heebie jeebies as I rode the train to the dinner hosted by Penguin Group for Young Readers. It was good company, and the author is a former teacher who worked in one of the smallest school districts in Wisconsin, although I bet most of her students can spell Wisconsin (maybe even Massachusetts or Connecticut).
She was quite kind and flattered, having done a week-long whirl of dinners in L.A., Chicago, NYC tonight--to meet her agent face to face for the first time (and schmooze with us and Pengy.) Tomorrow morning, it's South Carolina and then back to her hometown. There is a lot of work going into the marketing of the book, and it's interesting because unlike most of what I've looked at in the past two months or so of pulling Y.A. novels out of the box--this is a book by strong writer that paints a Pieta of sorts--Young Readers see this trope with C.S. Lewis et al., only the delight is in the terror she brings with antique ghosts.
Tomorrow night, Ted Conover is reading at the Strand. His new book on roads, Routes of Man drives me through some country I've never considered while watching all of America out the window of Poppa's white Dodge van. Right now, I'm with him on a frozen river that is literally a rite of passage for a gang of forty teenagers that have grown up in a Himalayan valley almost 12,000 feet above sea level and who have all "maxed out on the education in Reru, their medieval hamlet, and were taking advantage of the cold to get out of Dodge." Conover is not so swift on the ice, while these kids have grown up tested by and testing the river that runs off the Indus. Cradle of civilization be damned, I've already been deep into Peru, where the "uncontacted" are still considered. The nuggets of knowledge are plentiful, although at times I think the writing gets a little tangential, but maybe that's just New York City commuting with me--funnily enough, DJ Random Play (itunes) is bringing me Fela Kuti's "He Miss Road."
I can never remember which imitates what, art or life.
