Jack Womack is an accomplished science fiction writer and part of the first wave of cyberpunks; he's also one of the world's foremost collectors of flying saucer ephemera: the zines, cheap paperbacks, and esoteric material associated with the saucer-craze, a virtually forgotten, decades-long global mania that features livestock mutilations, abductions, messages of intergalactic brotherhood, claims of both divine and satanic origins, and psychic phenomena.
Being a compendium of some of my most popular kids' book reviews from the past year, from Glorkian Warrior to Alan Mendelsohn
Children's author, essayist and hero of literature Daniel Pinkwater has revived his classic backlist as a line of DRM-free ebooks! Each one is only $3, and there are some astoundingly good titles in there.
Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars was my first Pinkwater, and it literally changed my life. — Read the rest
When I was finishing grade school the works of Daniel Pinkwater delighted me. I read his stories over and over and The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death is a life long favorite.
Reminiscing with an old friend last night brought tears to my eyes. — Read the rest
Welcome to this year's Boing Boing Gift Guide, a piling-high of our most loved stuff from 2012 and beyond. There are books, comics, games, gadgets and much else besides: click the categories at the top to filter what you're most interested in—and add your suggestions and links in the comments.
Hal Johnson's Immortal Lycanthropes is a YA novel unlike any other. It's the story of Myron Horowitz, a horribly disfigured amnesiac orphan whose nice adoptive parents can't protect him from the savage beatings administered by the school bully every day. But then the bully is found bruised and battered and hurled through shatterproof glass, and Myron is found on the floor of the cafeteria, naked, with no sign of his clothes anywhere. — Read the rest
Today, the New York Review of Books' Children's Collection imprint released a new edition of Daniel Pinkwater's debut book, the classic gonzo science fiction kids' title Lizard Music. Lizard Music is the improbable tale of Victor, a social oddball who loves anchovy pizza and late-night TV — and one night, he discovers that his TV is receiving after-hours programming from another dimension of intelligent lizards. — Read the rest
I've been wandering around for a week reading Jo Walton's Among Others, trying to think of how I'd describe it once I finished, and now I've just finished and I'm still stumped.
So let me start with some adjectives. "Indescribable" for a starter. — Read the rest
IO9's excellent "Where To Start With Young Adult Science Fiction" booklist won me over as soon as I saw Pinkwater's Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars on it, and then I saw that they'd been kind enough to include my novel Little Brother, and I was over the moon! — Read the rest
Continuing last week's spate of Daniel Pinkwater reviews (see the earlier posts on The Neddiad and The Yggyssey), I'm here today to tell you about The Education of Robert Nifkin, one of Pinkwater's true geek-inspirational masterpieces.
I missed Nifkin the first time around (it was initially published in 1998), but I'm pleased to have corrected that oversight, especially since the latest edition, from Houghton Mifflin's Graphia imprint, comes with a fabulous Shag-illustrated cover. — Read the rest
The Pantheon of Idols is a page of the literary and musical heroes of Chaleon I.O. Myme, a neurologist at Brandeis University. His detailed accounts of meeting The Amazing Kreskin and Kate Bush are so full of giddy joy and keen insight that I know I'm going to spend at least $100 buying the books and CDs he raves about. — Read the rest
