Presenting the 2022 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award Winners
Today, the Horn Book, Inc. announced the 2022 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winners. First presented in 1967, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards celebrate excellence in children’s and young adult literature. “Young people today are living through history,” said Elissa Gershowitz, Acting Editor in Chief, The Horn Book, Inc. “This selection of winners and honorees so beautifully captures this shared moment and the extraordinary issues young people face. At a time of increased book bans and challenges, it’s vital for readers to have access to thought-provoking, mind-expanding, worldview-questioning titles such as these.” Winners included: Ain’t Burned All the Bright written by Jason Reynolds and illustrated by Jason Griffin for the Picture Book Award; All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir for the Fiction and Poetry Award; and Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre by Brandy Colbert for the Nonfiction Award. You can see the presentation of all the winners and honorees here.
Zoe Kazan Developing East of Eden Limited Series
Actress and screenwriter Zoe Kazan is developing a limited series based on John Steinbeck’s classic novel East of Eden for Netflix. This series comes nearly 70 years after Kazan’s grandfather Elia Kazan directed a film adaptation of the novel starring James Dean. Kazan will write and executive-produce the project, and Florence Pugh is on board to star as Cathy Ames. In a statement to Deadline, Kazan said she “fell in love with East of Eden when I first read it, in my teens. Since then, adapting Steinbeck’s novel — the great, sprawling, three-generational entirety of it — has been my dream. More than anything, I have wanted to give full expression to the novel’s astonishing, singular antiheroine, Cathy Ames.” Kazan also described Florence Pugh as her “dream Cathy.”
New Video Game Based on Poems of Emily Dickinson
A new video game called EmilyBlaster is a new 1980s-style game in which players must shoot words out of the sky to correctly recreate Emily Dickinson’s poetry. This game is a real-life version of the fictional game that a character creates in the forthcoming novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Zevin describes the EmilyBlaster game as “a little bit addictive and the right amount hard.”
Current Bookish Trends, Observed by a Very Online Bookseller
As in all areas of culture, book trends come and go. Whether it’s genre or cover trends, here are a few current ones.