Lydia Perović (no relation) interviews a mainstay of this Weblog, Russell Smith, and gets everything wrong that could be gotten wrong, from facts to copy to mondegreens to ‘apostrophes and ‘quotation marks’.
The YA is largely targeted at young girls. And I know this form my son; there are now a lot of middle grade books aimed at boys. But now we’re moving into the YA phase. There’s almost none I can find. I’m reading him old, really problematic adventure books that he absolutely loves. Biggles. This is so English. Biggles is a series of stories about a First World War pilot and adventurer, written by a British army officer in the air force of the time. He wrote them in 1920s 30s, 40s, and it’s all upper class British “fighting the Hun and the Bosch” and daring-do adventuring and getting out of scrapes and escaping from behind German lines and it’s classist and xenophobic and tremendously exciting for a 12-yo boy. There are all kinds of stereotypes about ‘silly Frenchmen’ and ‘uptight Germans’ but it’s intra-European so it’s fine.
Is an inability to publish correct type and copy another reason why literature is dying? (Is such a death deserved, even merciful?)
Perović and Smith operate in a world where Reality Hunger was never written. Of no surprise whatsoever were Perović’s absent questions on plagiarism.