[Music] could the autism epidemic be an optical illusion Steve Silberman will be here to talk about his book neurotribes The Legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity autism parenting has a long and terrible history of uh people being subjected to shame and stigma because for most of the 20th century the prevailing Theory among psychologists was that autism was caused by bad parenting what happens when a woman with a perfect work life balance gets a more than full-time job at a 247 tech company Elizabeth Egan will be here to talk about her debut novel a window opens the thing that keeps me up at night the most is the poll between family and ambition and family and finances and trying to find the right footing in both of those worlds looking for that perfect picture book Maria Russo our children's book editor will join us to talk about this year's back toschool kids books Alexander Al will fill us in on the latest from the literary World parl SEL has bestseller news and we'll let readers and listeners ask a few questions for us editors here at the book review this is inside the New York Times book review I'm Pamela [Music] Paul Steve Silberman joins me now from San Francisco hi Steve hey Pamela great to be here it's great to have you your new book is called neuro tribes the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity a very interesting subject but not one that you would think someone who writes about science and cultural Affairs for Wired um you write a lot about technology as well would necessarily write about so what brought you to this topic yes I came to the subject of autism in a in a very interesting and very wired way back in uh I believe it was 200000 I was on a boat uh with over a 100 computer programmers cruising through a l on something called a geek cruise and uh there was a guy in the boat who invented one of the first open-source programming languages uh called pearl without which things like Amazon and Craigslist and the Internet Movie Database that we all depend on would not be possible and towards the end of the cruise I asked him if I could come and interview him at home in Silicon Valley and he said yeah sure I should tell you I have an autistic daughter and at that point like most people at the time who didn't have a personal con ction to autism I didn't know that much about it uh really beyond what I'd seen in Rainman his remark registered but I didn't think anything of it but then a few months later I was profiling another technologically very Adept family in Silicon Valley in fact the patriarch of the family built the first computer in the Middle East and uh I asked the uh sister-in-law of the woman I was profiling if I could come interview her at home and she said uh yeah sure I should tell you we have an autistic daughter and I thought well that's a an odd you know coincidence and at that point like most of the world I believe that autism was this extremely rare uh you know neurological syndrome and so I was telling that story to a friend of mine in the neighborhood Cafe here in San Francisco a woman at the next table said oh my god do you realize what's happening I'm a special education teacher in Silicon Valley there's an epidemic of autism in Silicon Valley something terrible is happening to our children and so I got you know I got a chill and I also because I'm a reporter I got uh the desire to do some reporting and so I wrote an article in 2001 for Wired called the geek syndrome which was one of the first mainstream articles to look at to take seriously the notion that there were a lot of people with autistic traits working in high-tech communities so I wrote the article and what happened was for years afterwards I got letters well emails anyway I got emails and uh from all different types of people from autistic people who saw reflections of themselves in my story uh from parents who lived in high-tech communities I remember I got an email from a dentist who worked in a town where there was a big IBM uh shop and he said that many of the parents who worked at IBM had autistic children and what the world was arguing about uh at that point so we're talking the mid 2000s the world was having a long and very rancorous argument about whether or not vaccines cause autism uh promoted by the the fraudulent paper of Andrew Wakefield but this is not what the parents that I had written about and the parents that were writing me were concerned about by that point what they were facing was that their kids would quote unquote age out of services once they graduated high school and so they were no longer you know kind of obsessing about what had caused their child's autism they were really facing difficult challenges uh helping their kids transition out of school helping their kids find jobs helping their kids learn how to live independently in the community and I realized that while this long argument about vaccines was unfolding in the mainstream world that the parents of autistic kids and also autistic adults were dealing with a completely different set of challenges that we were not meeting as a society by focusing so narrowly on the Dynamics of autism in high-tech communities I had missed a larger and more important human story and so that's what I uh attempted to write with neurotribes all right I have about 20 follow-up questions but I want to get into just the interesting that the language um that both of those parents used I should tell you I have an autistic son or daughter why do you think it's phrased that way I should tell you what do you think they were trying to convey with that autism parenting has a has a long and terrible hisory his of uh people being uh subjected to shame and stigma because for most of the 20th century the prevailing Theory among psychologists was that autism was caused by bad parenting of course there was a guy named Bruno bleheim who was like first America's first celebrity psychiatrist and he wrote a bestseller in the 60s called The Empty Fortress and he blamed autism on refrigerator mothers right and so uh parents everywhere are still dealing with a lingering stigma of being blamed for their children's autism and even now the stigma sort of expresses itself differently which is that many parents uh of autistic kids tell me that you know they'll be at the supermarket and you know they'll get a sour look from another mom who says like can't you control your own child there's no question that some autistic Behavior can be alarming uh to see from the outside if you're not used to it although I have to say after spending a lot of time uh with these families and with autistic adults as well I've pretty much gotten used to it it's not it's not that hard to get used to you know if a kid is having a meltdown he's usually responding to Something in in the environment that's making him or her uncomfortable and that you know they should be listened to but anyway so I think that what they were telling me was that you know if you come to our house and uh our children are there you may see things that you're not used to seeing there's a lot of talk among parents especially espcially parents of boys that every child it seems is diagnosed with autism or ADHD or executive function disorder or sensory processing disorder so many of these diagnoses are these things becoming more prevalent or is it that we are recognizing them if you uh read my book what it really is is uh a kind of a 70 to 80 year history of how the diagnosis of of autism uh has expanded uh particularly in the last 25 years or so or 30 years one of the most frequently asked questions that comes to me is do you think autism is being overdiagnosed and you know aren't these kids just quirky well I don't think so every uh person that I've met who has an official diagnosis who's you know gone through the clinical process of getting a diagnosis really does need uh special forms of support and help and accommodations just to get through daily life I think that some of those disorders parents now refer to their kids as alphabet kids because they have so many you know acronymic diagnoses you know it's really well chronicled by the New York Times I have to say that ADHD kind of went wild uh with the help of big Pharma big Pharma came up with drugs that they wanted to sell uh to the parents of kids with ADHD and then you know miraculously the you know ADHD diagnoses spiked however with autism something else and very special is happening what I describe is that Hans asger in the 1930s disco was the true discoverer of autism and he believed that it was very very common and that it was a lifelong condition that expressed itself in uh very diverse ways from kids who couldn't talk at all to chatty uh professors of astronomy at universities but then h asberg had The Misfortune of uh working in Nazi occupied Vienna and so his work was really not just forgotten but buried after World War II by the guy who went on to uh claim credit for discovering autism a child psychiatrist in American named Leo Connor and unlike Asperger Leo Connor proposed that autism was very very rare that it was an in quote unquote infantile disorder restrict to the early years of life he once bragged that he turned nine out of 10 kids referred to his office for a diagnosis of autism by other clinicians away without giving them one because he was so concerned with keeping the diagnosis narrow monolithic you know pure in his mind so what happened was I believe autism was radically uh underdiagnosed for decades and often kids ended up with a diagnosis called childhood schizophrenia which we Now understand is very very rare but there were hundreds of kids at in Bellevue diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia there were hundreds of kids at Langley Porter psychiatric Institute which is three blocks from my house here in San Francisco diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia childhood schizophrenia was considered an epidemic in the in the 1950s which is like this Eerie precursor of the alleged autism epidemic in the 80s now we understand that schizophrenia hardly ever uh manifests in childhood and so what happened was these kids were hiding behind different labels I would say and so they weren't getting the help they need if they were you know if they could pass as merely quirky they were pretty much left on their own and their families were left on their own and you know I chronicled many people who came into adulthood having no idea why they had such trouble with relationships and employment uh and just feeling comfortable in the social World um because there was no label for them until the Asperger syndrome label was invented in the in the80s well it's interesting that you bring up Asperger syndrome because they just sort of got rid of that label yeah they did they folded it into the autism spectrum disorder label for me um you know the saddest thing about that was the loss of the name Asperger because uh I really feel that Asperger's work was very underappreciated and was very preent he really recognized that a autism is a very broad spectrum and he also developed ways to uh teach autistic kids and to support them throughout their lives and so uh one of the things I'm very happy about in the book is that Asperger is one of the main characters and he's a fascinating uh character I have to say and so at the same time that Asperger's name is being forgotten from the so-called Bible of Psychiatry the DSM I am remembering him at length in neurot tribes and a lot of his uh the people who Me by that diagnosis will call themselves aspies and and are fighting the fact that this has been taken from the DSM and still self-identifying in that way that's true well Asperger syndrome was a very important invention culturally because uh in America in particular not so much in England but England by the way has been about 30 years ahead of us on autism uh for a very long time but um for adults the Asperger syndrome diagnosis was like the first diagnosis that could apply to them and in part it became popular because it didn't have the word autism in it the diagnosis was invented by this woman named Laura Wing who recognized that Asperger had been right that autism was a lifelong condition and that it was very Broad and that it was very common uh and that Connor had been wrong that it was narrow monolithic and infantile and she sort of behind the scenes swapped out Connor's criteria uh which were very exclusive from the DSM and swapped in as you know Asperger's criteria and then coined this term Asperger syndrome which she was quite Frank in saying that it appealed to parents because it did not have this stigmatized word autism in it and so it became wildly popular uh and people started identifying themselves as aspies as you say and that's something that you know I think asger himself would have been completely surprised by that is the term now high functioning autistic for the previously uh Asperger syndrome you know I don't like the functioning labels high functioning and low functioning I'll tell you why people who are called high functioning are usually dealing with challenges in their lives that are not so obvious and that can be very disabling and so high functioning people are usually facing more intense struggles in day-to-day life than is obvious whereas uh we're discovering particularly as new technologies to enable communication for people who can't use words easily spoken language like keyboards and to allow people who can't use spoken language to communicate we're discovering that even so-called low functioning people can be very very bright and very Adept and have a lot to say just because you can't talk doesn't mean you have nothing to say and so I avoid uh the terms high functioning and low functioning in the book although you know it's it's obvious that uh some autistic people are more blatantly disabled than others yeah and one of the criticisms that you often hear about uh studies of autism is that they skew toward I'm not sure what term to use instead of high functioning so I'm going to use it for lack of another term but they skew towards the more verbal the more high functioning autistic end because many of those who are nonverbal um or may have other complicating factors or diagnoses at work are not even able to take part in the studies yes I actually spoke about this with Simon Baron Cohen who was one of the uh pioneers of asger syndrome research and autism research in England and he described how gradually he noticed that the work of autism researchers was drifting towards uh you know more articulate more Adept with spoken language people over time and you know that's a kind of a natural thing in that experimenters simply found it easier to to concoct experiments uh on people who could talk Baron Cohen um also expressed the notion that because it was believed that uh people who couldn't talk were uh suffering from intellectual disability his colleagues Baron Cohen's colleagues thought that that was a complicating factor and that by studying people with Asperger syndrome they were studying a kind of more pure form of autism what's interesting is that parents in the United States often have the completely different approach and think that you know the the purest form of autism is the most disabling so it's it's an interesting question about how science gets done you know there's been much more research on uh so-called high functioning people uh recently I think that's a problem one of the things that I really want my book to do is to get us to start thinking about where should the research money really go because we have spent millions and millions of dollars in the past decade alone you know what's often called combating autism there was a combating autism act where does that money go that money usually goes on you know sort of Big Ticket uh fishing Expeditions in human genetic databases looking for candidate genes uh that might contribute to autism well we've been finding them you know we found more than a thousand candidate genes that may in some way be involved with cases of autism it turns out that every autistic person is genetically unique even the most common genetic risk factors for autism are found in only a very small percentage of the cases okay so then you people say all right so forget about the genetics let's focus on environmental risk factors well you know so many potential environmental risk factors s have been identified uh everything from increasing uh paternal age to maternal smoking maternal diabetes WiFi said you know Susan Greenfield in England you know some of them are more credible than others we won't even go into vaccines yes but what I would suggest is that we should be putting money towards improving the lives of the autistic people who are already here so many of them we don't even know how many there are and a truly shocking fact that came out in a report from the government accountability the GAO a couple of months ago was that the NIH funding for research on improving the lives of autistic adults has gone down in recent years keep in mind there are more autistic adults than there are autistic children it's so easy to associate autism with children in part because Leo Connor did for so many decades but also because look at the websites of uh organizations like Autism Speaks there are many many pictures of children and few pictures of adults one thing I think is interesting is this new wave of university is sort of uh specializing in programs that are adapted for young autistic adults yeah absolutely well the whole generation of kids who were diagnosed in the90s is coming of age and we're recognizing that we have so few resources available to them and that so much time was wasted really arguing about vaccines when we should have been Building Services for Families and uh autistic people who who could transition out of childhood into more rewarding creative and engaged lives it's one of the things that's I think makes it so hard for people to uh get a grasp on autism is that the definitions are are constantly shifting and the ways we're thinking about it have changed so much between getting rid of the diagnosis for Aspergers to thinking about it in terms of a spectrum you've used the word condition and I think a lot of people don't know is it a condition is it a pathology is it a personality trait some people talk about it as extreme maleness how do you see it I see it as as a part of the human condition and I think the profound truth that autism has to teach us is that some of human kind's most illustrious gifts are accompanied by profound dis ability and one of the things that I talk about in the book is the is the many different ways that uh people with autistic traits in the past have contributed to the evolution of science technology and culture by the way I would say that the contribution of autistic women is still virtually invisible because there is still very little research done on women on the Spectrum and that's another area that we've been ignoring while we've been chasing down uh you know the question question do anti-depressants in the water supply cause autism why not uh research what the lives of autistic women are like and why they present differently on the Spectrum than men that's something we know very little about and it's shocking what asger believed was that the culture as we know it would not be what it is if it wasn't for the kind of hidden presence of autistic people and he tried to make them visible he did not identify it uh as only a pathology as Leo Connor uh primarily did he looked at it as a as a a mixed blessing in a sense it was a set of distinctive gifts that he called autistic intelligence along with distinctive challenges like the inability to read social signals in real time and what he thought was that if Society could accommodate the challenges that autism would be less disabling and then the gifts could shine forth and help us all as a society and now that philosophy has been given a name uh by by uh the daughter of an autistic woman uh an anthropologist named Judy singer she coined the term neurodiversity in the 90s to celebrate the diversity of the styles of human cognition that's what the word neurodiversity in my subtitle means instead of seeing conditions like autism and ADHD and dyslexia as errors of nature that must be fixed we uh see those conditions as expressions of human genetic diversity that will increase the resilience and uh our ability to respond as a society to a a very rapidly changing world I think your book is going to go a long way in terms of Shifting that focus in a productive and positive direction so Steve thank you so much thank you Steve Silberman is the author of neurotribes the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity [Music] Alexander alter is here with news from the publishing World hi Alexandra hi Pamela what's going on so this week thousands of Science Fiction readers and writers are gathering in spoken Washington for the Hugo Awards which are one of the most prestigious awards for science fiction writers with past winners that include Kurt vaget and Ursula lewinn but amid the celebration this year there's sort of a controversy that's been brewing for the last couple years but it really blew up this year the Hugo awards are sort of an unusual prize because fans can vote and it's sort of democratic that way but there's been a block of writers who've been lobbying fans to vote for writers that they think should win and there's sort of an ideological divide that has arisen around this what are the sides the very vocal group this year calls themselves the sad puppies and they've run a very successful campaign to nominate these kind of swashbuckling kind of throwback Space Opera type books that they feel like have been edged out in recent years in favor of more diverse voices books by women books that tackle kind of social issues and racial issues of Injustice through the lens of Science Fiction um this group has complained that the awards have gotten too academic and too ideologically left leaning so in order to counter that and sort of take back the Hugo Awards they have led this very successful campaign to nominate writers who are writing what they view as more traditional science fiction some really prominent authors have gotten involved in this fight George R Martin was blogging about it saying that he feels like the awards are broken and need to be re-evaluated does that make him a sad puppy he is sad about it but he is not a sad puppy um George R Martin thinks what the sad puppies have done is it's not you know against the rules it's in no way cheating but it's making the science fiction Community divide itself into two camps people who support diversity and different kinds of voices and people who apparently are taking a more traditionalist View and it's actually lining up on these right-wing left-wing ideological lines how political is science fiction generally I mean that's an interesting thing I think it's always been extremely political um it's always been a vehicle for writers to explore bigger ideas I mean going back to sort of futuristic dystopian classic works that looked at basically Fascism and the effects of fascism through science fiction it was a way for writers who were oppressed perhaps politically to write about what was going on in the world around them in a futuristic setting um and lately it's actually become I think an even more interesting genre there's a lot of Works in Translation that are thriving here like um a Chinese science fiction writer whose books are selling really well here a science fiction writer from Cuba and one of the most successful authors to emerge in recent years is Ann Ley um her book ancillary Justice dominated the awards last year won hugos and nebulas and other Awards and her book is very political it takes place in a future world where gender is irrelevant and all the characters are referred to with a pronoun she so these are the kind of books that the sad puppies say have gotten precedence over more traditional science fiction works all right I got to ask so if one side is called the sad puppies what's the other side called I think it's everyone else but I'm not sure there's there hasn't been formal block on the other side you know a group that it's named itself in any way can we name them what do you think well I think it's obviously got to be something with kittens something with happy happy cats but the awards are concluding on Saturday that's when they'll be given out and and after that I think the whole organization is going to vote on whether the whole voting system needs to be overhauled to prevent this kind of Stack of of the votes so we'll see how play Twilight Zone music here I think we should all right well we'll see what the future for science fiction holds thanks Alexandra thanks for having [Music] me Elizabeth Egan joins us now she has a new novel a window opens welcome Liz thank you Pamela thanks for being here so tell us about this novel this is your first novel it is my first novel and it is the story of a woman who finds herself on the brink of 40 starting a brand new job after her husband uh in a very explosive fashion loses his job and she needs to earn more money so she gets a job at a company called scroll which is supposed to be kind of the Starbucks of bookstores with very carefully curated books for sale in a luxurious literary lounge and it seems like the dream job dot dot dot dot dot dot yes okay I'm not going to be koi um because uh you are the subject of a big profile in the New York Times this week because you worked at a scroll like company and you have also been a longtime player in the literary world so just tell us a little bit about your background and where you've worked I was the books editor at self for a long time and left there in 2012 to go work for Amazon's publishing division here in New York it was a very small satellite office and Amazon was was and still is publishing its own fiction and non-fiction but I was only working on fiction I was only there for 13 months for me it just really was not the right fit it was the wrong time of my life it was the wrong corporate culture really for me it made me start thinking about what one does when one finds themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong story in the wrong story which is just like your your heroin Alice Pierce when you were um writing this heroine Alice how much did you think of it as being a kind of you once removed and how like Alice are you I'm very much like Alice I'm not quite as flaky as she is it's a little embarrassing to me that people might think I'm exactly like her but I also have three kids I also live in New Jersey like Alice is everyone going up to you and saying oh my god did your husband lose his job yes everybody is and everybody says does your husband have a drinking problem which he doesn't I do have an unruly dog who is on Prozac my kids are not happy that I've violated his privacy by going public about that but uh yes she pretty she tracks pretty closely to my life but the events of the book didn't happen exactly as they do in the book in the story around the time that Alice starts working at scroll her father who has had throat cancer before has a recurrence and becomes very sick which did happen in my real life but not when I worked at Amazon one of the things I think readers will really relate to in this book is that it's it tracks two very different but major Trends going on in so many of our lives one is um Alice is part of this sandwich Generation Um right now where she's dealing with caring for her parents at the same time that she is caring for her own children and for herself and her career career and kind of um a lot of people have said this is you know the novel for the leanin generation but it really is true that it's about that juggle between competing uh family and personal agendas and needs and then on the other hand it's also very much of the moment in terms of what the corporate atmosphere is like in a lot of um sort of High Press White Collar jobs did you think about that consciously or was that just all not really I mean it's kind of the story of my life and my phase in life and it's the conversation that I have with my friends the thing that keeps me up at night the most is the pull between family and ambition and family and finances and trying to find the right I really don't like the word balance but trying to find really the right footing in both of those worlds and right now I'm lucky enough to be working in an environment I'm the books editor at glamour I find it a very familyfriendly place to be but not everybody is so lucky and it made me think what happens when you're in that spot and you have something in your life that is the straw that breaks the camels back that you know whether it's a sick parent or a spouse who's in their own career Cyclone or kids who have who need you more that year than they did the year before it was a conversation I kept having in my own head and with my friends and I felt like it wasn't really represented in fiction we have all of these big non-fiction books um we have lean in anarie Slaughter is coming out with a book in October about some of these issues also but I felt in fiction my experience wasn't really represented what's interesting too is that in this book she loses her footing at home and she loses her footing um at work and all of these things kind of happen at once and you think well that's you know improbable but the truth is it's not that's the way things happen in life where absolutely think can pile on when it rains it poures I mean that has been that's been my experience one of my favorite parts of the book um is the specifics that you uh go into especially in terms of language uh with the corporate speak at scroll give us an example of uh a few examples of some of the ways in which they spoke in that office that didn't jive with a literary person like Alice Pierce there were many Expressions I didn't understand I mean even the term metrics um even diving deep looking at things from a 30,000 foot perspective toggling toggling referring to books as carbon based or now is that real yeah no that is that is real I will say that it when I was at Amazon everyone there has an excellent sense of humor about their own internal vocabulary I mean when I first started there somebody sent me a glossery of all the terms that I would need to learn so it wasn't like I was completely flailing and out there but as a lover of language it was truly like going to a different country and beginning again I want to ask you about an interesting decision you made as a writer in the book where there's so much specifics um true to life in the language in the in the corporate atmosphere at scroll and scroll by the way seems like a completely believable technology company entity corporate entity the brand names and in the uh sort of parenting uh foibles of today but one area where you were a bit koi was with the town in New Jersey now I know where you live in New Jersey you invented a town in New Jersey and I'm curious why you decided to do that well I'm a native of New Jersey I am really perhaps New Jersey's biggest booster I often think if my career in publishing doesn't work out I might transition into real estate because I really really love where I live and I wanted to show that in the book and to show the way that in the end for Alice the town and the people she lives with are in my mind the heroes and the the mothers who are picking up her kids from school and cheering her on as she gets on the train for her first day of work not literally cheering her on but those are the people who kind of come to her rescue in the end um I've always lived in a small town and feel very I love living near New York City but I also have this passion for New Jersey that probably not many people have so that's The Unsung part of your book it's it's secretly an Ode to Suburban New Jersey it is it is and the town is called filament because I grew up actually in South Orange New Jersey not far from where Thomas Edison's light bulbs were invented and from his Labs so I started thinking about the light bulb and the filament is a key piece of the light bulb so um that's why I named the town filament so this is really a a tell all about South Orange New Jersey well I'm not living I'm not living in South Orange now but I'm living nearby all right Elizabeth Egan author of a window opens Liz thanks so much for being here thank you Pamela this was [Music] fun John Williams joins us now as the standin for our listeners hi John hey Pamela so you're going to tell us questions that we've had from our tweeters listeners we had a tweet question from raer named Mike stzen and he asks would you consider sharing some of your fun regrets not sure fun is the word uh he says for example the book review failed to note such and such amazing book regrets distant past and recent W can I name only things that my predecessor did yes no I won't do that um although that he is some of the best but I was here so I was culpable by association um and I don't know that these are all necessarily fun but uh these are the ones that stand out to me you know I would say that there are always going to be books that we quote unquote Miss because some books break late some books uh may just not have appealed to the individual editor who looked at them we always have some perfectly reasonable excuse right John but I would also say that we we it's amazing how little we miss that that breaks late but it's usually that something gains momentum after the fact and then it's kind of too late to chime in right and certainly when the award you know nominees come out and the winners come out it's not necessarily true that we have reviewed all of them or that we were gave them all favorable reviews um a few books I remember that we did uh review a little bit late in recent memory but I'll tell you why they were late but great The Battle Hymn of the tiger mother that book we did not review right away um the editor who handled it I uh originally skipped it we did end up assigning it once we saw that it had gained of readership generated a lot of reaction it did generate a lot of reaction and that actually enabled the reviewer at the time Susan Dominus to write a really smart review of the book because she Not only was able to review the book but she was able to write a broader essay about why it had struck such a chord and what the reactions were and what it meant and it just turned it into a broader kind of cultural peace another regret uh was a a printing error I believe um but we did have a cover review written by Henry Kissinger in which we accidentally left Henry Kissinger's name off the cover it was not on purpose it was an accident there are no conspiracy theories there and then I would say one one uh oversight that did happen under my tenure uh was we did not review Thomas pik's book I'm going to try to not over French pronounce that uh that French pronunciation one of the reasons we didn't review It ultimately was because so many people had written about it in the newspaper um that I don't think people were really looking for another take on Thomas picky by the time his book actually came out so I regret that we didn't review it in a certain way but uh it would have felt redundant by the time a review had come in yeah and the paper certainly surrounded it in other ways and there was a lot of conversation about it on other pages right so it was all very reasonable um I won't say that it was all necessarily fun but there you have it Mike rnck I hope I answered your question yes and I hope that we don't miss many big things in the coming years all right ask us more questions what are the coordinates John the coordinates are on Twitter you can follow us at NY Times books and ask us questions there or you can email us at books NY times.com all right thanks so much Don thank you our children's book editor Maria Russo joins us now hi Maria hi Pamela so we have a big back to school issue lots of children's books reviewed in this week's issue both uh from picture books to graphic novels to regular novels to non-fiction to ya talk about some of the big books for the back to school season well our first review I think is one of the biggest books for this fall it's a new novel by Rebecca St who uh is the author of When You Reach Me Newberry winner from a few years back and we have a review a wonderful review from Meg Waller who points out this is a book that really in in Rebecca Dead's Sweet Spot which is 12 year-old children 11 12 13y old children who are kind of on the threshold of becoming adolescents but not quite there yet and she really shows the emotional situation of these kids her in other words middle school middle school right and and even starting in fifth grade I think for some kids her heroin is in seventh grade and has survived a near death accident a roller skating accident she lives on the upper west side and this is kind of about her coming back to life really and realizing that her friendships are changing school is changing her family is changing and um it's a quieter book I think than when you reach me which had that time travel element that was sort of heads spinning and exciting but just as powerful I think as as as Meg Waller points out it really is about change and another exciting name uh for that particular age group is of course Rick Ryan author of the Percy Jackson series Etc um and who has his own book coming out a new series later this fall but he writes a review of a new take on Robin Hood what's that about yeah this is a new the start of a new series by kekla magon about a girl uh who takes the name Robin hoodlum um it's kind of said in a in a in a not quite real Society where there's um you know it's a totalitarian state her family is among the elite but she's mixed race so there's she she experiences a lot of um Prejudice due to that but she and she's eventually uh she's she's arrested on trumped up charges and becomes breaks out of jail and becomes uh a robin hood-like heroin interested in you know redistribution the income gap and equality and so you know Rick ryen points out you know we we mythology for kids really has to capture the spirit of the times to to work and uh and this book really does capture our current interest and passion right now for isues of social inequality and budding social activists here you go all right what are the other big books for fall well I think um we should mention the picture books there's so many great picture books coming this fall and we have three um reviewed by Dan salstein in this issue by really big uh picture book authors and artists there's um Waiting by Kevin hanky one my favorites yeah this is just a beautiful wonderful book and it's about waiting which uh is you know kind of a lesson in patience for children it's about five toys that live on a window sill and they just wait but his Art Is So Graceful and elegant and he makes waiting he makes children I think and adults see that that waiting has its own Beauty and and fun even um Hank is of course the author of Lily's Purple Plastic Purse of the penny and the marble Series yeah he writes kind of early chapter books and uh picture books and they're all they're all just beautiful and wise and funny too he really gets that interplay between word and image between the text and the image so well yeah he does they're they're great um one of the biggest hits from recent years was The Day the Crayons Quit uh in the picture book world and it's got of course a sequel well we have we have a sequel uh The Day the Crayons came home the Crayons uh decide to come back and um you know I'm sure this one will do well too there's you know you can't over estimate the incredible appeal and charm of Oliver Jeffer artwork I mean it looks like just random crayon drawings by a kid but but they just capture so much personality and wit but you know our reviewer points out you know there is something about this book that's in the category of uh books that seem to appeal more to parents than to Children the the humor does seem a little bit over the head of a lot of kids but somehow they they keep selling I think that maybe kids see their par having so much fun reading these books that uh they they kind of come along for the ride too let's talk for a second about early readers um one of the big bad news uh that about to happen in the p in the the children's book world is that our beloved Mo Williams has decided that the next volume of um elephant and piggy will be the last um for those of us who think that it just keeps getting more and more brilliant with each new book this is very very sad news indeed um but what it means is that a lot of Publishers are coming up with new characters for early readers and you know our reviewer who is a school librarian points out this is a hard category those early readers for children who are just starting to read on their own it's a hard category to find Variety in and as you say Mo Williams books you know Gerald and piggy the kind of neurotic lovable friends have dominated this category for a long time and uh so now there's some there's a lot of new ones coming on it's hard to do these books they're hard to write they it's a lot of production involved with making sure the words look right on the page and all of that and um so the new books that she points out that we have in this issue are one of them is by Bob sheay who um you might recognize from some of his picture books he does the dinosaur versus Series so dinosaur versus Mom dinosaur versus school um it's very different than elephant and piggy these are much more antic and simple kind of um big big bright colors and sort of slashing are um one of the things I think that a lot of the news series have in common is is humor it's like really funny they finally got the lessons of Dr Dr Seuss was the first uh person to really take this early reader category of book and say you can do a lot there and make them fun to read kids learning how to read should be having fun and I think the books that we have reviewed really do that we have a new series uh called a pig in a wig which is which is really amusing and and uh I do want to point out the the uh we have a book called flop to the top in this revieww that is really in the comic style which is a big Trend and I think a really exciting trend for early readers where it it looks like comic style panels and this can really help the new readers kind of follow the story the one we have is is a called is about a girl whose dog who wants to be famous herself and it turns out her dog becomes famous and you know hilarity ensues let's talk about one last comic book since we love that genre so much um or graphic novel but for readers a little bit older this one is uh it's called secret coders also the beginning of a series uh by the brilliant um Gan Len yangang who wrote um American boorn Chinese and the secret the boxers and Saints series and he is doing here two things that are great which is a middle grade book for readers that is very very visual for visual readers uh it's in it's also in the comics graphic novel style and also a book that that makes coding into something fun for kids so it's a way to get kids interested in the basics of coding is they're following it's a mystery it's a it's two kids in a school where there's creepy things happening and he very cleverly kind of works into the story coding principles about binary numbers but it's fun well lots of great books here to read to your kids or to read over the shoulders of your kids thanks Maria thanks [Music] parl seel joins us now to talk about the bestseller lists hi parl hi Pamela this week you're going to talk about the combined list rather than the hard cover so this is sales in hard cover and ebooks what's new on the combined list well on fiction there are a bunch of new books if not names we have Debbie mccomb's latest Silver Linings which is her latest entry in her Rose Harbor in series debuting at number three at number 10 there's curious L enough um state of fear by another Mainstay Michael kryon but this book was published in 2004 it feels oddly precient now there's um a group of activists Who start staging environmental disasters to prove that global warming is real um also new on the list is Devil's Bridge by Linda ferin the prosecutor turned mystery writer and it's her 17th book in the series featuring Alexander Cooper who in this book vanishes and in non-fiction which is a bit more steady this week but again populated by some familiar names there's Eric lson Mark Lev laen Hillen brand but there is one new name um who is totally new to me her name is Felicia Day and her Memoir you're never weird on the internet almost debuse at number five I feel like you should know about this Tom I should well she's she's now I'm kind of obsessed with her she's she's fascinating she was this I mean she she's known to most sort of readers and viewers probably as an actress on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural but she's you know this pioner and sort of Renaissance woman of Internet geek culture she's called Queen of the Geeks she was this homeschooled you know woman growing up in Texas this and she became this violin Prodigy and mathematical Prodigy and she also became obsessed with gaming and took a few cameras into her garage and started this show called The Guild which is you know beloved in online communities is the first sort of full-throated celebration of Greek culture um but you know so she shopped it around nobody bought it she put it up on YouTube and she just became this huge hit and she has this book now which sort of reads like online Gchat SL riffs about you know fandom and her own sort of very odd doy childhood and just like a celebration of obsessions see people love books so much that they even want to read the internet in books anything else new on the list uh no nothing else new on the list but I hear we have some new developments in children's bestsellers we do I will tell you about that we made a big change this week with the children's bestseller list and it sounds like a minor change but the results are quite significant here's what we did we had a middle- grade list of bestsellers and a young adult list of best Sellers and when we created those lists back in 2011 we decided that we would include all formats in each of those lists so the middle grade list would be ebooks paperback and hard cover all combined together and the YA books would similarly include books in all formats the thinking behind this at the time felt very forward thinking at least to me since it was what I did uh since I'm responsible um because people thought paperbacks were going to go away and that ebooks were going to take take over and that the format of a book would become largely irrelevant so I thought well let's just go one step ahead of that step ahead and we'll be there when Book Sales get there well as it turns out and we all know now paperbacks have not gone away ebook sales have not eclipsed print sales and hard cover really does Remain the way in which a lot of new books get discovered and our readers and authors and Publishers made it known that they noticed as we did that a lot of the same books were on those lists forever people used to joke that the ya list was the John Green list and I love John Green as much as the next John Green lover does but uh all of his books dominated because they were in paperback and uh teenagers like paperback as do adults and uh they were selling so much that they kind of eclipsed all of the new YA books that were coming out so we backpedal and we said okay let's take middle grade hard cover and ya hard cover and we'll run them here in the print New York Times book revieww we will still count ebooks and we will still count paperback books those we will show every week still online so we're not getting rid of them but this is a way for people who want to see what's new and doing well in both middle grade and ya and the results of this first list I think show um that in fact there is a lot of exciting books for children uh being published and uh they were not on the list before before so uh John Green alas though we love him is no longer even on the young adult hard cover list um our new number one bestselling ya author this week is Rambo row author of Elanor and park which John Green actually reviewed for us many years ago so he's there in spirit and on the middle-grade hard cover uh we do have a book that is uh has been out for quite some time but it is a Wonder sorry about that pun RJ palo's debut novel Wonder is uh number one and there's also a lot of new titles and that's exciting to see so that will be in the weekly book review from now on middle-grade hard cover and young adult hard cover how exciting I think it's especially exciting to all these uh newly crowned uh number one bestselling authors both on the list now and to come and to the readers who will be discovering them and our apologies to John Green that's right sorry John all right thanks parl thanks P remember there's more at nytimes.com book our producer is Joselyn Gonzalez and you can always write to us at books atny times.com thanks for listening for the New York Times I'm Pamela Paul [Music]