Best Young Adult Novels, Best Teen Fiction, Top 100 Teen Novels. It's almost a cliche at this point to say that teen fiction isn't just for teens anymore. Just last year, the Association of American Publishers ranked Children's/Young Adult books as the single fastest-growing publishing category. Which is why we were only a little surprised to see the tremendous response that came in for this summer's Best-Ever Teen Fiction poll. A whopping 75,220 of you voted for your favorite young adult novels, blasting past the total for last year's science fiction and fantasy poll at, dare we say it, warp speed. And now, the final results are in. While it's no surprise to see Harry Potter and the Hunger Games trilogy on top, this year's list also highlights some writers we weren't as familiar with. For example, John Green, author of the 2012 hit The Fault in Our Stars, appears five times in the top 100. Summer, like youth, is fleeting. How Young Adult Fiction Came of Age.
Five questions about literature's hottest genre Meredith Barnes, a literary agent with Lowenstein Associates, demonstrates superhuman patience while explaining young adult literature to me. I am familiar enough with the basics: that YA is not to the written word as PG is to film. That it is publishing's closest thing to a safe bet in years. That it has seen explosive growth as a result.
While the purchasing power of young people has certainly increased over the years, such astounding figures and simple observation suggest that it's not just 12-year-olds smashing piggy banks on the counter at Powell's. Ms. But if everyone is reading this subset of fiction where seemingly no subject is taboo, why is it corralled as young adult, anyway? Teens shooting horse sounded like an exponential improvement over the kid lit of my childhood, and on the advice of basically everyone else in the world, I read the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.
So what's next for YA? For Mr. Best Young Adult Novels, Best Teen Fiction, Top 100 Teen Novels. Jonathan Franzen Says Young Adult Lit Equals "Moral Simplicity" and It's a Tired Insult | Bustle. Author Jonathan Franzen has never shied away from speaking his mind on everything from Twitter to Oprah’s Book Club to e-books.
The first is “unspeakably irritating,” the second is “for women,” and the third is ”corroding values,” according to the writer. And now Franzen is criticizing young adult literature, saying that it equates to “moral simplicity.” Come on, Franzen, this is a tired insult; we YA lit lovers have heard this one before. Franzen spoke with Butler University as part of a visiting writers program, where he took part in a Q&A, a reading, and an interview with an MFA candidate. It was in that interview that the MFA student Susan Lerner brought up Ruth Graham’s piece on adults reading young adult novels. You remember the one: She said that adults should be embarrassed for reading and enjoying stories directed at teenagers.
Lerner asked Franzen what he thought about Graham’s piece about adults substituting “maudlin teen drama for the complexity of great adult literature.” Against YA: Adults should be embarrassed to read children’s books. Illustration by Liana Finck. As The Fault in Our Stars barrels into theaters this weekend virtually guaranteed to become a blockbuster, it can be hard to remember that once upon a time, an adult might have felt embarrassed to be caught reading the novel that inspired it. Not because it is bad—it isn’t—but because it was written for teenagers. Ruth Graham is a regular Slate contributor. She lives in New Hampshire. The once-unseemly notion that it’s acceptable for not-young adults to read young-adult fiction is now conventional wisdom. Today, grown-ups brandish their copies of teen novels with pride. There are endless lists of YA novels that adults should read, an “I read YA” campaign for grown-up YA fans, and confessional posts by adult YA addicts.
The largest group of buyers in that survey—accounting for a whopping 28 percent of all YA sales—are between ages 30 and 44. Let’s set aside the transparently trashy stuff like Divergent and Twilight, which no one defends as serious literature. Vandergrift's 100 List. A brief history of young adult literature. Thursday is Celebrate Teen Literature Day, part of National Library Week. But with young adult literature regularly burning up the bestseller lists, it's clear many young adults don't need an excuse to seek out the written word: Sixteen- to 29-year-olds are the largest group checking out books from their local libraries, according to a Pew survey. Wizards, vampires and dystopian future worlds didn't always dominate the genre, which hit its last peak of popularity in the 1970s with the success of controversial novels by the likes of Judy Blume.
In the years between, young adult has managed to capture the singular passions of the teen audience over a spectrum of subgenres. Now, as the book industry enjoys a second "golden age of young adult fiction," according to expert Michael Cart, it bears asking why young adult fiction has become so successful. The proof just may be in the timeline. The book world began marketing directly to teens for the first time at the turn of the millennium.