When YA and A are valued equally, with thanks to Main Line Today and Main Point Books

Anybody who knows me knows how I feel about labels. Applied to people. Applied to literature.

Still, those of us who write young adult fiction must, at times, face those who suggest that it is a lesser form, not nearly as important as the work written expressly for adults—a problem I discussed in a story for Publishing Perspectives titled, "Removing the YA Label: A Proposal, A Fantasy."

(Those of us who write quote-unquote literary contemporary YA fiction must also endure the suggestion that John Green has singlehandedly ushered in this genre's golden era, but that's a topic for another conversation, and we must be careful not to blame John Green for what is written about him.)

The problem with the YA-is-lesser assessment is that the YA writers I respect aren't writing down, aren't writing in haste, aren't writing with any less literary ambition than those who write novels for adults. We're just writing stories that happen to have younger protagonists at their heart; often we're writing "whole family" tales. Always, if we're serious about this stuff, if we're writing not toward known trends but toward felt story, we're writing as best as we can.

And so I will admit to feeling equal measures of joy and peace at finding Going Over on the Main Line Today list of 10 great beach reads by local authors. Not 10 YA books. Just ten books by authors ranging from Robin Black and Jennifer Weiner to Kelly Corrigan and Ken Kalfus. Ten books curated by Cathy Feibach of Main Point Books, who has made it her business, in this, the first year of her store's existence, to get to know who is writing what and to evaluate each book on its own terms.

I am honored. And I am looking forward to next Saturday, when I will drive down Lancaster Avenue and stop in Bryn Mawr and spend an hour signing both Going Over and Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir in Cathy's store. My signing caps a full day of signings, the details for which are here. And when I'm not signing, you can be sure that I'll be buying the books I want, seeing straight past their labels.

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Stone Arabia/Dana Spiotta: The Book of This Year?

Let me call this one as I think it rightly is: You might be headed to the BEA next week in search of the Book of the Year, the Big One, the Ultimate Prize Winner. You may imagine yourself wending down and through those Javits Center aisles, your shoulder a book-bag-burdened sloop, your ears somewhere between burn and buzz, the whole of your senses gone hyperkinetic as you pile on the galleys and pack in the giveaways and assure yourself that somewhere, inside all that brilliant literary mayhem, is the Best Book of This Year.

But unless you somehow find yourself a copy of Dana Spiotta's Stone Arabia (and at the moment copies are scarce) you are (I am sorry to report) not in possession of this year's best. You may just have to wait until July 12, when this slender volume sets sail.

Because maybe Jennifer Egan and her music-saturated, technically daring Goon Squad captured our imaginations in 2010. But Dana Spiotta, with her own lyric-besotted, indie-spirited Stone Arabia (Scribner), does something different, something more. It's a book about losing, fudging, and outfoxing memory. It's about a brother and a sister in their reeling mid-lives—that brother's life as an almost-musician, that sister's lonesome, fated love.  It's about the anomie of living right now—when the news affronts and hallows, and the tragedies of perfect strangers make us cry, and we lose ourselves within the portals of internet knowing and emerge merely more lost and a lot less knowing. (It's also, in small part, a calibrated riff on our blogging culture, but I only smiled, took no offense.)

We are a half step from forgetting, Spiotta reminds us, and we are a half step from being forgotten, but we are not vanished yet. We still have it in our power to live beyond the authoritative record, to tinker with our own legacies. The brilliance of Stone Arabia is matched by its beauty, which is to say that this is a fiercely intelligent book and also (importantly) an utterly humane one.

A personal note: I found Lightning Field, Dana Spiotta's gorgeous first novel, in a bookstore and brought it home a decade ago. Soon enough, Spiotta's second novel, Eat the Document, was nominated for the National Book Award. From time to time, then, in conversations with other writers, I would hear about Spiotta's graces as a person—her unshowy intelligence and big heart noted by writers like Rick Moody and Ken Kalfus.  Her university workshop students seem to love her, too; I've heard a fine tale or two about that.

But none of what I thought I knew prepared me for the power of Stone Arabia.  I hate that it's late May and that you'll therefore have to wait until mid-July to read it.

Read it, though, as soon as you can.

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