Event photos: Linda Bailey and Bill Slavin (and Stanley)

On Thursday, Feb. 15, Kids Can Press hosted a meet-’n'-greet at the head offices of Corus Entertainment in the cold, cold heart of Toronto’s financial district to celebrate the launch of Stanley’s Beauty Contest by Linda Bailey and Bill Slavin.

Kids Can president Lisa Lyons and editor Tara Walker.

Linda Bailey introduces Stanley’s real-life counterpart – her dog.

Bill Slavin shows off some of the book’s illustrations.

KidLit columnist (and frequent Q&Q contributor) Deirdre Baker chats with Slavin.

The loot bags.

Kids’ books with the added value of gaming

According to a report by the BBC, Oxford University Press has created a new series of picture books – branded Project X – that attempt to appeal to young boys by mimicking the look of video game imagery.

The books have been tested in 2,000 schools and … are centred around the character of Max and his friends Cat, Ant, and Tiger, who find their watches have the power to make them shrink, opening up a whole new world of adventures. The friends end up snowboarding on spoons, exploring inside a sandcastle, white-water rafting on a pencil, and surfing on lolly sticks.

Sounds a lot like that Mighty-Mites comic that used to run in the back pages of Owl Magazine, no? If memory serves, however, that strip was fairly handsomely illustrated, whereas Project X is “ghastly” looking, according to a number of industry critics.

Charlie Higson, author of the Young Bond books, welcomed the OUP’s attempt to write fiction for boys, but questioned the books’ reliance on computer images. “They look absolutely ghastly,” he said. “They’re trying to look like computer games and they’re trying to get [boys] to interact with them like a computer. The point is that books are different to computers – that’s the whole point. If kids want to play with computers, they’ll play with computers, not read these stories.”

You can see a few pages from the series here and judge for yourself.

Walter the Farting Dog goes to Hollywood

Remember Walter the Farting Dog, the hit series of kids’ picture books co-created by New Brunswick author Glenn Murray? (Q&Q has covered it a fair bit.) Alert the Academy: a movie adaptation is set to begin production next year, according to Canadian Press. And for readers who’ve asked themselves, “What would make Walter’s saga even better?” and answered themselves, “The Jonas Brothers,” it’s a banner day.

This bit caught Quillblog’s attention:

The screenplay will be written by Alec Sokolow (Toy Story, Garfield) and Joel Cohen (No Country For Old Men, Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?).

But before we got too excited – imagining Walter caught up in a convoluted kidnapping-and-revenge plot, complete with bowling and a few surprise gory deaths – we remembered that there’s no h in Coen. Sadly, CP is probably mixing up the Oscar-winning auteur with this guy.

Major U.S. book awards announced

The nominations for the U.S. National Book Critics Circle award were announced last weekend, and, as always, a few big names were snubbed in the fiction category, most notably Thomas Pynchon. The fiction list was also noteworthy in that none of the 2006 National Book Award nominees – including the eventual winner, Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker – were included.

Two of the nominations went to relative newcomers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf), and Kiran Desai for her Man Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic, and Penguin here in Canada). The other nominations went to three authors already ensconced at the top of the American literary scene: Dave Eggers, for his tale of a refugee from the Sudanese civil war, What Is the What (McSweeney’s), Richard Ford, for the third installment in his Frank Bascombe series, The Lay of the Land (Knopf), and Cormac McCarthy, for his post-apocalyptic tale The Road (Knopf).

Just a day after the Book Critics Circle announced their nominations (the full list of which can be seen here), the American Library Association announced the winners of their annual Newbery and Caldecott awards for children’s literature.

The Newbery Medal, for a work of prose fiction, went to a surprise winner: the relatively untouted The Higher Power of Lucky (Simon & Schuster), by Susan Patron, about a motherless girl in a small California town. Meanwhile the Caldecott Medal, for picture books, went to illustrator David Wiesner for his wordless tale Flotsam (Clarion), about a boy who finds an underwater camera at the beach. The award makes Wiesner a three-time Caldecott winner: he won for Tuesday in 1991, and for The Three Pigs in 2001.