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It is no coincidence that the great moral teachers—Socrates, Plato, Jesus, the Rabbis, the Zen masters—taught best through story and parable, for stories bring tangible form to elusive, fugitive truths. What would only be ghostly cerements otherwise, the lingering traces of the passing gods, can, embodied, present themselves to our conscious minds, and thereby become ours.

We all have stories. There are the stories we tell ourselves and others, which we believe to be true. There are stories we tell ourselves and others, which are not true, whatever our belief in them. There are stories that “tell us into the world” on a daily basis, but we do not know them, nor even surmise their presence. The problem with the unconscious is that it is unconscious.

Of these unconscious narratives, we can, by definition, say nothing at all. But we intuit their presence, posit their possibility, through our observations of others, and of ourselves. What, after all, is generating those patterns which characterize our history? What, but the presence of unconscious stories to which our tribe, our ancestors, our culture, are in service?

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As the release date of my first novel for teens approached last fall, what I looked forward to the most was meeting teenagers. I couldn’t wait to talk with them and hear their responses, not only to my book, but also to their lives.

Mainstream media has a strange relationship with teenagers, obsessing and freaking out over them in equal measure. If you believe what you read in magazines, you might well come to the conclusion that your average teenager is a prescription drug-addicted sexual deviant who’s never read a book in his/her life and who communicates exclusively via eccentrically spelled text messages.

Well, I’ve never been one to heed warnings about “kids these days”. After all, haven’t people been saying this kind of thing for as long as teenagers have been around? But, as I started writing for young people, I found myself a little more susceptible to the word on the street about teens and books. Before Vidalia in Paris came out, I was told that teenagers read fewer books, play more video games, care less about reading than “we” did as kids. I also heard that boys barely read at all, aren’t interested in writing, and definitely won’t care about a female character.

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Amid the doom and gloom of a global economic crisis, it's nice to be able to share a little good news every now and then. We at Perigee are celebrating a milestone: We now have a whopping 200,000 copies in print of a fun little book called Wreck this Journal, which we first published in June 2007.

There are lots of reasons the book is such an underground hit. It's boldly original, it's got a great package with hand-lettered text throughout, and it encourages readers to draw, color, doodle, mark up, and personalize every page. The book's editor, Perigee Senior Editor Meg Leder, has lavished the book with her signature close attention and creative sense of play throughout. And of course we have a great sales team that keeps the book front and center in the marketplace (thank you, sales team!).

But there's another reason the book is such an ongoing success, in my opinion: its crossover appeal. In an age of segmented markets, it's rare to publish a book that appeals to men and women, adults and kids, skeptical tweens and their parents alike. The book sells in Hot Topics (for the non-Goths out there, that's a mall store with a paint-it-black vibe), as well as in the creativity section at B&N, the kids' section at Borders, and in independents, museum stores, and elsewhere. Our publisher, John Duff, keeps a dog-earred copy on his desk, as does my best friend's ornery ten-year-old.

PENGUIN YOUNG READERS GROUP (USA) TO PUBLISH RETURN TO THE HUNDRED ACRE WOOD

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New York, NY (January 12, 2009) – Dutton Children’s Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, Inc. (USA), will publish the first authorized sequel to A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner entitled Return to the Hundred Acre Wood to be released October 5th 2009. Egmont Publishing will publish the book simultaneously in the UK.

Michael Brown, for the Trustees of the Pooh Properties, who manage the affairs of the A. A. Milne and E.H. Shepard Estates said, “We have been hoping for a good many years that we might one day be able to offer the world a sequel which would do justice to the original Winnie-the-Pooh stories. The original books were one of the greatest celebrations of childhood in any language, but we believe that David Benedictus and Mark Burgess have captured the spirit and quality of those original books. We hope that the many millions of Pooh enthusiasts and readers around the world will embrace and cherish these new stories as if they had just emerged from the pen of A. A. Milne himself.”

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Viking/Penguin’s Tana French Is the Undisputed “Favorite Author” in Penguin Group (USA)'s Book of the Year Award Poll

In the last Spotlight of 2008, we opened the polls to all employees to vote for the second annual “Penguin Group (USA) Book of The Year” Award. Viking/ Penguin author Tana French emerged as the clear winner: In the Woods (Penguin) received the most votes, while her latest book, The Likeness (Viking), came in a close second.

Congratulations to everyone involved in making these books such successes in 2008!

We’d also like to award honorable mentions to the following titles that received the next highest number of votes:

• City of Thieves by David Benioff (Viking)
• Paper Towns by John Green (Dutton Children's Books)
• The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (Viking)