Le scénariste LaDarian Smith travaillera avec les studios 3000 Pictures à l’adaptation du livre middle-grade pour le grand écran, en partenariat avec la société de production Homegrown Pictures. La date de sortie du film n’est pas encore connue. (Lire l’article de Deadline)
SIMON B. RHYMIN’ raconte avec humour et poésie l’histoire touchante d’un jeune rappeur qui parvient à rassembler les membres de sa communauté autour de ses rêves et ses rimes. Le livre évoque des sujets qui parlent à tous les enfants, comme l’importance des amis et de la famille, la nécessité de surmonter ses peurs, de résister à l’intimidation, et d’apprendre à se défendre.
Dwayne Reed, auteur du livre et professeur des écoles à Chicago, s’est d’abord fait connaître sur internet auprès du jeune public grâce à sa vidéo virale « Welcome to the 4th Grade ». Le scénariste LaDarian Smith a lui aussi été enseignant en lycée.
Les droits de langue française de SIMON B’ RHYMIN’ (Little, Brown BYR, mars 2021) et SIMON B. RHYMIN’ TAKES A STAND (avril 2022) sont toujours disponibles.
That’s what Jess was to me. I was the ground; she was the rain. I wasn’t anything until she woke me up.
THE SIGN FOR HOME tells the story of Arlo Dilly, a DeafBlind 23-year-old man raised by conservative family members who limit his use of technology. While taking a basic English composition class, Arlo is assigned a new sign language interpreter named Cyril Brewster who is recovering from a romantic breakup and is looking for a new challenge in his career. When Cyril begins to interpret Arlo’s classes he soon realizes that Arlo’s understanding of language, love, and life have been limited, governed, and often censored by iron-fisted guardians. Showing Arlo more of the world and the independence he could have puts Cyril in conflict with Arlo’s family. Against this external conflict of language mediation, we travel inside Arlo’s mind and inside his perceptions of the most important moments of his life, including his own linguistic awakenings, and a heartbreaking memory of first love and first friendship derailed by unspeakable tragedy. When the buried memories are eventually unlocked by a class writing assignment, Arlo convinces Cyril to abandon his own professional ethics to facilitate a forbidden meeting with his old school friends and first love. The narration of The Sign For Home alternates between Arlo’s voice (with its distinctive Deaf syntax) and Cyril’s fast and funny point of view, with dialogue rendered in both standard English and an approximation of American Sign Language structure. The resulting novel is not only unique, but fast-paced, delectable, emotional, and powerful.
THE PARTY YEAR is a an ekphrastic, illuminating tour de force, inspired in part by Cunningham’s own time working on the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama. In these pages, fundraising staffer David Hammond travels around the country for donor events, landing everywhere from a trailer in New Hampshire to a Beverly Hills mansion. Hammond is a keen and thoughtful observer, whose reflections on memory and history are interwoven throughout in a flowing counterpoint between past and present, the personal and the larger-than-life. Through intimate, candescent prose, THE PARTY YEAR contemplates the stories and arts that define and bring beauty to our lives.
An unnamed woman checks into a guesthouse in a mysterious district known only as the Subdivision. The guesthouse’s owners, Clara and the Judge, are welcoming and helpful, if oddly preoccupied by the perpetually baffling jigsaw puzzle in the living room. With little more than a hand-drawn map and vague memories of her troubled past, the narrator ventures out in search of a job, an apartment, and a fresh start in life. Accompanied by an unusually assertive digital assistant named Cylvia, the narrator is drawn deeper into an increasingly strange, surreal, and threatening world, which reveals itself to her through a series of darkly comic encounters reminiscent of Gulliver’s Travels. A lovelorn truck driver…a mysterious child…a watchful crow. A cryptic birthday party. A baffling physics experiment in a defunct office tower where some calamity once happened. Through it all, the narrator is tempted and manipulated by the bakemono, a shape-shifting demon who poses a distinctly terrifying danger. Harrowing, meticulous, and deranged, SUBDIVISION is a brilliant maze of a novel from the writer Kelly Link has called “a master of the dark arts.” With the narrative intensity and mordant humor familiar to readers of