Posts by Live Talks LA

Goosebumps creator R.L. Stine teams up with the pop-culture phenomenon Garbage Pail Kids for a first-ever GPK illustrated middle-grade series

R.L. Stine has more than 400 million English-language books in print, plus international editions in thirty-two languages, making him one of the most popular children’s authors of all time. Besides Goosebumps, he has written series including Fear Street, Rotten School, Mostly Ghostly, The Nightmare Room, Dangerous Girls, and Just Beyond. Stine lives in New York City with his wife, Jane, an editor and publisher. The Topps Company, Inc., originator of Garbage Pail Kids, Mars Attacks, and Bazooka Joe brands, was founded in 1938 and is the preeminent creator and marketer of physical and digital trading cards, entertainment products, and distinctive confectionary.  More on the Garbage Pail Kids website.

The book is illustrated by Jeff Zapata and Joe Simko.  Jeff Zapata has worked on comic books and trading cards for more than twenty-five years, including thirteen gross, memorable ones as an editor, art director, and artist on Garbage Pail Kids and other brands at the Topps Company. Joe Simko is an artist known for his happy-horror style. He is one of the premiere Garbage Pail Kids illustrators for the Topps Company and lives in New York City with his wife, son, dog, and many, many boxes of cereal.

Welcome to the town of Smellville, where ten kids all live in a big tumbledown house and have as much fun as they possibly can. People may think that they’re gross and weird and strange, but they’re not bad kids—they just don’t know any better. In this hilarious new illustrated series from bestselling author R.L. Stine, the Garbage Pail Kids—from Adam Bomb to Brainy Janey—get into mischief at their middle school, all while battling bullies and their archenemies, Penny and Parker Perfect. These all-new illustrated stories are sure to amuse, entertain, and blow away readers of all ages. Bonus: includes four exclusive Garbage Pail Kids stickers!

Kitty Felde won more than a dozen Golden Mike Awards for her work covering baseball, politics, high profile trials, riots, earthquakes, and immigration. She was named “Journalist of the Year” three times in three years by the LA Press Club and Society of Professional Journalists. She hosted Southern California Public Radio KPCC’s afternoon talk show “Talk of the City” for nearly a decade. She covered Capitol Hill for half a dozen years. Her award-winning debut novel “Welcome to Washington, Fina Mendoza” was published in 2019 and has been adapted to an 8-part dramatic podcast The Fina Mendoza Mysteries available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.  Kitty is host and executive producer of the Book Club for Kids podcast – named one of the top 10 kidcasts in the world by The Times of London. She is also an award-winning playwright whose work has been produced worldwide. A commission, QUENTIN, is currently running as a tour of the White House neighborhood. Felde co-founded LA’s Theatre of NOTE and led the playwriting program at the HOLA Youth Theatre in Los Angeles. 
 

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen changed the conversation―Just Us urges all of us into it

Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His other books are a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. His most recent publication is Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his six-year-old son, Ellison. His next book is the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed, forthcoming in March 2021.

“With Just Us, Claudia Rankine offers further proof that she is one of our essential thinkers about race, difference, politics, and the United States of America. Written with humility and humor, criticism and compassion, Just Us asks difficult questions and begins necessary conversations.”―Viet Thanh Nguyen

As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.

Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces―the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth―where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.

This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend’s explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.

Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.