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Jerry Spinelli has written more than 35 books for young readers, published in more than 35 languages. He is the award-winning author of Stargirl; Love, Stargirl; Milkweed; Crash; Wringer; Hokey Pokey; Maniac Magee, winner of the Newbery Medal; and Knots in My Yo-Yo String, the autobiography of his childhood. The Warden's Daughter, a middle-grade novel about a girl who lives with her father on the grounds of a 1950s prison, will be published by Knopf Books for Young Readers on January 3, 2017. A graduate of Gettysburg College, Spinelli lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, poet and author Eileen Spinelli.
On your nightstand now:
The Trespasser by Tana French. I read murder mysteries for fun. A couple of years ago I discovered Tana French. Now I read her new books as soon as they come out.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Story of Babar by Jean de Brunhoff. My mother read it to me. Every time she read it, I cried. And wanted more the next night. The power of story.
Your top five authors:
Eileen Spinelli, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Loren Eiseley, Jean Giraudoux (Ondine), Dylan Thomas
Book you've faked reading:
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. It was for an English novel course in college. At semester's end I confessed to the instructor that I hadn't really read it. He looked crestfallen. I've felt guilty ever since.
Book you are an evangelist for:
When You Are Happy by Eileen Spinelli. Yeah, I know, she's my wife. But this 32-page picture book hits my trifecta: language, illustrations, message. Never before has so much humanity been packed into so few pages.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont. I'm a fan of the old pulps, a taste of which, with their lurid language and melodrama, I tried to evoke in Hokey Pokey. Malmont's novel is an homage to that dime-novel era.
Book you hid from your parents:
None. I didn't read then--well, not books anyway, except for the Bobbsey Twins. My reading was pretty much confined to the sports pages of the paper and comic books, none of which needed to be hidden.
Book that changed your life:
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. This was after grad school, when I had my first job (menswear editor for a department store magazine). Until then I was still writing, in effect, for Mrs. Taylor's creative writing course at Gettysburg College. I read and wrote in an ivory tower. If you were a bestselling title, I looked down my nose at you. The Exorcist changed that for me. No, it wasn't immortal literature, but in it I found elements of storytelling that I myself had studied and respected and tried to emulate. I discovered it was possible for a book to be both good and popular. From then on, Mrs. Taylor wasn't the only reader I wrote for.
Favorite line from a book:
"Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience, a mirage of an eternal wedding cast upon the racial memory, as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth, as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey." --Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
Five books you'll never part with:
When You Are Happy by Eileen Spinelli, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, Ondine by Jean Giraudoux, Reading Modern Short Stories by Jarvis A. Thurston, and The American Tradition in Literature (Vol. 2, Whitman to the Present), edited by Sculley Bradley
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Story of Babar by Jean de Brunhoff. I read it to myself now and it still works.
Book you stuck down the back of your pants before getting paddled by the science teacher in seventh grade:
The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope. That was about the closest I came in those days to reading a real book. I recommend comics, as they're less likely to be discovered and removed than a 300-page hardback.