Lauren Oliver has a lot to celebrate this year, as both Pandemonium and The Spindlers are included on Barnes and Noble’s Best Books of 2012 list!
The books were released in February and October, respectively, and they certainly did not disappoint! With Requiem just around the corner (less than three months!), Lauren is also proving herself to be very prolific!
The Spindlers
Lauren Oliver recently announced a competition for Halloween!
The prize is a copy of her two middle school books Lisel and Po and The Spindlers which she says will be perfect for halloween.
This competition is the celebrate the end of her tour promoting The Spindlers.
So what do you have to do? Well, dig out all your old halloween pictures and send them along to the email bellow and Lauren herself will pick out her favourite five to receive copies of her books!
Competition closes on October 30th, so best of luck.
All entries send to:
laurenoliverbooks@gmail.com
On October 2nd, Lauren Oliver released her newest middle grade adventure, The Spindlers!
As part of the Halloween Character Booktacular, Lauren wrote an exclusive Halloween scene featuring the characters from The Spindlers, which was originally posted on Once Upon A Twilight!
It was perhaps to be expected that an argument broke out about who must be the caterpillar’s rear end, and who got to be its head.
“I’m older,” Liza told her brother Patrick matter-of-factly, “And that means I get to choose.”
“Not fair,” he said. And then, in a wail that steadily increased in volume. “Not faiiir! Not faaaaiiiir!”
Their mother, who was busy trying to sort out whether last year’s leftover Halloween candy was still edible, barely glanced up. “Let Patrick be the head, Liza,” she said, then winced as she attempted to bite into a peanut chew. She held a hand to her cheek. “I think I chipped a tooth,” she said, but it came out “I fink I chipped a toof.”
Patrick tried to swipe the caterpillar’s head–which was a vivid green, and crafted from cardboard and tissue paper, with two halves of a red rubber ball for eyes and curled gardening wire for antennae–and Liza held it out of his reach.
“If you’re the head, that means you’re the brains, too,” she said. “And you can’t be the brains, because you don’t have any.”
Patrick kicked her in the shins. Liza said a bad word and was sent to her room for a half an hour. And in the end, Liza’s mother cut another red rubber ball in half and quickly refashioned the caterpillar’s rear end so that it, too, could be a head, even though Patrick complained it looked like a butt with a pair of eyes and Liza moaned that no one–NO ONE!–had ever heard of a caterpillar with two heads.
Their first stop was Mrs. Costenblatt’s house, where they received three irregularly wrapped pumpkin spice cookies and a snickers bar a piece. They moved systematically down the block, threading between children wearing monster masks and–to Liza’s disgust–pink flouffy princess costumes and several ghoulish vampires, which would have been Liza’s first choice had her mother not been deathly afraid of blood, even the fake kind. As Liza expected, every grown-up who answered the door looked alarmed at seeing Parick and Liza’s costumes and confused when she explained they were a two-headed caterpillar.
“I told you there was no such thing,” she told him, as they neared the end of the street.
“Is too,” he said.
“Is not!” she insisted.
“Is too,” he said. “Look.”
They were standing in front of a rusted gate with a large No Trespassing sign attached to it. Beyond was a garden grown wild with a riot of rhodendron, long brown grasses, and trees with branches as bare as gnarled fingers. It was the only garden on the block that wasn’t as neatly trimmed as a mustache, because it was the only house on the block that was uninhabited and, according to local legend, haunted. Liza could just see a bit of a blackened roof, stiff as the top of a witch’s hat, and a single window, missing its glass.
Liza followed the direction of Patrick’s pointed finger. And she saw, curled on top of a large brown leaf, flat as a palm, just on the other side of the gate, a vivid green caterpillar. It appeared to be trying to move in two directions at once, and as she bent closer to look, she detected a thin reedy voice saying:
“This way, you blistering idiot!”
And another voice: “It’s this way, you gruesomely grotesque grub!”
Liza’s breath caught in her throat. The caterpillar was talking. This in itself did not surprise her, because she had read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and knew that such a thing could happen.
But this caterpillar was talking from two separate heads.
If you live anywhere near New York, Lauren Oliver is promoting her new middle grade The Spindlers at an event today with six other authors. She’ll be signing copies of the book.
18 West 18th Street
New York, NY 10011
The event starts at 2pm.
I know it’s cutting the time a little close, but if you have the time, you should go check it out and let us know what you think!
Lauren Oliver is full promotion mode for her new middle-grade book, The Spindlers, due to be published October 2nd! The Spindlers follows Liesel as she travels into a mystical underground world to save her little brother, whose soul has been captured by the evil Spindlers.
Many fans have asked Lauren came up with such an idea, so she created a video to show us!
As for why we haven’t seen much news regarding the Delirium trilogy recently, we think Lauren answered it best on her Tumblr:
Delirium trilogy author Lauren Oliver is an amazingly diverse writer. Her next book will be The Spindlers, a middle-grade standalone about a young girl who must travel into a mysterious underground world known as Below to retrieve her little brother’s stolen soul.
Out October 2, 2012!
Just today, Lauren released the first excerpt from The Spindlers, shortly after revealing the first line for her Spindlers Writing Challenge:
One night when Liza went to bed, Patrick was her chubby, stubby, candy-grubbing and pancake-loving younger brother, who irritated her and amused her both, and the next morning, when she woke up, he was not.
She could not describe the difference. He looked the same, and was wearing the same pair of ratty space-alien pajamas, with the same fat toe sticking out of the hole in the left foot of his red socks, and he came down the stairs exactly the same way the real Patrick would have done: bump, bump, bump, sliding on his rump.
But he was not the same.
In fact, he was quite, quite different.
It was something in the way he looked at her: It was as though someone had reached behind his eyes and wrung away all the sparkle, leaving only a blank gaze. He walked quietly–too quietly–to the table, sat nicely in his chair, and placed a napkin on his lap.
The real Patrick never used a napkin.
Looks like quite a fun story! Will you be picking up a copy of The Spindlers?
Book Expo America is here! For the first time, BEA will be open to the general public, Lauren Oliver has three appearances at the event though out the week that it will be running, and she very much hopes to see you there at one or all of them! Here are the dates and what Lauren has to say about them;
Tuesday, June 5th:
Continuing on from her last question session , Lauren Oliver has released part 2 of her most frequently asked questions:
My second book for middle-grade readers, THE SPINDLERS, will be released in October of this year. In the spring of 2013, the last book in my Delirium series, Requiem, comes out; and after that…who knows! I’m working on a teen standalone right now but it’s in its very early stages.
With difficulty! I keep lists of names I like, street names, and place names on my computer. But sometimes I just mix-and-match the names of people I know!
I started writing pretty much as soon as I was old enough to hold a pen and read on my own. My first stories were spin-offs of the books I loved, like CS Lewis and the Redwall series.
I pronounce it Hah-na (the way a British person might!), but most people say Hana to rhyme with the last syllable of banana, which is fine too. She’s used to it!
Discipline, discipline, discipline. I’ve trained myself to write every day, no matter what. And remember: the first drafts don’t have to be good, or even readable!
Delirium Fandom 