Matthew Tobin Anderson
Matthew Tobin Anderson
Matthew Tobin Anderson, known as M.T. Andersonis an American writer of children's books that range from picture books to young-adult novels. He won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2006 for The Pox Party, the first of two "Octavian Nothing" books, which are historical novels set in Revolution-era Boston. Anderson is known for using wit and sarcasm in his stories, as well as advocating that young adults are capable of mature comprehension...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth4 November 1968
CountryUnited States of America
There are times when friendship feels like running down a hill together as fast as you can, jumping over things, spinning around, and you don't care where you're going, and you don't care where you've come from, because all that matters is speed, and the hands holding your hands.
I miss that time. The cities back then, just after the forests died, were full of wonders, and you'd stumble on them--these princes of the air on common rooftops--the rivers that burst through the city streets so they ran like canals--the rabbits in parking garages--the deer foaling, nestled in Dumpsters like a Nativity.
...for reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family, and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways, immobile and thus unfettered.
We must curb ourfury, and allow sadness to diminish, and speak our stories with coolness and deliberation.
Then it was this big thing. She was like, 'I never want to see you again', and I was like, 'Fine. Okay? Fine. Then get some special goggles.
My idea of life, it's what happens when they're rolling the credits.
I don't know when they first had feeds. Like maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.
Of course, I had my heart broken as a teen. I was desperately in love with myself. Then I found out that I was completely shallow. I haven't spoken to myself since.
I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.
If we're going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don't see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean.
It's insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should.
There is a power in names. Olakunde told us of ashe-the power which runs through all things, subtle and flexible, which find its most potent expression in human utterance; so that it is a terrible thing to call down imprecations on an enemy, or to wish for anything but good, for what is said out loud is forged into truth.
I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.
Occasionally people ask me how it is I write different types of things, and my answer to that is it's very natural. You get bored writing one kind of thing all the time.