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David Levithan

Biography

David Levithan

David Levithan finds it downright baffling to write about himself, which is why he's considering it somewhat cruel and usual to have to write this brief bio. The factual approach (born '72, Brown '94, book '03) seems a bit dry, while the emotional landscape (happy childhood, happy adolescence --- give or take a few poems --- and happy adulthood so far) sounds horribly well-adjusted. The only addiction he's ever had was a brief spiral into the arms of diet Dr Pepper, unless you count MY SO-CALLED LIFE episodes as a drug. He is evangelical in his musical beliefs and deathly afraid that his bio will end up sounding like the final paragraph in an on-line dating ad.

Luckily, David is much happier talking about his book than he is talking about himself. BOY MEETS BOY and THE REALM OF POSSIBILITY started as stories he wrote for his friends for Valentine's Day (something he's done for the past 16 years) and turned themselves into teen novels. When not writing during spare hours on weekends, David is a senior editor at Scholastic, and the founding editor of the PUSH imprint, which is devoted to finding new voices and new authors in teen literature. With BOY MEETS BOY, he basically set out to write the book that he dreamed of getting as an editor --- a book about gay teens that doesn't conform to the old norms about gay teens in literature (i.e. it has to be about a gay uncle, or a teen who gets beaten up for being gay, or about outcasts who come out and find they're still outcasts, albeit outcasts with their outcastedness in common.) He's often asked if the book is a work of fantasy or a work of reality, and the answer is right down the middle --- it's about where we're going, and where we should be.

Of BOY MEETS BOY, the reviewer at Booklist wrote: "In its blithe acceptance and celebration of human differences, this is arguably the most important gay novel since ANNIE ON MY MIND and seems to represent a near revolution in the publishing of gay-themed books for adolescents" --- which pretty much blew David away when he read it. Viva la near revolution!

David Levithan

Books by David Levithan

by David Levithan - Fiction, Romance, Young Adult 12+

New York Times bestselling author David Levithan tells the based-on-true-events story of Harry and Craig, two 17-year-olds who are about to take part in a 32-hour marathon of kissing to set a new Guinness World Record --- all of which is narrated by a Greek Chorus of the generation of gay men lost to AIDS.

by David Levithan - Fiction, Romance, Young Adult 12+

Every morning, A wakes in a different person’s body, a different person’s life. He lives by three rules: Never get too attached. Avoid being noticed. Do not interfere. That is, until he wakes up in Justin's body and meets Justin's girlfriend. From that moment, the rules by which A has been living no longer apply. Because finally A has found someone he wants to be with --- day in, day out, day after day.

by David Levithan - Fiction

How does one talk about love? Taking a unique approach to this problem, the nameless narrator of David Levithan’s THE LOVER'S DICTIONARY has constructed the story of his relationship as a dictionary.