John Green: Teenager, Aged 36

A profile of the author of the wildly popular book The Fault in Our Stars:

His greatest fear was that he would upset the very people he was writing about, sick teens, who would see the novel as a monstrous presumption. By and large, Green says, that hasn’t been the case. “One of the unexpected blessings of this book is that sick kids have responded terrifically generously. They read it looking for emotional truths.” If Esther taught him anything, it is that “one of the most psychically damaging things about chronic illness is that it can be a separation between you and the rest of the world. Because the way the world looks at you is often as if you are semi-human; as if you’re partly dead.”

Published: May 1, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,640 words)

Maurice Sendak: ‘I refuse to lie to children’

To his millions of readers, of course, Sendak will always be young, a proxy for Max in Where the Wild Things Are, who runs away from his mother’s anger into the consoling realm of his own imagination. There are monsters in there, but Max faces them down before returning to his mother for reconciliation and dinner. Sendak’s own exile took rather longer to resolve. The monsters from Wild Things were based on his own relatives. They would visit his house in Brooklyn when he was growing up (“All crazy – crazy faces and wild eyes”) and pinch his cheeks until they were red.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Oct 2, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,021 words)