According to Bernat Fiol, a representative of SalmaiaLit, American and European publishers have been showing a lot of interest in Latin American authors lately. “I think special attention is being paid to young writers of a marked literary character who offer their vision of reality but also contribute new perspectives on Latin America’s literary tradition”, he claims.

As evidence of this interest, SalmaiaLit has revealed that it has sold the rights to a number of Latin American writers’ works, notably F.G. Haghenbeck’s novel The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo, which was translated into 15 languages and sold well in a number of countries. Another translation that’s in the works is of “El desierto y su semilla”, a modern classic.

Laurence Laluyaux, an agent at Rogers Coleridge and White in London, has also seen a “distinct interest” in Latin American writers lately, especially in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, markets that were usually seen as far too difficult for such books. She says that this new development can be explained by the “international fatigue when it comes to English-language literature”. It seems that readers across the world are willing to break out of their comfort zone and explore new and original novels. According to Laluyaux, there’s now a “definite strong interest in form as well as content” of Latin American books.

Source: “Is Latin America The Next Literary Hot Spot?”, Adam Critchley, Publishing Perspective, Spring 2017, p.8

Through the stories of her spirited heroines and their circles, their interactions and rituals, their movements from ballrooms to drawing rooms, from London and Bath to parklands and gardens, she recreates the life of the English gentry that she observed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each of her novels is a love story and a story about marriage; marriage for love, for financial security, for social status. But they are not romances; ironic, comic, wise and penetrating , they are brilliant portrayals of the society Jane Austen knew.

Includes seven stories: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and Lady Susan.

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1.         Young Adult is not a genre. We hear that often — “the YA genre.” You’re wrong. Don’t call it that. Stop it. But seriously, Young Adult is a proposed age range for those who wish to read a particular book. It is a demographic rather than an agglomeration of people who like to read stories

2.         The average Young Adult novel probably hovers around the 70,000 word mark — shorter if it leans away from genre and toward literary. Particularly, for the first book in a series.

3.         They also tend to be more quickly paced and with a great deal of dialogue. Some young adult books read with almost the spare elegance of a really sharp, elegant screenplay.

4.         Adults are rarely the main characters of a young adult book. Why would they be? They don’t have teen problems. They’re witnesses, at best. That said, adults can be the supporting characters (though usually still peripheral to the teen world — teachers, parents, older siblings) and they can also certainly be the villains.

5.         Adults read a lot of young adult fiction, particularly “cross-over” fiction that leans toward the higher end of that teen age range. One might speculate adults like it because it recaptures some part of their youth. Or that adults are frequently not as grown up as they’d prefer these days.