The Lerner Blog

I have always been a bit squeamish. I don’t like bathroom humor, I’ve never laughed at a fart, and all but the tamest euphemisms for bodily functions tend to make me uncomfortable. Even typing the word fart in the last sentence made me cringe. So consider my surprise when the first book I fell in […]Read more "Street Pigs and Euphemisms: a History of the Toilet"

  (This is a picture of Attorney General Edwin Meese, who commissioned the Meese Report on Pornography. He’ll be keeping an eye on things, just so no one gets the giggles. The following post acknowledges the existence of sex.) I had the pleasure last week of teaching a class with Carrie Mesrobian at the Loft Literary […]Read more "Lessons from Teen Writers"

Our new website launched over the weekend, and I feel like it would be silly to blog about anything other than that today. I haven’t had much of a chance to explore it yet, but please take a look and let us know what you think!Read more "Oooooh, shiny!"

Congratulations to Bree Dumont! You’ve won Beetle Boy! Please send an email to publicityinfo@lernerbooks.com with the subject line “Free Book Friday” telling us your mailing address so we can get your book in the mail. This week, enter to win Transgender Lives: Complex Stories, Complex Voices, written by Stonewall Award-winner Kirstin Cronn-Mills. “I didn’t hear the word transgender until I was […]Read more "Free Book Friday!"

Did any of you readers out there love coming up with moneymaking ideas when you were a kid? I know I did. I’ve blogged before about my adventures with a babysitting business. I also once helped start a neighborhood newspaper, and my cofounders and I actually collected quite a bit of money from our publication. […]Read more "For the Young Entrepreneur"

Photo Editor Manager Cynthia Zemlicka today shares the blog post you all know you wanted to: LOC cats!  It looks like I have case of the Mondays. What else can I do but share images of cats from the Library of Congress for today’s blog post. This photo is titled “Silvester child with Buzzer the […]Read more "LOC Cats!"

Congratulations to Cathy Potter (@cppotter)! You’ve won When Lunch Fights Back! Please send us a DM on Twitter or an email to publicityinfo@lernerbooks.com with the subject line “Free Book Friday” and tell us your mailing address so we can get your book in the mail. This week, enter to win Beetle Boy by Margaret Willey, a story of a lost childhood with […]Read more "Free Book Friday!"

I hope you’re enjoying your summer! Perhaps you’ve been camping or hiking, in which case you might be coming across animal tracks of various kinds. Does your family or do your students ever wonder what kinds of animals made which tracks? What kind of question is that? you might be asking. Of course they do! […]Read more "Tracking wild animals and FREE teaching materials"

One of my favorite topics at author conferences–and one of the few things I feel qualified to advise authors on, really–is helping authors understand what their work is about over the span of a career, regardless of trends, audience, or any other externalities. If an author knows what she cares about and what her work […]Read more "Old magazines, experienced authors, and the long view"