Linda M. Castellitto

Unlike many of his fellow authors, John Green always intended to write books for young adults. " Most of the YA authors I know wrote a book and then were told it was YA, but I always wrote with that audience in mind," Green says. "I wanted to be a part of the process of broadening and deepening what it means to write for teenagers." If critical acclaim is any indication, he has certainly chosen the right career path. Green won the Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature for his first book, Looking for Alaska, a compelling portrait of the students at an Alabama boarding school. When he accepted the award at the American Library Association convention in June, Green says his parents brought along two books he wrote at the age of eight: It Just Isn't Fair, about a nerd who gets ridiculed, and Me and Mitch Learned a Lesson, an anti-bullying book.

Another bully appears in Green's new novel, An Abundance of Katherines, but he's a tiny part of a larger picture. The novel offers an offbeat, but ultimately wise, perspective on failed romance, even as it explores the challenges, hilarity and occasional moments of beauty on the path to adulthood. Green makes liberal use of footnotes and anagrams which, in the wrong hands, might be distracting. Not here; instead, his sly asides and wordplay-centric plot twists make the story even more fun, and the anagrammatic dedication to his wife, Sarah Urist Green, is an odd yet touching work of poetry. A snippet: Heart-reassuring/Signature Sharer/Easing rare hurts.

Though the couple lives in New York, the author spoke with BookPage from Chicago, where he and Sarah are spending a few months (she's working at the city's Museum of Contemporary Art). During an earlier stint in the Windy City, Green was on the staff of Booklist, an ALA publication, doing production and database management. "I was very fortunate that there was a great emphasis on everyone being book people, passionate readers," Green says of the experience. " I got the chance to review a lot of books, and it made a huge difference in my . . . writing life and reading life."

Green says he wrote An Abundance of Katherines while he was still working at Booklist, but adds, "it was really created after I left. The book took its form in revision." During that revision Green estimates 80 percent of the words changed over several additional drafts the novel assumed its final, unusual shape.

At the book's core is Colin, a recent high school graduate and former child prodigy who attempts to apply mathematical principles to his checkered romantic history. Colin is determined to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which will help him understand why he's been dumped by 19 girls named Katherine.

Colin's friend Hassan is a clever sort who gets impatient with Colin's mooning about, so the two teenagers set off in search of a little edification and a lot of adventure. They find it in Gutshot, Tennessee, where they befriend a girl named Lindsey and her mother, the local tampon-string factory owner who offers them a job and a place to stay for the summer. Two obvious questions might be: 1. Tampon-string factory? and 2. Does the theorem work? Green says he knew a girl in high school whose father owned just such a factory, and yes, it does.

Getting the theorem to make sense was a bit challenging, so he sought the help of his friend Daniel Biss, a 28-year-old Green describes as a genius, one of the best mathematicians in the world. (He's also an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and a research fellow at the Clay Mathematics Institute.) The two worked on the theorem together, starting with the idea that a relationship can be represented by a graph in which the x-axis represents time, and key events a date, a vacation, a breakup can be plotted track the relationship's highs and lows, beginning and end. Green and Biss tested the theorem with their own ex-girlfriends as well as famous celebrity couples such as Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson.

"It's right 100 percent of the time," Green says. He emphasizes, though, that " I wrote [the theorem] to be beautiful. It's meant to be something to look at, with gorgeous clean lines. It was important to me to write a book a math idiot like me could enjoy completely without ever stopping to look at the math." Green isn't selling short his YA audience, though. The author routinely hears from his teenaged readers, "who are an amazingly smart and interesting bunch of people. I've been really impressed by the quality of their thinking." It is for those readers as well as any mathematicians inclined to pick up Katherines that Green worked to ensure the book's math is correct. "I wanted people who have the inclination to be able to look more deeply and to show readers that math can become a language, and a graph can tell a story."

John Green rearranged the letters in Linda M. Castellitto's name, and came up with the anagrams A slim, not little, cad and Maniac dolt tells it, among others.

For National Book Award-winning author Pete Hautman, the experience of writing his latest young adult novel, Invisible, was an intense and unusually speedy one.

The author says most of his books take several years to write, but when he got the idea for Invisible, I wrote the first draft in five weeks. I was almost obsessed. He adds, In a sick, depressing way, it was a joy to write. That’s quite a caveat, but an understandable one: the narrator of Invisible is Doug Hanson, a witty kid with a knack for model-railroad building and a host of disturbing hobbies and behaviors, including an unhealthy fascination with fire and an unsavory habit of spying on a female classmate. Despite Doug’s moral lapses and odd behaviors, Hautman succeeds in making him a sympathetic character. Young readers will surely relate to Doug’s feeling of adolescent invisibility, his exasperation with the seemingly clueless adults he encounters daily and his singular focus on his best friend, Andy. Nearly every kid has someone they call their best friend, Hautman says. As you get older, friendship becomes more complex, it changes. I wanted to write about that kind of pain, about a kid who lost his best friend and couldn’t make that transition. Hautman launched his writing career in 1993 with a mystery, Drawing Dead, and followed it with a series of crime novels. His first book for young adults was Mr. Was (1996), and he went on to write four other inventive teen novels, including Godless, the National Book Award-winning story of a boy who starts a religion by worshipping the town water tower. The author says his young adult works come from a different emotional and intellectual place than his adult books. In my adult books, I’m writing for the reader I am when I read a popular novel, I demand to be amused, and that justice is done in the end. I don’t want to have to ponder the book after I’m done with it. In writing for young adults, Hautman has a different goal: When I’m writing YA [young adult] books, I’m interested in vicariously experiencing the emotions and drama the world has to offer. As a teenager, I wanted ambiguous endings, books that perplexed and made me think. He adds, I think of YA as coming-of-age stories about kids taking on adult responsibilities for the first time, in terms of friendship, sex, violence, any number of things. It’s about discovering your personal power, and how you can affect the world. The collision of Hautman’s curiosity about personal power and a wrong turn in a shopping mall resulted in the creation of a key element of Invisible Doug’s intricate, time-consuming model railroad, made from thousands of wooden matchsticks. In a mall somewhere in Arizona, late at night, I ended up in a room filled with an enormous model railroad, Hautman recalls. I talked to the three old guys there, members of a model train club. They were so proud of what they’d done. The experience stuck with Hautman. I became fascinated by the kind of mind that embraces this hobby and the notion of imposing yourself on a miniature world, making yourself God. It is just this sort of imposition that proves impossible for Doug to maintain. His destructive actions are ultimately revealed, culminating in a scene that is at once astonishing, sad and thought provoking but definitely not for the faint of heart.

On a lighter note, Hautman and his wife, poet Mary Logue, are co-authoring a series of middle-grade mysteries. Another adult mystery is due out next year, plus a YA book titled Rash. Hautman will work on these projects from his home in Golden Valley, Minnesota, which he shares with Logue and two toy poodles.

And, in the wake of his National Book Award, Hautman has been traveling and giving talks at schools and conferences. It’s really nice to be acknowledged as a writer. It’s given me a lot of new readers, he says. We writers are all desperate for attention. We hide in our rooms and hammer away on our keyboards . . . and we really want the world to come to us.