I have a hunch that when the top twenty names on USA Today pop culture blogger Whitney Matheson's "Hot 100" list for 2007 come out later today, J. K. Rowling is going to be somewhere close to #1, but for now, the highest-ranking author on the list is National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie at #23, and Matheson threw in a supplementary interview with Alexie, who has done a fantastic job of reinventing himself as a YA author with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (Seriously: I don't care how old you are. Read this book.)

She brings up the fact that, while it's easy to think of the novel as "Native American YA," it's also a powerful story about the effect of poverty on young lives. "There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world," Alexie concedes. "And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap. I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature... I think we're all ashamed of it, whether we are poor or we're also ashamed that in this incredibly wealthy country, a lot of people could be that poor."

Alexie also speaks to the book's content, which isn't really any less mature than what he's been writing in his "adult" fiction for years, just with a slight shift in tone: "The problem is that too many adults think their kids' lives are simple, or they try to make their lives simple, when their emotional lives are just as complicated as ours. They might have a few less tools to deal with it because they're young, but the emotions are all the same, and the subject matter is all the same."