And they are almost entirely forgotten — except by a few people, like me, who remember those long still afternoons in the library. Skurnick says that's because most of these books were written by women, for teenaged girls — and written off by everyone else. "I've never met anybody who didn't know this period of literature and doesn't immediately assume that it's cutesy and about romance."
Some of the books are romances — and what's wrong with that? — but Skurnick is also publishing things like Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family stories, about a Jewish family on the Lower East Side before World War I. And A Long Day in November, Ernest J. Gaines' novel about a young boy on a Southern sugarcane plantation.
Skurnick herself is a teen author; she's written several books in the Sweet Valley High series, and a few years ago she started a column for Jezebel devoted to discussing the books she remembered reading as a girl. That column became a book, called Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. And it attracted attention from publishers.
"I had followed her columns and remembered these books that I loved from the past," says Elizabeth Clementson, who runs Ig Publishing with her husband, Robert Lasner.
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