Young Adult | featured news

A week ago, Fort Collins author Lauren Myracle, whose young adult novels include the enormously successful "ttyl" series, was ecstatic to learn that her latest novel, "Shine," was on the short list for this year's prestigious National Book Award.

Call it the recession's lost generation. In record numbers, they're struggling to find work, shunning long-distance moves to live with mom and dad, delaying marriage and raising kids out of wedlock, if they're becoming parents at all. The unemployment rate for them is the highest since World War II, and they risk living in poverty more than others - nearly 1 in 5.

Young adults, long the group most likely to be uninsured, are gaining health coverage faster than expected since the 2010 health law began allowing parents to cover them as dependents on family policies. Three new surveys, including two released on Wednesday, show that adults under 26 made significant and unique gains in insurance coverage in 2010 and the first half of 2011. One of them, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimates that in the first quarter of 2011 there were 900,000 fewer uninsured adults in the 19-to-25 age bracket than in 2010.

This month, young adults across the nation are donning graduation robes and tweaking resumes, while parents ready their Canons and Kleenex. At the podium, guest speakers will motivate and inspire, but they will likely omit one tiny detail: Many of those grads will remain financially dependent on their parents for years.

In January and February, she e-published a trilogy of young-adult novels she’d written years earlier. She called the first one “Seattle Girl” and chose a new author name, Lucy Kevin, to distinguish it from the sexually explicit Andre books. Here’s what her first quarter looked like: 56,008 books sold; income, $116,264.

They're up to three times more likely to use substances nicotine, cocaine and marijuana in adolescence and as young adults, research suggests. ...

The elderly have a harder time multi-tasking than young adults because older people are far less nimble at switching neurological connections in their brains between activities, according to research released on Monday.

Amanda Hocking, the 26-year-old author who shot to fame by selling more than a million copies of her self-published books, has signed up with a traditional publisher for her next series.St. Martin’s Press, part of Macmillan, will publish Ms. Hocking’s “Watersong” series, four books in the young-adult paranormal genre.A heated auction for the rights to publish her books began early last week, and several major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins, dropped out as the price climbed into the seven figures.

Many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting color lines that have defined Americans for generations.

The rituals of college -- making new friends, studying until dawn, excessive partying -- can stress out any young adult. But students with bipolar disorder, or those at risk for the condition, are even more vulnerable in a college environment.