When I asked her whether she had read Graham’s article, she answered, “Yes. She spoke to me over the telephone from her home in Oklahoma. Given the furor, it seemed like a propitious moment to talk to Hinton. Over the summer, the critic Ruth Graham published an article in Slate arguing that “adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children.” There was a strong backlash from adults who read and write Y.A. Hinton’s current publishers at Diversion Books hope that the promotion will “help a new generation of readers discover” her work and “inspire long-time Hinton fans to reconnect with the author.” They are hoping, in short, to capitalize on the popularity of young-adult literature among both teen-age readers and adults-a trend that has been a heated topic of late. genre into being, this marks a kind of transgenerational full-circle return. The author who changed the way that books for teens were written and published has seen her own work go from the spinning wire display rack near checkout to an online marketplace accessible while you wait for your morning latte. For Hinton, who almost single-handedly brought the Y.A. This week, “Rumble Fish” will be a Starbucks pick, available for free download through the coffee chain’s app or via iTunes. Along with Hinton’s other books for teen-agers-“That Was Then, This Is Now,” “Rumble Fish,” “Tex,” and “Taming the Star Runner”-“The Outsiders” remains a mainstay on middle-school and high-school reading lists, and it continues to sell well in digital formats.

Since then, “The Outsiders” has gone on to sell more than ten million copies. All of a sudden, they realized that there was a separate market for young adults.” “ ‘The Outsiders’ died on the vine being sold as a drugstore paperback,” Hinton told me, but her publisher “noticed that in one area it was selling very well. Hinton recalls that when she published her début novel, “The Outsiders,” in 1967, “there was no young-adult market.” Her book, written by a teen-ager about teen-agers in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was issued in hardcover by the Viking Press and then in softcover by Dell-both adult trade imprints.

Rumble fish by se hinton