Stop, Look, and Listen

(WENDY MAEDA/GLOBE STAFF/file 2006)

M.T. Anderson (above) marches to the beat of his own inner drummer, hearing staccato rhythms where most wouldn't. When the Stow native graduated from high school in the late 1980s, for instance, he entered Harvard University but quickly rejected it for the other Cambridge, in England, where he devoured literature taught with the depth and rigor he needed. When years later he decided to write books for young people, his novels were offbeat, complex, long, and dark. Books for young people are often formulaic, the field is crowded, and success is rare. He violated many of the form's rules, and succeeded spectacularly.

Anderson is the author, most recently, of the two-volume, 900-page saga "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing," the tale of an educated young black slave in colonial Boston and his quest for freedom during the Revolution. The first volume, released in 2006, won the National Book Award for Young People, and the second was published in October. The books are written in carefully researched 19th-century English, giving them an unusual layer of authenticity, but also in theory an unusual degree of difficulty in reading them, particularly for teenagers.

But Anderson will have none of that. "In reading, as in everything else, he once told an interviewer, "kids want to have a certain kind of sophistication, which means they will push themselves to understand things." In another interview, he said, "It's insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should."

Anderson, who lives in Cambridge (this one now), says he came up with the idea for the Octavian saga while watching a Massachusetts reenactment of a Revolutionary War battle. He found himself wondering what it would have been like on that spot more than 200 years ago, when the war wasn't yet won and history hadn't been written by the victors. So he worked to re-create it, with sometimes jarring results. For instance, young Octavian begins as a slave in the North and eventually fights as a freeman alongside the British in the South. This is literary history with the loose threads hanging. Anderson will talk about his work tonight at 7 p.m. at the Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner, Brookline.

JIM CONCANNON

A ONE-NIGHT 'VACATION'

New Wave writer Deb Olin will read from and discuss her first novel "Vacation," a narrative tapestry with myriad plotlines, also today at

7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner.

ZEN AND THE ART OF RELAXING

As a timely antidote to the overwrought holidays, Anh le Tran will explain techniques for reducing daily stress. He'll also discuss Zen meditation at Yamawaki Auditorium, Lasell College, 1844 Commonwealth Ave. in Newton on Thursday at 5:30 p.m.