Hi, I'm Dave from Winnipeg, Canada.

Sound of Young America is an independent production supported by listeners like you and me.

If you'd like to donate to support the show, visit maximumphone.org and click on donate.

Live on tape from my house in Los Angeles, I'm Jesse Thorn, and this is the Sound of Young America from MaximumFun.org.

It's the Sound of Young America, I'm Jesse Thorn, on this week's program, Neil Gaiman and Henry Selleck.

Gaiman is a celebrated writer in the 1980s, he created the Seminole comic series Sandman, which followed a dream god protagonist through a series of quite literally surreal adventures in the Sleeping World.

He's been honored for his prose as well. His 2002 book Coraline has been adapted into a film by Selleck, the master of stop-motion animation.

Selleck's films include The Nightmare Before Christmas and James in the Giant Peach, and he recently animated The Underwater Sequences in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic.

In Coraline, the board-young protagonist passes through a brick-dover door into an alternate world where everything is both a little better, a little more exciting, and a little more sinister.

Not least, because the residents of the other world, like her other mother, have buttons where their eyes should be.

Hmm, something smells good.

Mom? What are you doing here in the middle of the night? You're just in time for supper, dear.

You're not my mother. My mother doesn't have buttons. Do you like them? I'm your other mother, silly. Now go tell your other father that supper's ready.

It's the sound of Young America. I'm Jesse Thorn. My guests on the program are Henry Selleck and Neil Gaiman. Welcome to the sound of Young America, guys.

And Neil, congratulations. Just a couple of days before we recorded this interview, it was announced that you won the Newberry Medal.

Does that come with an actual medal?

I very much hope so.

Because what's the point otherwise, right? I'm sure it's...

Although you sort of really start hoping that maybe it'll be chocolate. They'll give you the medal and then you'll peel it open and start eating it.

And you won't have the medal anymore. That's the trick. It's the thing is it's made of chocolate. But if you eat it, you won't have your...

So you just have to keep it. And anytime you want chocolate, you have to figure out a different plan.

But it'll... It's okay, because it's stamped. The medal will exist stamped on the front cover of every copy of the graveyard book from now until probably the end of time.

...