Two novels arrive on Tuesday with big expectations; John Grisham’s  The Racketeer (RH; RH Audio and Large Print; BOT Audio) and Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio, read by Lou Diamond Phillips).

Grisham will appear on the Today Show on Tuesday. Wolfe is heralded with a full PBS documentary, Tom Wolfe Gets Back to Blood, airing on Friday.

The number of advance reviews is inversely proportionate to public interest. Just two have appeared for The Racketeer (see previous post), which, in libraries, has three times the holds as Back to Blood.

The latter is already piling up the reviews, with news sources pulling out their big guns, none of whom (except for People magazine’s reviewer) love it:

Ron Charles, Washington Post, 10/16:

For a few hundred pages, this circus of tribal warfare is entertaining enough …Wolfe has never been a terribly subtle writer, but he’s usually an engaging one. This time the lack of nuance is wearing, like a camp skit that drags on till long after the fire has burned out.

I suppose when you’ve paid $7 million for a manuscript, you can’t very well start tossing golden chunks of it onto the floor, but “Back to Blood” could have been much better under a stronger editorial hand.

Michiko Kakutani, NYT, 10/18:

…a soapy, gripping and sometimes glib novel that’s filled with heaps of contrivance and cartoonish antics, but that also stars two characters who attest to Mr. Wolfe’s new and improved ability to conjure fully realized people.

Many of Mr. Wolfe’s efforts to send up his subjects devolve into predictable setpieces mocking the antics of the rich to get into the most exclusive clubs or parties…

Mr. Wolfe doesn’t really seem to care if his story becomes increasingly preposterous: his aim is to serve as an entertaining tour guide to the theme park-reality show that he calls Miami.

James Wood, The New Yorker, 10/15 — Most reviews begin with the assertion that in this book, Wolfe does for Miami what he did for New York in Bonfire of the Vanities and Atlanta in A Man in Full. Wood, however, feels all three books are about the same thing:

The content and the style haven’t changed much since The Bonfire of the Vanities was published, in 1987: select your city; presume it to be a site of simmering racial and ethnic civil war, always a headline away from a riot; throw a sensational news story into the fire; and watch the various interest groups immolate themselves

Back to Blood merely confirms what we already thought we knew about that city, and fails to dramatize ordinary people within that space.

Nestor, like everyone else in the book, is simply a blaring Klaxon for Wolfe’s excitability. In the regime of the enforced exclamation mark, everyone is equal. (There are seventy-seven exclamation marks in the novel’s twenty-page prologue.)

Daniel D’Addario, The New York Observer, 10/16:

In his vaunted hyperbolic style, Mr. Wolfe blows up details of consumption and lards each one with an exclamation point; a pixelated focus on the trappings of wealth serves as a stand-in for character development.

…the plot … is diluted by lengthy descriptions of the Magic City’s fine restaurants and art galleries. In spite of the presence of Hollywood stars “Leon Decapito and Kanyu Reade” (yikes), the white people buttering each other up at Art Basel are more authentic than any other characters in the book.

Rob Brunner, Entertainment Weekly, 10/17 — gives it a “B”:

..so distinctively Tom Wolfe-ish that it verges on self-parody. There’s that famously overamped prose … There’s the familiar obsession with class, power, and status … And there’s the usual wide-ranging cast of characters…

Kyle Smith, People magazine (review not available online) — 3.5 of 4 stars

Wolfe strikes some chords he has play before…but the novel roars and zips along like a cigarette boat, and even at 82 the Man in White proves to be a marvelous reporter. Call this bawdy humdinger the Bonfire of the Miamians.

John Grisham’s next blockbuster, The Racketeer (RH; RH Audio and Large Print; BOT Audio) which arrives on Tuesday, gets an early review from the NYT‘s Janet Maslin today.

“Like any Grisham book not involving baseball, The Racketeer has a plot built around a particular legal principle,” she says. However, unlike his more recent books, this one is not based on fact, which Maslin says is a good thing because “Mr. Grisham writes with rekindled vigor here. Perhaps that’s because he hasn’t mired this book in excessive research” and that he has “gone back to what he does best, storytelling rather than crusading.”

Entertainment Weekly agrees, giving it an A minus, and calling it a “bit of a departure” and a “tautly plotted new thriller.”

Sorry, folks. We understood that Barack Obama was going to appear on The Daily Show last night. It turns out that his appearance is scheduled for tonight (Thursday, Oct 18).

Last night’s guest was Nate Silver. Jon Stewart was so taken with his “absolutely fascinating book,”  The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t (Penguin Press) that the interview ran to two extended segments (Pt. 1 is below; link here for Pt. 2 and Pt. 3).”

Asked who is winning the presidential race, Silver said Obama has a modest lead.

Silver, who is profiled in Vanity Fair this month, has become the go-to guy on political stats, based on his accurate predictions of the 2008 presidential election which landed him a spot on Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. His blog, “FiveThirtyEight” is now licensed to the NYT.

His book landed on the NYT Nonfiction list at #12 two weeks ago and moved down to #20 last week. Libraries are showing heavy holds.

An author’s appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, can turn a book into a bestseller.

Tonight (UPDATE: This appearance will be on Thursday night), however, Stewart features an author who already has several best sellers to his credit, but has not written in a book in several years.

The author last visited the show Oct. 27. 2010.

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (Bloomsbury USA), the Booker finalist that was published here on the very day of the announcement that another book won the prize, got recognized by the Huffington Post as one of the “Best Books of 2012 So Far,” describing it as “Short, simple and haunting.”

Neither the Booker winner, Bring Up the Bodies, nor any of the other titles from the longlist, makes the HuffPo’s list of 23.

Last week, it was reported that Michelle Williams will star in a movie based on Suite Francaise, the novel by Irène Némirovsky, which became a surprise hit when it was published in 2004, more than 60 years after the author’s death in Auschwitz.

Following that story, Screen Daily reports that Kirstin Scott Thomas also plans to join the production. Whether the two actresses actually star all depends on who signs on to play Bruno, the German officer that Lucille (Michelle Williams’s character) falls for and if everyone’s schedules line up.

The film will be directed Saul Dibb, who has had experience with historical fiction. His most recent film was The Duchess (2008), based on Amanda Foreman’s novel, Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire. starring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes.

If you’ve wondered what it’s like to be in the midst of the world’s largest book fair (featuring over 7,000 exhibitors in multiple buildings), the New Yorker gives a good impression of it:

The Frankfurt Book Fair, which took place in Germany last week, feels like an airport (gift shops, people movers, high ceilings, ample bathrooms, the anxiety of missing something), except you can’t go anywhere.

And, in a description that could be applied to an ALA show floor, “Little separates the book fair from a tech fair,” but with a different twist:

The juxtaposition of game giants with paper products seemed an accurate—if slightly disorienting—reflection of today’s publishing landscape. The book publishers are doing digital products and the video-game makers are doing books.

Tellingly, the story focuses on the technology and not the books.

The latest episode of “Book Lust with Nancy Pearl” features an interview with Paul Auster, whose new book, a memoir, Winter Journal (Macmillan/Holt; Macmillan Audio; Thorndike Large Print) was published in August.

Now that Hilary Mantel has won her second Booker in a row, the media takes a look at the stats. She is the…

First person to win for a direct sequel — the BBC

First woman to win the prize twice — The Daily Mail

First British author to win twice — The Independent

Third double winner — the BBC

In August, it was announced that the two books, Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, are being adapted as a BBC2 series, expected to air late in 2013 in the UK.

Of course, both Bring up the Bodies, and its predecessor, Wolf Hall, are rising on Amazon’s sales ranking. Mantel has written many others, a total of twelve, as outlined by the BBC. For more about Mantel’s earlier work, check the essay, “Devil’s Work,” in 28 Artists & 2 Saints by Joan Acocella (RH/Pantehon, 2007). Written before Mantel became well-known in the US, it calls her “one of England’s most interesting contemporary novelists” and notes that she “has experimented with her gift; her books jump from genre to genre,” which is clear from the following list of her titles (unless otherwise noted, the quotes are from the BBC. Links are to the US editions):

Every Day Is Mother’s Day, 1985 — her first published novel about “an agoraphobic clairvoyant, her daughter and their social worker…inspired  by the author’s experiences as a social work assistant at a geriatric hospital.” The publisher describes it as “Stephen King meets Muriel Spark.”

Vacant Possession, 1986 — sequel to the above.

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, 1988 — draws on Mantel’s experiences while living in Saudi Arabia with her husband, a geologist, in the 1970s.

Fludd, 1989 — “this dark, often surreal fable” about a newcomer’s impact on a small mill town in Northern England won several prizes in the UK. It was reviewed in the NYT BR.

A Place of Greater Safety, 1992 — a historical novel set during the French Revolution. It won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award. It was reviewed in the New York Times.

A Change of Climate, 1994 — “about a missionary couple who lose a child.”

An Experiment in Love, 1995 — “about three schoolfriends from northern England,” it was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year and was reviewed in the NYT BR by Margaret Atwood, who called Mantel “an exceptionally good writer.”

The Giant, O’Brien, 1998 — “about an Irishman who comes to London to make his fortune as a sideshow attraction,” it is set in London in 1782 and was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year  as well as a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.

Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir, 2003 — “about her early childhood, her Catholic upbringing and how she came to be a writer. The title referred to the ‘ghosts of other lives you might have led,’ as the author realised she was ‘staring 50 in the face’,”

Beyond Black, 2005 — “about a medium who is tormented by her acquaintances, both the living and the dead.” It was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. It was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Wolf Hall, 2009 — the book “that really made her name.”

Hilary Mantel wins her second Booker Award, for Bring up the Bodies, Macmillan/Holt. It’s the second in a planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, which began with Wolf Hall, for which Mantel was awarded her first Booker.

She is currently at work on the third in the series, The Mirror and the Light (no pub date has been announced yet).

J.K. Rowling’s appeared on Jon Stewart’s show last night to discuss her first book for adults, The Casual Vacancy. Part 1 is below. Click here for Part 2.

Get ready for the next gen Carrie. The teaser trailer for a new film based on Stephen King’s classic debuted at New York ComicCon over the weekend.

Starring Chloë Grace Moretz as Carrie and Julianne Moore as her deranged mother, the movie arrives in theaters on March 15. 2013.

Official Web site: Carrie-Movie.com

The already heavy holds on statistician Nate Silver’s book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t (Penguin Press) are likely to increase after his appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Wednesday.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t Nate Silver Retail Price: Hardcover: 544 pages Publisher: The Penguin Press – (2012-09-27) ISBN / EAN: 9781594204111, 159420411X

Leading in to her live appearance at Lincoln Center tomorrow night, J.K. Rowling will be interviewed by Harry Potter fan, Jon Stewart on The Daily Show tonight.

The Casual Vacancy, (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; Hachette Large Print), the author’s first book for adults, moved from #1 on the USA Today best seller list, to #4 in its second week on sale. At #1 is Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus: The Mark of Athena, followed by Sylvia Day’s Reflected in You and Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy.

In an interview with USA Today, Rowling was less than definitive about her next book, “I think the next thing I publish will be for children, but I don’t really want to be held to that because I also know what my next book for adults will be and I really like that too, so it depends. I’ve always had more than one thing going.”

Feeding her Harry Potter fanbase, Rowling appeared on a Scholastic telecast last Thursday, in an interview at her home in Edinburgh, Scotland.

On NPR’s Morning Edition today (audio goes up around 9 a.m. EST), a book that warns, “Forget the 1 percent; it’s the wealthiest .1 percent who are outpacing the rest of us at breakneck speed.”

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else Chrystia Freeland Retail Price: $27.95 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Penguin Press – (2012-10-11) ISBN / EAN: 1594204098 / 9781594204098