The new issue of Newsweek goes retro-modern, to celebrate the new season of Mad Men. Included is a comparison of what people were reading in 1966 vs. today (the #1 NYT Fiction best sellers, above). The earlier era is deemed superior, but several of those titles warrant spots on AwfulLibraryBooks.net.

The Muppets do their own version of The Hunger Games trailer (to promote their DVD and VOD “Wocka Wocka Value Pack“):

Meanwhile, Lionsgate has released a new “exclusive” clip from the real thing on Yahoo!

If you need an antidote to all the Best Books lists, try the New York Daily News list of the Most Overrated titles of the year (including the book that Esquire magazine named THE Book of the Year, The Submission by Amy Waldman).

This just may make me feel a bit better about some of my own typos:

As always when John Green mentions his upcoming book on his vlog to his brother Hank, it rose to #124 on Amazon’s sales rankings, from #367.

It seems it had no affect on the sales of The Pasta Bible, (JG Press).

The Fault in Our Stars John Green Retail Price: $17.99 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Dutton Juvenile – (2012-01-10) ISBN / EAN: 0525478817 / 9780525478812

As the former Editor-in-Chief of Random House, Daniel Menaker knows flap copy. On the Barnes & Noble Review, he offers a great tongue-in-cheek guide to incorporating as many cliches as possible into a few short paragraphs.

Kenneth Branagh may have abandoned plans to direct an adaptation of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. In August, Variety reported that he was planning to begin production on Guernsey in the spring of 2012. Now, that publication announces that Branagh is set to direct Italian Shoes, based on the book by Swedish writer Henning Mankell (New Press, 2009). Branagh starred in the English-language adaptation of the author’s crime-thriller series Wallander for the BBC.

Italian Shoes is decidedly not a crime thriller, however. It’s the story of an aging former surgeon, living alone on a remote island. Various women from his past come to visit and help him regain the desire to live. Reviewing it, the Boston Globe noted, “…if the plot seems like something out of a film by Mankell’s father-in-law, the late Ingmar Bergman, the prose isn’t any sunnier.” Even so, the reviewer was amazed to report, “But you know something? Italian Shoes is a good read.”

Branagh continues his career in front of the camera, playing Sir Laurence Olivier in My Week With Marilyn, based on the book by Colin Clark, released for the first time here as a tie-in. The Oscar buzzed movie opens this Thanksgiving. Two new clips, featuring Michelle Williams as Marilyn, were released yesterday.

My Week with Marilyn Colin Clark Retail Price: $16.00 Paperback: 336 pages Publisher: Weinstein Books – (2011-10-04) ISBN / EAN: 1602861498 / 9781602861497

Also on audio from Dreamscape and on OverDrive.

The faux picture book phenomenon, Go The F**k to Sleep, gives parents a chance to vent their frustrations with their recalcitrant offspring. But why should parents have all the fun?

Be honest; you’ve felt this way on at least one occasion:

The above is a panel from “Learn to F*cking Search” on Emily Loyd’s comic blog, Shelf Check.

Earlier this week, we highlighted what we thought was one of the funnier of the Royal Wedding books, Knit Your Own Royal Wedding (Andrews McMeel).

Turns out it’s been one of the biggest-selling titles in the UK and is currently out of stock in the US. The staff the Everett Public Library in Washington State actually took up the challenge and knitted the entire wedding party. The resulting display gained coverage from the local newspaper as well as CNN.

Compare the photos below — we think the Everett Public Library knitters’ results are even better than those in the book.

Photo Credit: Everett Library staff

Of course, it was tough to predict exactly what the family would wear, but the knitters got one thing right — Kate Middleton, confounding expectations, wore a tiara.

Take a break from all you have to do before tomorrow and watch this inspired piece (be sure the sound is on!):

We wish we had gotten it together to create a fun holiday greeting. We didn’t, so we’ll just steal this one from those creative folks at Chronicle Books (love the use of the company logo and the dancing CEO).

Happy holidays to all our wonderful EarlyWord readers (try to imagine the EarlyWord bird swooping into the scene).

Starring the Chronicle staff, in order of appearance:

Laura Bagnato, Marketing Designer
Alex Sheehan, Special Sales Manager
Nion McEvoy, Chairman & CEO
Ben Laramie, Industrial Designer
Dean Burell, Managing Editorial Director
Anna Carollo, Marketing Design Coordinator
Jack Jensen, President
Emily Craig, Marketing Designer
Kelly Abeln, Marketing Design Fellow

If you want to find out more about the creation of this stop motion video, check Chronicle’s behind the scenes blog post.

UPDATE: We’ve received several correct answers — these are all based on movies. However, we are looking for a more SPECIFIC answer!

HINT: These movies based on books are tied together by a person who will receive a major award on Jan. 22

To take your mind off all you have to do between now and tomorrow’s feast, we offer the following quiz.

Below is a list of books. If they were in a display, what would tie them together (other than the obvious)?

Bonus question: Why would this display be particularly relevant right now?

Please try to answer without the aid of reference books or Google (in this case, we DON’T want you to cite a source!)

Fiction

• Austen, Jane, Emma
• Chabon, Michael, Wonder Boys
• Condon, Richard, The Manchurian Candidate
• Connelly, Joe, Bringing Out the Dead
• Cunningham, Michael, The Hours
• Erian, Alicia, Towelhead
• Foer, Jonathan Safran, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• Goldsmith, Olivia, The First Wives Club
• Gregory, Philippa,  The Other Boleyn Girl
• Grisham, John, The Firm
• Heller, Zoe,  Notes on a Scandal
• Irving, Washington,  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• Kureishi, Hanif,  Venus
• Larsson, Stieg,  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Levin, Ira,  The Stepford Wives
• McCarthy, Cormac,  Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men
• Portis, Charles, True Grit
• Price, Richard,  Freedomland
• Russo, Robert,  Nobody’s Fool
• Sinclair, Upton, Oil!
• Tidyman, Ernest, Shaft
• Yates, Richard,  Revolutionary Road

Nonfiction

• Bayley, John, Elegy for Iris
• Goldsmith, Barbara,  Little Gloria… Happy at Last
• Gordon, Barbara,  I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can
• Harr, Jonathan, A Civil Action
• Lewis, Michael,  Moneyball
• McCourt, Frank, Angela’s Ashes
• Mezrich, Ben,  Accidental Billionaires
• Powell, Julie,  Julie & Julia
• Rawicz, Slavomir,  The Long Walk
• Schiff, Stacy,  Cleopatra
• Waizkin, Fred, Searching for Bobby Fischer

Childrens

• Dahl, Roald, Fantastic Mr. Fox
• Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events

Compare your picks of the most overrated contemporary writers with critic Anis Shivani’s list of 15 in the Huffington Post (you can also vote on his selections).

Number 15 is NYT Pulitzer Prize winning critic, Michiko Kakutani.

Up next, Shivani promises to list the most underrated authors.

Merriam-Webster is highlighting their incredibly knowledgeable staff in a series of Ask the Editor videos on YouTube.

Try memorizing each one  to astound (or irritate) your friends (subscribe here).

Here’s hoping this one has a positive effect on my own grammar (via HuffingtonPost.com):

What’s the most over-the-top book blurb you’ve ever read?

The UK’s Guardian has their nominee, one that they call, in a bit of understatement, “strikingly effusive.”

It comes from Nicole Krauss (recently named one of the 20 best writers under 40 by the New Yorker, she is the author of The History of Love and the forthcoming Great House) for David Grossman’s To the End of the Land,

Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I’ve ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity. For twenty-six years he has been writing novels about what it means to defend this essence, this unique light, against a world designed to extinguish it. To the End of the Land is his most powerful, shattering, and unflinching story of this defense. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.

The last line prompted critic Scott Esposito to write on his blog, Conversational Reading, that he thinks he can live without having the place of his own essence touched.

The Guardian is running a contest for readers to create an outrageous blurb, for Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. They chose that title because, “…we don’t want to make it easy for you by letting you blurb a book which may actually be good, like Grossman’s. ”

No winner of the outrageous blurb award has been announced yet. Our vote goes to the following, which manages to match the tone of Krauss’s blurb, in far fewer words,

I was so enamoured, beguiled and enraptured at the thought of reading the The Da Vinci Code, I decided not to. Therefore, I also urge you not to, lest the spell is broken.

Meanwhile, The Guardian says that, apart from the blurb, David Grossman’s book sounds “extremely interesting. The story of an Israeli mother, Ora, who sets out for a hike in Galilee with her former lover in order to avoid the ‘notifiers’ who might tell her of her son’s death in the army…”

The book will be published here in September. There are no prepub reviews so far.

To the End of the Land David Grossman Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 592 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2010-09-21) ISBN / EAN: 0307592979 / 9780307592972