As I mentioned earlier, my personal pick of the fall books is Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World (one of the books featured at the BEA’s Librarian Book Buzz session).

Well, why not? I love libraries and I love cats. But it seems I’m not the only one to be bitten by Dewey. USA Today featured the book in Thursday’s Book Buzz column. No lesser source than Barnes & Noble buyer Bob Wietrak says he expects Dewey to be a hit, “comparable to Marley or Anna Quindlen’s Good Dog. Stay.”

Congrats to Vicki Myron, author of the book and director of the Spencer (Iowa) Public Library.

Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World

Vicki Myron

• Hardcover: $19.99
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (September 24, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0446407410
• ISBN-13: 9780446407410

• Audio CD: Unabridged, $22.98
• Publisher: Hachette Audio, (September 24, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 1600243827
• ISBN-13: 9781600243820

• Large Print Hardcover: $22.99
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, (September 24, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0446541192
• ISBN-13: 9780446541190

The New York Post gossip columnist Richard Johnson is not happy. In today’s column, he calls S&S’s Adam Rothberg a “fork-tongued flack.” It seems Adam refused to give him the scoop about Madonna’s brother’s tell-all book, due next month. Instead, he gave the story to Hillel Italie of the AP.

Good for you, Adam. Hillel is on the publishing beat full time and Johnson only covers books when it suits his gossip-mongering.

Johnson adds some tidbits to the story — he claims the book will be “brutal”;

“It’s extremely graphic and devastating,” said a source who declined to give details. “He wrote it on the sly without telling Madonna. They want to put it out before her lawyers can get a hold of it.”

We’ll let you know when we get biblio info on the title, due next month.

Did you know there was a Madonna mystery? Well, don’t worry about it too much, it’s been solved.

S&S has been promoting a mystery celebrity memoir to bookstores, asking them to order the book on faith.

The AP just broke the news that Madonna’s brother, Christopher Ciccione, is writing a memoir about his famous sister, to be released in mid-July, with a printing of 350,000 copies.

No ISBN, title, or cover yet; we’ll let you know when pub info is available.

It’s worth checking out the article for the photo of the siblings from 1991. I’d almost forgotten Goth Madonna.

Salon continues its quirky summer reading recommendations (earlier, they selected chick lit and thriller titles) with a list of “First Person Narratives” (is it significant that they avoid calling them “memoirs”?) Of course, they include David Sedaris’s When You are Engulfed in Flames. The other four picks are less heralded titles:

The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind - and Almost Found Myself - on the Pacific Crest Trail

Dan White

• Paperback: $14.95
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (May 20, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0061376930
• ISBN-13: 9780061376931

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The Importance of Music to Girls

Lavinia Greenlaw

• Hardcover: $23.00
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 29, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0374174547
• ISBN-13: 9780374174545

NPR also selected this title as one of the “Summer’s Best Nonfiction,” saying;

In her eccentric new memoir, The Importance of Music to Girls, British writer Lavinia Greenlaw writes about the way music — especially rock — propelled her into her first experience of puppy love (with Donny Osmond) and later, her Clash- and Banshee-inspired punk rebellions.

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Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever

Joel Derfner

• Hardcover: $23.95
• Publisher: Broadway (May 13, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0767924304
• ISBN-13: 978-0767924306

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Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life

Neil Steinberg

• Hardcover: $24.95
• Publisher: Dutton Adult (June 19, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0525950656
• ISBN-13: 978-0525950653

The title’s great and I love the jacket, even if the L.A. Times review opens with a diatribe against it. From the consumer reviews, Bob Morris’s Assisted Loving sounds like just the thing to pass the time while waiting to get to the head of the David Sedaris reserve list.

Libraries own it in modest quantities, with comfortable holds to copy ratios.

Here’s what consumer reviewers have been saying:

Entertainment Weekly, 5/23, Tina Jordan

Just months after his mother died, journalist Bob Morris noticed with horror that his 80-year-old dad, Joe, had — quite unmistakably — begun to troll for babes….Morris laces his droll, sweet story with some pretty unflinching descriptions — not just of his dad but of himself.

Los Angeles Times, 6/3, Dinah Lenney

Morris alternates chapters about their love lives, his and his father’s, to hilarious and touching effect…[a] heartfelt contribution to the canon of father-son memoir; an expression of civility, a grace note unto itself.

Interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross, 5/28

Before Assisted Living was a book, it was an off-Broadway comic review. Morris’s experience on the stage makes him a great interviewee.

Assisted Loving by Bob Morris

• Hardcover: $24.95
• Publisher: Harper (May 27, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0061374121
• ISBN-13: 978-0061374128

Today’s Christian Science Monitor looks at the memoir flap, with this quote from David Sedaris:

What’s interesting to me is that we live in a time when our government is telling us some pretty profound lies. And then James Frey writes a book and it turns out some of it’s not true. No one asked for their vote back, but everyone wanted back the money they’d spent on that book. We’re in the shadow of huge lies and getting angry about the small ones.

Sedaris’s next book, coming in early June, includes a short preface, calling it “real-ish.”

Jesh, have we come to this, humor has to be factual, too?

When You Are Engulfed in Flames
by David Sedaris

• Hardcover: $25.99
• Publisher: Little, Brown, (June 3, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0316143472
• ISBN-13: 978-0316143479

• Audio CD: Unabridged, $34.98
  
• Publisher: Hachette Audio; (June 3, 2008)
• Reader: David Sedaris
• ISBN-10: 1600241824
• ISBN-13: 978-1600241826

• Audio Cassette: Unabridged, $34.98
  
• Publisher: Hachette Audio (June 3, 2008)
• Reader: David Sedaris
• ISBN-10: 1600242316
• ISBN-13: 978-1600242311

• Large Type: $25.99
• Publisher: Little, Brown. (June 3, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0316024597
• ISBN-13: 978-0316024594

…Julie Andrews proves us wrong and now Barbara Walters is poised to do the same.

Audition: A memoir releases next week and is at #6 on Amazon. Reserves are running heavy in most libraries.

She is scheduled to blitz the networks (she does have ready access to the media), including Oprah, NPR’s Morning Edition and even Bill O’Reilly.

Get this one out of the back room as soon as it arrives!

Audition: A Memoir (Hardcover)
by Barbara Walters

• Hardcover: $29.95
• Publisher: Knopf (May 6, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 030726646X
• ISBN-13: 978-030726646

• Audio CD: Abridged, $29.95
• Publisher: Random House Audio, (May 6, 2008)
• Reader: Barbara Walters
• ISBN-10: 073934398X
• ISBN-13: 978-073934398

• Paperback: $29.95
• Publisher: Random House Large Print (May 6, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0739327305
• ISBN-13: 978-0739327302

Janet Maslin takes an ax to The Wolf at the Table in today’s New York Times (I had to check the byline twice to make sure it wasn’t Michiko Kakutani). A few other reviewers have been disappointed that Burroughs has abandoned his usual pain tinged with humor, but Maslin goes further, “Determinedly unfunny, awkwardly histrionic and sometimes anything but credible, it repudiates everything that put Mr. Burroughs on the map.”

In contrast, the Washington Post’s critic, as we quoted earlier, sees the change differently

Burroughs is doing something new here: ripping the scabs off emotional wounds without his usual acidic humor to deaden the pain…Still, Burroughs retains his capacity to move the reader: There is gorgeous writing on every page….Burroughs is to be commended for addressing this painful material head-on and with such sobriety, but I can’t help missing his crisp, biting humor and the immediacy of an author who typically puts his reader right alongside him for the journey. As much as I admire his brave effort, I felt relegated to the back seat. With Augusten Burroughs, I want to be riding shotgun.

People magazine gave it four stars out of a possible four.

A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father

by Augusten Burroughs

• Hardcover: $24.95
• Publisher: St. Martin’s Press (April 29, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0312342020
• ISBN-13: 978-0312342029

• Audio CD: Unabridged, $29.95
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio; (April 29, 2008)
• Reader: Augusten Burroughs
• ISBN-10: 142720425X
• ISBN-13: 978-1427204257

Variety reports that the film rights to the father/son memoirs of addiction, David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction (Houghton Mifflin, Feb) and Nic Sheff’s Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines (Ginee Seo Books/S&S, Feb) have been sold to Paramount Pictures and Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. Father and son made an appearance on Oprah three weeks ago. Both books are now on the NYT Best Seller lists (Beautiful Boy at #1 on Nonfiction and Tweak at #3 on Children’s Chapter Books).

Variety also notes that the movie will be produced in association with Starbucks. The coffee chain is currently featuring the book in their stores (the next Starbucks Pick is The Art of Racing in the Rain).

Plan B and Paramount are also developing Eat, Pray Love with Julia Roberts set to star.

Remember, selling film rights doesn’t always result in a movie. Whenever hearing such news, it pays to remember the many books to movies that are lost in production.

Variety also reports that Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons has been optioned.

New York magazine this week puts Augusten Burroughs under the microscope to find out if he really remembers everything he claims he does (Sam Anderson, the writer of the article, actually refers to his “inner polygraph” going off on occasion). Ironically, a disclaimer at the beginning of the article reads,

NOTE: This profile of the allegedly fake memoirist Augusten Burroughs is based on real events. Dialogue has been compressed, and chronology has been changed for dramatic effect

Refreshingly, a review in the Washington Post today wastes no time on trying to verify the book’s claim (unlike the Times and a few others, as we reported earlier) and focuses on the book’s appeal,

Burroughs is doing something new here: ripping the scabs off emotional wounds without his usual acidic humor to deaden the pain…Still, Burroughs retains his capacity to move the reader: There is gorgeous writing on every page….Burroughs is to be commended for addressing this painful material head-on and with such sobriety, but I can’t help missing his crisp, biting humor and the immediacy of an author who typically puts his reader right alongside him for the journey. As much as I admire his brave effort, I felt relegated to the back seat. With Augusten Burroughs, I want to be riding shotgun.

This week’s People magazine gives it four stars out of a possible four (sorry, no link. People does not put its reviews online) and makes it their pick of the week.

Most libraries I checked showed it still on order, with reserves building. Time to get the book into circulation.

A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father

by Augusten Burroughs

• Hardcover: $24.95
• Publisher: St. Martin’s Press (April 29, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0312342020
• ISBN-13: 978-0312342029

• Audio CD: Unabridged, $29.95
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio; (April 29, 2008)
• Reader: Augusten Burroughs
• ISBN-10: 142720425X
• ISBN-13: 978-1427204257