Call him “the Nicholas Sparks of nonfiction.”

Michael Lewis is on a roll. His book on the financial crisis, The Big Short, is topping best seller lists, the movie based his football book, The Blind Side grossed $287 million worldwide and won an Oscar for Sandra Bullock. The tie-in has been on best seller list for months.

Now, it looks like a movie of his book on baseball, Moneyball, will finally begin production. According to Michael Fleming, reporting for the web site, Deadline New York, Sony Pictures is talking about a July start date, starring Brad Pitt as the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane.

The movie had been caught in production hell; last year, days before it was scheduled to start shooting under the direction of Steven Soderbergh, Sony, unhappy with the script, pulled the plug.

A new script, by Aaron Sorkin, seems to please everyone including new director Bennett Miller, whose most recent film is Capote.

All it needs now is the approval of Major League Baseball; without that, the filmmakers will not be able to use official logos and uniforms or shoot in stadiums.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Michael Lewis Retail Price: $13.95 Paperback: 320 pages Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company – (2004-04) ISBN / EAN: 0393324818 / 9780393324815

Close on the heels of the best selling Letters to Jackie, Hyperion has announced that they will publish a book of previously unreleased interviews with the First Lady, conducted just months after her husband was killed.

The idea doesn’t please everyone. Irish Central, the web site of the Irish Voice and the Irish American, editorialized against the project, saying that, with all we now know about President Kennedy’s personal life,

…Jackie is in danger of looking dangerously naive about her marriage and her husband. The tapes will doubtless reveal a Jackie who will speak about a devoted couple even though the harsh truth was otherwise — and Jackie knew it.

The book will be published in September, 2011.

A debut novel, published by a small indie press, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Tinkers Paul Harding Retail Price: $14.95 Paperback: 192 pages Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press – (2009-01-01) ISBN / EAN: 193413712X / 9781934137123

Bellevue Literary Press was founded in 2005 and is affiliated with NYU’s School of Medicine.

As a result of the announcement, the book raced up Amazon’s sales rankings, from #162,012 to #10.

It may be a surprise that the winner is a debut book and from such a small (one could say “tiny”) press, but it hasn’t been exactly unsung. It had already appeared on several year-end best books lists (Library Journal, Publishers Weekly and Amazon) and received strong prepub reviews from Publishers Weekly (an “outstanding debut”), Library Journal (“a solid addition for literary collections”) as well as a star from Booklist (“a rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and acute psychological and metaphysical suspense”). In the consumer review media, it was covered by the Boston Globe (in a review by Chris Bojalian), the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the Hartford Courant and the L.A. Times (which also named it as a finalist for their book prize) and it was an IndieNext pick for Jan. ’09. However, the New York Times, both the daily and the Book Review, overlooked it.

According to Publishers Weekly, just 15,000 copies were in print before the announcement. Bellevue is planning to go back to press on the book.

Paul Harding’s next book, Enon will be published by Random House; it was sold at auction at the end of 2009 to Susan Kamill, RH’s Editor-in-Chief (via Publishers Marketplace); no pub date yet.

The two finalists in Fiction are both short story collections. Love in Infant Monkeys, by Lydia Millet, which is also from a small indie press, Soft Skull. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton), was a National Book Award finalist.

More mainstream, but less heralded, is the winner in the General Nonfiction category; The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, by David E. Hoffman (Doubleday), which did not appear on major end-of-the-year best lists.

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy David E. Hoffman Retail Price: $35.00 Hardcover: 592 pages Publisher: Doubleday – (2009-09-22) ISBN / EAN: 0385524374 / 9780385524377

Audio and eBook available from OverDrive.

The finalists in that category have been more recognized:

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities, John Cassidy, FSG

The Evolution of God, Robert Wright, Little, Brown

Below are the winners and finalists in the other book categories (the full list of all categories is here).

HISTORY

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, Liaquat Ahamed, Penguin

Finalists

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, Greg Grandin, Holt

Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, by Gordon S. Wood, Oxford University Press

POETRY

Versed, Rae Armantrout, Wesleyan

Finalists

Tryst, Angie Estes, Oberlin College Press

Inseminating the Elephant, Lucia Perillo, Copper Canyon Press

BIOGRAPHY

The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, T.J. Stiles, Knopf

Finalists

Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, John Milton Cooper, Jr., Knopf

Cheever: A Life, Blake Bailey, Knopf

I’m delighted that Miss Brooks Loves Books (And I Don’t) arrives on the NYT Children’s Picture Books Best Seller list this week.

Miss Brooks Loves Books (And I Don’t) Barbara Bottner Retail Price: $17.99 Hardcover: 32 pages Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers – (2010-03-09) ISBN / EAN: 0375846824 / 9780375846823

Seriously, this is my favorite read aloud so far this year. The gender-neutral protagonist is plagued by an over-enthusiastic school librarian. My students were rolling on the floor with the giggles claiming they knew someone just like that (personally, I don’t see the resemblance). Then it’s Book Week! oh no. Our hero just can’t seem to find a book to love and share.

The deadpan humor and expressively comic drawings make this one a book to read again and again. Of course it is a bestseller!

It’s not good. In fact, it’s probably as bad a review as any author might fear from the critical Kakutani,

[Beatrice and Virgil] is every bit as misconceived and offensive as his earlier book was fetching.

The only positive consumer review so far is from USA Today‘s book critic, Dierdre Donahue, although she makes it sound tough going,

Up until about page 117, Yann Martel’s new novel, Beatrice and Virgil, appears teeth-grindingly precious. Then, click, you realize: Martel knows exactly what he’s doing in this lean little allegory about a talking donkey and monkey.

This novel just might be a masterpiece about the Holocaust.

Alan Cheuse, in the San Francisco Chronicle calls it “one of the most confounding books I’ve read in a long while.” At the end of a review in which he manfully tries to figure the book out, he gives up and exclaims,

As for this mixture of mock self-effacement, literary posturing and pretentiousness, I would say: Stuff it!

Among the prepub reviews, only Booklist‘s was positive, giving it a star.

For a look at the tortured process of publishing this book, see “Yann Martel’s Life After Pi“, in the National Post of Canada,

Beatrice and Virgil Yann Martel Retail Price: $24.00 Hardcover: 224 pages Publisher: Spiegel & Grau – (2010-04-13) ISBN / EAN: 1400069262 / 9781400069262

RH Audio: UNABR; 9780307715159; $30
Large Print: trade pbk; 9780739377802; $24
Adobe EPUB eBook and WMA Audiobook available from OverDrive

Ironically, the biggest news in Kitty Kelley’s biography of Oprah, releasing today, may be that she was NOT abused as a child, as she claims. Today, the Huffington Post features a photo essay on Oprah’s “Aunt Katharine” (she’s actually an older cousin), who is quoted in Kelley’s book on the abject poverty Oprah claims she was raised in,

Now, you have to understand that I love Oprah, and I love all the good work she does for others, but I do not understand the lies that she tells. She’s been doing it for years now.

NPR’s Morning Edition (audio will be available some time after 9 a.m.), is interested in Kelley’s claims that she got the cold shoulder from many news outlets, including ABC, commenting,

Perhaps that’s not surprising, given that ABC’s parent company, Disney, is partnering with Winfrey on several of the new shows she’ll present on the Oprah Winfrey Network. But it is troubling to some.

In Kelley’s interview with Matt Lauer on The Today Show yesterday, Kelley lists the shows that turned her down. Asked whether her motivation to choose Oprah as a subject was the millions of fans who might buy it, Kelley responds that “they will love it.”

Media attention has increased sales; the book is now at #3 on Amazon (from being in the 300’s over the weekend) and library holds have nearly doubled in the libraries we checked (bringing the average to 1.75 holds per copy). Half the libraries have received their copies.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Kitty Kelley, author of an unauthorized bio of Oprah, releasing tomorrow, has famously not been invited to many TV talk shows that usually vie for such high-profile books. The only show it is booked for is the Today Show this morning.

As of Friday, the book was in the 300’s on Amazon sales rankings and few details had been released (the media was a bit distracted by Oprah’s announcement that she is planning to host a prime-time show on her new network, OWN, which debuts in January).

But the print media has not been so reticent. Over the weekend, details began to leak and the book broke into the Top  20 on Amazon. It’s currently at #16, just behind David Remnick’s bio of Barack Obama (which is the lead review of the NYT BR this week) and well behind books about the founders that Glenn Beck is currently promoting. Today, the New Yorker, USA Today and the New York Times‘ Janet Maslin all parse Oprah, the book.

So, what’s the big “revalations”?

• Oprah won’t give her mother her phone number (but she does have people check on her daily, gives her a car and driver and provides her with $500 hats) –the UK’s Times Live
• Kelley names the boy Oprah gave birth to at 14 (or 15, sources differ. He died just weeks after he was born) — New York Times Magazine
• She once ordered two pecan pies and ate them both — New York Times Magazine
• Oprah lived with John Tesh briefely when they were both in Nashville (the New York Daily News)
• Kelley found out the name of Oprah’s father, but is not revealing it in the book (Janet Maslin, the NYT)
• Is she a lesbian? Kelley raises the question, but doesn’t give a definitive answer (the New Yorker)
• Her cousin claims that the sexual abuse Oprah has been open about just didn’t happen (USA Today)

Damning with faint praise, Maslin says,

After some hollow authorial claims of respect and admiration, Oprah just aims for the jugular. It doesn’t draw blood.

Part of the problem is that much of this has been revealed already, often by Oprah herself; the dieting, the James Frey brouhaha; “Ms. Kelley simply replays the televised version. She has nothing new to add to these stories.”

Library holds are averaging 1:1.

Oprah: A Biography Kitty Kelley Retail Price: $30.00 Hardcover: 544 pages Publisher: Crown – (2010-04-13) ISBN / EAN: 0307394867 / 9780307394866

Large Print from Random House

• $30; ISBN 9780739377857

Audio from Random House Audio

• CD: $50; ISBN 9780307749246

Celebrating her first appearance at #1 on the hardcover NYT best seller list this week is Patricia Briggs, for Silver Borne, the fifth book in her Mercy Thompson series, about a shapeshifter and auto mechanic in Washington State.

Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson, Book 5) Patricia Briggs Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Ace Hardcover – (2010-03-30) ISBN / EAN: 044101819X / 9780441018192

Penguin Audio; UNABR; ISBN 9781101192566; $39.95
Audio downloadable from OverDrive

At #2 after 53 weeks on the list (and the paperback still not in sight) is The Help by Kathryn Stockett. It was last at #1 two weeks ago.

Ian McEwan’s Solar has been getting dozens of reviews (Entertainment Weekly said this black comedy is “… the funniest book Ian McEwan has ever written, though granted that’s faint praise given the things his characters have done to corpses over the years”). It hits the list at #6.

Solar Ian McEwan Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Nan A. Talese – (2010-03-30) ISBN / EAN: 0385533411 / 9780385533416

Large Print; 978-0-7393-7778-9; $27
Adobe EPUB eBook downloadable from OverDrive

Slipping to #15 after four weeks is Viking’s big bet of the season, Angelology.

Jonathan Kellerman’s new Alex Delaware title, Deception, arrives at #4.

Deception: An Alex Delaware Novel Jonathan Kellerman Retail Price: $28.00 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Ballantine Books – (2010-03-30) ISBN / EAN: 0345505670 / 9780345505675

RH Audio; UNABR; 9780739368954; $45
Audio and Adobe EPUB eBook available from OverDrive.

PBS is beginning a week of programming about the Holocaust with a new adaptation of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl this Sunday, which is Holocaust Remembrance Day; all of the programs are based on books.

Monday, April 12

Among the Righteous, a documentary about Arabs who protected Jews during the Holocaust.

Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands ROBERT SATLOFF Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 251 pages Publisher: PublicAffairs – (2006-10-30) ISBN / EAN: 1586483994 / 9781586483999

Tuesday, April 13

Blessed Is the Match, a documentary based on the diary of Hannah Senesh, who, at age 22,  parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe to save the Hungarian Jews.

Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary, the First Complete Edition Hannah Senesh Retail Price: $19.99 Paperback: 325 pages Publisher: Jewish Lights Publishing – (2007-08-30) ISBN / EAN: 1580233422 / 9781580233422

Wednesday, April 14

Worse Than War, a documentary about state-sponsored genocide, from the Holocaust to Rwanda to Darfur, based on the book of the same title.

Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Retail Price: $29.95 Hardcover: 672 pages Publisher: PublicAffairs – (2009-10-06) ISBN / EAN: 1586487698 / 9781586487690

Kitty Kelley’s Oprah: A Biography goes on sale next week, but it may get short shrift on national TV: only NBC will interview Kelley (0n Weekend Today this Sat. and the Today Show, Mon. & Tues.), according to the New York Post.  Library demand for the book is moderate, so far, at those we checked.

Relatively few of the book’s details have been released so far, aside from the National Enquirer‘s headline about the “Big Gay Lie” of Winfrey’s relationship with Stedman Graham, as we reported earlier.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, Oprah herself is currently dominating entertainment headlines with the announcement of an evening talk show on the Oprah Winfrey Network, which launches in January. Reports also indicated that a book club show may be part of the lineup, with Oprah appearing on it occassionally.

Oprah: A Biography Kitty Kelley Retail Price: $30.00 Hardcover: 544 pages Publisher: Crown – (2010-04-13) ISBN / EAN: 0307394867 / 9780307394866

Large Print from Random House

• $30; ISBN 9780739377857

Audio from Random House Audio

• CD: $50; ISBN 9780307749246

Also Available Next Week:

Michael J. Fox’s A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the Future, (Hyperion) is the former TV and film star’s third memoir. He will appear on Entertainment Tonight on April 12 or 13, and Good Morning America on April 15.

FICTION

Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil, (Random House). Heavily anticipated, after the author’s beloved Booker winner, The Life of Pi, the new book’s reviews have not been strong, causing Kirkus to bring out some scary comparisons; “Like a Russian doll, the novel contains parables within parables…[the] dialogue sounds like Aesop filtered through Samuel Beckett.” PW was in agreement, but Booklist gave it a star. The new issue of Entertainment Weekly is in the Kirkus/PW camp, giving it a C+.

Anna Quindlen, Every Last One, (Random House). Entertainment Weekly reviews this title jointly with Anne Lamont’s Imperfect Birds (Riverhead, published last week), giving both books about parents trying to cope with teenage daughters C ‘s and saying, “Bottom line here? Fans of Quindlen and Lamott may want to give these two a skip.” Prepub reviews of both were very strong, however.

For more titles coming this week, go to BandN.com, Coming Soon.

Continuing at #1 on the NYT Manga best seller list this week is Warriors: Clan in Need, the new title in the wildly popular series (which is also popular in its prose format). Meanwhile, the manga-influenced version of another wildly popular title, Twilight is #1 on the Hardcover list.

So, why is Warriors on the Manga list, while the manga-influenced Twilight is not? These placements highlight a debate among comics and manga readers as to how to best define manga for the US readers. Manga is simply the Japanese word for comics but it has evolved to define a particular style. What constitutes that style, however, is highly debatable. Some say it should only include titles originally published in Japan by Japanese creators.  Others expand the definition to include manga-influenced titles, like both Warriors and Twilight. This then raises debate about how many manga elements a title needs to include (the Graphic Novel Reporter gives a good rundown of manga style). Does only art style come into it, or should the other aspects of manga including symbols, pacing, and storytelling techniques be necessary?

But, in the end, readers don’t care so much about these distinctions; they just want to know if particular titles appeal to fellow manga fans. Dramacon by Svetlana Chmakova is a US-produced title that is beloved by manga fans because it adopts not only the visual style but also the intricacies of symbols, pacing, and layout that make manga a recognizable art form.  The popular series Megatokyo and stand-alone works like June Kim’s 12 Days occupy a more complex middle spot between manga and western comics sensibility.

On the other hand, the Warriors graphic novels are not particularly appealing to manga fans (they’re appealing to Warriors fans, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish).

I am a librarian who believes, for the purposes of creating lists and organizing collections, it’s easiest to define manga strictly as comics produced in Japan for a Japanese audience.  Once you start including titles from outside Japan as manga, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine a line between manga and non-manga. As art styles and influence grow more intermingled, it is problematic to leave the term up to individual tastes or publisher’s marketing schemes.  The most important thing, however, is consistency, something which is not happening on the New York Times lists.

The Warriors series has appeared on the manga list multiple times, as have other US created manga-style series including Vampire Kisses: Blood Relatives from Ellen Schreiber and Maximum Ride by James Patterson. On the other hand, Scott Pilgrim, a series with marked manga influences, appears on the softcover lists, as does Adam Warren’s Empowered and X-Men: Misfits, both of which are clearly manga-style in terms of art.

How does the NYT decide what is manga and what is not? It seems they simply take the publishers word for it. If a publisher calls a title “manga” it goes on that list; when a title has no designation, it goes on either the hardcover or paperback lists.

As a result, sometimes true manga titles don’t appear on the manga list. Last year, A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, a stunning memoir by one of the founders of gekiga, or dramatic manga aimed at adult men, showed up on the softcover list, with no indication that the list makers realized that it was manga. Even more troubling, Death Note: L Change the World appeared for many weeks on the manga list even though it is a prose novel and thus not even a graphic novel. Death Note is indeed a best-selling manga series, but L Change is a novel spin-off, and its continued placement on a graphic novel best seller list made it appear that the New York Times list makers weren’t quite paying attention.

In selecting, we need to be aware that all the titles on the manga list may not appeal to manga fans. Buying Warriors or Vampire Kisses will not be a way to satisfy your readers’ demand for more manga.

Beginning on PBS Masterpiece Theater a week from Sunday is a two-part series based on Andrea Levy’s Small Island.

About Jamaicans coming to London to find a better life in the late 1940’s, the book won both the Orange and the Whitbread Prizes in 2004. It was well-reviewed here, with the San Francisco Chronicle called it a “triumph,” lauding the author’s remarkable narrative skills,

Using multiple narrative voices and regular flashbacks, the plot unfolds fanlike, from the middle. Where some authors risk frustrating the reader with several narratives, Levy uses the technique like a prose conductor.

Picador has released a tie-in.

Small Island Andrea Levy Retail Price: $15.00 Paperback: 448 pages Publisher: Picador – (2010-03-30) ISBN / EAN: 0312429525 / 9780312429522

For his new book, Bruce Feiler turns from Biblical history (Walking the Bible, etc.) to a much more personal story; his “lost year” dealing with aggressive cancer treatments. Worrying about his daughter’s lives without him, he formed the “Council of Dads,” six men he asked to be there for his girls at key moments in their lives. Even Kirkus was moved.

The book will be getting heavy promotion leading up to its May 1 publication, beginning with the cover of USA Weekend this Sunday. Other major media hits will include a profile in People (4/23), interview on the Today Show (4/28) and Fox’s Glenn Beck Show (week of May 3) and a one-hour documentary on CNN on Father’s Day weekend.

The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me Bruce Feiler Retail Price: $22.99 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: William Morrow – (2010-05-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061778761 / 9780061778766

HarperAudio; UNABR; 9780061988493; $29.99
Will be available as an Adobe EPUB eBook from OverDrive.