It’s no wonder they took a pseudonym; the real names of the husband and wife team known as Lars Kepler are Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril. Their book, The Hypnotist, (FSG, 6/21/11) is the most recent title to be hailed as the “next Stieg Larsson” (and, in fact, the authors chose the name “Lars” as a tribute to their predecessor).

The authors are profiled on NPR’s Morning Edition today. They say the real reason they chose a pen name for their first crime novel is that each is already a published writer in Sweden and they wanted to create a new identity. They are parents of three daughters, and much of the book’s violence is carried out by children and women. Why? Because, they say, books are scary if you “care for the people in the book…you don’t want anything bad to happen to them.”  In writing The Hypnotist, they thought of how frightening it would be if their daughters became evil.

The book landed on the 7/17 NYT Fiction best seller list at #15. Libraries are show growing holds.

Holds are equally heavy for the an earlier “next Stieg Larsson” title, The Snowman by Jo Nesbo (Knopf, 5/10/11). It debuted on the NYT Hardcover Fiction list at #10, stayed on for four weeks and is now#28 on the extended list.

Diane Sawyer’s Primetime interview last night with Jaycee Dugard sent her memoir, A Stolen Life (S&S), to #1 on Amazon sales rankings; the audio rose to #147. Dugard is also scheduled for Good Morning America, tomorrow, the book’s release date.

Next week in fiction, two buzzy titles arrive: NBA finalist Dana Spiotta returns with her third novel and British author Glen Duncan delivers a literary werewolf thriller for adults. In nonfiction, Jaycee Dugard tells the story of her kidnapping and 18 years as a captive of her abductor and will appear on major evening and morning news shows, while journalist Ben Mezrich returns with a real-life NASA-related adventure.

Watch List

Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta (Scribner) is the third novel by this National Book Award finalist, about a conflicted artist in Southern California and his sister, who is convinced he’s a genius. PW says its “clever structure, jaundiced affection for Los Angeles, and diamond-honed prose” make this “one of the most moving and original portraits of a sibling relationship in recent fiction.” It also gets an early review in New York magazine, which calls it “good, sly fun, but … also tender, rueful, and shrewd.”

The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan (Knopf)  is a literate page-turner about a 201-year-old werewolf who is the last of his kind. It’s getting a big push from the publisher, buzz from early readers, and has been mentioned at BEA’s Shout and Share as well as on our very own GalleyChat. This one’s a fun (and dirty!) read.

Rising Star

Iron House by John Hart (Thomas Dunne Books) is the story of two orphaned boys separated by violence. It’s the fourth literary thriller by this award-winning writer, whose last book (The Last Child) was a bestseller. This one has an announced 200,000-copy first printing and is the #1 Indie Next pick for August.

Usual Suspects

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin (Bantam) is the long awaited fifth installment of the epic fantasy A Song of Ice and Fire series. It already had a strong fan base that was expanded by HBO’s Game of Thrones, based on the first book. Its been in the Amazon Top Ten for a month. Recent news stories about  spoilers surfacing on fan sites on the Web are just adding to the excitement.

Quinn by Iris Johansen (St. Martin’s) is a follow-up to Eve that delves deep into the life and psyche of Eve Duncan’s lover and soul mate, Joe Quinn. As a ruthless killer closes in, long-held secrets are gradually revealed. LJ, PW and Booklist all say it’s a pulse-pounder.

Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner (Atria) is the story of four women whose lives intertwine in creating a child through reproductive technology. LJ says, “fans of Marian Keyes, Anna Maxted, and other authors of serious chick lit will thoroughly enjoy this title for its humor mixed with a sympathetic portrayal of real women’s lives and challenges.”

Blood Work: An Original Hollows Graphic Novel by Kim Harrison (Del Rey) brings the authors popular urban crime fantasy series to visual form.

Young Adult Fiction

Dragon’s Oath by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast (St. Martin’s Griffin) is the first in a new mini-series of novellas, and tells the story behind the fencing instructor in the bestselling House of Night series.

Forever by Maggie Stiefvater (Scholastic) concludes the Wolves of Mercy Falls werewolf trilogy.

Nonfiction

A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard (Simon & Schuster) is a memoir by a woman who was kidnapped in 1991 at age 11 and endured 18 years of living with her abductor and his wife, bearing and raising his child before she was discovered in 2009. This one has an impressive news lineup. It’s on the cover of the July 18 issue of People, with an excerpt and a brief Q&A with Diane Sawyer about her  two-hour interview with Dugard, to air on ABC’s PrimeTime July 10th. Sawyer says that her spirit “will astonish you” and that “everything she says makes you stop and examine yourself and your life.” She is also scheduled for Good Morning America on July 12th.

Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History by Ben Mezrich is the story of a fellow in a NASA program who schemed to steal rare moon rocks as a way to impress his new girlfriend. The author wrote Accidental Billionaires (the basis for the movie The Social Network). Our own view is that the details about the space program will be catnip for space junkies (and even those who are not – the James Bond stuff they have at the Johnson Space Center is amazing), but the central character doesn’t have the celebrity value of Mark Zuckerberg, so it may not draw a wider audience. It is currently being developed for a movie, by the same production team that created Social Network, but with Will Gluck (Easy A) directing, rather than David Fincher.

I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards (Houghton Mifflin) is the story of Google’s rise from the perspective of the company’s first director of marketing. PW says, ” The book’s real strength is its evenhandedness” and that it’s “more entertaining than it really has any right to be,” though Kirkus finds it less focused than it could be, given all the other books written about Google.

Of Thee I Zing: America’s Cultural Decline from Muffin Tops to Body Shots by Laura Ingraham and Raymond Arroyo (Threshold) criticizes the contemporary American culture of consumerism.

The top two books in the business category on Amazon’s sales rankings right now are not owned by most libraries.

The Lean Startup, coming in September, is by Eric Ries, who is called “the face of the lean startup movement.” He’s even trademarked the concept and promotes it constantly at tech conferences. Several blogs call the concept the “next big thing” in business (Fast Company’s Expert Blog, Forbes’s Rethink, SmartMoney’s Encore).

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Eric Ries Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Crown Business – (2011-09-13) ISBN / EAN: 0307887898 / 9780307887894

Crown is a Random House imprint, so the book will also be available from OverDrive.

The number two book (number 1 last week), is also aimed at entrepreneurs. Anything You Want by CD Baby founder Derek Sivers is published by Seth Godin’s “cut out the middleman” Domino Project, which he launched with Amazon in December. It’s promoted with this engaging video, “I Miss the Mob,” sure to appeal to anyone who has dealt with MBA types or business consultants. Personally, I could watch it all day long.

Talk about a lean startup; Sives began CDBaby.com, a distributor of independent music, in 1998 with $500 and grew it with no outside investors. Ten years later, he sold it for $22 million. He didn’t pocket the money himself, however. It all went to a charitable trust for music education.

The book is available through library wholesalers. It is also on audio from Brilliance and downloadable from OverDrive.

Anything You Want Derek Sivers Retail Price: $14.99 Hardcover: 88 pages Publisher: The Domino Project – (2011-06-29) ISBN / EAN: 1936719118 / 9781936719112

Hold your groans; this is one may not come to pass.

Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes; releasing Aug. 5 and expected to a summer’s blockbuster) is talking about doing a big-screen adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Entertainment Weekly reports the news and comments on the “motion-capture” technique Wyatt plans to use, “Seeing as how blown away we were by Wyatt’s use of the technology in clips for Apes, [watch trailer here] it’s easy to get excited about the prospect of Farm, which would feature a diverse group of human-like barn animals leading a rebellion.”

On the other hand, if Rise of the Planet of the Apes does as well as expected, the director may turn his attention to making it a franchise.

Hallmark Entertainment released a made-for-TV version of Animal Farm in 1999, with Kelsey Grammar doing the voice of Snowball.

George R.R. Martin has threatened to go all medieval on the Amazon.de employee who accidentally shipped 180 copies of A Dance with Dragon before its official release date. Spoilers have now appeared online and Martin’s response is to threaten to put the person’s head on a spike.

How important are spoilers, really? Go The F@@k To Sleep, continues to be s bestseller, even though it was available online in its entirety before publication. In fact, many attribute it’s success to just that fact.

Nonetheless, a lot of passion is being expressed online about A Dance with Dragon‘s release now being “marred.”

But those supposed spoilers may be red herrings; Entertainment Weekly quotes Elio M. Garcia, Jr. webmaster for Martin fansite Westeros.org, that most of them are “inaccurate or garbled.”

So, what’s the punishment for inaccurate spoilers?

The book’s official release date is Tuesday, July 12

A Dance with Dragons (Song of Ice and Fire) George R.R. Martin Retail Price: $35.00 Hardcover: 1008 pages Publisher: Bantam – (2011-07-12) ISBN / EAN: 0553801473 / 9780553801477

If you were to cast the movie of the high-concept comic novel, Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips (Little, Brown, 2007), which imagines the Greek gods are alive and living in a modern-day moldy brownstone in London, who would you pick to play Zeus, the down-on-his-luck, now crazy patriarch?

Would you choose a quirky, somewhat scary actor, like Christopher Walken?

If so, then you’d be in agreement with director Marc Turtletaub (producer of Little Miss Sunshine, Everything is Illuminated and Away We Go), who has also chosen a roster of other well-known American actors, necessitating a switch in location to a brownstone in NYC. Shooting begins mid-July (via Thompson on Hollywood).

The rest of the cast includes:

Alicia Silverstone and Ebon Moss-Bachrach — Kate and Neil, mortals who share the house with the Olympians

Sharon Stone — Aphrodite, a phone-sex operator

Oliver Platt  — Apollo, a TV psychic

Edie Falco — Artemis,  a dog-walker

Nelsan Ellis — Dionysus, a night-club owner

Phylicia Rashad — Demeter

John Turturro — Hades

Rosie Perez — Persephone

Following the success of her debut novel, Push, which was adapted into the Oscar-winning 2009 movie Precious, the book’s author Sapphire has published a sequel, The Kid (Penguin Press), released yesterday. The story begins with the death of Precious, and follows the difficult life of her son Abdul Jones into his teens.

USA Today‘s Bob Minzesheimer says the new book, which “…explores the shame of the foster home system and why more black kids like Abdul aren’t adopted” is “…more ambitious”  than the first book.

Reviewers agree that Abdul’s life is harrowing; Carolyn Kellogg in the Kansas City Star, calls it “…an accomplished work of art, but it is a grueling story, one whose depictions of brutality and desire may be too challenging for some readers.” Michiko Kakutani in yesterday’s NYT takes a more dim view, “What is meant to be provocatively obscene in this novel, however, often feels merely willfully perverse, just as what is meant to be shocking often feels like sensationalistic contrivance.” People gives it 3.5 of 4 stars in the 7/11 issue.

The author was interviewed by USA Today at NYPL’s Harlem branch, at the beginning of her 17-city book tour. Below is the video of the interview that accompanies the story on the USA Today Web site:

Library holds are light, averaging 1:1 in the libraries we checked, on modest ordering.

Fortune magazine reports that the title of Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming bio of Steve Jobs has been changed, causing the book to zoom up Amazon’s sales rankings to #51 (from #16,712). It is scheduled for release next Spring, March 6, 2012.

According to Fortune, Isaacson’s wife and daughter lobbied to change it from the “too cutsey” title chosen by publisher S&S, iSteve: The Book of Jobs to the prosaic, Steve Jobs.

The ads for the new Harry Potter movie say simply, “It all ends” a week from Friday. For the actors, the ending came earlier:

Two new behind-the-scenes videos are feeding fan frenzy.

…

A childhood favorite, The Borrowers by Mary Norton (Harcourt, 1953) is coming to screens in two forms; an animated movie from Japan and a BBC live-action film, to be shown on BBC-One at Christmas (no news on when it may appear in the US).

Called Arrietty, after Arriety Clock, the borrower family’s teenage daughter, the Japanese film will be dubbed in the US by Amy Poehler, Will Arnett and Carol Burnett (the trailer below is the British version, dubbed by other actors) and is scheduled for release next year, on February 17.

The BBC adaptation, called The Borrowers and starring Stephen Fry, Victoria Wood and Christopher Eccleston, just began filming.

The Borrowers was adapted as a film in 1997 with John Goodman, Jim Broadbent and Celia Imrie, as well as an American 1973 made-for-TV movie and a 1992 BBC TV series.

We noted last Wednesday that John Green’s forthcoming YA novel, The Fault in Our Stars, rose to #1 on Amazon’s sales rankings the day the title was announced, nearly a year in advance of publication (it’s currently at #3).

The Wall Street Journal also took note. On Friday, they looked in to Green’s social networking success. Green being Green, the story went instantly to his head, causing him to don a suit and give out financial advice.

The RITA Awards for best romances in twelve categories were announced at the RWA Conference in New York last week. The winner in the Young Adult category is The Iron King by Julie Kagawa, from the recently launched Harlequin Teen imprint.

Also announced were ten Golden Heart winners, awarded to unpublished manuscripts.

Wendy Crutcher, Materials Evaluator for Ocean County (CA) Public Libraries, is the 2011 RWA Librarian of the Year. The award was established in 1995 to “honor librarians who go above and beyond in their support of the romance genre, its authors, and readers.” Wendy posted her acceptance speech on her blog, The Misadventures of Super Librarian.

The WWII survival story, Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff (Harper, 4/26) debuts at #14 on the 7/10 NYT Print Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list, two months after publication, a result of the author’s appearance on The Daily Show. It is likely to rise higher next week; since the list was compiled, Amazon’s editors selected it as the best book of 2011 (so far).

Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II Mitchell Zuckoff Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: Harper – (2011-04-26) ISBN / EAN: 0061988340 / 9780061988349

HarperLuxe Large Print; 9780062065049; $26.99
Audio; Books on Tape; UNABR; 9780307917256; $40
Audio and eBook on OverDrive

Chicago journalist Brenda Wilhelmson appeared on The Today Show yesterday to promote her alcoholism and recovery memoir. The book is currently at #184 on Amazon sales rankings. It was not reviewed prepub.

Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife Brenda Wilhelmson Retail Price: $14.95 Paperback: 400 pages Publisher: Hazelden Publishing – (2011-04-01) ISBN / EAN: 1616490861 / 9781616490867

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