The watchword next week is “heavily anticipated,” as proved by the number of titles that have already received attention. Sarah Jessica Parker is the unexpected champion of the literary debut, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, reviewing it in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, and promoting it in the Wall Street Journal. Veteran author John le Carré publishes his 23rd book, which is either the best he’s ever written, or the worst, according to which critic you trust. And, Charlaine Harris closes the book on her long-running vampire series, the basis for the popular TV series True Blood, with Dead Ever After. Leading the pack in holds is John Sandford’s Silken Prey. Check our downloadable spreadsheet for these and many other titles arriving next week, New Title Radar, Week of 5.6.13.

With all these big names, some below-the-radar titles are looking for attention:

The Other Typist, Suzanne Rindell, (Penguin/Putnam/Einhorn; Penguin Audio)

The first novel by poet Rindell about a typist working in a New York precinct in the ’20’s, who falls in with a flapper, is singled out as a favorite by one of our GalleyChatters, Jen Dayton, from Darien P.L. Kirkus calls it a “a pitch-black comedy” with a “dollop of Alfred Hitchcock, a dollop of Patricia Highsmith.”

Murder as a Fine Art, David Morrell, (Hachette/Mulholland)

The real-life author Thomas De Quincey is suspected of being the “artist of death” in Victorian London, committing a number of ghastly murders. Entertainment Weekly gives it an unequivocal “A.”

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, audio read by Jake Gyllenhaal, Brilliance Audio

The imminent arrival of Baz Luhrmann’s movie, has made Gatsby the best seller Fitzgerald fervently hoped it would be in his own day. Also arriving is this new audio version, narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal, who is NOT in the movie. E! Online, giving rare attention to audio, claims it “Makes Us Swoon as Much as Leonardo DiCaprio.” Check your own pulse, below:

Get ready for Rick Yancey‘s The 5th Wave to fulfill heavy expectations when it arrives next week. The first in a new series, it is one of many  debuting from both well-known and first time authors with the arrival of the summer publishing season. Also look for  the first collaboration  between two bestselling YA authors, Andrea Cremer and David Levithan in a book young people in love, somewhat complicated by the fact that one of them is invisible.

All the titles highlighted here and more, are available on our downloadable spreadsheet, Kids New Title Radar, Week of 5.6.13

Picture Books

Yoo-Hoo, Ladybug! Mem Fox, Laura Ljungkvist, (S&S/ Beach Lane Books)

Mem Fox is the master of the early childhood read aloud (Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes). Her rhythmic rhyming text is just right for the seek-and –find pictures. (Hint: to find her in the spread below, consider which vehicle a ladybug would drive).

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If You Want to See a Whale Julie Fogliano, Erin Stead (Roaring Brook Press )

A quiet, playful and imaginative take from the award-winning team that brought us the 2012, And Then It’s Spring.

The Great Lollipop Caper, Dan Krall, (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)

The whole family will enjoy this edgy silly fun with its cartoon-y graphic illustrations. The book trailer reflects the book’s spirit:

Beginning Readers

Pancakes, Pancakes, Eric Carle,  (Simon Spotlight )

Rooster Is Off to See the World, Eric Carle, (Simon Spotlight)

Classic Carle titles return in their original format (we know and love them as picture books, but they were originally easy-to-read books). These are particularly welcome as interesting low-level readers are the most difficult to find. Newly fluent kids eat them up like popcorn.

Chapter Book

Sugar, Jewell Parker Rhodes, (Hachette/Little, Brown BYR)

A gripping historic fiction tale of friendship set on a Southern sugar plantation from the author of the Coretta Scott King honor, Ninth Ward,

Middle Grade

Doll Bones, Holly Black, Eliza Wheeler (S&S/McElderry;Listening Library:

Black returns to her Spiderwick audience with this gripping creepy middle grade horror tale. Do not read before bedtime. You have been warned.

Young Adult

The Lucy Variations , Sara Zarr (Hachette/Little, Brown BYR)

Zarr’s is always the first galley I read from the Little, Brown galley pile. I can’t say it better than Kirkus, in a starred review, “What makes Lucy’s story especially appealing is the very realistic way this ‘entitled brat’ (as grandfather called her) acts out as she experiments with new identities. … The combination of sympathetic main character and unusual social and cultural world makes this satisfying coming-of-age story stand out.”

The 5th Wave, Rick Yancey, (Penguin/Putnam)

Arriving with a major promotional campaign from Penguin, this cross between King’s The Stand and Hunger Games is s a roller coaster ride. My heart was in my throat the entire read. Entertainment Weekly featured the book trailer, with the headline, “Is this the Next Big Thing?” The answer is “Yes.”

Reboot, Amy Tintera, (HarperTeen)

There’s been enthusiasm on YA GalleyChat for this new addition to the dystopian genre, readers calling it “Dark and twist-y, with well rounded characters.” The only prepub review, from Kirkus, is equally enthusiastic, characterizing it as a “compulsively readable science-fiction debut [that] will appeal widely… Superb concepts and plotting will hook readers from the start… [with] plenty [for] those who appreciate romance.”

Steven Spielberg announced in January that he had abandoned plans to adapt Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse (RH/Doubleday; BOT), which had been set for release next year, starring Chris Hemsworth, Anne Hathaway and Ben Whishaw.

Yesterday, he cleared up speculation about what he will turn to next and announced plans to direct an adaptation of American Sniper (HarperCollins/Morrow), the best selling memoir by Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who was killed on a Texas shooting range in February.

Bradley Cooper, who bought the rights to the book a year ago, will star.

Before he died, Kyle had a second book int the works, Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms, (HarperCollins/Morrow; HarperAudio). It is being released, as planned, in early June.

We thought that the poor box office showing for the adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Hachette/Grand Central, 2012) had finally killed off thoughts of a film based on the grandmother of the mashup genre, Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, also by Grahame-Smith (Quirk Books), but The Hollywood Reporter announces that Lily Collins is now set to star with Burt Steers directing.

Collins follows a string of actresses that have been rumored or announced for the role (Natalie Portman — who is still attached as a producer —  Emma Stone, Anne Hathaway, Scarlett Johansson, Mia Wasikowska and Rooney Mara). Steers is the fourth director attached to the project.

The mashup craze seems to have run its course, but zombies still live.

Last fall, John Grisham told Matt Lauer on the Today Show that he was seriously considering a sequel to his first and favorite novel, A Time to Kill. Over the years, he said, he has “been looking for some other trial [Mississippi lawyer] Jake could have a couple of years after the trial in A Time to Kill…and I’ve found the story.”

Random House just announced that Grisham’s next book will be that sequel, Sycamore Row (via the AP sydicated story), to be published on Oct. 22 by the Doubleday division of Random House (also RH Audio, BOT and RH Large Print).

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Another project announced in 2010, an HBO series based on Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge (Random House) is now gearing up. Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right) has been signed to direct with Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins starring. Tom Hanks’ Playtone Partners is co-producing with McDormand’s company. According to Deadline, “Getting this cast, director and a four-hour commitment from HBO is a real testament for McDormand … [who] fell in love with the book before it won the Pulitzer…[and] bought it with her own money.”

Strout’s The Burgess Boys (Random House), her first novel since Kitteridge, was published in March. McDormand’s first production effort, an adaptation of Laura Lippman’s Every Secret Thing, is currently filming.

Back in 2010, when Bernard Cornwell’s bestselling novel, Agincourt (Harper, 2009), about the battle that was also the basis for Shakespeare’s Henry V, was signed for a film, we warned you not to hold your breath. Filmmaker Michael Mann had several other projects in the works. Since then, he has completed two TV series for HBO (Luck and the documentary Witness).

Agincourt is now back in the news; Deadline reports that the script is being rewritten. There is some excitement about Mann’s renewed interest based on his handling of 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans, starring Daniel Day-Lewis (Roger Ebert called it,  “quite an improvement on Cooper’s all but unreadable book”). One more  project stands in the way, however. Mann begins production in June on another feature film.

The new edition of the often-attacked “bible” of American psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders known as  D.S.M., is about to be released and, predictably, it is being preceded by controversy.

The NYT ‘s Dwight Garner examines two books that lead the alarm, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg, (Penguin/Blue Rider; Tantor Audio, 5/13) and Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life by Allen Frances, (HarperCollins/Morrow, 5/14) saying, they are “unalike yet deeply alike, as if they were vastly dissimilar Rube Goldberg devices that each ultimately drop the same antacid tablet into the same glass of water.”

Both, he says, are “repetitive and overlong,” and would have made better magazine articles, but, “Mr. Greenberg is a fresher, funnier writer. He paces the psychiatric stage as if he were part George Carlin, part Gregory House.”

The Zookeeper’s Wife, (Norton, 2007) by Diane Ackerman is the true story about the director of the Warsaw Zoo during WWII, who, with his wife, managed to rescue over 300 Jews from the Nazis. Film rights were signed in 2011.

The adaptation is now moving forward, with actress Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty) signed to star and Niki Caro to direct, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

USA Today’s headline, “Stephen King’s 11/22/63 headed to TV,” makes it sound like a a done deal, but the Deadline story it’s based on is less definitive, stating that rights to the novel are being negotiated and that they “hear” the plan is to turn it into ” a TV series or miniseries, likely for cable.”

What is certain is that a series based on another King novel, Under the Dome, begins on CBS on June 24.

The cable channel FX’s adaptation of the first novel in Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s vampire trilogy, The Strain, (HarperCollins/Morrow, 2009) now has a lead, Corey Stoll (who played a character in the Netflix original series, House of Cards).

Del Toro will direct the pilot. According to Deadline, the network is likely to pick it up as a series.

The next project from the creator of the hit cable series Weeds, Jenji Kohan, is an original series for Netflix, Orange Is the New Black, adapted from Piper Kerman’s 2010 memoir (Norton). Netflix just announced that all thirteen episodes will be released on July 11.

Netflix recently began developing their own programs, in an effort to attract and retain subscribers. The first two, House Of Cards (February) and Hemlock Grove (April) were also based on books.

Actress Taylor Schilling stars as Piper, who was incarcerated for 13 months in the Danbury Federal Prison in Connecticut. A Smith college graduate, just beginning her career, she seemed an unlikely candidate for prison, until a ten-year-old drug trafficking charge caught up with her.

At the time of publication, USA Today said the book “transcends the memoir genre’s usual self-centeredness to explore how human beings can always surprise you. You’d expect bad behavior in prison. But it’s the moments of joy, friendship and kindness that the author experienced that make Orange so moving and lovely.”

The next season of the popular British series, Downton Abbey is currently in production. The series’ first black actor has just joined the cast. Gary Carr will play jazz singer Jack Ross, reports the UK’s Independent. A slide show of the other new additions, gives hints about the upcoming story lines (there’s at least one new love interest for Lady Mary).

Among the returning cast members are audience favorites, Shirley MacLaine and Maggie Smith. However, Siobhan Finneran, who played the conniving lady’s maid O’Brien, will not be back.

The author of the best selling Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey (RH/Broadway; Tantor Media), Countess Fiona Carnarvon, is publishing a new book about Highclere Castle this fall, featuring Lady Almina’s successor, Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey (RH/Broadway).

Lady Carnarvon, her home and her previous book were featured on CBS Sunday Morning earlier this year.

Diane Sawyer’s heavily promoted interview with Amanda Knox aired on ABC’s Nightline last night.

The full interview is available here. Knox’s book, Waiting to Be Heard, (Harper; HarperLuxe, HarperAudio), released yesterday, rose to #11 on Amazon’s sales rankings as a result.

Entertainment Weekly reviewed it, giving it a “B.”