The arrival of the holidays coincides with the end-of-the-year cut-off for Oscar qualification. As a result, movie releases shift into a higher gear in the upcoming weeks, beginning with the wide release tonight of the final Hobbit movie, expected to bring in $75 million by Sunday.

But there’s no surer sign of the arrival of a big movie than an SNL sketch:

In fact, this holiday is so crowded that the Weinstein company ended up changing the release date of their big kid’s movie, Paddington, to January 16. Little did they know that one of the major Christmas releases, The Interview, would end up being cancelled by most major theater chains (reminder: 25 years ago, independent bookstores stood up to threats against selling Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses)

Below are the book-related movies scheduled through the end of the year (for all upcoming movies based on books, check our listing. For tie-ins, check our catalog on Edelweiss).

12/19 — Annie

This live action movie is based on the musical, which in turn is based on the Little Orphan Annie comic strips by Harold Gray, it stars the youngest-ever Oscar nominee, Quvenzhané Wallis, as Annie and Jamie Foxx as Will Stacks (a new version of Daddy Warbucks) with Cameron Diaz chewing up the scenery as a conniving Miss Hannigan.  See the trailer here

Scholastic has the tie-ins:

Annie: The Junior Novel (Movie Tie-In), Lexi Ryals

Annie: A True Family (Movie Tie-In), Calliope Glass

12/25  — American Sniper

After an Oscar-qualifying limited release on Christmas Day, this opens across the country on Jan 16. Originally a Steven Spielberg film, Clint Eastwood is the director. It stars Bradley Cooper and  Sienna Miller. Trailer

Jesse Ventura is helping keep the book in the news by suing over its mention of him (it seems the movie doesn’t include that scene).

Tie-in:

American Sniper [Movie Tie-in Edition], Chris Kyle, (HarperCollins/Morrow)

12/25 — Unbroken

With Angelina Jolie as director, this has already received major advance attention (she’s already appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote it). Trailer

Tie-in:

The following brief clip from the BBC series based on Susanna Clarke’s 2004 best selling debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, can’t be accused of giving away too much, but it does give a sense of Eddie Marsan’s portrayal of Norrell.

No news on when the series will debut in the U.S., but the tie-in (Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA) is now showing a May release date, indicating it’s not expected until later in 2015.

ABC’s new comedy Fresh Off the Boat will premiere on Wednesday, Feb. 4  before moving to its regular timeslot on Tuesday, Feb. 10 at 8 p.m. ET.

Based on restaurateur and food show host Eddie Huang’s memoir of his childhood, Fresh Off the Boat, (RH/Spiegel & Grau; RH Audio; BOT), this will be the first Asian American family sitcom since Margaret Cho’s All American Girl.

The show stars Hudson Yang as the young Huang with Randall Park and Constance Wu as his parents. The show’s producer, the actual Eddie Huang, will do the voiceover narration.

The trailer for the show’s pilot, below:

NBC’s 8-part adaptation of the controversial award-winning novel, The Slap by Australian Christos Tsiolkas, (Penguin, 2010) has been scheduled to begin airing on Feb. 12.

Starring Uma Thurman (shown in some recent photos from the Brooklyn set), it is directed by Lisa Cholodenko, (HBO’s Olive Kitteridge and the movie The Kids are All Right).

About the repercussions of a man slapping an obnoxious four-year-old boy at a barbecue, the book was a hit in both Australia and the U.K., where it became a reading group staple. It was made into a popular Australian TV series in 2011 (as a result, some reports cite the new adaptation as a remake of that series, without noting the original source material).

Released in the U.S. as an original trade paperback, it  received a strong endorsement from the Washington Post. The reviewer praised it for giving American readers a sense of life in Australia, while exploring subjects that resonate here,

In The Slap we live for a few short weeks in suburban Australia, learning the language, becoming intimate with the characters and experiencing their customs. But finally the novel transcends both suburban Melbourne and the Australian continent, leaving us exhausted but gasping with admiration.

The creator of Clifford the Big Red Dog, Norman Bridwell, died on Friday. He was 86 years old.

Scholastic published the first  Clifford book in 1963. The series became so important to the company that Scholastic adopted the dog as its official mascot.

In a statement released yesterday, Dick Robinson,  CEO, of Scholastic, paid tribute to the author, saying, “Norman Bridwell’s books about Clifford, childhood’s most loveable dog, could only have been written by a gentle man with a great sense of humor.”

In 2012, Scholastic celebrated Clifford’s 50th anniversary and released a video interview with Bridwell:

A live-action, animated 3D movie, Clifford the Big Red Dog is scheduled for release on April 8th, 2016.

The next book in the series will be published in April.

Clifford Goes to Kindergarten
Norman Bridwell
Scholastic: April 28, 2015
Ages 3 to 5, Grades P to K
Paperback
$3.99 USD

Get ready for a resurgence of the popularity of the name Ruby. Steven Spielberg has just announced that 10-year-old British actress Ruby Barnhill will star in his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1982 children’s book, The BFG, (Macmillan/FSG YR).

In a statement, Spielberg gives the young actress high praise, “After a lengthy search, I feel Roald Dahl himself would have found Ruby every bit as marvelous as we do.” She will play a young girl named Sophie who befriends a giant, played by Mark Rylance.

Disney plans to release the film on July 1, 2016.

Meanwhile, BBC One has completed another Dahl adaptation,  a TV movie based on Esio Trot, starring Judi Dench and Dustin Hoffman. It is scheduled to air in the U.K. on New Years Day. U.S. rights have been acquired by the Weinstein Co., but the U.S. release date has not been announced.

The UK’s Folio Prize, now in its second year, announced its longlist and it certainly lives up to its name, with a field of 80 fiction titles selected by the Folio Prize Academy, a group of writers and critics whose members read like a who’s who of literary fiction super stars.

The Prize was created in response to the 2011 Man Booker Prize shortlist, considered by some in the UK book scene as more “readable” than “literary.” Here is the entire 2011 Man Booker Prize list (long, short, and winner), in case you want to speculate on which titles triggered the debate.

Given the fuss, the Folio Prize longlist is remarkably similar to this year’s Booker longlist and includes the winner, Richard Flanagan’s
The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Also included are many of the titles that appeared on this year’s National Book Awards fiction longlist, but not the winner, Redeployment by Phil Klay.

The Folio shortlist will be announced on Feb. 9 and the winner on March 23, 2015. Last year’s winner was George Saunders for Tenth of December.

Many are assessing their favorite books of the year right now, but imagine summing up your favorites from an entire lifetime?

Jonathan Yardley, long-time Washington Post book critic takes on that task in his final, farewell column before retiring.

Only one of the total of 30 titles was published this year, Ward Just’s American Romantic (HMG), which Yardley counts as “perhaps his best, though the competition is fierce” (he also lists Just’s 1990 novel, The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert).

In nonfiction, one author gets three mentions, Rick Atkinson for his “magisterial World War II trilogy,” An Army at Dawn, (Macmillan/Holt, 2002), The Day of Battle, (Macmillan/Holt, 2007) and The Guns at Last Light (Macmillan/Holt, 2013),

In a separate column, Yardley looks back on his career with the Washington Post.(many of you will recognize the headshot, above, that once ran above his column), and resolves to “make one last attempt to read Ulysses, the gargantuan novel by James Joyce that was admitted to this country by my great-great uncle, federal Judge John Woolsey, whose famous opinion authorizing its admission I regard as considerably more engaging, witty and intelligible than the novel itself.”

A critic to the end!

When French author Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize this year, only a handful of his 30 books were available in the U.S. in English.

In a press release, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced today that they have acquired the rights to the author’s latest novel, So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood (French title, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier). They did not announce an anticipated release date.

As the Washington Post reports, this is not happy news for the founder of one of Modiano’s long-time U.S. publishers, David Godine, who tells the Post, “Money is what this business is all about, There is no venality that exists more than the venality that exists after the Nobel Prize is awarded.” He also notes that the company has done well with Missing Persons, one of the few books available in the U.S. at the time of the Nobel announcement, adding, “if you’re going to read a Modiano, that’s the one to read.”

Last month, the University of California Press, reprinted Dora Bruder, one of Modiano’s more well-known books. In addition, Yale University Press released Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas, (reviewed recently in the Washington Post).

Most libraries are showing holds on the winner of the National Book Award in Fiction, Phil Klay’s Redeployment, (Penguin Press; Penguin Audio; Thorndike, OverDrive Sample)

Holds are likely to increase when Klay gets the Colbert Bump on Wednesday (which is the next to last day of the show. Here’s hoping Colbert continues to cover books when he takes over David Letterman’s chair on the Late Show in January).

Last month, Klay appeared on the PBS NewsHour:

Calling her as “The Cover Girl For A New Kind Of Ballet,” CBS Sunday Morning featured African-American ballerina Misty Copeland.

Her autobiography, Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina, (S&S/Touchstone; Tantor Audio), published in hardcover in March, is coming out in trade paperback this week.

She also published a children’s picture book in September, Firebird, illus. by Christopher Myers, (Penguin/Putnam) picked as a best book of the year by NPR:

“The book is for very young dancers who may not see many people who look like them in the world of ballet. It’s illustrated by Christopher Myers, whose collagelike work is painterly, vivid and emotional. Copeland’s writing and Myers’ art draw you into a beautiful world, rich with color, texture and drama. For all budding young artists who maybe don’t have role models they can relate to, this little book provides some inspiration.

Anderson Cooper talked about discovering mindfulness on 60 Minutes last night (it’s a long segment, so we haven’t embedded the video here). He was introduced to the practice by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is called  “the man who’s largely responsible for mindfulness gaining traction.” One of his ten books,  Mindfulness for Beginners rose to #2 on Amazon sales rankings as a result.

It was published in 2011 by Sounds True, a Colorado publisher focused on spirituality, and is available through wholesalers.

Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment–And Your Life
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Sounds True
Hardcover, 9781604076585, $ 21.95
Audio, 9781591794646, $ 19.95

Despite the  popularity of the Little House on the Prairie novels, their source material, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s actual autobiography, has never been published. That was corrected last month by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press, with the release of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography.

Although the cover of the book paints a romantic picture, the real story is much grittier and is written for adults.

It was featured on the PBS Newshour last night:

The Wall Street Journal also featured the book this week.

Holds are heavy in most libraries. According to the official web site, PioneerGirlProject.org the book is now temporarily out of stock, and is expected to resume shipping in mid-January.

For fans who cannot get their hands on the book, the project’s blog offers a fascinating look at the extensive research behind it, such as the effort to verify the story of a teacher who improvised an igloo out of an overturned sleigh to protect his children during a freak blizzard.

Released just an hour ago, the first full length trailer of Insurgent. The movie arrives on March 20, 2015.

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The first LibraryReads list of the new year has just been released.

The number one pick is the most recent Flavia de Luce novel, As Chimney Sweepers Come
to Dust, Alan Bradley, (RH/Delacorte; BOT Audio — go behind the scenes of the audio recording here).

Also on the list of ten titles are two follow ups to book that have been popular with librarians, The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion (S&S; S&S Audio) and Golden Son: Book II of the Red Rising Trilogy by Pierce Brown, (RH/Del Rey; Thorndike; Recorded Books) and a debut that has been heavily buzzed on EarlyWord‘s GalleyChat, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (Penguin/Riverhead; Penguin Audio).