Heading in to Valentine’s Day weekend, which morphs this year into Fifty Shades of Grey weekend as the R-rated movie opens to major box office expectations, the book it is based on is #3 on Amazon’s best seller list, followed closely by the boxed set of the entire trilogy. At #13, is a title that sounds similar, Fifty Shades of They (Creative Pastors) by the founding pastor of the Fellowship Church, a Dallas megachurch, Ed Young.

Although the title may seem to pay homage to E.L. James’s famous novel, Young calls that book a “perverted attempt to trap readers and leads them to a misunderstanding of what intimacy and connection are all about.” As a protest, he plans to “baptize” copies of it this weekend. His book, published by Creative Pastors, an imprint of the Fellowship Church, is about forming relationships with the “right ‘they'” and claims to offer “fifty simple, yet profound insights that will help any relationship thrive.”

None of the titles arriving next week have long holds list waiting for them. The new Richard Price novel, currently showing few holds against fairly modest ordering, may take off amidst a burst of media attention. Also arriving, several LibraryReads and GalleyChat titles to recommend.

All the titles covered here, and several more notable titles arriving next week, are listed, with ordering information and alternate formats, on our downloadable spreadsheet, EarlyWord New Title, Week Radar of Feb. 16, 2015

Keep Your Eye On 

The Whites, Richard Price as Harry Brandt, (Macmillan/Holt; Macmillan Audio by Bobby Cannavale; OverDrive Sample)

You can understand why Richard Price wanted to write a “slicker, more commercial book,” the reason, as this week’s NYT feature reports, he decided to try writing under a pseudonym. Among fellow crime writers, he is considered a master. Yet, despite awards and acclaim, his books don’t sell as well as Dennis Lehane’s or Michael Connelly’s.

Although the author himself thinks he didn’t achieve his goal, some reviewers disagree. In the New Yorker, Joyce Carol Oates calls The Whites, “more of a policier than Price’s previous fiction—more plot-driven and less deeply engaged by the anthropology of its urban communities.” In his other books, she says,  setting is “lavishly detailed” but in The Whites, “the grim urban landscape is scarcely more than a backdrop. The author focusses on the interwoven lives of a number of characters in language as forthright and free of metaphor as a police report, and on the construction of an elaborate narrative that shifts between present and past action.”

Michael Connelly, on the cover of this Sunday’s NYT Book Review, says Price “manages to give the story a fierce momentum, one that makes putting this book aside to sleep or eat or do anything else very difficult … This book literally interrupted my professional and personal life. Once in, I had to stay in and stick with it to the end.” This one could give Price the commercial success he seems to be seeking.

Librarian Picks 

A Touch of Stardust, Kate Alcott, (RH/Doubleday; RH Audio; OverDrive Sample)

LibraryReads:

“With the background of the making of Gone with the Wind, this is a delightful read that combines historical events with the fictional career of an aspiring screenwriter. Julie is a wide-eyed Indiana girl who, through a series of lucky breaks, advances from studio go-fer and assistant to Carole Lombard to contract writer at MGM. A fun, engaging page-turner!”  — Lois Gross, Hoboken Public Library, Hoboken, NJ

Dreaming Spies: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, Laurie R. King. (RH/Bantam; Recorded Books;  OverDrive Sample)

LibraryReads:

“Considering that King is one of the finest mystery authors writing today, it’s no surprise that the latest in the Russell/Holmes series is an engaging read. Intrigue follows the duo as they board a liner bound for Japan and meet up with a known blackmailer and a young Japanese woman who is not all that she seems. Great historical research and rich atmosphere!” — Paulette Brooks, Elm Grove Public Library, Elm Grove, WI

Half the World, Joe Abercrombie, (RH/Del Rey; OverDrive Sample)

LibraryReads:

“Fifteen-year-old Thorn, determined to become a king’s soldier, is fighting not just physical opponents, but her world’s social mores. Girls are supposed to desire nothing more than a wealthy husband. Period. Thorn’s struggles to achieve her dream make for a riveting read. Second in a series, this book reads very well as a standalone.” — Cynthia Hunt, Amarillo Public Library, Amarillo, TX

Fiercombe Manor, Kate Riordan, (Harper; OverDrive Sample)

A favorite on our September GalleyChat, “With its English manor setting, threads of madness, and hints of hauntings, it’s an obvious homage to Kate Morton, Victoria Holt, Sarah Waters, and Daphne du Maurier. Before reading, Google ‘Owlpen Manor’ to see the house that inspired the setting.” Edelweiss is also showing “much love” (their version of “likes,” but stronger) from a dozen librarians.

Media Attention

ISIS : Inside the Army of Terror, Michael Weiss, Hassan Hassan, (S&S/Regan Arts; OverDrive Sample)

This title appears to be embargoed, since there are no prepub reviews and, as a result, libraries have not ordered it. Co-author Hassan published a story last week in The Guardian in which he writes that he and Weiss conducted in-depth interviews with ISIS members for the story. Hassan is a journalist for The National, an English-language newspaper from Abu Dhabi, which reviews the book. No news just now on media attention, but given the subject, and that it is the first title from publicity magnet Judith Regan’s new S&S imprint (her colorful presence is welcomed back in a story in last Friday’s NYT), expect to be hearing about it.

The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty, Amanda Filipacchi, (Norton; Highbridge Audio)

Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan this week on NPR’s Fresh Air; “a farcical fictional meditation on female beauty structured as a mashup of an old episode of Friends, a fairy tale and a murder mystery.” The author recently appeared on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show.

Movie tie-in

Insurgent Movie Tie-in Edition, Veronica Roth, (HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen), also in paperback

The movie of the second installment in the series starring Shailene Woodley and Theo James opens March 20. A new trailer appeared online this week.

Combat photojournalist Lynsey Addario, who has been kidnapped twice, won a McArthur “Genius” award, and was a member of a team that won a Pulitzer, has published a memoir,  It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War (Penguin, Feb. 10; OverDrive Sample). Heavily covered in the media, it is racing up the Amazon sales rankings. It has received attention from a wide range of publications, including NPR’s Fresh Air, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, Time, and the New York Times Magazine. (with the arresting headline, “What Can a Pregnant Photojournalist Cover? Everything.”)

While described as both affecting and riveting, Addario’s take on photography, war, and being a woman in a high-octane profession has had mixed reviews. Kirkus gives it a star, saying the memoir is “a remarkable achievement … a brutally real and unrelentingly raw memoir that is as inspiring as it is horrific.” Entertainment Weekly, however, gives it a “B”, marking it down for failing to fully flesh out the people in Addario’s life.

As more attention mounts, Addario’s amazing and timely story, illustrated with 90 of her photographs, is likely to have staying power – making it a title to watch.

If you’re going to use a pseudonym, why reveal it on the book’s cover? In an interview in today’s NYT, Richard Price explains why the cover of his new book The Whites (Macmillan/Holt; Macmillan Audio), coming on Tuesday, carries the awkward attribution, “Richard Price Writing as Harry Brandt.”

He set out to write in a different style, a “stripped-down, heavily plotted best seller.” The only problem was that he couldn’t pull it off and ended up writing a Richard Price novel. Bowing to his publisher and editor who convinced him that if he didn’t make the pseudonym transparent, he would commit “commercial suicide,” he wound up with the two names on the cover. He says it “seemed like a good idea in the beginning, and now I wish I hadn’t done it,”

In an advance review, also in today’s NYT,  Michiko Kakutani says it has all the hallmarks of a Richard Price novel, “an ear for street language … kinetic energy … hard-boiled verve … [characters] who become as vivid to us as real-life relatives or friends.”

The title refers to the white whale that haunts Ahab in Moby Dick. Similarly, the cops and former cops in Price’s novel are all haunted by previous cases. Kakutani praises it  as ” a gripping police procedural and an affecting study in character and fate.

Prepub trade reviews are also strong. In a starred review, Booklist calls it ” a strong contender for best crime novel of 2015.”

It’s become commonplace for us to write that Jon Stewart has featured on The Daily Show the author of some heavy-duty book on an important topic, which then flies up best seller lists. Sadly, Stewart announced last night that he is leaving the show possibly in September when his contract is up, but it “might be July, or December,” because “this show doesn’t deserve an even slightly restless host.”

Before Stewart, who would have imagined serious conversations with authors presented in the context of a comedy show? Not only did he introduce that concept and make it work, he continued it in another show he produced, The Colbert Report. Thanks, Jon Stewart, for giving books the attention they deserve. You never seem restless when you are engaging authors, whether you agree with their points of view or not.

True to form, Stewart featured a 2-part interview with President Obama’s campaign manager and “political philosopher,” David Axelrod on the same show. As a result, the book, which had already received a boost from a feature on CBS Sunday Morning, rose from #139 to #28 on Amazon sales rankings.

Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (Penguin; OverDrive Sample) details Axelrod’s relationship with Obama as well as his Senate and Presidential campaigns, but he also shares stories of other politicians and his belief in the kind of politics that serves the nation best. In an interview with the New York Magazine he says “I didn’t want to write a book that would be measured by the number of revelations in Politico … I wanted to write a narrative, a story about my life, through my eyes, through the evolution of politics in our country.”

It’s somewhat of an irony then that Politico leaked a story from the embargoed book that “Mitt Romney ‘12 concession call ‘irritated’ Barack Obama” which brought a swift response from the Romney camp that the call never happened. And now news sources are jumping on evidence in the book that Obama was lying when he initially said he opposed gay marriage.

For the most part, however, as David Gergen puts it in his New York Time’s review, “David Axelrod has written a highly readable, uplifting account of the candidate he loves — and, reassuringly, has shown politics can still be a calling, not a business.”

TV and movie rights to librarian and bookseller favorite, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, (RH/Knopf, Sept., 2014; RH Audio; Thorndike) have been acquired by Scott Steindorff (producer of Jon Favreau’s Chef).

A number of directors are circling the project according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The novel was a LibraryReads Top Ten Favorite for the year, a National Book Awards finalist and on multiple best books lists.

The author of a string of best sellers Into the Wild, (1996), Into Thin Air (1997), Under the Banner of Heaven (2003), and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2007) is publishing a new book in April that examines campus rape. Titled Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, (RH/Doubleday; RH Audio; RH Large Print), it is about a series of attacks at the University of Montana, which, according to the publishers press release, Krakauer decided to write “after learning that a young woman with whom he and his wife have a close relationship suffered intensely in secret for many years after she was raped by a man she trusted.” The story is  being picked up by news sources, including USA Today.

News about the book first emerged last fall, when the AP reported that a judge ordered the university to turn over records on a 2012 rape case to Karkauer.

Cynthia Bond’s debut novel Ruby (Hogarth, 2014; RH Audio OverDrive Sample; to be released in trade paperback today, 978-0804188241) is the newest title in Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club 2.0 (read Oprah’s announcement here).

Winfrey says she loved the opening pages so much she saved the book until she had time to focus on it alone, according to The Associated Press, holding the book until “I was in bed with the flu to start reading it.” She also bought the film and television rights to the novel and will feature an interview with Bond in the March issue of O magazine, due out next week. The Book Club 2.0 site includes  a preview of that interview and a reading group.

Bond was widely compared to Toni Morrison at the time of the novel’s publication, it racked up a number of starred reviews, and received fairly wide attention for a literary debut.

According to the AP story, 250,000 paperback copies will be published by Hogarth. At this point distributor listings are blind, under ISBN 978-0804188241.

Shortly after appearing at Midwinter, Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train (Penguin/Riverhead; OverDrive Sample), appeared on today’s CBS This Morning.

She says she is already at work on the next book and admits that she has drunk canned gin and tonics.

Selma director Ava DuVernay has signed to direct an original TV series for Oprah’s network OWN, based on the novel Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile (Penguin/Pamela Dorman; Thorndike; 2014), which was featured in our Penguin First Flights Debut author program.

Oprah herself will have a recurring role in the series. Production  is expected to begin later this year.

About a woman who leaves her L.A. life to move, with her teenage daughter, to Southern Louisiana, where she has in inherited a sugar cane plantation, it was selected as a book of the week by Oprah’s O magazine, saying, “In Queen Sugar, two bulwarks of American literature—Southern fiction and the transformational journey—are given a fresh take by talented first-time novelist Natalie Baszile.”

In the press release announcing the production, Oprah states, “I loved this book and immediately saw it as a series for OWN. The story’s themes of reinventing your life, parenting alone, family connections and conflicts, and building new relationships are what I believe will connect our viewers to this show.”

The 2015 Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album, presented last night, went to Joan Rivers, for Diary of a Mad Diva (Penguin Audio; BOT Sample).

Her daughter, Melissa Rivers accepts the award, below.

The nominees were:

Actors Anonymous. James Franco, (Brilliance Audio)

A Call To Action, Jimmy Carter,  (S & S Audio)

Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America, John Waters, ( Macmillan Audio)

A Fighting Chance, Elizabeth Warren, (Macmillan Audio)

We Will Survive: True Stories Of Encouragement, Inspiration, And The Power Of Song, Gloria Gaynor, (Brilliance Audio)

Days after the announcement that Go Set A Watchman, (Harper; HarperLuxe, HarperAudio; July 14, 2015) Harper Lee’s first, unpublished book, had been discovered and will be published in July, media excitement subsided into dark questions.

Lee, now nearly blind and deaf, lives in an assisted living facility and does not speak directly to the press. All of her statements are issued by her lawyer, Tonya Carter, who is also the person who discovered the manuscript. Throughout her life, Lee was adamant that To Kill a Mockingbird would be her only book. Is it any wonder that questions are being raised?

The New York Times today outlines the arguments that Lee has been manipulated into agreeing to the book’s publication as well as those that she is “happy as hell” about the whole thing.

Over the weekend a purported cover appeared on Twitter, which Amazon is now shows as the cover [UPDATE: the cover has now been removed from the Amazon site. Whether it is the real cover or not, it looks similar to the U.K.’s 50th anniversary edition of Mockingbird, above. Amazon U.K. is still showing the Watchman cover above left]. As of this writing, no cover appears on HarperCollins’ site.

What does the title mean? According to a story on the Alabama Media Group web site, Lee, who grew up reading the bible and particularly loved the King James version, took it from Isaiah 21:6, “For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.” One of her life-long friends, Monroeville, Alabama resident, Wayne Flynt tells the publication, ”

‘Go Set a Watchman’ means, ‘Somebody needs to be the moral compass of this town.’ Isaiah was a prophet. God had set him as a watchman over Israel. It’s really God speaking to the Hebrews, saying what you need to do is set a watchman, to set you straight, to keep you on the right path … Nelle [Harper Lee] saw her father as being the watchman on the metaphorical gate of Monroeville [which became Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird] … To me it’s a beautiful title that was probably wildly out of fashion in 1960 … I find it a delicious irony that this [original] biblical title … is suddenly coming back as a second novel, because the first novel made her an international literary celebrity, and now it doesn’t make it any difference what she calls it.”

Eat your hearts out, Colonists — the three-part adaptation of  J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, (Hachette/Little, Brown), begins airing in the U.K. on Feb. 15.

Here in the U.S., we have to wait for its HBO debut on April 29th & 30th.

We are left to console ourselves with the crumbs from the recently released  trailer:

No tie-ins have been announced.

Oh, my Mr. Grey, I can’t LEGO of your playroom!

(Click here for a less interesting version).

At #2 on the 2/15/15 NYT Nonfiction Hardcover list is a book that many have had trouble getting their hands on, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, (South Dakota State Historical Society Press). The book, which had an initial print run of just 15.000 copies, was sold out before Christmas. A second printing of 15,000 was released the week represented by the list and it is now out of stock on Amazon and wholesaler sites (some indies, like Powell’s have copies available). As NPR reported last week, a third printing, of 45,000 copies is in the works. If you haven’t been tracking this title, check EarlyWord‘s earlier coverage from  August, December and January.

Other notable new additions to the list:

#6 The Reaper, Nicholas Irving with Gary Brozek, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s) — with a cover that bears striking similarities to American Sniper, (Harper) as well as a similar subtitle, (author Irving is just “One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers” as opposed to Sniper‘s Kyle, who gets a higher billing as, “the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History“). Unsurprisingly, given the success of Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation of Sniper, rights were acquired to adapt The Reaper as a 5-part TV series by the Weinstein Co. No news yet on which network will air the series, but production is expected to begin this summer. We’re not seeing significant holds in libraries at this point.

#8  Ghettoside, Jill Leovy, (RH/Spiegel & Grau; OverDrive Sample) — as we wrote earlier, the author has been in the media, with appearances on The Daily Show and NPR’s Weekend Edition, The book has been reviewed widely, including   a cover review in the NYT Book Review. Holds are heavy in several libraries.