Do all those Fall book previews look the same to you?

You’re not alone, says Slate’s “Words Correspondent” Katy Waldman, “The mechanics of the books industry make it difficult to escape the sense of literary groupthink … the system’s imperfect, but I’m not sure what a good alternative would look like.”  Thus the lists end up repeating the names Jonathan Franzen,  Margaret Atwood, Patrick DeWitt, Mary Gaitskill, Gregory Maguire, Sloane Crosby [oops — we meant Crosley — thanks for the correction!], and Salman Rushdie.

To add to those, Waldman offers a list of seven mostly titles that “sound good” (that is the problem with these previews; they end up being based on how things sound or the reputations of the authors) but haven’t made it onto other lists.

Most of the titles will appeal to more literary tastes, but she does include one popular author, Judith Viorst’s Wait for Me: And Other Poems About the Irritations and Consolations of a Long Marriage, (S&S, Oct), a “lovely collage of cartoons and poems from the author of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day [that] follows Viorst through more than 50 years of matrimonial commitment to her husband.”

Fall movie and tv previews are arriving, along with the book previews (for books, see our coverage here and here).

This is the fall of the return of Star Wars, but a number of other tentpole movies as well as Oscar contenders are based on books, including Everest, Maze Runner: Scorch Trials, The Martian, Steve Jobs and, of course, Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2.

Below are links to some of the major movie previews.

Entertainment Weekly

Rolling Stone

Huffington Post

For a full list of upcoming adaptations, download our Books to Movies and TV spreadsheet. For tie-ins, link to our listing.

Analyzing what Michael D’Antonio’s new biography of Donald Trump, Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success (Macmillan/Thomas Dunne Books; Macmillan Audio; Sept. 22) indicates about his potential as a political candidate, The New York Times notes that it includes “candid and sometimes unflattering assessments of Mr. Trump by co-workers, friends, enemies and, most entertainingly, his former wives.”

D’Antonio also interviewed Trump, but says that those sessions ended abruptly after Trump discovered that the author had interviewed one of his enemies.

On the touchy subject of the military, the bio says that Trump, who never served, having received multiple deferments during the Vietnam War, claims he nevertheless “always felt that I was in the military” due to the character of the military-themed boarding school he attended as a teenager.

He tells Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist D’Antonio that the school provided “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”

With great glee the NYT also reports on the more grandiose of Trump’s past public statements, saying “Mr. Trump is a veritable factory of boorish put-downs, laugh-out-loud exaggerations and self-aggrandizing declarations. But Never Enough unearths decades-old gems that might otherwise be lost to history.”

The publisher’s promo includes a list of “Ten Facts” from the book, including that he once hoped to date Princess Diana and that Richard Nixon urged him to run for office.

Originally scheduled for release in January, publication was moved up due to “high demand and heightened interest” in Trump after he announced he was running for president. Library orders and holds are light, however.

UPDATE: Never Enough is also reviewed in the NYT Sunday Book Review by James B. Stewart, NYT columnist and author of Den of Thieves.

Hints that there might be more books by Harper Lee in the safe deposit box that contained Go Set a Watchman were laid to rest last week by a story in the Wall Street Journal,

Still, stories about other books continue to roil around.

Today, the AP revives questions about what happened to Harper Lee’s  true crime novel, raised earlier this year in the New Yorker.  Rumored to be in the vein of In Cold Blood, it is based on a twisted and deeply Southern Gothic case of a preacher suspected of a string of killings of family members.

The family of the lawyer involved in the case has evidence that Lee had started work on the book, “four typed pages [that begin] with an early morning phone call from the accused black preacher to his white lawyer … Hand-scrawled at the top is the title The Reverend. The text is dotted with handwritten b’s, filling in where a typewriter key apparently stuck … consistent with the typewriter Lee used at the time.”

One of the few people close to Lee also tells the AP that one of Lee’s sisters told him that the book was completed.

Yet, as is the case with most of Lee’s literary history, stories are contradictory. One of the people Lee interviewed for the novel tells the AP she had second thoughts, telling him after months of work that “she didn’t know if she was going to write the book or not.”

Typically, Lee’s lawyer, who controls all access to Lee and her papers, did not respond to the AP’s requests for clarity.

Tonight, Stephen Colbert takes over David Letterman’s chair as host of The Late Show and the media is engaged in a game of trying to predict how he will transition from his Comedy Central persona to a more traditional style. As the New York Times asks, “Will the new digs have room for ‘truthiness’ and ThreatDowns?”

Looking at the initial lineup of guests that includes Justice Stephen Breyer and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon Variety comments, “It’s a different sort of mainstream late-night program, the kind that convenes guests from broader walks of life, almost in recognition that the nation has grown very weary of seeing actors and actresses hype their latest project and go on their merry way.”

Those in the book business are hoping he will continue to give authors the famous “Colbert Bump.” Encouragingly, an author will be featured in the first week, although one who doesn’t need the bump. Stephen King is scheduled for Friday’s show. It’s a big week for him; the day before he receives the National Medal of Arts presented by Barack Obama.

King’s Finders Keepers came out in June. A new collection of short stores, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams will be published in November (S&S/Scribner; S&S Audio).

The finale of CBS’s adaptation of King’s book Under the Dome will be broadcast on Thursday.

King already has a rapport with the host, having appeared on the Colbert Report in 2009.

The real character of the new Late Night is likely to take a while to emerge. As CNN points out in their run down of various iconic late night shows, many of them took months or even years to hit their strides.

Offering a few comics and graphic novels for late summer reads, NPR.org’s reviewer Etelka Lehoczky suggests titles she says are “perfect to pore over in a patch of muggy sunlight.”

First up is Pénélope Bagieu’s English language debut, Exquisite Corpse (Macmillan/First Second). Bagieu is a French comic artist who turns her hand here to a short subversive story that has a “fiendishly unexpected denouement that combines feminist politics with a generous affection for [the] heroine.”

Bagieu’s artwork is particularly engrossing, full of wry observations and saturated colors, which Lehoczky characterizes as “eloquent” and “deceptively unsophisticated.”

Next is Little Nemo: Return to Slumberland (IDW) by Eric Shanower (writer) and Gabriel Rodriguez (artist), winner of this year’s Eisner Award for best limited series and an extension of the groundbreaking Winsor McKay original newspaper strips that began in the early 1900s.

Lehoczky does not admire it as fully. While she says “there’s much here to divert open-minded readers,” she is put off by the style “It’s utterly at odds with the original strip’s ambience, and it’s hardly narcoleptic. In fact, there’s something downright wakey-wakey about such assertive shades — they practically smack you in the eye.”

Last comes Five Ghosts vol. 3 by Frank J. Barbiere and Chris Mooneyham (Image Comics). It features “macho treasure hunter Fabian Gray [who] is possessed by five literary spirits whose abilities he can manifest: The Wizard, the Archer, the Detective, the Samurai and the Vampire.”

Calling it “adventure of the highest order” Lehoczky details Gray’s tribulations,  which begins with “our hero fighting zombies in Romania and winds up with him strapped to Dr. Moreau’s operating table.”

The Syfy channel announced a deal to adapt the series last fall.

Topping the WSJ ‘s list of  “15 Books to Read This Fall” is, unsurprisingly, The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz (RH/Knopf; RH Audio). Most of the rest of the titles are also no surprises, including Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (Macmillan/FSG; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample) and Patti Smith’s M Train (RH/Knopf; RH Audio).

Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child (Europa Editions; OverDrive Sample) also makes the cut. With her fourth novel in the Neapolitan series, the author has moved rapidly from Who IS Elena Ferrante? to usual suspect, appearing on all the fall previews, the cover of last week’a NYT Sunday Book Review. and reviewed this week in the L.A. Times, The New Yorker, and Entertainment Weekly, and by Michiko Kakutani in the NYT.  In libraries we checked, holds are heaviest for the first book in the series, My Brilliant Friend, which makes sense since many readers are still be new to the author.

Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, John Banville, John Irving, Geraldine Brooks, and Lauren Groff (whose Fates and Furies also just announced as the #1 pick for October’s Indie Next list) round out the expected selections.

The list also includes a few buzzy debuts such as Garth Risk Hallberg’s big-ticket 900-page City on Fire (RH/Knopf; Random House Audio) and Chinelo Okparanta’s novel Under the Udala Trees, About a young Nigerian girl discovering she is gay under a repressive society, it has also been included in previews by Bustle, BookRiot, The Millions, and BuzzFeed.

Reminding us that these previews lack the benefit of hindsight, an article accompanying the WSJ list declares Hanya Yanagihara’s  A Little Life (RH/Doubleday) “the sleeper hit of the summer.” (BuzzFeed, however, spotted it in January “27 Of The Most Exciting New Books Of 2015” as did the B&N Review, “Anticipations: Coming in Early 2015“).

The holds leader for next week is the next in Lee Child’s series.

Make Me, Lee Child, (RH/Delacorte Press; BOT)

On the eve of the release of the 20th book in the series, news broke that the second Jack Reacher movie starring Tom Cruise is moving ahead and is now scheduled to premiere in Oct. 2016.

Janet Maslin, who has reviewed many of Child’s books in the daily NYT, considers this one of his best. It is also a LibraryReads pick:

Jack Reacher is back. Jack gets off a train at an isolated town. Soon, he is learning much more about the town, and its residents are learning not to mess around with Jack Reacher. Readers new to this series will find this book a good starting point, and fans will be pleased to see Jack again. — Jenna Persick, Chester County Library, Exton, PA

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 Radar, Week of Sept. 7, 2015

Advance Attention

Bream Gives Me Hiccups, Jesse Eisenberg, (Grove Press)

This debut short story collection features a 9-year-old restaurant critic and is getting attention largely as a result of the author’s other career as an actor. A profile of the author/actor in the NYT Sunday Book Review reveals that he is reader.

This book may cross over to the small screen. In January, it was announced that Eisenberg had made a deal with Amazon Studios to adapt the stories into a half-hour comedy.

Eisenberg narrates the audio. Below, he reads one of the stories.

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie, (Random House)

From The Tonight Show to a profile in the New York Times, Rushdie is getting attention for his latest, reviewed in the L.A. Times.

 Peer Picks

The Art of Crash Landing, Melissa DeCarlo, (Harper Paperbacks)

This original trade paperback is the #1 LibraryReads pick for the month,

“At once tragic and hilarious, this book is a roller coaster of a read. You’ll find yourself rooting for the snarky and impulsive but ultimately lovable Mattie. At the heart of this tale is a beautifully unraveled mystery that has led Mattie to her current circumstances, ultimately bringing her to her first real home.” — Patricia Kline-Millard, Bedford Public Library, Bedford, NH

This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!, Jonathan Evison, (Workman/Algonquin)

Librarians have been fans of Evison ever since his first book and they made this his fourth a LibraryReads pick for the month:

“Harriet Chance receives word that her recently deceased husband, Bernard, has won an Alaskan cruise. Deciding to go on the trip, she is given a letter from her close friend Mildred, with instructions not to open it until she is on the cruise. The contents of this letter shatter Harriet and she begins to reevaluate her life and her relationships.” — Arleen Talley, Anne Arundel County Public Library Foundation, Annapolis, MD

It is also an Indie Next pick.

Black Man in a White Coat : A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine, Damon Tweedy, M.D, (Macmillan/Picador)

A BEA Editors’ Buzz title, this is on Entertainment Weekly “Must List” in the current issue, “This riveting memoir chronicles Tweedy’s rise from wide-eyed med student to practicing physician, as he’s forced to consider the ways race and health intersect in his patients’ lives — and his own.”

it is also an Indie Next pick:

“Black Man in a White Coat would be an important book no matter when it was published, but in this season of Ferguson and Charleston, when we must assert more loudly and clearly than ever that black lives matter, the book is essential reading. Dr. Tweedy reflects on the issues faced by black professionals as they confront racism in their careers and black patients as they face the inequities of our health care system. This book is introspective and inspiring in a way that a less personal narrative could not be. We owe the author our gratitude for shining a spotlight on these important issues.” —Carole Horne, Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, MA

The Hummingbird, Stephen P. Kiernan, (HarperCollins/Morrow)

Indie Next:

The Hummingbird is a powerful story about the critical role of human empathy in dealing with two important contemporary issues: hospice care and post-traumatic stress disorder. Kiernan’s characters are well-drawn and give unique perspectives on death, trauma, and providing care in difficult times. The Hummingbird is a must-read for all who want to help loved ones die with dignity as well as for those helping veterans achieve normalcy after serving our country. —Phyllis K. Spinale, Wellesley Books, Wellesley, MA – See more at:

Tie-ins

Getting a jump on the holiday weekend, the movie adaptation of A Walk in the Woods starring Robert Redford, Nick Nolte and Emma Thompson opened on Wednesday. New York magazine’s review will disappoint those hoping for a movie that was as funny as Bryson’s 1008 book.

As we head to the fall movie season, several tie-ins are scheduled for publication next week. Movie inks are to our coverage, with trailers.

The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins, John Pearson, (HarperCollins/William Collins); Movie opens 10/2/15

Room, Emma Donoghue (Hachette, trade pbk, mass mkt., audio);  Movie opens 10/16/15

Trumbo (Movie Tie-In Edition), Bruce Cook, (Hachette/Grand Central);  Movie opens 11/6/15

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin,  (S&S/Scribner); Movie opens 11/6/15

For a full list of upcoming adaptations, download our Books to Movies and TV and link to our listing of tie-ins.

NPR,org  is on something of a Fantasy spree, devoting stories to Terry Pratchett’s last novel and, in what seems like a direct response to both the Hugos and the We Need Diverse Books campaign, offering two reviews that highlight the diversity of the genre, its authors, and its characters.

One is Bradley P. Beaulieu’s newest novel, Twelve Kings in Sharakhai (Penguin/DAW; Brilliance Audio), a Silk Road Fantasy, set not in the fantasy genre’s  familiar quasi-medieval world of Western Europe but in locales inspired by and situated within Eastern cultures. For Beaulieu that means Islamic and Ancient Egyptian influences fill this first of a new series.

NPR.org’s reviewer Jason Heller sings the novel’s praises noting its “intricate, suspenseful” plot, the female “gladiator by trade” central character who is “fierce…dynamic, multilayered, utterly fascinating,” and a setting created out of a “fabulist mix of cultures.”

In recommending readers dive in he offers this ready-made RA annotation:

Fantasy and horror, catacombs and sarcophagi, resurrections and revelations: The book has them all, and Beaulieu wraps it up in a package that’s as graceful and contemplative as it is action-packed and pulse-pounding. As fantasy continues to diversify and open itself up to a more vibrant representation of cultures and possibilities, Twelve Kings in Sharakhai should rank among the most satisfying.

The second of NPR’s most recent picks is Zen Cho’s debut novel Sorcerer to the Crown (Penguin/Ace; OverDrive Sample).

Reviewer Amal El-Mohtar says it nods towards Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in its settings and blend of real world and magic, but that it “actively exploits gaps and shortcomings in” Clarke’s modern classic.

In a packed and multifaceted review, El-Mohtar neatly explains the many-threaded plot:

When Sir Stephen Wythe, England’s Sorcerer Royal, dies in mysterious circumstances, his adopted black son Zacharias takes up the Sorcerer’s staff amid malicious mutterings that he murdered his guardian for the position. The timing is terrible: Besides being in disgrace with Fairyland, England is enmeshed in non-magical war with France and in tense diplomatic talks with the Sultan of Janda Baik over the matter of witches and snake-women. Zacharias must contend with an overreaching government, assassination attempts, the decline of magic — and, most unexpectedly, with Prunella Gentleman, a dark-skinned young Englishwoman of uncertain parentage who wishes to escape her magical school and enter society.

And then heaps praise on Cho for her approach and execution:

Cho foregrounds characters that are usually treated as curiosities and set pieces in Regency fiction giving them complex inner lives and thoroughly enriching her world-building as a result… Cho’s achieved something remarkable in making corrupt bureaucracy more terrifying than dragons; ambitious baronets more dangerous than vampires. I was genuinely chilled by the depiction of powerful men’s whims where magic and the Sorcerer Royal’s position were concerned: Dragons can be fought and beaten, but white supremacy and institutional oppression are as atmospheric as the magic in Cho’s world.

Lest she leave readers thinking that Cho’s novel is a slog, El-Mohtar is also quick to point out

Absolutely everything about this book is delightful. I can’t remember the last time I read a fantasy novel that made me laugh so much — and as often as I laughed, I gasped, I shouted rude words at offending characters, and just generally fell over myself with admiration for Cho’s dextrous depiction of Regency manners and wit.

There is plenty of Lee Child in this week’s New York Times 

For the cover of the Sunday Book Review, he offers his opinion of The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz (RH/Knopf; RH Audio) and today, in the daily NYT, reviewer Janet Maslin offers her take on Child’s newest Reacher novel Make Me (RH/Delacorte Press; BOT).

First, Child on Lagercrantz.

While he admires some of what Lagercrantz has done with the story itself, which he deems “a fine plot,” in the end he decides the task of bringing back Lisbeth Salander was impossible:

And what of Lisbeth Salander? Given that Lagercrantz knows she’s what ­readers want, her long and suspenseful introduction is masterful. It’s a striptease. She’s mentioned in the prologue (“One Year Earlier”), and then she’s not in the story at all, and then she is, maybe, purely by inference, and then we get a brief glimpse of her, and then another, and then some longer scenes. But it’s not until Page 216 that she actually speaks to Blomkvist. “Lisbeth,” he asks, answering her phone call, “is that you?”  “Shut up and listen,” she replies, and he does. And we’re off to the races. Or are we? Does she spark to life and get up off the slab?

No decides Child, she does not, “The sublime madness of Larsson’s original isn’t quite there.”

It is another story for Maslin’s reaction to Make Me.

She likes it, a lot, calling it “a hot one” and going on to say “Lee Child’s Reacher series has hit Book No. 20 with a resounding peal of wisecracking glee… Everything about it, starting with Reacher’s nose for bad news, is as strong as ever.”

Without spoilers, she hints to readers that the book marks a turning point in the series while giving a sense of its gritty core:

… this book’s spectrum of good and evil is so wide, and its depths of horror so extreme, that it seems impossible for even Jack Reacher to come away from it unchanged. Usually he walks away from one novel and into the next without even getting his hair mussed. Maybe not this time…[the book] takes Reacher from the kind of cracking wise his fans love and the violence that he understands into the eerie realities of 2015, not the ones Reacher learned in the last century as part of his military training.

News also just arrived that the second Jack Reacher movie will arrive next fall, again starring Tom Cruise.

Noted science writer and WIRED reporter Steve Silberman appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday, sending his new book NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (Penguin/Avery; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) rocketing up Amazon’s sales rankings.

A history of autism, its evolution, and the way the scientific world has approached its diagnosis, NeuroTribes is changing the conversation
on the subject.

Jennifer Senior, who says the book is “beautifully told, humanizing, important” in her piece on it in the NYT Sunday Book Review, highlights just one of the ways Silberman shines new light on the very definition of autism:

The autism pandemic, in other words, is an optical illusion, one brought about by an original sin of diagnostic parsimony. The implications here are staggering: Had the definition included Asperger’s original, expansive vision, it’s quite possible we wouldn’t have been hunting for environmental causes or pointing our fingers at anxious parents…This is, without a doubt, a provocative argument that Silberman is making, one sure to draw plenty of pushback and anger. But he traces his history with scrupulous precision, and along the way he treats us to charming, pointillist portraits of historical figures who are presumed to have had Asperger’s, including Henry Cavendish and Nikola Tesla.

Likely to become a classic in the field, it is already listed along with works by Andrew Solomon and Temple Grandin and comes with a forward by Oliver Sacks.

Holds are exceeding a 3:1 ratio across the country in libraries we checked.

For its Labor Day weekend issue, arriving when subscribers are likely to have more time to read it than usual, Sunday’s NYT Magazine profiles an author few readers know, Joy Williams. Her new book, arriving next week, The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories (RH/ Knopf), writes Dan Kois, culture editor at Slate, “cements her reputation as not merely one of the great writers of her generation, but as our pre-eminent bard of humanity’s insignificance.”

A reminder, the magazine has done this before, featuring another author greatly admired but largely unknown short story writer, George Saunders, making his book The Tenth of December a long-running best seller.

Kois lavishes Williams with praise, saying, “To call her 50-year career that of a writer’s writer does not go far enough. Her three story collections and four darkly funny novels are mostly overlooked by readers but so beloved by generations of fiction masters that she might be the writer’s writer’s writer.”

The list of authors lining up to sing her praises is a modern who’s who of greats. Don DeLillo, George Saunders, and Karen Russell are quoted, with Russell saying Williams is “a visionary” and “resizes people against a cosmic backdrop.’’

In a few share-worthy lines Kois offers a quick introduction:

Her stories often reveal themselves as parables, and her writing on the environment is equal parts fire, brimstone and eulogy…The typical Williams protagonist is a wayward girl or young woman whose bad decisions, or bad attitude, or both, make her difficult to admire: She drives away while her husband is paying for gas, or ransacks a houseguest’s room to read her journal.

Orders are very light (or nonexistent) in libraries we checked.

Amy Stewart’s Girl Waits with Gun (HMH; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample) is gathering velocity.

Stewart spoke with Steve Innskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday. The charming interview sent her debut novel (after successful nonfiction titles) racing up Amazon’s sales rankings.

Separately, Girl Waits with Gun was also reviewed on NPR by author Genevieve Valentine. “Charming” is a word that comes up frequently there as well, with Valentine saying “It might seem odd to be reading about an old-fashioned farmstead shootout and thinking about how charming it is, but if you’re reading Girl Waits With Gun, you might as well get used to it. You’ll be thinking that a lot.”

As we reported in the look ahead to books coming out this week, Stewart’s novel has four prepub stars and is both an Indie Next and a LibraryReads pick.

Holds are topping a 3:1 ratio at some libraries and are strong everywhere we checked. Don’t be surprised if it shows up on best seller lists next week.

Despite hints by Harper Lee’s attorney, Tonja Carter, there is no new book in Lee’s safe-deposit box.

As we reported earlier, Carter had suggested there could be more than one new title on the way.

As the Wall Street Journal now reports, those hints turned up empty. A rare-book expert, James S. Jaffe, brought in to review the box, has issued a report stating that it only contains pieces of Lee’s two published novels and copyright documents.

According to Jaffe, the pages show the transformation of Lee’s original draft into the published form of To Kill a Mockingbird and where segments of Go Set a Watchman appeared in Mockingbird.

Jaffe’s full report is posted at the end of the WSJ article.

Of course, for all those invested in even more books by Lee, there could always be other papers in other places and there is still the rumor of the true crime novel floating around.