The New York Times‘s review of the book du jour appears in the paper tomorrow, the day that Vintage releases trade paperback editions of Fifty Shades of Grey (the two other titles in the trilogy are scheduled for release on 4/17).

Unfortunately, we don’t get to hear Michiko Kakutani’s take on it. Instead, Alessandra Stanley, the newspaper’s television critic reviews it (no surprise, then, that many of the comparisons are to TV’s handling of sex). Stanley manages to come up with a new line about a book that has been talked to death; saying that it  “…is to publishing what Spanx was to the undergarment business: an antiquated product re-imagined as innovation.”

For their edition of the book, Vintage is sticking to what has now become an iconic cover:

Fifty Shades of Grey: Book One of the Fifty Shades Trilogy E L James Retail Price: $15.95 Paperback: 528 pages Publisher: Knopf/Vintage – (2012-04-03) ISBN / EAN: 0345803485 / 9780345803481

The Time magazine Web site offers a long excerpt (the first three chapters) of Under Wildwood (HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray) coming September 25, the follow-up to Wildwood which was on the NYT children’s best seller list for two weeks last fall. It was also on the IndieBound top five for 18 weeks, three of them at #2.

Time also interviews the author, who is the singer/songwriter  for Portland folk band, The Decemberists, and the illustrator, Carson Ellis.

William Joyce won an Oscar this year for his animated short, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. Next up is a Dreamworks holiday feature, Rise of the Guardians, opening November 21. The trailer has just been released:

Official Movie Site: RiseOfTheGuardians.com

The project also involves an extensive book publishing program, including picture books and chapter books about the characters.

The second title in the chapter book series was published last month:

E. Aster Bunnymund and the Warrior Eggs at the Earth’s Core! (Guardians of Childhood Chapter Books) William Joyce Retail Price: $14.99 Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers – (2012-02-21) ISBN / EAN: 1442430508 / 9781442430501

Featured n the movie’s Facebook page is this image of Santa’s tattooed forearms.

On NPR’s Morning Edition today, Anne Tyler gives her first interview in years — “I figure [doing one] every 35 years will do it…”

Listen here.

Her next book comes out on Tuesday.

The Beginner’s Goodbye Anne Tyler Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2012-04-03) ISBN / EAN: 0739378546/9780739378540,

RH Large Print; RH Audio

MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow has been appearing on other shows to promote her first book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (Crown; BOT Audio; ebook and audio on OverDrive). On The Daily Show last night, she told Jon Stewart that, as much as she hates to write, she needed the long form of a book to lay out her argument that we have become a nation that wages perpetual war.

Janet Maslin reviews the result in the New York Times; Drift by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC Traces American Militarism.

Drift is currently at #8 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Just look at this cover; is it any wonder the book is rising on Amazon sales rankings (currently at #16)?

Soldier Dogs Maria Goodavage Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 293 pages Publisher: Penguin/Dutton – (2012-03-15) ISBN / EAN: 0525952780 / 9780525952787

Blackstone Audio

People magazine gives it 3.5 of 4 stars in the 4/9 issue;

Journalist Goodavage gives in-the-trenches access to the training for both pups and handlers, exploring the dogs’ highly developed sense of smell, the tender devotion between handlers and their charges and the desperate need for dogs of war to be able to retire to loving homes when their work for our country is done.

It also got a little help from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

Jonah Lehrer’s third book, Imagine: How Creativity Works debuts at #1 on both the Indie and the NYT nonfiction best seller lists.

His previous book, How We Decide (HMH, 2009), was on both the NYT hardcover and paperback extended lists.

Media attention, including two interviews on NPR helped raise the book’s profile;

NPR’s All Things Considered, 3/19, Interview

NPR’s Fresh Air, 3/21, Interview

Review in the Washington Post, 3/23

Library holds are very heavy where ordering is light (one large system shows 215 holds on 9 copies).

Imagine: How Creativity Works Jonah Lehrer Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – (2012-03-19) ISBN / EAN: 0547386079 / 9780547386072

Brilliance Audio

Cheryl Strayed’s grief /hiking memoir, Wild, may not have needed the media attention it’s begun receiving this week. The book debuts at # 7 on the 4/8 NYT Nonfiction best seller. Libraries across the country are showing heavy holds on moderate ordering (one large library has 173 holds on 10 copies).

NYT review, Dwight Garner, 3/27; The Tracks of an Author’s, and a Reader’s, Tears

Wall Street Journal review, Michael J. Ybarra, 3/26;  A Long Walk Unspoiled

People magazine, 3/25 lead review; 4 of a possible 4 stars; “with grace, wild humor and transcendent insights..Strayed’s language is so vivid, sharp and compelling that you feel the heat of the desert, the frigid ice of the High Sierra and the breathtaking power of one remarkable woman finding her way — and herself — one brave step at a time.”

Reese Witherspoon is probably happy about the news; she recently bought the film rights.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail Cheryl Strayed Retail Price: $12.99 Hardcover: 338 pages Publisher: RH/Knopf – (2012-03-20) ISBN: 9780307592736

   

The word-of-mouth hit Fifty Shades of Gray is featured on the cover of the new issue of Entertainment Weekly (subscribers will get the version on the right; the newsstand version features The Hunger Games).

What more could signal that “mommy porn” is now mainstream? Perhaps the $5 million Universal is rumored to have paid for the film rights (bringing speculation on whether the studio will risk an NC-17 rating) and the fact that all three books in the trilogy are in the top ten on USA Today’s bestseller list for the second week in a row.

Guess which books are in the top four spots (hint: they have to do with Entertainment Weekly‘s other cover).

Sadly, Barney Rosset did not live to see this.

NPR’s Back Seat Book Club’s March pick, The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart and Carson Ellis (Hachette/LBYR) was featured on Monday’s  All Things Considered. The book, the first in a series, is described as “filled with twists and turns and constant conundrums. It’s not just mysterious. It’s also fantastic and heart thumping and just plain fun.”

The Club’s April title is appropriate for spring, Seedfolks, by Paul Fleischman

Seedfolks Paul Fleischman Retail Price: $14.99 Paperback: 70 pages Publisher: HarperTeen – (1997-04-11) ISBN / EAN: 0060274719/9780060274719;

When we saw this book, we could hardly contain ourselves:

What better combo than librarians + knitting + cats?

Fortunately, our friends at Workman/Black Dog & Leventhal agreed and prevailed upon author Sally Muir to offer an opportunity for a librarian to win a knitted version of his or her very own cat.

To enter, email the publisher with a photo of your beautiful feline (be sure to note if the cat works in a library). The cut-off date is Thursday, 4/12/12 at midnight, ET.

Five runners-up will win a copy of the book.

When James Cameron’s The Titanic came out in 1997, publishers experienced a sudden windfall as the sales of over 30 backlist and new titles from a range of different publishers jumped onto best seller lists (resulting in the joke that it “floated all boats”).

Publishers are hoping that magic hits again, when the movie is rereleased in 3-D on April 4th, days before the 100th anniversary of the disaster. This time around, audiences will be offered another reenactment of the events in Julian Fellowes’ (Downton Abbey) two-part, four-hour series, Titanic, running April 14 and 15 on ABC. Fellowes has been on the offensive about the big-screen version, calling it inaccurate.

One of the books that experienced renewed sales the first time around was Walter Lord’s 1955 classic A Night to Remember (reissued in a 50th anniversary edition in 1996, with an intro. by Nathaniel Philbrick). It’s included in USA Today‘s extensive roundup of 25 available titles, as is the update of the movie tie-in (new forward by Cameron):

James Cameron’s Titanic James Cameron Retail Price: $24.99 Paperback: 208 pages Publisher: Harper Design – (2012-03-06) ISBN / EAN: 0062119389 / 9780062119384

Just one adult fiction title is featured in that list, The Dressmaker by Kate Alcott. The author was profiled in the NYT prior to the book’s release in February. The approaching anniversary is bringing renewed attention; the book was reviewed by Carolyn See in The Washington Post on Friday and was recently featured as an adult book for teens in SLJ. The public is picking up on the connection; several libraries are showing heavy holds, as high as 8:1.

The Dressmaker: A Novel Kate Alcott Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 322 pages Publisher: RH/Doubleday – (2012-02-21) ISBN : 978-0385535588

As of today, Harry Potter ebooks are available for consumer purchase exclusively via the Pottermore.com shop.

As of tomorrow at 9 a.m., ET, the entire series will be available for checkout from OverDrive, according to an email sent by the company earlier today. Pre-orders, which had been temporarily halted, have now been restored (and the 10% discount extended through 4/30). The company also says that all holds place on earlier ordering will be honored.  The HP books are available in EPUB, Kindle and MP3 audio formats.

Washington Post book critic Ron Charles finds the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka, “a disappointing choice from a list of finalists that gave strong preference to short fiction… [with the one exception of] Russell Banks’s grim Lost Memory of Skin.” He blames the oversight on the makeup of the jury, “As writers and teachers of writing, the judges have a professional interest in the craft of storytelling, which attracts them, I suspect, to perfectly cut miniatures as opposed to the rock and flow of a great novel.”

He wishes the jury had been more sympathetic to “long, fully developed stories we can sink into for days,” and lists the following as the year’s prime examples (none of which were on the PEN/Faulkner short list):

Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, (Harper)

Mary Doria Russell’s Doc (Random House) 

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River,  (Norton)

David Vann’s “devastating” Caribou Island, (Harper)

Alex Shakar’s “demanding” Luminarium, (Soho Press)

The Buddha in the Attic Julie Otsuka Retail Price: $22.00 Hardcover: 144 pages Publisher: RH/Knopf – (2011-08-23) ISBN: 9780307700001

RH Audio/BOT; Thorndike; Overdrive, audiobook and ebook

Previous honors:

National Book Awards Finalist
Library Journal Top Ten of 2011
New York Times Book Review Notables, 2011
Women’s National Book Assn. Great Group Reads

Now that it’s a bona fide hit, speculation is rife on what will be the “next Hunger Games.”

The Playlist examines fifteen properties that could fill the bill, with pros and cons for each. Three are scheduled for release next spring:

Beautiful Creatures (based on the first in a series by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, published by Hachette/LBYR, 2009) — Feb. 1

The Seventh Son (based on the middle-grade title, Revenge of the Witch, the first in The Last Apprentice series, Joseph Delaney, published by HarperCollins/Greenwillow, 2005. In the UK, the book is titled The Spook’s Apprentice and the series is called The Wardstone Chronicles) — Feb 15

Ender’s Game (based on the sci fi novel by Orson Scott Card, Macmillan/Tor, 1991) — March 15