The 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination is bringing dozens of books, as we have been noting. In the upcoming Oct. 27th  New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jill Abramson, the newspaper’s Executive Editor, assesses the many books that have been published over the years, saying,

The true mystery in Kennedy’s case is why, 50 years after his death, highly accomplished writers seem unable to fix him on the page … Other presidents, good and bad, have been served well by biographers and historians … Kennedy, the odd man out, still seeks his true biographer.

Abramson celebrates one of the earliest, now back in print:

… the Kennedy family, which controlled publication rights to [William Manchester’s] The Death of a President, allowed it to go out of print, and for a number of years copies could be found only online or at rummage sales. The good news, maybe the best, of the 50th anniversary is that Little, Brown has now reissued paperback and e-book editions. [Note: HarperPerennial brought an edition back into print in 2009, the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s election].

She also provides a sidebar sampler of her favorites, few of them newer titles (in the longer piece, she is unimpressed with the recent crop of books and is particularly scornful of Bill O’Reilly, who she says “has milked the Kennedy assassination with unique efficiency”). She calls An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, by Robert Dallek. (Hachette/Little, Brown, 2003; Hachette Audio), “one of the best of the full biographies.”

In a separate piece, Jacob Heilbrunn is kinder to several of the newer titles (he doesn’t mention any of O’Reilly’s).

Just as the tie-in is published to the big upcoming George Clooney movie,  The Monuments Men, it’s announced that the film release date has been pushed from Dec. 18 to an unspecified time in the first quarter of 2014.

The L.A. Times reports that director Clooney says he needs more time to get the special effects correct.

Will that hurt the sales of the tie-ins — The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, Robert M. Edsel, (Hachette/Back Bay trade pbk; Mass Mkt: Macmillan Audio)?

Unlikely; we’ve seen several tie-ins become hits even when the films were put off, the most notable being Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which landed on best seller lists only to see the movie put off for months, finally releasing a year later.

It seems famous faces on covers are all consumers need. In this case, there are several; Clooney, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray and Jean Dujardin.

Official Web Site: MonumentsMen.com

The release of the second volume of a book that was an unexpected best seller in 2010, the autobiography of Mark Twain, was celebrated on the PBS Newshour.

Based on the first title in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels, the STARZ series began production in Scotland earlier this month, and now has an official web site, Starz.com/Originals/Outlander.

During last week’s Comic Con in NYC, Gabaldon and Executive Producer Ronald D. Moore held a special event for fans (summary here:  “Who’s Been Cast in Starz’s ‘Outlander‘? Plus 11 More Things We Know About the Upcoming Series“). Moore emphasized how faithful the adaptation will be to the book  (“I live with a fan, my wife, and it’s my job not to screw up her favorite book!”)

Below is the video, preceded by some scenes from the shoot. Concept art for the sets is shown beginning at time stamp 9:15:

The forthcoming 8th title in the series, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, (RH/Delacorte) has been moved from its original December publication date to March 25, 2014, when it will tie in to the publicity for the STARZ series.

It looks like Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street, will hit theaters in time for Oscar nominations. According the L.A. Times, it will be pared down from its 3-hour first cut in time to hit theaters on Christmas Day.

Based on the memoir by Wall Street trader Jordan Belfort, the Wall Street Journal calls it “the most audacious movie about Wall Street ever made.”  It stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Jonah Hill, Kyle Chandler, Jean Dujardin and the Absolutely Fabulous Joanna Lumley.

Tie-ins, in trade paperback (RH/Bantam) and audio (RH Audio; read by Boardwalk Empire‘s Bobby Cannavale), are listed for release on  Dec 17.

As a result, says the L.A, Times, the movie based on Tom Clancy’s character, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, now also scheduled for Christmas Day, will likely be moved to late January, 2014.

Read at midnight last night by Veronica Roth:

Appearing in select theaters on Friday, 12 Years A Slave arrived with Oscar buzz. Now it looks like it will also be a box office hit. Opening in just 19 theaters, The Hollywood Reporter says it achieved “one of the top averages ever for a movie opening in that number of theaters.”

The word “harrowing” appears in nearly every review. As harrowing as the movie is, the Daily Beast notes that the memoir it is based on is “even more appalling.”

First published in 1853, it sold well for its time, but was eclipsed by a more famous work, the fictional Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Baton Rouge Advocate recently recounted the story of how Northup’s book was rediscovered. In the 1930’s a 12-year-old girl, Sue Eakin, came across a copy, fell in love with it, making it her life’s work to bring it back into print. Working with a New Orleans history professor, the two verified that the book is a firsthand account of slavery and got it republished in 1968 through LSU Press.

Assigned in college courses, it is now available in many editions, both print and audio. Click through for information on recent releases.

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The top three most anticipated books for next week, based on library holds are John Grisham’s  Sycamore Row, (RH/Doubleday; RH Audio; BOT; RH Large Print), Wally Lamb’s We are Water (Harper; HarperAudio; HarperLuxe) and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; Hachette Large Print).

All titles highlighted here and more are listed, with full ordering information and alternate formats, on our downloadable, New Title Radar, Week of Oct. 21.

Grisham will have his usual publication-day sit-down with Matt Lauer on the Today Show on Tuesday. The new novel brings back Jake Brigance from the author’s very first novel, A Time To Kill. In addition to the Today Show, Grisham is also scheduled to appear on publication day on PBS’s Charlie Rose show, NPR’s Morning Edition and NPR’s Diane Rehm show.

Wally Lamb’s We are Water is both an IndieNext and a LibraryReads pick:

Annie Oh, a newly famous artist, sends her family into a tailspin when she announces her intention to marry her powerful gallerist, Viveca. While Annie’s husband Orion is devastated by the loss of his wife of 27 years, her children’s responses range from delight to denial. Good writing and distinct characters, personalities and voices.” — Katie Karkheck, Valley Cottage Library, Valley Cottage, NY

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, only her third in 20 years, is being reviewed widely. The NYT‘s Michiko Kakatani gave it a rare rave a full two weeks before publication as did Stephen King in his cover review of the NYT Book Review. The kudos continue to roll in, with “Dickensian” the favored description. It gets four stars and is designated a “Pick” by Peoplr. Entertainment Weekly is a holdout, giving it just a B-, marking it down for being, ” long on well-drawn incident but short on engaging plot.”

Media Magnets

Barring  major breaking news that plays havoc with schedules, the media will be filled with books next week (see spreadsheet for full list). Dick Cheney gets double attention, as the subject of one book Days of Fire,(RH/Doubleday; RH Audio; BOT)  and the author of another, Heart, (S&S/Scribner; S&S Audio;Thorndike) which book reveals that he nearly died in 2010, giving pundits the opportunity to wonder what might have happened if he had. Speaking of alternate histories, Jeff Greenfield speculates on how history would have been different If Kennedy Lived (Penguin/Putnam). Warren Buffet’s son, Howard, will be getting attention for his book on solving world hunger, 40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World. Rounding it all out, incongruously, a poet will appear on The Colbert Report; Billy Collins, for his new collection, Aimless Love, (Random House; RH Audio; BOT).

Tie-ins

The big movies based on books arriving next week are 12 Years A Slave, based on the 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup and Carrie., based, of course, on the Stephen King horror novel (links to the trailers on the right).

Several tie-ins to upcoming movies are being released next week:

The Monuments Men, Robert M. Edsel, (trade pbk; Back Bay Books; premium mass mkt ed., Little, Brown; audio, Macmillan Audio)

Widely expected to be an Oscar shoe-in, this movie, opening Dec. 18, features a marquee full of major stars;  George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett. In addition to The Monuments Men, Edsel published another book in May on the rescue of art works in WW II, Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis, (Norton). Several other books and a documentary have also been released about the story (see our earlier post). Trailer here.

How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff, (RH/ Ember)

Based on a Meg Rosoff’s debut novel, a Printz Award winner published in 2004, before the term “YA dystopian novel” was common, this film is directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King Of Scotland) and stars Soairse Ronan as Daisy, an American teenager who is sent to stay with relatives in the English countryside just before World War III breaks out. The movie opens in selected theaters on Nov. 8. Trailer here.

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, (Penguin Books)

At 46, Helena Bonham Carter is one of the youngest actresses to play the part of Miss Havisham (she is edged out slightly by Gillian Anderson, who was 43 when she starred in the BBC TV miniseries). The film’s director, says, however, “if you read the book she’s actually in her 40′s.” The movie opens on 11/9. Trailer here.

Coming Valentine’s Day (of course), is the second adaptation of Scott Spencer’s Endless Love. The trailer debuted on MTV News earlier today.

Based on the 1979 best seller (HarperCollins), the 1981 film version was directed by Franco Zeffrelli, starred Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt and was considered a bit of a mess. Roger Ebert noted, “The novel Endless Love is about a teenage boy who remembers, with full ferocity and grief and yearning, the great love of his life, after it has been ended by fate and the adult world. The movie Endless Love is about a teenage boy and girl who are in love, until fate and adults end their relationship. There is all the difference in the world between these two story sequences, and although there are a great many things wrong with the movie, this blunder on the narrative level is the worst.”

From the trailer, it appears the new version may have the same issue (Hollywood.com accuses it of looking like a Nicholas Sparks movie).

The new version stars Alex Pettyfer, who has appeared in two movies based on teen novels, I Am Number Four and Beastly, and Gabriella Wilde who has a supporting role in Carrie, which opens this weekend.

Official Web Site: EndlessLoveMovie.com

Trailer below:

Tie-in:

Endless Love: A Novel
Scott Spencer
Paperback: 9780061926006, 0061926000

It is also available in e-book from Open Road Media, as is the rest of Spencer’s backlist, through library e-book vendors. Click here to see Open Road’s interview with Spencer, which is available for use on library web site.

Local press in Cape Anne, MA. reports that film crews are currently shooting the HBO miniseries based on Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in the form of linked short stories, Olive Kitteridge (Random House).

Why Massachusetts, rather than the author’s beloved Maine? It seems it’s become a popular choice for filmmakers because of favorable tax incentives.

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right), the four-part series stars Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins.

McDormand, having fallen in love with the book before it won the Pulitzer, bought the rights and has been nursing the project along. She is co-producing it with Tom Hanks’ Playtone Partners.

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, today, David Steinberger, CEO of Perseus Books and Chairman of the National Book Foundation, announced the finalists for the National Book Awards (winners to be announced on Nov. 20; the presentation of the awards will be hosted by the Morning Joe co-hosts, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough).

Download our spreadsheet, with ordering information and alternate formats, here: Nat’l Book Awards Finalists, 2013

Fiction

Kushner, Rachel, The Flamethrowers, (S&S/Scribner)
Lahiri, Jhumpa, The Lowland, (RH/Knopf)
McBride, James, The Good Lord Bird, (Penguin/Riverhead)
Pynchon, Thomas, Bleeding Edge, (Penguin Press)
Saunders, George, Tenth of December, (Random House)

Nonfiction

Lepore, Jill, Book of Ages, (RH/Knopf)
Lower, Wendy, Hitler’s Furies, (HMH)
Packer, George, The Unwinding, (Macmillan/FSG)
Taylor, Alan, The Internal Enemy, (W. W. Norton)
Wright, Lawrence. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief by (RH/Knopf)

Poetry

Bidart, Frank, Metaphysical Dog, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Brock-Broido, Lucie,  Stay, Illusion, (Knopf)
Matejka, Adrian, The Big Smoke, (Penguin)
Rasmussen, Matt, Black Aperture, (Louisiana State)
Szybist, Mary, Incarnadine, (Graywolf Press)

Young People’s Literature

Appelt, Kathi, The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp, Ages 8 to 12, (Atheneum)
Kadohata, Cynthia, The Thing About Luck, Ages 10 to 14, (Atheneum)
McNeal, Tom, Far Far Away , Ages 12 And Up, (Knopf)
Rosoff, Meg, Picture Me Gone, Ages 12 And Up, (Penguin/ Putnam)
Yang, Gene Luen, Boxers & Saints, Ages 12 to 17, (Macmillan/ First Second)

The first consumer review of the Man Booker Prize winner, The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, published here yesterday (Hachette/Little, Brown), coincidentally the day the award was announced, is by novelist Chris Bohjalian in The Washington Post. UPDATE: We’re wrong — it’s a close tie for which publication had the first U.S. consumer review. The Barnes and Noble Review released one on Oct. 15. It is also an excellent guide to appreciating the novel.

Not only is Catton the youngest person to ever win the Booker, but at over 800 pages, her book is the longest in the award’s history. Bojalian notes that he had to create his own “Cliff Notes” to keep the characters straight and that the book is “astoundingly complicated and almost defies explanation. Moreover, I can’t recall the last time I read a novel that left me so baffled. In the end, however, I was awed…”

He goes on to offer readers a handle on this Byzantine story about a group of characters in an 1860’s  New Zealand gold-rush town; “the key to following the story is to try to follow the money.”

The book, which had a modest announced first print run of 15,000 copies, jumped to #10 on Amazon sales rankings on the news of the award. If it follows in the footsteps of previous award winners, it will continue on to other best seller lists and enjoy healthy sales here.

Many libraries are showing heavy holds on light ordering. It was only reviewed prepub after the longlist was announced by Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. Both publications starred it. It also appeared in the Millions preview of the  “Most Anticipated” books of the fall.

The author’s debut, The Rehearsal (Hachette/Back Bay) received praise from author Adam Ross (“a wildly brilliant and precocious first novel”) in the NYT Sunday Book Review when it was published in 2010. It is still in print in trade paperback.

The movie adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s mega-best seller, Gone Girl (RH/Crown, 2013) has just been announced for release on October 3rd next year. Directed by David Fincher, it stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike. Filming is currently under way in  Missouri.

Several other domestic thrillers based on books are in the works. It was recently announced that Nicole Kidman has bought the rights to The Silent Wife, by A. S. A. Harrison (Penguin original trade pbk, 6/25/13), a book that has often been compared to Gone Girl. She has just completed filming Before I Go To Sleep, (Harper, 2011) a novel by S.J. Watson about a woman who wakes each morning with no memory and a husband she doesn’t quite trust.

In addition, CBS Films recently optioned the movie rights to The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty (Penguin/Putnam/Einhorn, 7/30/13), another novel about a husband who isn’t what he seems.

The winner of this year’s Man Booker Award, just announced in London, is the youngest in the history of the award; Eleanor Catton, 28 wins for The Luminaries, (Hachette/Little, Brown). In a great stroke of timing, the book is being released in the U.S. today.

UK reviews – Telegraph; The Observer.

Hollow City, (Quirk Books), the sequel to Ransom Riggs’ unlikely best seller, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, based on eerie found photographs, arrives in January. The cover has just been revealed.

There’s not much news on it yet, beyond the publishers description:

“This second novel begins in 1940, immediately after the first book ended. Having escaped Miss Peregrine’s island by the skin of their teeth, Jacob and his new friends must journey to London, the peculiar capital of the world. Along the way, they encounter new allies, a menagerie of peculiar animals, and other unexpected surprises.

Complete with dozens of newly discovered (and thoroughly mesmerizing) vintage photographs, this new adventure will delight readers of all ages.”

Love the line about London being “the peculiar capital of the world.”