Examinations of the lives of rock star entrepreneurs are in the news this week.

On the heels of  stories about a bio of Jeff Bezos, The New York Post runs an excerpt today of an embargoed  book about another legendary leader, The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life With Steve Jobs by Chrisann Brennan, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s; Tantor Audio), to be published on Oct. 29 (front covers on the left; back on the right).

The author first met Jobs in 1972. They split up after  Brennan became pregnant with Jobs’ daughter in 1977.

Media attention is focused on Brad Stone’s embargoed title, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Brad Stone, (Hachette/ Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; Hachette Large Print), which arrives today.

The business press, including The Wall Street Journal, is focused on what the book says about Bezos’s management style, while more general magazines are fascinated by the fact that Stone managed to track down Bezos’s biological father.

Stone, senior editor at Bloomsberg Businessweek appeared on NPR yesterday and on CBS This Morning. Opinions of Bezos are divided, and Stone is one of his fans. As a review in The Seattle Times notes, “There clearly are Amazon critics who would love the definitive chronicle of Bezos and the company he built to knock both down a few pegs. This isn’t that book,” and goes on to say, “It’s a deeply reported and deftly written book revealing how Amazon is a reflection of the drive of its founder.”

Reuters headline, portrays it differently, “Why It Pays to Be a Jerk Like Jeff Bezos.”

Below is the video from CBS This Morning:

That was quick. Soon after speculation that Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street, would not be edited in time for release in 2013, Showbiz 411 now reports “Sources say that Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker are trying desperately to deliver a manageable length version of The Wolf of Wall Street; for Christmas Day release.”

A feature published just a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal calls  it “the most audacious movie about Wall Street ever made,” with the release date still listed as the original, Nov. 15.

The movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Jonah Hill, Kyle Chandler, Jean Dujardin and the Absolutely Fabulous Joanna Lumley.

It is based on a book that the Wall Street Journal describes as “the real-life rogue trader Jordan Belfort’s memoir of his 1990s pump-and-dump flameout, during which he … inflicted over $200 million of losses on investors and sunk a 167-foot yacht—all on his way to a federal indictment for securities fraud and money laundering and 22 months in prison.”

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.

Among the big-name authors with titles arriving next week is legal thriller favorite, Scott Turow with Identical. Helen Fielding has already been receiving attention for her third Bridget Jones title, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which is the Today Show‘s next book club pick.

Titles highlighted here and many more arriving next week, are listed on our downloadable spreadsheet, with ordering information and alternate formats, New Title Radar, Week of Oct. 14.

Watch List

Guests on Earth, Lee Smith, (Algonquin)

The fascination with Zelda Fitzgerald continues. This summer two novels,  Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s) and Call Me Zelda by Erika Robuck (Penguin/NAL), brought renewed attention to her struggle with mental illness. In this novel, Lee Smith presents the story from the point of view of a young girl Zelda takes under her wing while in a mental ward. Librarians on GalleyChat predict this one will be a winner.

Media Magnets

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Brad Stone, (Hachette/ Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; Hachette Large Print)

A book about the most-talked about company in the country by a senior editor at Bloomsberg Businessweek; of course it will get attention. USA Today has already covered one of the revelations from the book; Bezos’ biological father only learned that Bezos is his son through Stone. In the understatement of the year, he says, “I wasn’t a good father or a good husband.”

Freakin’ Fabulous on a Budget  (S&S/Gallery Books)

The co-host of TLC’s What Not to Wear and ABC’s The Chew will be making the rounds of ABC shows next week, including Good Morning America, The View,  Rachael Ray Show, and, of course, The Chew.

Tie-Ins

The Book Thief,  Markus Zusak, (RH/Knopf Books for Young Readers; Listening Library)

Starring  Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson with Sophie Nélisse in the lead, this is now scheduled to open on Nov. 8th.

Official Movie Site: TheBookThief.com

The Counselor: A Screenplay, Cormac McCarthy, (RH/Vintage)

The Wall Street Journal features a story this week about McCarthy’s first foray into writing an original script, after seeing many of his books adapted (No Country for Old Men, The Road, All the Pretty Horses). The movie, directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Brad Pitt, opens Oct. 25.

Official Movie Site: TheCounselorMovie.com

The Mayor of MacDougal Street [2013 edition], Dave Van Ronk, Elijah Wald, Da Capo Press

The Coen brothers’ latest movie,  Inside Llewyn Davis, is inspired by this memoir by Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002), one of the founders of the 1960s folk music revival. Opening Dec. 20, it stars Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund and Justin Timberlake.

Official Movie Site: InsideLlewynDavis.com

The top 15 titles on Amazon’s Movers and Shakers list, which represents the books that have seen the largest jumps in sales in the last 24 hours are, of course, by the newly-announced Nobel prize winner in literature, Canadian short-story writer, Alice Munro.

Five of her many titles rose into the top 100 (all published by Knopf):

#8 Dear Life (the hardcover rose to #95), her most recent collection

#14 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

#18 Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

#22 Runaway

#31 Selected Stories

This is the first time since Doris Lessing won in 2007 that the prize winner is an author who writes in English. The New York Times reports, “The selection of Ms. Munro was greeted with an outpouring of enthusiasm in the English-speaking world, a temporary relief from recent years when the Swedish Academy chose winners who were obscure, difficult to comprehend or overtly political.”

Winners in the last six years were:

2012 — Mo Yan, China

2011 — Tomas Transtromer, Sweden

2010  — Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru

2009  — Herta Müller Germany (born Rumania)

2008 — Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Franch

Munro, who is 80, has said that she has retired from writing. Reminded of that in the Nobelprize.org telephone conversation recorded soon after she learned she had won (listen to it here) she opens the door a bit, saying “But this may change my mind.” She also says she hopes this award will bring new recognition to the short story, which is “often brushed off as something people do before they write their first novel.”

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, called a “high-profile” 3-D adaptation by The Hollywood Reporter, of a 2009 novel, will be released on Dec. 19. UPDATE: The U.S. release date is no longer firm and is now listed for some time in 2014

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larson (Penguin Press) was a high-profile debut when it was published, reportedly acquired for a $900,000 advance, excerpted in Vanity Fair, and reviewed widely.

Told from the point of view of T.S. Spivet, a 12-year-old rancher’s son, who travels to Washington D.C. on his own to receive an award for the maps he obsessively draws, it features hand-drawn marginalia that spill over the pages of Larsen’s book. Reviewing it, Ron Charles in the Washington Post noted T.S.’s “… guileless asides and antique-looking drawings fill the margins … mixing the graphic intensity of Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine with the ironic footnotes of Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace” and predicted that anyone who paged through the book would take it home. Like other reviewers, however, he felt it did not live up to its promising beginning.

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie), the movie stars newcomer  Kyle Catlett as T.S. and Helena Bonham Carter as his mother.

Reviewing the movie when it premiered at the San Sebastian Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter predicted, “Despite its flaws, international arthouse success seems assured for this amusing, poignant and visually stunning take on a child prodigy’s attempts to understand his weird family and the even weirder wider world.” Variety notes a promotional challenge, “As with Hugo, however, guessing the target audience will be tricky.”

A trade pbk. movie tie-in is currently listed for publication in May, but now that the release date, of Dec. 19 has been announced, we can expect to see it earlier.

As the trailer indicates, below, the movie T.S. is younger than the book’s character and has been changed from a cartographer to an inventor.

The new Today Show Book Club launched last month, sending the first pick, Samantha Shannon’s debut,  The Bone Season, (Macmillan/Bloomsbury), on to the NYT Hardcover list, where it stayed for three weeks. The second pick is Helen Fielding’s  Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (RH/Knopf; BOT; RH Audio), the third in her Bridget Jones Diary series, releasing next week.

Fielding was interviewed on the show by Jenna Bush Hager and will chat with fans on the Monday, Nov. 4 for a Today Book Club Google Hangout. The book is currently at #256 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Meanwhile, reviewers in the U.K., where the book is coming out this Thursday, are not treating it kindly, calling it a “toe-curling, clunking disappointment,” but that hasn’t put off readers. It is currently #3 on Amazon U.K.’s best seller list.

The tabloids are abuzz with a leaked story from an embargoed bio of Johnny Carson written by his longtime lawyer and close friend, Henry Bushkin. Titled simply Johnny Carson, (HMH; Brilliance Audio), the book will be published on Monday

Amazingly, it seems to still matter whether Carson’s second wife had an affair in the early 1970’s with  sportscaster Frank Gifford. His wife, Kathie Lee used some of her time on the Today Show yesterday to deny the story while also saying that when she asked her husband, now 86, he replied, “I don’t remember.” Joanna Carson, now 81, on the other hand, is certain it never happened.

The NYT‘s Pulitzer-Prize-winning critic, Michiko Kakutani, gives Donna Tartt’s new novel, The Goldfinch, (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; Blackstone Audio), a rare early rave, a full two weeks in advance of publication.

Calling it “deeply felt” (a phrase  she’s used for just 39 other books her more than 30 years of reviewing, according to Slate), she compares it favorably to Tartt’s 1992 debut, The Secret History; “her controlled, cerebral approach to characters in that novel has given way to a keen appreciation of the tangled complexities of the mind and heart.”

Originally set for Valentine’s Day, the film of James Dashner’s The Maze Runner has now been moved to the fall, Sept. 19, 2014. About the change, director Wes Ball tweeted, “These things aren’t my choice, but I 100% agree with Fox’s decision. Just imagine the cool stuff we can do with a little extra time.”

As a result, it will no longer be competing with Vampire Academy, still scheduled for Feb. 14.

In a less dramatic move, The Book Thief has been rescheduled from Nov. 15, this year, to a week earlier, Nov. 8.

The film version of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, (Penguin/Dutton), is now set for release on 6/6/14.

When the names of the stars were revealed earlier this summer, Shailene Woodley as Hazel and Ansel Elgort as Gus, the two teenagers who fall in love after meeting in a cancer support group, Green launched a spirited defense of the choices on his Tumblr page.

Green pointed out, “There seems to be some concern that Ansel and Shailene are playing siblings in a different movie [the upcoming Divergent, based on the book by Veronica Roth]. I guess I can understand that, but they’re actors … I mean, no one watched Silver Linings Playbook and thought, ‘When did Katniss move to the suburbs of Philadelphia?’”

In a new interview in The Pittsburgh Gazette, where filming is currently in progress, he notes that the screenplay is remarkably true to his novel, “almost every line of dialogue in the movie is from the book.”

Green has been updating fans from the movie set via Twitter and his Vlogbrothers videos on YouTube. The most recent video from the set is below:

A movie that has already been called 2013 Oscar bait, may need to look to next year’s nominations. Scheduled to release on Nov. 15. Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street, based on the true story of high jinks in the financial district by Jordan Belfort, is rumored to have been sent back to editing to cut down the nearly three-hour version. The studio has not confirmed the widely reported rumor, but some sites are showing that the release date has been moved to 2014.

The movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Jonah Hill, Kyle Chandler, Jean Dujardin and the Absolutely Fabulous Joanna Lumley.

Perhaps an indicator that the rumors are true is the change in publication date of the  tie-ins, trade paperback (RH/Bantam) and audio (RH Audio; read by Boardwalk Empire‘s Bobby Cannavale),  from Oct. to Dec.

The release of the trailer over the summer  put the the 2008 trade paperback edition on best seller lists during the summer.

It also brought renewed attention to Belfort’s  followup, Catching the Wolf of Wall Street: More Incredible True Stories of Fortunes, Schemes, Parties, and Prison, which is still available in trade paperback (RH/Bantam).

The NYT today calls Mary Oliver’s new book of poetry, coming out tomorrow, “a sweet golden retriever of a book that curls up with the reader.”

The 35 poems and one essay in Dog Songs (Penguin) are, of course, about the dogs that have been in her life.

Three major literary awards are being announced in the space of less than a week. To help keep track, see our schedule below.

This is  an opportunity to create displays of the contenders.

Thurs., Oct 10 — Nobel Prize in Literature

No shortlist — so contenders are anyone’s guess. The leading favorites in betting at Ladbrokes are:

Haruki Murakami (5/2)

Alice Munro, (4/1)

Joyce Carol Oates (8/1)

Further down the list is Bob Dylan (50/1) — we assume the prize would be for his lyrics. The Chicago Review Press has published  two volumes that examine every song Dylan wrote until 2006; Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973  and Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1974-2006, both by Clinton Heylin.

The Guardian’s pick is Javíer Marías (see our earlier story). His odds are only 33/1.

Tues., Oct 15 — Booker Winner 

Shortlist:

We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo, (Hachette/Little, Brown)  – Consumer review links

The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton, (Hachette/Little, Brown) — coming next week — no U.S. consumer reviews yet; UK reviews – Telegraph; The Observer

Harvest, Jim Crace, (RH/Doubleday/Nan A. Talese) — Consumer review links

The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri, (RH/Knopf) – Consumer review links

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozseki, (Penguin) — Consumer review links

The Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín, (S&S/Scribner)  – Consumer review links

Wed., Oct. 16 — National Book Awards Shortlists, to be announced on MSNBC’s Morning Joe

Downloadable llonglists:

Natl-Book-Awards-Fiction-Longlist

Nat’l Book Awards – Nonfiction Longlist

Natl Book Awards- Poetry Longlist

Nat’l Book Awards; Young People’s Longlist

This week, The Daily Show features authors on two of its four shows. In addition to Malala Yousafzai’s appearance tomorrow (see previous story on the contenders for the Nobel Prize), author Brian Jay Jones appears on Thursday for his book about the world’s best-known puppeteer,  Jim Henson: The Biography (RH/Ballantine).

The book was reviewed last month in The Washington Post, (great line, “If the life of the man who created the Muppets had been any cornier or more wholesome, he would have been sued by Norman Rockwell’s lawyers for plagiarism”) as well as The Hollywood Reporter.