Betting is running high on Bob Dylan to win the Nobel prize in Literature, reports the Guardian. Daily announcements of the various prizes begin this week. The winner of the prize for literature will be revealed this Thursday.

Don’t get too excited, however, Dylan has been in the lead before. As the Guardian puts it, “Ladbrokes [the London betting agency] have made a killing on Dylan betting in years past … And they’d be fools not to give punters the option of giving them money in this way.”

Considered a serious contender is Spanish novelist Javíer Marías. His latest title, The Infatuations, (Knopf; Spanish language edition, Los enamoramientos, Vintage Espanol) was published here in August.

The Millions noted earlier this year,

Each of [Marías’s] last few books with New Directions [see listings here], translated by Margaret Jull Costa, set a new high-water mark—most recently, the mammoth trilogy Your Face Tomorrow. Now he’s made the jump to Knopf [downloadable list here; Javier Marias — Knopf titles], which means you’re about to hear a lot about him. And deservedly so, it would seem: The Infatuations has already been called ‘great literature’ in Spain and ‘perhaps his best novel’ in the U.K.

As predicted, he book did receive attention here. It was reviewed in both the NYT Book Review and the Los Angeles Times.

In addition, another Nobel Prize, the Peace Prize, may go to an author. Malala Yousafzai, the now 16-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot by the Taliban last year for her campaign for women’s rights to education, is publishing her memoir this week, I Am Malala (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio).

Diane Sawyer landed aninterview with her, which is being featured all week on ABC, beginning with today’s Good Morning America, World News tonight and the full interview on 20/20 on Friday, the day the Peace Prize will be announced.  She also appears on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart tomorrow.

Many libraries have not ordered Dave Eggers’ new book, The Circle, which is being published next week. A late drop-in to the RH/Knopf catalog, it was also reviewed late by the pre-pub sources (Kirkus and Publishers Weekly have covered it).

An excerpt is the cover story of last week’s NYT Magazine, an event considered such a “departure” that it had to be explained in an accompanying story (not that the magazine completely avoids  fiction; short story author George Saunders was featured on the cover at the beginning of the year as was the King family of writers this summer).

The Circle is also available in audio from BOT (CD, 9780804191180: Audiobook Download, 9780804191197)

UPDATE:

The Circle is being reviewed so widely that Gawker published an article titled, “Circle Jerks: Why Do Editors Love Dave Eggers?”

Entertainment Weekly — gives it a B+

Los Angeles Times: “Trapped in the web with Dave Eggers’ The Circle: Dave Eggers’ dystopian novel The Circle follows a young woman as she gives her life over to an Internet company.” by Carolyn Kellogg

The New York Times — “Inside the World of Big Data: The Circle, Dave Eggers’s New Novel,” by Michiko Kakutani

Slate Magazine — “All That Happens Must Be Known: Dave Eggers has zero interest in the tech world. So why did he write a 500-page satire about it?”

Time Magazine — “Dave Eggers’ Scathing Attack on Social Media: The author’s new book zings our obsession with being constantly connected,” by Lev Grossman

The Wall Street Journal — Dave Eggers’s The Circle Takes Vengeance on Google, Facebook

The Washington Post — “Dave Eggers’s The Circle is a relentless broadside against social media overload” by Ron Charles

One day after Tom Clancy died, the trailer for the latest movie based on his character, Jack Ryan, was released.

The title has been changed, from Jack Ryan: Shadow One to Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also plays a Russian villain, it stars Chris Pine as the young CIA analyst Ryan, Keira Knightley as his wife and Kevin Costner as Ryan’s CIA handler. Unlike previous Jack Ryan movies, (The Hunt for Red October, The Sum of All Fears, Clear and Present Danger, and Patriot Games), this is an original story, not based on a specific Clancy novel.

Opening today, the Tom Hanks-produced movie Parkland reminds us that the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination is next month. Based on Vincent Bugliosi’s Four Days in November (Norton; tie-in released last week), it examines the chaos at the Dallas hospital when the dying president was brought to  the emergency room.

Several  books about Kennedy arrive next week, including a novel by former PBS New Hour anchor Jim Lehrer, Top Down, (Random House). The title refers to the fateful deceision to remove the bubble top from Kennedy’s car.

In Dallas 1963: Politics, Treason, and the Assassination of JFK, (Hachette/Twelve), two Texas journalists  look at the politics that made Dallas a city so hostile to JFK that many, including vice president Lyndon Johnson, a Texas native, warned him not to make the trip.  In Camelot’s Court (Harper),  Kennedy historian Robert Dallek examines the president’s relationships with his advisors.

For a gentler view, Caroline Kennedy has edited a book of her grandmother’s personal family photos, Rose Kennedy’s Family Album, (Hachette/Grand Central).

All the titles highlighted here, and more, are on our downloadable spreadsheet, with ordering information and alternate formats, New Title Radar, Week of Oct. 6

Known Quantities

Leading in library holds among next week’s titles are new book by Stuart Woods, John Sandford, and a Christmas themed book by Debbie Macomber, whose fan base has grown since Andie MacDowell brought new attention to the Cedar Cove books with the Hallmark TV series. Speaking of big names,  twenty writers, including Lee Child, C. J. Box, Charlaine Harris, John Connolly and Mary Higgins Clark collaborate on a “serial novel” titled Inherit the Dead, (S&S/Touchstone; S&S Audio).

In nonfiction, Daniel Goleman, author of the long-running best seller, Emotional Intelligence, turns to the subject of what make leaders in Focus, (Harper; HarperAudio)

Watch List

Longbourn, Jo Baker, (RH/Knopf; RH Audio)

A GalleyChat favorite that is now a LibraryReads pick for October, this is the downstairs to Pride and Prejudice‘s upstairs, focusing on the servants in the Bennet household. Word seems to be getting out; libraries are already showing holds.

Jo Baker spoke to librarians at the Random House Breakfast during BEA:

Media Magnets

Two remarkable young women who have triumphed over  adversity will be featured in the news this week. One is  the Pakistani girl who was shot in the head for her efforts to secure education for women, Malala Yousafzai. She writes about her beliefs in  I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio). Honored last week at Harvard, she is currently a favorite for the Nobel Peace Prize. Diane Sawyer landed the first U.S. television interview with Malala, to air beginning on Monday on all ABC News broadcasts culminating with a special edition of  20/20  on Friday, Oct. 11. On Tuesday, Oct. 13, she is scheduled to appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She is also featured on the cover of Parade magazine. [NOTE: we got ahead of ourselves and announced this on last week’s New Title Radar].

Also arriving is Elizabeth Smart’s memoir, My Story, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s; Macmillan Audio) who was kidnapped at age 14, survived nine months of rape and torture, managed to engineer an escape and now is an advocate for educating children on sex crimes. NBC News will air Elizabeth’s Story: A Meredith Vieira Special tonight.  Smart will appear again live on the Today Show on publication day, Tuesday, October 7. (See our downloadable spreadsheet for several other titles that are scheduled for media attention next week).

Movie Tie-ins

Romeo and Juliet gets a Hollywood makeover  that’s newsworthy enough to land it in the pages of the new issue of People (USA Today quipped about the premiere, “Some aspiring screenwriter named William Shakespeare worked with Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes to produce the screenplay.”)  The trade pbk. tie-in (RH/Ember) includes both Shakespeare’s and Fellowes’ versions. Worth seeing, if only for Paul Giamatti as Friar Laurence.

The Orphan Train, a novel by Christina Baker Kline (author of The Way We Should Be, among others) rises to #5 on the USA Today Best Seller list this week, its highest spot to date. A paperback original, it is based on historical events, the rounding up of orphans from New York streets, between 1854 and 1929, to ship them via train to the midwest, in hopes families there would adopt them.

Programs commemorating that history are being held this month on the both ends of the orphan train route; New York’s Grand Central Station, where a musical based on the story opens next week, and in Minnesota’s Union Depot. CBSNews.com posted a slideshow of photos from a nonfiction title, Extra! Extra! The Orphan Trains and Newsboys of New York, by Minnesota historian Renee Wendinger, whose mother was one of the Orphan Train children.

Christina Baker Kline’s novel, The Orphan Train  (Harper/Morrow; 4/2/13) was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday in April. Holds are heavy in most libraries.

Introducing his show last night, Jon Stewart made the sweeping statement that The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism by Naoki Higashida (Random House) is one of the “most incredible” books he has ever read. This resulted in one of the biggest “Stewart Bounces” in the history of the show, propelling the book to #1 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

The book was translated  from the original Japanese by David Mitchell and  his wife, KA Yoshida, who have an autistic son. Below, he explains to Stewart what the book taught them.

Best selling author Tom Clancy has died at 66, according to the New York Times. The cause of death is not reported [UPDATE: Clancy’s home town paper, The Baltimore Sun, reports that he died after “a brief illness at the Johns Hopkins Hospital”].

His next book, Command Authority, co-authored with Mark Greaney, (Penguin/Putnam), is scheduled for released on December 3.

A movie featuring Clancy’s character, Jack Ryan, titled Jack Ryan: Shadow One, is coming to theaters on December 25. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, it stars Chris Pine as Ryan, Keira Knightly as Ryan’s wife and Kevin Costner. It is not based on a specific book in the series.

Stephen King is not shy about criticizing others. Recently, he told the BBC how much he dislikes Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining (see video, below) and then went on to take stabs at Twilight (“tweenager porn”), Hunger Games (dull and derivative) and Fifty Shades of Grey (which he says he actually read) in the Guardian (we’re waiting for him to let loose on those frightening photos that accompany the story).

For a look at what critics think of King, the Boston Globe offers a chart of the “notable lows and highs in the gradual rise of Stephen King’s literary star.” When The Shining was published in 1977, The New York Times called him “a writer of fairly engaging and preposterous claptrap.”

If you’re searching for ideas for your library blogs, here’s one to steal from Oprah.com, a feature on seven “Audiobooks That Sound Better Than the Printed Versions.” Among the narrators spotlighted are Edoardo Ballerini (Beautiful Ruins, HarperAudio; listen to Ballerini here), Dean Robertson (The Poisonwood Bible, Brilliance; sample here), and, of course, Jim Dale (the Harry Potter series, Listening Library; samples here).

Not much needs to be said about narrator of Graham Greene’s The End of The Affair. The story simply states, “I’m only going to say this once: Colin Firth’s speaking softly, directly into your ear—and he’s talking about love.”

Unfortunately that one is not available to libraries; it’s only on Audible.com, but we couldn’t resist showing this behind-the-scenes video of Firth in the recording studio:
 

Many movie sites are trying to wrest insights from the following two and a half minutes of film footage.

Our favorite comment on the trailer comes from The Guardian: “What does the new trailer for the second Hobbit movie tell us? Mostly that Peter Jackson knows more about Middle Earth than JRR Tolkien did.”

Official Movie Site: TheHobbit.com

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug opens Dec. 13.

To tie in to the release, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is publishing a Visual Companion, a Movie Storybook, and an Official Movie Guide. HarperDesign is publishing a book by the Weta Workshop, the company that designed the movie’s special effects, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Chronicles: Art & Design

An excerpt of the third installment of Bridget Jones’s diary, the upcoming Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy by Helen Fielding (RH/Knopf, 10/15), in The Sunday Times of London is causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It reveals that Bridget, who became an international obsession in 1996 with the publication of Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the subsequent film, is now a 51-year-old widow.

Yes, dear readers, she married Mark Darcy, but it did not turn out as hoped.

The book rose to #79, from #225, on Amazon’s sales rankings as a result of the attention.

For those who prefer to remember happier times, below is the trailer for the movie adaptation of the first book in the series:

The movie Philomena, starring Judi Dench and based on The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, by U.K. journalist Martin Sixsmith (Macmillan U.K., 2009), received buzz at the Venice Film festival and is widely considered an Oscar contender. Originally set for a limited release on Christmas Day in the U.S., the date has been moved up to the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 22, expanding to more theaters the following week. The Hollywood Reporter states that the distributor, The Weinstein Company, sees it as “potent counterprogramming to more commercial fare” such as The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

The movie, directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen), stars Dench as Philomena Lee, an Irish woman who was forced as a teenager to give her child up for adoption and Steve Coogan as the reporter who helped her rediscover him in the U.S., fifty years later.

The book, which will be published for the first time in the U.S. as a trade paperback tie-in, titled Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search  (Penguin), with a foreword by Dench, was recently reviewed in the pre pub media. It got a strong thumbs up from Kirkus (“A searingly poignant account of forced adoption and its consequences”), and the cold shoulder from LJ (“Sixsmith’s narrative, while emotionally compelling, lacks context and verges at times on the sensationalistic, with invented dialog and narration”).

Below is the latest trailer:

To mark the 35th anniversary of the publication of Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (Perseus/Sierra Club Books, 1977), which examines how agribusiness has affected the U.S., the author appears on Moyers & Co. on PBS this Friday, October 4.

Below is a promo for the show:

Jeff Bridges’ 15-year long effort to adapt Lois Lowry’s seminal YA dystopian novel, The Giver (HMH, 1993; winner of the 1994 Newbery Medal) is finally coming to fruition. A release date of Aug. 15 next year has been announced, with production  set to begin this month in Cape Town, South Africa.

Australian actor Brenton Thwaites will star as Jonas, a young boy in a utopian society that has eliminated conflict via conversion to the “Sameness.” Jonas has been selected by the Giver to become the “Receiver of Memory” who knows the truths behind the facade. Jeff Bridges will star as The Giver (a role Bridges originally envisioned for his father, Lloyd Bridges). Meryl Streep will play the Chief Elder of the community; Katie Holmes, Jonas’s mother; Alexander Skarsgard, Jonas’s father; Cameron Monaghan, Jonas’s best friend Asher; and Odeye Rush, Jonas’s friend and love interest Fiona.

Bringing new attention to the production, it was recently announced that singer Taylor Swift is also joining the cast.

Holds are already heavy relative to light ordering by libraries for The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism by Naoki Higashida (Random House) and likely to rise after David Mitchell, who translated the book from the original Japanese with his wife, KA Yoshida, appears on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart tomorrow night.

Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas (2004) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), and his wife say this book helped them to better understand their own autistic child’s daily life. Stewart has a personal interest in the subject; he organizes an annual benefit for autism education, Night of Too Many Stars,

The NYT Book Review last month stated that, on its own, the book “makes for odd reading — a book about disordered sensorineural processing by a person with disordered sensorineural processing, written one letter at a time in adolescent Japanese prose and then translated into colloquial English.”