Cormac McCarthy’s next book is a screenplay. After several of his novels were adapted into successful movies (No Country for Old Men, The Road, All the Pretty Horses), the 79 year-old wrote his first spec script, The Counselor, which was snapped up in January, 2012 by the producers of The Road. The story is about a lawyer who thinks he can dabble in the drug business but ends up having to try to extricate himself from a desperate situation.

Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, and Penelope Cruz, the movie is scheduled for release on October 25.

The screen play will be published  as a book The Counselor (Movie Tie-in Edition): A Screenplay, (RH/Vintage, 10/8/13). It was excerpted in The New Yorker‘s “Summer Fiction” issue earlier this month. Remarkably, the excerpt is all description, without a single line of dialog, as if if were a script for a silent movie.

The teaser trailer was released this week (note that McCarthy gets second billing after the director).

The beloved 1990 children’s book Esio Trot by Roald Dahl (Penguin) is about a shy old man who hatches a complicated plot to win over the heart of the woman he loves by helping her tiny pet tortoise grow into a larger, more dignified animal. His scheme  involves  an incantation that begins with the backwards spelling of tortoise, Esio Trot.

Production is set to begin for an adaptation of the book, reports the movie news site, Showbiz411, starring Dustin Hoffman and Dame Judi Dench, lead by Irish director Dearbhla Walsh.

A picture book that celebrates the joys of math, released  today, is rising on Amazon after Cory Doctorow gave it a rave on Boing Boing. Praising The Boy Who Loved Math by Deborah Heiligman, with illustrations by LeUyen Pham (Roaring Brook) about the eccentric Hungarian math genius, Doctorow says it uses “numbers and mathematics through the text, with lively, fun illustrations of a young Erdős learning about negative numbers, becoming obsessed with prime numbers and leading his high-school chums on a mathematical tour of Budapest.” The ultimate accolade? His five-year-old daughter, “demanded that I read it to her three times in a row,” (spreads are available on the Boing Boing site)

Who would guess that a movie called The Family starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer about a Brooklyn Mob family in the witness protection program, is based on a French novel, a black comedy called Malavita (or “underworld,” the name of the family dog)?

The trailer for this cultural mashup was recently released. The movie is scheduled for September 20.

The book by Tonino Benacquista, a 2004 French best seller, makes its first appearance in the U.S. today as an original trade paperback (Penguin).

In a piece of scary timing, Brett Martin’s Difficult Men (Penguin Press), which features the now-famous story of James Gandolfini disappearing from the set of The Sopranos (excerpted in GQ magazine this month, where the author is a correspondent, under the headline, “The Night Tony Soprano Disappeared,” it is the source of many  news stories) is scheduled for release next week.

The book, which was covered back in April in the New York Times Media section by  David Carr, is reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in today’s issue. It covers what  Martin claims is “the signature American art form of the first decade of the 21st century,” cable TV series such as Mad Men, Deadwood, and Breaking Bad, all of which characters who are all “difficult men.”

More is coming, including a segment on the upcoming NPR Weekend Edition and a review in the 7/14 issue of the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

It appears that the rumors of Tim Burton directing Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children were true; Fox recently announced a release date, with Burton’s name attached to direct.

It will be a while, however, it’s scheduled for July 31, 2015.

The sequel to the novel will arrive sooner. Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine’s Children (Quirk Books; AudioGo) is scheduled for release in January next year.

Burton is now at work on a biopic about painter Margaret Keane, whose kitschy portraits of kids with enormous eyes were popular in the ’60’s. It’s being called, of course, Big Eyes.

The first trailer for the biopic JOBS, starring Ashton Kutcher was just released. Originally scheduled for April, it is now opening on Aug. 16. In addition to Kutcher as Steve Jobs, it stars Dermot Mulroney (as Mike Markkula, who supplied key funding for Apple’s startup), Josh Gad (Steve Wozniak), and Matthew Modine (John Scully).

Even though it’s likely to bring renewed attention to Walter Isaacson’s best selling bio, Steve Jobs (S&S), it is not based on it or any other book. At one time there were two Jobs biopics in development. Sony was working on an adaptation of the book, with Aaron Sorkin writing the script. No news has emerged about that project since Sorkin mentioned it briefly in January. Last week, he told Vanity Fair that he is at work on a Broadway play but made no mention of the film.

Isaacson’s book will be released in paperback on Sept. 9, nearly two years after the hardcover. It featured an image of the older Jobs, the paperback uses a photo of him as a young man, looking so much like Kutcher that some might confuse it for a tie-in.

Which is better, the book or the movie? That question takes on new intensity with the opening today of World War Z, starring Brad Pitt and based on the long-running best seller by Max Brooks. The author himself has said that the only thing the movie shares with book is the title, since it completely abandons the beloved faux-oral history style of the novel.

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Disappointed fans can console themselves with a new audio version, released as a movie tie-in, but much more true to the book. Five hours longer than the original 2006 edition, it is titled World War Z: The Complete Edition and features dozens of new narrators, including director Martin Scorsese, Spiderman star Alfred Molina, The Walking Dead creator Frank Darabont, rapper Common, Firefly star Nathan Fillion, and  Shaun of the Dead’s Simon Pegg, with Brooks serving as The Interviewer as he did in the first audio edition (more details are on the author’s web site).

This just in from Wendy Bartlett, Collection Development Manager, Cuyahoga P.L. from her weekly “Hot Title” alert:

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, Anton DiSclafani. (Penguin/Riverhead)

Not only is this the most fun title to say this summer, it’s also the most fun author’s name. DiSclafani? Sounds like the newest “Defense Against the Dark Arts“  teacher, doesn’t it? And her first name  is actually pronounced “Antin” (yes, she is a she). [Ed. Note: for more background on the author and her name, see our Penguin First Flights online chat].

The book is  getting a lot of buzz as a good summer read [Ed Note: see the great review from one of our favorite sources, Ron Charles in the Washington Post, this week, Even the NYT‘s Michiko Kakutani is a fan] and deservedly so; you can hand sell this one to customers with confidence as the perfect vacation read. It’s doing so well for us in Cuyahoga — we bought a several for each branch and they’re flying — that we’re ordering more to make it available for browsing and hand selling.

The story is set in the Depression. Thea, who is fifteen, is banished from her wealthy parents home to an exclusive riding school in the mountains of North Carolina. You can’t stop reading until you figure out why she was sent away. The dissonance of the idea of spending the Depression among wealthy young ladies gives this novel a fresh angle. I’m loving it  and I think you and your customers will too.

Let us know what is hot in your library in the comments section below.

A photo-story about the wives of the first U.S. astronauts is the perfect nostalgia piece for People magazine and it’s featured in this week issue (adding even more nostalgia, the piece is written by the magazine’s legendary founding editor, Dick Stolley, who was at Life magazine when the wives were featured on the cover. That image is used on the book jacket).

The story is based on The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story by Lily Koppel (Hachette/Grand Central; Hachette Audio and Large Print), which author Curtis Sittenfeld, writing in the Washington Post, calls a “breezy and entertaining book, which — like the women themselves — takes pleasure in both playing up and defying the stereotypes of the time. ” Librarians on EarlyWord‘s GalleyChat called it a great selection for book clubs.

Most libraries are showing heavy holds on light ordering.

The wives, and the book,  were also featured on CBS Sunday Morning last week:

Author of the Mitch Rapp counterterrorism thrillers, Vince Flynn, died yesterday of prostate cancer. He was 47.

Flynn’s best selling books were particularly popular with conservatives (George Bush was a fan and Rush Limbaugh a close friend). In an interview with USA Today in 2012, Flynn said that was probably because of the ” the pro-military, CIA and law enforcement theme of the books … And the idea that the United States is not the problem.””

Flynn’s next novel, The Survivor was originally scheduled to be released in October. USA Today reports that the  publisher, S&S/Atria, does not yet have information on how much of the book was completed.

His most recent book, The Last Man, was published last November.

Calling her a “surprise choice,” Deadline announces that Sam Taylor-Johnson has signed on to direct a film based on the mega bestseller, Fifty Shades of Grey, saying, “In addition to [her directorial debut, a movie about the early life of John Lennon] Nowhere Boy, which garnered her a pair of BAFTA nominations … she had only directed the short film Love You More which was in Cannes in 2008.” The article  notes that she is also developing a film based on Robert Goolrick’s A Reliable Wife.

No cast has been announced.

Friday’s issue of Entertainment Weekly offers a “first look” at the movie Divergent,  based on Veronica Roth’s dystopian YA best-seller, the first in a series.

The cover asks the question that’s preoccupying Hollywood, “Is This the Next Hunger Games?” (we’ll have to wait for the issue to see if they offer an answer). There will be a longer wait for the ultimate answer; the movie won’t be released until March 21, 2014.

What is not in question is that the female lead, Shailene Woodley, is a rising star, so hot that she has been cast to star in the adaptation of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars.

Before the public sees her in either, they will see her in another YA adaptation, The Spectacular Now, opening August 2.

A favorite at the Sundance Film Festival, it is based on the 2008 National Book Award finalist by Tim Tharp, (RH/Knopf Books for Young Readers; Brilliance Audio).

The film also stars Miles Teller (who won kudos for his role in the remake of Footloose) and Jennifer Jason Leigh and is directed by James Ponsoldt.

The paperback tie-in releases on July 9 (Random House/Ember).

Library holds are growing on The Shining Girls, (Hachette/Mulholland) by Lauren Beukes after it was reviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered by Alan Cheuse on Friday,  applauding it for its “heroine, the smart and spunky Kirby Mizrachi, [who] is as exciting to follow as any in recent genre fiction” and the “sharply described murder scenes — some of which read as much like starkly rendered battlefield deaths out of Homer as forensic reconstructions of terrible crimes.”

The novel is also moving up Amazon’s sales rankings, although it hasn’t cracked the Top 100 (it’s currently at #222).

The NYT‘s critic Janet Maslin declared it earlier to be ”a strong contender for the role of this summer’s universal beach read.”  Movie rights have been acquired by Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way.

Librarians responding to our Beach Read Challenge, were only partially won over. Joseph Jones of Cuyahoga P.L. says,

Short chapters and a fast pace makes this a definite beach read. The subject matter may turn off some readers who are not into serial killers, violence against women or just the casualness of the violence. Normally time travel is not an issue for me in books, but the way the author switches back and forth in time EVERY chapter does get a bit annoying. Having the date listed at the beginning of each chapter seemed to mock me more than help me figure out where the story was in the timeline. Also, when the author would try to throw in some cultural history for the different time periods I thought it had a tendency to drag the story down without really adding anything. The saving grace of the book though is Kirby. Broken, flawed and a survivor in every sense of the word, she burns with an intensity that for me defines “shining girl.”

Work on the pilot for a possible HBO TV series based on Tom Perrotta’s best selling 2011 novel The Leftovers, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s) is ramping up. Deadline reports that Liv Tyler is joining the cast to play Meg, whose relationship with Laurie Garvey, not yet cast, is pivotal to the book. Justin Theroux was cast earlier to play Laurie’s husband and town mayor, Kevin.