Eyes Wide Open, an erotic romance by Raine Miller, debuts on the USA Today Best Seller list at #6, on the 6/2 NYT E-Book Only list at #2 and at #3 on the NYT Combined Print & E-Book list.

It’s the third in a series, which was originally self-published, with rights later acquired by S&S’s Atria imprint. Currently only available in e-book, the paperback edition will be released in August.

Several libraries own print copies of the first two titles in the series, but in Spanish, published by Santillana.

The NYT Magazine profiles author Jeannette Walls this week. Her 2005 memoir, The Glass Castle, an “instant classic … has sold 4.2 million copies and been translated into 31 languages.” Her second, a novel based on the story of her grandmother’s hard-scrabble life in the West, Half Broke Horses, was also a best-seller, even if it did not achieve quite the level of an instant classic.

Her third book, a novel, The Silver Star,(S&S/Scribner; S&S Audio; Thorndike Large Print) deals with a theme familiar from her previous books, children growing up with parents who are, at best, neglectful. It’s a subject she knows well, having overcome a childhood that the NYT says would “have flattened others.”  As she says in the interview, “One of the blessings of my childhood was being a fighter and a scrapper.” Appropriately, the title of the profile is “How Jeannette Walls Spins Good Stories Out of Bad Memories.”

The Silver Star is an IndieNext Pick for June. The author is scheduled to appear on CBS This Morning on June 11, the book’s release date.

“Positioned to be the big literary read of the summer,” according to Wall Street Journal, Philipp Meyer’s second novel, The Son, (Harper/Ecco; HarperAudio; HarperLuxe), which arrives next week, is currently at #41 and rising on Amazon’s sales rankings.

The author’s first book, American Rust, received an enviable level of attention when it was published in 2009. It was on Newsweek’s list of “Best. Books. Ever,” named one of five best novels of the year by the Washington Post, and a New York Times Notable Book. In addition, the New Yorker hailed the author as one of the 20 best writers under 40. If that wasn’t enough, Patricia Cornwell gave it the ultimate product placement; it appears at the crime scene in her novel, Scarpetta.

In the Washington Post. Ron Charles says those accolades were not premature.

What a pleasure it is now to see Meyer confirm all that initial enthusiasm with a second book that’s even more ambitious, even more deeply rooted in our troublesome economic and cultural history. With its vast scope — stretching from pre-Civil War cowboys to post-9/11 immigrants — The Son makes a viable claim to be a Great American Novel of the sort John Dos Passos and Frank Norris once produced.

Booksellers have made it the #1 IndieNext Pick for June.

Claire Danes, who began her career with the realistic portrayal of a teenager in the TV series, My So-Called Life, will soon appear on the big screen as the mother of a teenage girl, in As Cool As I Am, based on a coming-of-age novel by Pete Fromm. Published in 2004, Kirkus said it explores “the sexual evolution of a cynical teenage girl who has the spunk and wit to survive two flaky parents and the urges of unbridled adolescence. ”

The trailer was just released (via Deadline). The movie begins a limited run on June 7.

Tie-in:
As Cool As I Am, Pete Fromm
On Sale Date: June 4, 2013
9781250045577, 1250045576
Paperback / softback / Trade paperback (US)
$16.00 US / $18.50 Can

The onslaught of coverage of Dan Browns Inferno, (RH/Doubleday; RH Audio; BOT Audio; RH/Vintage espanol; RH large print), releasing tomorrow, continues today with the first review, by Janet Maslin’s in the New York Times. An unabashed Dan Brown/Robert Langdon fan, she is equally enthusiastic about this new outing.

Reviewing The Da Vinci Code in 2003, she said that in this “gleefully erudite suspense novel, Mr. Brown takes the format he has been developing through three earlier novels and fine-tunes it to blockbuster perfection” and prophetically, that, his is “a name you will want to remember,”

Admitting that the “early sections of Inferno come so close to self-parody that Mr. Brown seems to have lost his bearings — as has Langdon, who begins the book in a hospital bed with a case of amnesia that dulls his showy wits,” she goes on to say, “Inferno is jampacked with tricks. And that shaky opening turns out to be one of them.”

The author is scheduled to appear this week on NBC’s Today Show, Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, PBS’s Charlie Rose and NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Library holds, while heavy, are not nearly as high as they were on Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl at its peak, averaging 2:1 on fairly aggressive ordering.

The Agatha Awards were announced on Saturday, just two days after the Edgars. Among the many well-known authors and publishers picking up awards, including Louise Penny who won Best Novel for The Beautiful Mystery (Macmillan/Minotaur), was small independent Dallas publisher Henery Press, winning Best First Novel with Lowcountry Boil by Susan M. Boyer. The Childrens/Young Adult award went to the second in the Code Busters Club series, The Haunted Lighthouse by Penney Warner (Egmont).

All the winners and nominees are listed after the jump. Download our spreadsheet with ordering information and other available formats, Agatha 2012, Winners and Nominees.

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The first trailer for the adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s Sci Fi novel, Ender’s Game, debuted online today. The movie debuts on Nov. 1 and stars:

Harrison Ford … Colonel Hyrum Graff
Abigail Breslin …Valentine Wiggin
Ben Kingsley … Mazer Rackham
Asa Butterfield … Ender Wiggin
Han Soto … Colonel Graff’s aide
Hailee Steinfeld … Petra Arkanian
Viola Davis … Major Gwen Anderson

The tie-ins are  releasing today:

Ender’s Game MTI (Ender Wiggins Quartet) Orson Scott Card Retail Price: $9.99 Paperback: 368 pages Publisher: Tor Teen – (2013-05-07) ISBN / EAN: 0765337541 / 9780765337542

Other Available Formats:

Audio ISBN: 9781427205261

Audio ISBN: 9781593974749

Audio ISBN: 9781427235398

Trade Paperback ISBN: 9780765337320

Likely to be the most-reviewed debut of the year, Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (RH/Hogarth) is also the only English-language novel about the conflicts in Chechnya. It happens to arrive just as the American public has become more aware of that troubled history.

It also happens to arrive with a good deal of fanfare. One of the first consumer reviews, Dwight Garner’s appears in the print edition of the NYT tomorrow. Noting that, since it is based on true stories of torture during the Chechen wars, it “can be sickening reading,” but he says it is leavened by the “human warmth and comedy [Marra] smuggles, like samizdat, into his busy story.” The review is only intermittently laudatory, however. Garner admits, “I admired this novel more than I warmed to it.”

There were no negatives in the review on NPR’s All Things Considered last night from a surprising source. Meg Wolitzer, who has written that men’s fiction gets more serious literary attention than does women’s, delivered a rave for this book by a male novelist, calling it “an absorbing novel about unspeakable things” that is “highly, deeply readable.”

UPDATE: Washington Post’s Ron Charles is also a fan, calling it “a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles … At the risk of raising your expectations too high, I have to say you simply must read this book.” If you’re going to read just one review of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, this the one. It is the most thoughtful and literate.

Expect many more reviews in the next couple of weeks. Library holds are still light at this point, but growing.

“Full of sex, intrigue and clues based on Victorian poetry, Elanor Dymott’s Every Contact Leaves a Trace [Norton; Brilliance Audio] is a literary mystery about a murder at Oxford University,” writes Maureen Corrigan on NPR’s Web site in reviewing this debut novel.

Arriving here this week from the UK, where it garnered strong reviews and was voted on to the long list for the Author’s Club’s Best First Novel Award, it did not do so well with prepub reviewers here. As a result, libraries ordered it very lightly. All four reviews complained that it is overlong (Booklist, “this novel would have been twice as good at half the length”), with chilly protagonists (Kirkus, “Readers will have difficulty embracing Alex and Rachel, since neither exhibits any warmth or even a quirkiness that might make them interesting”), while sprinkling in a few bland kudos (LJ, “should satisfy readers who hang in until the end;” Booklist, “the author’s deft evocation of mood and place marks her as a writer to watch;” PW, “patient and forgiving readers of Gone Girl and The Secret History will be drawn in by its contemplation”).

Donna Tartt’s best selling first novel The Secret History, (RH/Knopf, 1992) has become reviewers’ shorthand for books that feature a murder among a close-knit group of students in a rarefied university setting. The UK’s Guardian also made the comparison, but to Dymott’s advantage, “Outwardly, her novel bears all the hallmarks of the Tartt school of academic intrigue. Yet past the atmospheric cover and the cordon of epigraphs lies a quite exceptional novel… [showing] a thoroughgoing confidence and ease with the rules of its genre, an appealing way of wearing its learning lightly, and a melancholy perceptiveness.”

Such strong opposing reactions make this a book to watch.

Helene Wecker was already off to a good start with her first novel, The Golem and the Jinni, with a 3.5 star review in USA Today that invites readers to “dive in and happily immerse yourself, forgetting the troubles of daily life for a while.” The Huffington Post calls it “The Book We’re Talking About,” and similar to The Night Circus, “a stirring, magical debut. Its intertwining of mythology and historical fiction is very engagingly written.”

The New York Times puts the icing on the cake in a review that will appear in print tomorrow,

… this impressive first novel manages to combine the narrative magic of The Arabian Nights with the kind of emotional depth, philosophical seriousness and good, old-fashioned storytelling found in the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

The book debuted on the May 12 NYT Hardcover Fiction extended list at #30 during its first week on sale.

Who knew that writing a popular series of books could be so dangerous? The WSJ reports that Charlaine Harris has opted out of doing a tour for her upcoming 13th Sookie Stackhouse book, Dead Ever After (Penguin/Ace, releasing Tuesday) because fans have been so vocal in their disappointment that it is the final book in the series.

Harris is planning a new series, set in small West Texas town, featuring “..familiar characters and supernatural themes, which could help draw Sookie fans to the books.” As a bridge, Ace will release a short story next spring featuring both Sookie and the main character of the new series (no publishing information yet, but it is likely to be an ebook-only title).

She has also written an epilogue to the Sookie series, After Dead, (Penguin/Ace), an A to Z listing of over 100 characters, with information on what happens to each of them, coming in November.

In October, she will release the first in a series of graphic novels, Cemetery Girl, in which a girl who is left for dead in a graveyard, wakes up with no idea how she got there and the unsettling ability to see spirits (9780425256664; listed in the publishers catalog, on page 24).

Dennis Lehane won the Mystery Writers of America Award for Best Novel last night for Live by Night. In his acceptance speech, he thanked librarians for offering “a light in the darkness for the kids from the wrong side of the tracks,” reports Shelf Awareness.

Lehane won over six other nominees in that category, including Gillian Flynn for Gone Girl.

Click to download a spreadsheet of all the Edgar-Nominees-and-Winners in the book categories, with ordering information, including audio, large print and paperback formats.

Winners in the book categories are listed after the jump: (more…)

We thought that the poor box office showing for the adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Hachette/Grand Central, 2012) had finally killed off thoughts of a film based on the grandmother of the mashup genre, Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, also by Grahame-Smith (Quirk Books), but The Hollywood Reporter announces that Lily Collins is now set to star with Burt Steers directing.

Collins follows a string of actresses that have been rumored or announced for the role (Natalie Portman — who is still attached as a producer —  Emma Stone, Anne Hathaway, Scarlett Johansson, Mia Wasikowska and Rooney Mara). Steers is the fourth director attached to the project.

The mashup craze seems to have run its course, but zombies still live.

Last fall, John Grisham told Matt Lauer on the Today Show that he was seriously considering a sequel to his first and favorite novel, A Time to Kill. Over the years, he said, he has “been looking for some other trial [Mississippi lawyer] Jake could have a couple of years after the trial in A Time to Kill…and I’ve found the story.”

Random House just announced that Grisham’s next book will be that sequel, Sycamore Row (via the AP sydicated story), to be published on Oct. 22 by the Doubleday division of Random House (also RH Audio, BOT and RH Large Print).

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Another project announced in 2010, an HBO series based on Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge (Random House) is now gearing up. Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right) has been signed to direct with Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins starring. Tom Hanks’ Playtone Partners is co-producing with McDormand’s company. According to Deadline, “Getting this cast, director and a four-hour commitment from HBO is a real testament for McDormand … [who] fell in love with the book before it won the Pulitzer…[and] bought it with her own money.”

Strout’s The Burgess Boys (Random House), her first novel since Kitteridge, was published in March. McDormand’s first production effort, an adaptation of Laura Lippman’s Every Secret Thing, is currently filming.