EarlyWord

Tom Hanks’ next movie role is based on Captain Richard Phillips’ memoir, A Captain’s Duty, about the 2009 hijacking by Somali pirates of the unarmed merchant marine ship he commanded. Phillips became a national hero by courageously leading his crew to safety.

Titled Captain Phillips, it is directed by Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum, The Bourne Supremecy), and is coming to theaters on Oct 11.

Official Site: CaptainPhillipsMovie.com

The book was heavily covered in the media when it came was first published in 2010 (see the real Captain Phillips on Dateline and on The Daily Show). A tie-in will be published on Sept. 24 (Hyperion).

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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Last night, the James Beard Foundation declared Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America, Maricel Presilla (W. W. Norton) the Cookbook of the Year. It has already won acclaim, appearing on several 2012 cookbooks lists (see our downloadable spreadsheet, 2012 — Best Cookbooks) and winning the IACP Award for Best General Cookbook.

Conversely, the book that had been named  IACP’s Cookbook of the Year, was a Beard category winner, for International, Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, (Ten Speed Press).

Marcus Samuelsson’s Yes, Chef: A Memoir, (Random House; RH Audio) won for Writing And Literature. It had also won the IACP’s award for a similar category, Literary Food Writing.

Inducted into the Cookbook Hall of Fame was Anne Willan, author of many titles on French cooking, including La Varenne Pratique (RH/Crown, 1989). Her next book is coming in August, One Soufflé at a Time: A Memoir of Food and France (Macmillan/St. Martin’s).

Unexpectedly, the winner in the Reference and Scholarship category is also available in audio; The Art Of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration Of Essential Concepts And Processes From Around The World, Sandor Ellix Katz, (Chelsea Green Publishing; audio, from Tantor— MP3 Audio Sample).

Following the jump, the full list of winners; click here to download our spreadsheet with ordering information, James Beard Cookbook Award Winners, 2012.

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Leading up to the release of Baz Luhrmann’s interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, some are debating whether the book lives up to its name.

Not buying it:

New York Magazine, “Why I Despise The Great Gatsby”

Great:

USA Today, “Five reasons Gatsby is the great American novel”

The Guardian, “What makes The Great Gatsby great?”

The Washington Post, “In defense of The Great Gatsby“

Rick Riordan’s next publication is a short story, “The Son of Sobek,” included in the paperback edition of The Kane Chronicles, Book Three: The Serpent’s Shadow (Disney/Hyperion, releasing today; also to be released as an e-book, with audio read by the author, on June 19). The cover and an interview with Riordan are featured in today’s issue of USA Today.

In “The Son of Sobek,” Percy Jackson (of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which features Greek mythology) and Carter Kane (of The Kane Chronicles, featuring Egyptian) come together for the first time. Riordian tells USA Today, “It was definitely reader driven. The fans wanted to see a crossover, and I thought, ‘Let’s see what happens!'”

He also notes, “Sobek is the crocodile god from Egypt, and the son of Sobek would be one of this followers. So … you can expect some major crocodile action in this book. The cover captures Carter and Percy at their first meeting … The two don’t really start on the best terms.”

Book four in the Heroes of Olympus series, The House of Hades (Disney/Hyperion; Listening Library) arrives Oct. 8.

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).

It seems everyone is talking about The Great Gatsby. Stephen Colbert goes a step further, creating a Gatsby book club. Jennifer Egan will lead the book discussion on Thursday, followed by a chat with Baz Luhrmann, whose adaptation opens the next day (a private screening was held in NYC on Sunday).

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: Read the rest of this entry »

The watchword next week is “heavily anticipated,” as proved by the number of titles that have already received attention. Sarah Jessica Parker is the unexpected champion of the literary debut, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, reviewing it in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, and promoting it in the Wall Street Journal. Veteran author John le Carré publishes his 23rd book, which is either the best he’s ever written, or the worst, according to which critic you trust. And, Charlaine Harris closes the book on her long-running vampire series, the basis for the popular TV series True Blood, with Dead Ever After. Leading the pack in holds is John Sandford’s Silken Prey. Check our downloadable spreadsheet for these and many other titles arriving next week, New Title Radar, Week of 5.6.13.

With all these big names, some below-the-radar titles are looking for attention:

The Other Typist, Suzanne Rindell, (Penguin/Putnam/Einhorn; Penguin Audio)

The first novel by poet Rindell about a typist working in a New York precinct in the ’20’s, who falls in with a flapper, is singled out as a favorite by one of our GalleyChatters, Jen Dayton, from Darien P.L. Kirkus calls it a “a pitch-black comedy” with a “dollop of Alfred Hitchcock, a dollop of Patricia Highsmith.”

Murder as a Fine Art, David Morrell, (Hachette/Mulholland)

The real-life author Thomas De Quincey is suspected of being the “artist of death” in Victorian London, committing a number of ghastly murders. Entertainment Weekly gives it an unequivocal “A.”

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, audio read by Jake Gyllenhaal, Brilliance Audio

The imminent arrival of Baz Luhrmann’s movie, has made Gatsby the best seller Fitzgerald fervently hoped it would be in his own day. Also arriving is this new audio version, narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal, who is NOT in the movie. E! Online, giving rare attention to audio, claims it “Makes Us Swoon as Much as Leonardo DiCaprio.” Check your own pulse, below:

Get ready for Rick Yancey‘s The 5th Wave to fulfill heavy expectations when it arrives next week. The first in a new series, it is one of many  debuting from both well-known and first time authors with the arrival of the summer publishing season. Also look for  the first collaboration  between two bestselling YA authors, Andrea Cremer and David Levithan in a book young people in love, somewhat complicated by the fact that one of them is invisible.

All the titles highlighted here and more, are available on our downloadable spreadsheet, Kids New Title Radar, Week of 5.6.13

Picture Books

Yoo-Hoo, Ladybug! Mem Fox, Laura Ljungkvist, (S&S/ Beach Lane Books)

Mem Fox is the master of the early childhood read aloud (Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes). Her rhythmic rhyming text is just right for the seek-and –find pictures. (Hint: to find her in the spread below, consider which vehicle a ladybug would drive).

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If You Want to See a Whale Julie Fogliano, Erin Stead (Roaring Brook Press )

A quiet, playful and imaginative take from the award-winning team that brought us the 2012, And Then It’s Spring.

The Great Lollipop Caper, Dan Krall, (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)

The whole family will enjoy this edgy silly fun with its cartoon-y graphic illustrations. The book trailer reflects the book’s spirit:

Beginning Readers

Pancakes, Pancakes, Eric Carle,  (Simon Spotlight )

Rooster Is Off to See the World, Eric Carle, (Simon Spotlight)

Classic Carle titles return in their original format (we know and love them as picture books, but they were originally easy-to-read books). These are particularly welcome as interesting low-level readers are the most difficult to find. Newly fluent kids eat them up like popcorn.

Chapter Book

Sugar, Jewell Parker Rhodes, (Hachette/Little, Brown BYR)

A gripping historic fiction tale of friendship set on a Southern sugar plantation from the author of the Coretta Scott King honor, Ninth Ward,

Middle Grade

Doll Bones, Holly Black, Eliza Wheeler (S&S/McElderry;Listening Library:

Black returns to her Spiderwick audience with this gripping creepy middle grade horror tale. Do not read before bedtime. You have been warned.

Young Adult

The Lucy Variations , Sara Zarr (Hachette/Little, Brown BYR)

Zarr’s is always the first galley I read from the Little, Brown galley pile. I can’t say it better than Kirkus, in a starred review, “What makes Lucy’s story especially appealing is the very realistic way this ‘entitled brat’ (as grandfather called her) acts out as she experiments with new identities. … The combination of sympathetic main character and unusual social and cultural world makes this satisfying coming-of-age story stand out.”

The 5th Wave, Rick Yancey, (Penguin/Putnam)

Arriving with a major promotional campaign from Penguin, this cross between King’s The Stand and Hunger Games is s a roller coaster ride. My heart was in my throat the entire read. Entertainment Weekly featured the book trailer, with the headline, “Is this the Next Big Thing?” The answer is “Yes.”

Reboot, Amy Tintera, (HarperTeen)

There’s been enthusiasm on YA GalleyChat for this new addition to the dystopian genre, readers calling it “Dark and twist-y, with well rounded characters.” The only prepub review, from Kirkus, is equally enthusiastic, characterizing it as a “compulsively readable science-fiction debut [that] will appeal widely… Superb concepts and plotting will hook readers from the start… [with] plenty [for] those who appreciate romance.”

Steven Spielberg announced in January that he had abandoned plans to adapt Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse (RH/Doubleday; BOT), which had been set for release next year, starring Chris Hemsworth, Anne Hathaway and Ben Whishaw.

Yesterday, he cleared up speculation about what he will turn to next and announced plans to direct an adaptation of American Sniper (HarperCollins/Morrow), the best selling memoir by Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who was killed on a Texas shooting range in February.

Bradley Cooper, who bought the rights to the book a year ago, will star.

Before he died, Kyle had a second book int the works, Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms, (HarperCollins/Morrow; HarperAudio). It is being released, as planned, in early June.