EarlyWord

Talk about a long time between sequels; a third installment of Bridget Jones, both book and movie, are in the works. Entertainment Weekly has confirmed that Working Title Films, the company that produced both 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and the 2004’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, is at work on a third.

The story references an earlier report in the London Evening Standard that Helen Fielding, author of the two Bridget Jones books, was at work on a third. She told the newspaper, “I will be working on both the book and the film but I don’t know if they are the same thing yet. It’s not been decided.”

Next week, watch for a dystopian debut infused with Gen X nostalgia by Ernest Cline and nonfiction looking at Al Qaeda, sexual abuse in the Church, a town recovering from a tornado and what ails the U.S. educational system.

Watch List

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Crown) is a debut novel set in 2044, in a dystopian America where the only escape is a vast virtual-reality simulation game based on geek culture from the 1970s and ’80s. It gets an “A-” from Entertainment Weekly, which says: “To say [it’s] the literary-fiction equivalent of VH1’s I Love the 80’s series may not sound like a compliment, but we… give Cline credit for crafting a fresh and imaginative world from our old toy box, and finding significance in there among the collectibles.” It was also a BEA Shout ‘n’ Share pick.

Usual Suspects

The Omen Machine by Terry Goodkind (Tor) continues the story of Richard and Kahlan begun in the Sword of Truth fantasy series.

Childrens

Big Nate on a Roll by Lincoln Peirce (HarperCollins) is an illustrated children’s book based on the Big Nate comic strip.

Nonfiction

Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker (Times) reveals some of the covert methods used to combat terrorism.

The Grace of Everyday Saints: How a Band of Believers Lost Their Church and Found Their Faith by Julian Guthrie (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) chronicles the struggle by members to reopen a San Francisco church closed by the Archdiocese to conceal evidence of sexual abuse.

The Sacred Acre: The Ed Thomas Story by Mark Tabb and Tony Dungy (Zondervan) tells the story of an Iowa town destroyed by a tornado and the coach who gave hope to the community.

Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools by Steven Brill (Simon & Schuster) assigns the majority of blame for America’s education shortcomings on teachers unions. Kirkus call it “an in-depth, impeccably researched examination of the education-reform movements that have swept America over the last several decades, as well as the obstacles they’ve faced…The author “tackles this beast of a topic admirably, creating a lucid, often riveting history that will be invaluable to the next generation of reformers.”

Movie Tie-in

Moneyball by Michael Lewis (Norton) is a reissue of the bestselling behind the scenes look at the world of baseball, tying in to the movie opening September 3, which stars Brad Pitt.

Reviews are breaking for one of the season’s biggest movies based on a book, The Help. Disney imposed an embargo until yesterday, the movie’s opening day, but that was broken by many bloggers, including Tyler Perry, who shared his enthusiasm with his fans. The studio is concerned about the movie’s reception as evidenced by a special NAACP screening, part of what the L.A. Times refers to as Dreamwork’s “delicate task of selling the film to moviegoers, black and white, who might be reluctant to rekindle unpleasant memories of segregation.” UPDATE, 8/11: The Assoc. of Black Women Historians issued a statement about The Help, saying it, “distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers.” (via Entertainment Weekly).

On NPR’s FreshAir yesterday, David Edelstein says the movie is heavy-handed, but saved by strong acting. The Christian Science Monitor rounded up the reviews so far, calling them “mixed, but mostly positive.”

USA Today unveils the cover of The Oprah Winfrey Show: Reflections on an American Legacy by Deborah Davis. It will be published on Nov. 15 to the tune of  500,000 copies by  Abrams (remember when they were an art book publisher?)

Most libraries have ordered it.

When we first read the galley of Kevin Wilson’s Family Fang, we loved its quirky charm and the uncomfortable truths it explored about parents’ demands on children. It’s one of those books that you hope manages to “find an audience.”

We didn’t have to worry; strong reviews, topped by today’s NYT profile of the author indicates it’s found readers. The story notes that the book has gone back to press three times for a total of 23,000 copies in print. While barely touching the numbers for NYT bestsellers, it’s still respectable. Holds are buiding, as high as 100 on 8 copies in one large library we checked.

The Family Fang: A Novel Kevin Wilson Retail Price: $18.99 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Ecco – (2011-08-09) ISBN / EAN: /780061579035/ 006157903

The PEN prizes were awarded last night and we’re pleased that Susanna Daniel’s Stiltsville (Harper, 8/3/10) shares this year’s prize for a debut work of fiction. It didn’t get much national review attention (congrats to the Miami Herald, the author’s home town newspaper, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune for recognizing it), but it’s one of our favorites from last year (see our various stories about it) and one that came up on GalleyChat repeatedly. As we described it earlier,

No high drama or madness here, thank heaven; just an engrossing story of an “ordinary” woman as she meets the man she will marry, forms lasting friendships, and raises a family. It’s refreshing to read about good, caring people who struggle with many of the same issues we all do, but who bring an extra ounce of wisdom to it.

It was recently released in paperback:

Stiltsville: A Novel Susanna Daniel Retail Price: $12.99 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: HarperPerennial – (2011-06-28) ISBN 978-0061963087

Large Type, Wheeler/Thorndike; ebook on OverDrive

The award is shared with a book that had more review attention, Danielle Evans’ book of short stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead). The NYT called it a “whip-smart … collection [that]  charts the liminal years between childhood and the condition dubiously known as being a grown-up. Told from a close distance, these stories lack the rich patina of hindsight, their pleasures coming instead from an immediacy and an engaging voice.”

Among the other winners were Stacy Schiff for Cleopatra: A Life (Little, Brown), Siddhartha Mukherjee for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner), which also won the Pulitzer Prize and the Award for Literary Sports Writing went to George Dohrmann for Play Their Hearts Out (Ballantine Books). The full list is here.

Edelweiss, the company that creates electronic catalogs for many of the major publishers, has begun offering Digital Review Copies. The first publishers to sign on are Random House and W.W. Norton.

To see what’s available, go to the Review Copies tab. Each available title is listed, with a blue “Request Digital RC” bar.

Several titles getting buzz from librarians on GalleyChat are downloadable to approved users, including Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (Norton, 10/31) and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus (Doubleday, 9/13).

An advantage of Digital RC’s over paper is that several staff can read a forthcoming title at the same time; no need to pass around the paper copy.

NetGalley.com offers a similar service.

For a while, it looked like the adaptation of Max Brooks’ zombie apocalypse novel World War Z, (Crown, 2006) might not happen because of the $125 million budget. New investors came along and the movie began filming in Glasgow, starring Brad Pitt, with Marc Foster directing. As a further indicator that it will see the light of the silver screen, it now has a release date of Dec. 21, 2012.

That also happens to be the release date of  Ang Lee’s adaptation of The Life of Pi starring Tobey McGuire.

How do you follow up a successful movie adaptation? How about a TV series?

ABC is developing Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer into a series reports Variety.

The film starred Matthew McConaughey.

It’s part of a trend; NBC is doing a series in the upcoming season based on John Grisham’s The Firm.

The Bricklayer by Noah Boyd (Morrow, Jan ’10) came out with high expectations last January, but only landed on the extended NYT Fiction Bestseller list for one week. If you still have copies around, here’s a chance to get more mileage out of them; as they say, it’s going to  become a major motion picture.

The story features a disillusioned FBI agent, working as a bricklayer, who is lured back in to the fold to help stop a criminal group that is blackmailing the bureau. Gerard Butler (300) has just signed to play the lead.

No news yet on when  production will begin.

The second book in the series, Agent X, came out in February.

If the great reviews of Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time (Dutton, 6/30) haven’t already grabbed you, check out the author’s interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last night.

Stewart says it’s “Really entertaining writing, really fun, a great trek and really interesting story.”

Charles C. Mann’s two books debunking what we think we know about the new world before and immediately after Columbus, jumped up Amazon’s sales rankings after the author was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday.

Sales rank: 10 (from 105 yesterday)
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles C. Mann, Knopf, Knopf, 8/9/11; audio, Books on Tape

Sales rank: 50 (from 773 yesterday)
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles C. Mann, Knopf , 8/9/05; now in trade pbk from Vintage, 9781400032051 and audio from Highbridge

Mann said that the arrivial of Columbus marked “…a tremendous ecological convulsion — the greatest event in the history of life since the death of the dinosaurs.”

One copy of every Dummies book in print is a lot of books — over 1,800 as Gwinnett County Public Library [GA] recently found out. As the winners of Wiley’s For Dummies 2011 Library Contest, the library won the full set of the books by creating a Dummies Fan Page on Facebook and gathering the most “Likes” (5,002).

Gwinnett County P.L. mascot Dewey the Dinosaur was assisted in unloading the books by The Dummies Man last week (it must have been hot inside those costumes).

It seems nobody told him that processing books is not for dummies.

Wiley is currently running a Frommer’s Library Display Contest, with the chance to win a visit and travel talk from Arthur and Pauline Frommer, as well as 50 Frommer’s travel guides.

On EarlyWord‘s GalleyChat, we’ve been talking about The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson (Ecco, 8/1) for months. It just arrived last week and it’s fun to see others come to the party.

On Fresh Air yesterday, Maureen Corrigan said it’s particularly refreshing that the book is being published during the heat of summer,

“…it’s such a minty fresh delight to open up Kevin Wilson’s debut novel, The Family Fang, and feel the revitalizing blast of original thought, robust invention, screwball giddiness. Every copy of The Family Fang sold in August should have a sticker on it imprinted with the life-giving invitation that used to be issued on movie marquees in summertime during the dawn of the air-conditioning age: ‘Come on in! It’s cooool inside!’ “

Holds are heavy in libraries on light ordering.

No need to wonder if there will be a sequel to The Hunger Games. Lionsgate has announced Nov. 22, 2013 as the release date for Catching Fire, based on the second book in the trilogy by Suzanne Collins (via Deadline). That’s nearly a year and nine months, after the release of the first in the series, scheduled to open March 23, 2012.

Why such a long wait? The Lionsgate press release does not address that question although it does state that the pre-Thanksgiving time slot is a good one for family movies. That slot in 2012 is already spoken for by Breaking Dawn, Part 2, the finale of the Twilight saga. Given the success of the finale of Harry Potter, what studio would want to go up against it?

The first movie, Hunger Games, is in the midst of filming. No word on the third book in the series, Mockingjay, but we’re betting it will be made and will be released in November, 2014.