EarlyWord

I am thrilled to announce that over 10,000 children have registered to participate in the Irma S. Black Award for Excellence in Picture Books. Whoo Hooo!!!!! Thanks for helping us reach our goal.

It’s not too late to register and participate with your classes.

Nuts and Bolts available here. Remember, votes are due by midnight on April 11th.

If you are in the New York area and would like to attend the award breakfast, the date is May 19th. The keynote speaker is Perri Klass, noted pediatrician/ journalist talking about early childhood literacy. Questions? Just email me.

The week’s big news in the world of comics and graphic novels is the announced return of Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon, a much-beloved shojo (or girls) comic, one of the key titles that ushered in manga boom beginning around 2000. Alongside other now out-of -print series like Tokyo Mew Mew and Marmalade Boy, Sailor Moon proved the importance of female fans to a skeptical (and yes, startled) comics industry.

Originally published in 1997 by Tokyopop (known then as Mixx), Sailor Moon is remembered by many librarians for its terrible binding, poor printing and paper quality; the volumes flew off the shelves until they fell apart. Kodansha Comics is resurrecting the series with a brand new translation and a deluxe edition (although what makes it “deluxe” is not  yet clear). The series will be released bi-monthly starting in September 2011 and will combine the original 18 volumes into 12 plus one more of side stories.

Read the rest of this entry »

We love it when a fellow librarian does well. Jon Michaud, head librarian at The New Yorker, just published his first novel, When Tito Loved Clara, which is getting some powerful recommendations:

O Magazine’s “17 Books to Watch for in March 2011”

NPR Review by Michael Miller — “Michaud…writes with a librarian’s sense of perfectionism.” (note: this is meant as a good thing!)

To be featured in the New Yorker Book Club

The New Yorker interviewed Michaud last week, describing the book this way,

The two protagonists are a pair of young lovers, whom we first meet in later years, when their paths have diverged: Clara is a librarian who lives with her husband and son in a nice house in the suburbs; Tito is still at the same job he had in high school, still living with his parents in Inwood, and still hung up on Clara. A series of events, fortunate and unfortunate, bring them together again, with surprising consequences.

An interview with fellow New Yorker librarian Erin Overbey on the Algonquin Books Blog reveals that several plot points involve library work; one character digitizes an archive (much as the New Yorker librarians themselves did, resulting in the New Yorker DVD set and NewYorker.com) and another catalogs a personal library.

When Tito Loved Clara Jon Michaud Retail Price: $23.95 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Algonquin Books – (2011-03-08) ISBN / EAN: 1565129490 / 9781565129498

OverDrive; Adobe EPUB eBook

Several bits of news about major upcoming book-to-film adaptations emerged yesterday on the movie news site Deadline.

Savages, Don Winslow, S&S, 7/13/10

The film based on the 2010 novel (which critic Sarah Weinmen calls her #1 favorite crime novel of the year) is moving closer to the screen, with the signing of Benicio Del Toro. Oliver Stone will direct. Deadline

Dune, Frank Herbert, 1965

After working for four years to put together a new version of Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 sci-fi book, Paramount has thrown in the towel and given up the rights, for which they paid over six figures. The project is haunted by past history. Back in 1984, David Lynch directed a version of the book that was both a commercial and critical flop. Deadline

Cleopatra, Stacy Schiff, Little Brown, 11/1/10

News that Angelina Jolie would star in an adaptation of the biography helped push the book on to best seller lists. James Cameron was going to direct it in 3-D. That was before he decided to do two sequels to Avatar. Now David Fincher (The Social Network) is working on it with producer Scott Rudin. However, Fincher has several projects coming up, including The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, so he may also have a time problem. Deadline.

Sing You Home, Jodi Picoult, Atria, 3/15/11

Ellen DeGeneres is working with partners to produce Picoult’s latest best seller as a feature film. The author’s My Sister’s Keeper became a 2009 movie, directed by Nick Cassavetes and starring Cameron Diaz, Abigail Breslin and Alec Baldwin.  Deadline

There’s been some grousing about the casting of blonde Jennifer Lawrence as the dark-haired, olive-skinned Katniss Everdeen in the film version of Hunger Games.

In a statement to Entertainment Weekly‘s “Inside Movies,” author Suzanne Collins weighs in on the choice, saying she was part of the casting process and “…after watching dozens of auditions by a group of very fine young actresses, I felt there was only one who truly captured the character I wrote in the book” and that actress was Lawrence.

Last night  Sarah Vowell accused Jon Stewart of getting his history from The Brady Brunch. Perhaps she was smarting because NPR had just called her new book about Hawaii, Unfamiliar Fishes (Riverhead/Penguin) “glib luau tales” (she can be comforted by the fact that this is a contrarian view).

Buyers were more influenced by Stewart’s clear enjoyment of the author and book; it rose to #36 (from #318) on Amazon.

Tomorrow night, Stewart interviews T.J. English.

The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge T. J. English Retail Price: $27.99 Hardcover: 496 pages Publisher: William Morrow – (2011-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 9780061824555 / 9780061824555

Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, Maxime Bilet Retail Price: $625.00 Hardcover: 2438 pages Publisher: The Cooking Lab – (2011-04-14) ISBN / EAN: 0982761007 / 9780982761007

Dozens of movie news sources, including Entertaiment Weekly‘s “Inside Movies”,  are reporting that Julianne Moore and Jeff Bridges will star in the Warner Bros/Legendary Pictures’ adaptation of the YA series, The Last Apprentice by Joseph Delaney. Originally titled after the book series, the movie is now being called The Seventh Son. Moore will play Mother Malkin, “the most evil witch in the world.” Bridges plays the exorcist mentor to the young apprentice (not yet cast) in the 1700’s.

The movie, planned as the first in a series, will be based on Revenge of the Witch.

Revenge of the Witch (The Last Apprentice) Joseph Delaney Retail Price: $17.99 Hardcover: 368 pages Publisher: Greenwillow Books – (2005-09-01) ISBN / EAN: 0060766182 / 9780060766184

The next book in the series, the eighth, Rage of the Fallen, has a 4/19/11 on sale date. Series Web site: LastApprenticeBooks.com

Director Neil LaBute has signed on to direct Agatha Christie’s 1949 mystery, Crooked House, reports The Independent. According to the story, this comes at a time when the venerable British Poirot TV series, based on one of Christie’s detectives, is having trouble raising the cash to continue.

Perhaps that is the reason that edgy film director LaBute (In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors) was chosen to direct this classic whodunnit. The site Word & Film, suggests that the pairing of “the misanthropic auteur” LaBute and Christie is not as strange as one might think.

The film begins shooting later this year.

Crooked House has just been released as part of HarperCollins’s repackaging of the Christie backlist.

Crooked House Agatha Christie Retail Price: $12.99 Paperback: 256 pages Publisher: Harper Paperbacks – (2011-02-01) ISBN / EAN: 9780062073532 0062073532

With the rising success of chef memoirs, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood began to take notice. Just optioned is Bill Buford’s best selling 2006 book about apprenticing in various kitchens, including that of star chef Mario Batali, Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Dante-quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Knopf), reports Deadline.

The screenwriter/producer team behind the deal also put together another major adaptation, Moneyball, based on the best selling book about baseball by Michael Lewis. Starring Brad Pitt, it will be released on Sept. 23rd of this year (for a list of upcoming adaptations, along with tie-ins, go to our Upcoming — with Tie-ins).

In reviewing Charles Cumming’s Trinity of Spies in the NYT BR, Jacob Heilbrunn delineates the many novels that have drawn their inspiration from  the real-life British Cold War spy scandal and ends with the unexciting assessment that this book is “…a notable addition to the accounts of the Cambridge spies.”

Patrick Anderson in the Washington Post offered more fulsome praise,

Cumming writes smart, seductive prose, and he’s gifted at revealing the subtleties of personality. Scene after scene crackles with excitement, tension and suspense. The novel’s ingenious plot is almost as complicated as real life, but as one astonishing revelation follows another, the book is all but impossible to put aside.

He compares the author to other spy masters,

With this novel, Cumming joins Alan Furst, David Ignatius and Olen Steinhauer among the most skillful current spy novelists, and he bears comparison with masters such as John le Carre and Graham Greene.

People magazine also rated the book highly, giving it four of four stars; “a smashing Cold War thriller for the 21st century.”

The Trinity Six Charles Cumming Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 368 pages Publisher: St. Martin’s Press – (2011-03-15) ISBN / EAN: 0312675291 / 9780312675295

One of the most engaging reviews in the 3/27 NYT Book Review is for the memoir, My Korean Deli by Ben Ryder Howe, about the author’s adventures running a deli in Brooklyn, with his mother-in-law, while maintaining his job as editor at the Paris Review. Any author would love this opener,

It’s hard not to fall in love with My Korean Deli. First, it’s the (very) rare memoir that places careful, loving attention squarely on other people rather than the author. Second, it tells a rollicking, made-for-the-movies story in a wonderfully funny deadpan style.

The book rose to #124 (from #258) on Amazon’s sales rankings.

My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store Ben Ryder Howe Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. – (2011-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 0805093435 / 9780805093438

Audio: Blackstone; read by Bronson Pinchot

USA Today says British writer Scott Mariani’s DaVinci-Code-style US debut, The Mozart Conspiracy releasing tomorrow from Touchstone with a 125,000 first printing, hits thrilling, suspenseful notes.

The book is actually the second in the author’s Ben Hope books. The sixth in the series, The Lost Relic, was released there in January and became a best seller.

….
Large type from Thorndike, June, 9781410438003; $30.99
Audio; Recorded Books

Chef/author Gabrielle Hamilton was interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered last night about her surprise best selling memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter (listen here).  Show host Guy Raz calls the book,

…the sort of hard-edged restaurant memoir we’ve come to expect from fellow New York chefs like Anthony Bourdain, who, coincidentally, described Hamilton’s book as “simply the best memoir by a chef. Ever.

This is her first book, but Hamilton says she intends to continue both cooking and writing.

Audio: Books on Tape; narrated by the author.

A trailer for the film adaptation of the popular reading group book, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, was released last week. It is scheduled to open in theaters on July 15th. The first of See’s books to be adapted as a movie, it is directed by Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club, Maid in Manhattan and Because of Winn-Dixie).

The author’s next book, Dreams of Joy, to be published May 31, is a continuation of the story begun in her 2009 novel, Shanghai Girls.

Web site: SnowFlowerMovie.com

Trailer on YouTube:

Tie-in:

What a week for Tea Obreht. Not only has the twenty-five-year-old author received press attention that would make Jonathan Franzen envious, her book The Tiger’s Wife lands at #11 on the 3/27 NYT Print Fiction Hardcover best seller list and at #1 on the independent booksellers’ list.

In Nonfiction, Andre Dubus’s memoir Townie moves up to #4, from #13, on the 3/27 NYT Print Hardcover list after two weeks. Riding waves of media attention, The Social Animal by David Brooks arrives at #1 on the list and Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein debuts at #3.