EarlyWord

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.

The media’s already got the jump on next week’s laydown of Sarah Vowell‘s Unfamiliar Fishes, a short, idiosyncratic history of Hawaii by the National Public Radio star and bestselling author.

Entertainment Weekly gives it a “B,” saying it “could use a little more of Vowell’s voice peppered throughout some of the long stretches of history and reporting, [but] her brainy wit and savvy cultural references keep the book from seeming like homework.”

There are also short interviews with Vowell in USA Today and Vanity Fair.

Unfamiliar Fishes Sarah Vowell Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover – (2011-03-22) ISBN / EAN: 9781594487873 / 9781594487873

Also up next week is Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations about Food and Money by Geneen Roth, the author that Oprah made into a star. It arrives with a 200,000-copy laydown. Kirkus calls it, “a timely portrait of one woman’s devastating loss and subsequent rise from the ashes of the Bernie Madoff scandal.”

Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money Geneen Roth Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 224 pages Publisher: Viking Adult – (2011-03-22) ISBN / EAN: 0670022713 / 9780670022717

T.J. English (Havana Nocturne) will be getting media attention next week for his book about New York in the 1960’s, The Savage City. It will be reviewed in the NYT Metro section on Sunday and the author is booked for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

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

Below is our weekly roundup of titles to watch next week, by authors you may not have heard about yet, but are poised for success, as well as our list of “usual suspects.” The week brings a large number of new books from big-name authors, including Harlan Coben and Alexander McCall Smith.

Titles to Watch

Spiral by Paul McEuen (Dial) is a techno-thriller that New York Times critic Janet Maslin compared favorably to Michael Crichton in his prime in a review that jumped the book’s pub date, as we mentioned earlier this week.  Today’s Wall Street Journal anoints the author a “publishing star,” although an “unlikely” one (McEuen is a Cornell physics professor) and points out that the book was a best seller in Germany, where it was published in translation last fall. Film rights have also been sold.

The Mozart Conspiracy by Scott Mariani (Touchstone) is this British author’s U.S. debut, though it’s actually the second installment in his thriller series featuring ex-SAS warrior Ben Hope. PW calls it “a fast, exciting read in The Da Vinci Code tradition,” though Kirkus adds “apart from the rumor that he was poisoned, though, don’t expect to learn much about Mozart.” It has a 125,000-copy first printing. Orders are in line with modest holds at libraries we checked.

The Four Ms. Bradwells by Meg Waite Clayton (Ballantine) is the story of four friends who met in law school in the early 1980s and have maintained their ties through decade of marriage, children, divorce, and various career twists, until they must confront a buried secret. Library Journal is on the fence, comparing it unfavorably to the author’s 2008 bestseller The Wednesday Sisters: “Instead of true characterization, Clayton resorts to literary quotes, legalese, and Latin verbiage to give her characters unique voices. Still, fans of Elizabeth Noble, Ann Hood, Elin Hilderbrand, and other luminaries of female friendship fiction will find much to captivate them.” Libraries we checked have modest orders in line with modest reserves to date.

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The rumor mill has been churning for days and now the movie news site The Wrap claims the exclusive that Jennifer Lawrence (nominated for an Oscar for Winter’s Bone) will play Katniss Everdeen in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. It is scheduled to arrive in theaters on March 23 next year and is planned as the first in a trilogy, followed by Catching Fire and Mockingjay.

The role of Peeta Mellark has not been cast yet, but The Wrap says the Alex Pettyfer (I am Number Four and Beastly) is one of the actors under consideration

Actually, we have two winners from yesterday’s book display contest. Within fifteen minutes of our posting the challenge, Lauri Wilson and Melissa DeWild both identified the unifying theme as books that are sources for movies that Tom Hanks is working on. Each will receive a copy of Knit Your Own Dog, published by Black Dog & Leventhal (thanks to Mike Rockliff, head of library marketing at Workman, for providing the prizes).

How did they guess so quickly? Both had also read Shelf Awareness yesterday and noticed that Hanks will star in a movie based on Richard Phillips’s memoir of his capture by Somali pirates, A Captain’s Duty.

It happens that we noticed the same story and it set us wondering about the other book projects Hanks has in the pipeline. Updates on them after the jump.

We’re hoping one of the winners knits us a dog — Lucy needs a new toy.

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The major international prize for books written by women, the UK’s Orange Prize For Fiction announced their long list of 20 nominees yesterday. Much is being made of the fact that Téa Obreht, whose novel The Tiger’s Wife was released last week to lavish attention, is, at 25, the youngest person on the list.

The prize was created in 1996 by a group of reviewers, librarians, and others in the U.K. book world, who felt that book prizes were disproportionately awarded to men. The Guardian‘s “Books Blog” yesterday addressed the question of whether the Orange Prize is still needed, pointing to recent research that women are still under-represented in literary magazines and criticism.

The full list of nominees is presented in the Guardian slide show, with annotations and  links to reviews. Viewing it can be a bit disconcerting for Americans; the British covers are often quite different from the ones we are familiar with. The UK jacket for The Tiger’s Wife, for instance, actually includes the wife (right, below).

Why is it called the “Orange Prize”? It has nothing to do with Scotland or a the female love of that color; it’s named for the UK mobile network company that funded the launch.

After the jump, the full list of 20 titles, with links to more information about them.

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