EarlyWord

In a time when Alzheimer’s is considered an epidemic, it’s no surprise that a book about memory fascinates people. After covering the U.S.A. Memory Championship, journalist Joshua Foer became so enamored of his subject that he spent a year working with a memory coach. He won the next event and wrote a book about the experience, with the memorable title Moonwalking with Einstein. It is drawing holds; one large library system shows 215 on 15 copies.

In the NYT yesterday, Michiko Kakutani practically sputters well-known comparisons in her review,

…Joshua Foer tackles the subject of memory the way George Plimpton tackled pro football and boxing…[his book] has a lot in common with Malcolm Gladwell’s best sellers…His narrative is smart and funny and, like the work of Dr. Oliver Sacks, it’s informed by a humanism that enables its author to place the mysteries of the brain within a larger philosophical and cultural context.

The author appeared on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report last night.

And, yes, he is the younger brother of Jonathan Safran Foer.

Jeff Greenfield is the Chief Political Correspondent for CBS News, so it’s no surprise that he was featured on the CBS Early Show today for his book on what might have happened if not for some simple twists of fate. If it had rained in Dallas when JFK was there in 1963, he would not have traveled in an open car and may not have been shot (curiously, Stephen King’s next book, titled 11/22/63 is about time travelers who try to prevent the Kennedy assassination).

Greenfield will also appear on The Colbert Report on Thursday.

…

Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan Jeff Greenfield Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 448 pages Publisher: Putnam Adult – (2011-03-08) ISBN / EAN: 0399157069 / 9780399157066

Mon., March 7
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Tea Party Goes to Washington Rand Paul Retail Price: $21.99 Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher: Center Street – (2011-02-22) ISBN / EAN: 1455503118 / 9781455503117

The Colbert Report

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything Joshua Foer Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The – (2011-03-03) ISBN / EAN: 159420229X / 9781594202292

Tues., March 8
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive Brian Christian Retail Price: $27.95 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Doubleday – (2011-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 0385533063 / 9780385533065

Wed, March 9
The Colbert Report

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement David Brooks Retail Price: $27.00 Hardcover: 448 pages Publisher: Random House – (2011-03-08) ISBN / EAN: 140006760X / 9781400067602

Thurs., March 10
The Colbert Report

Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan Jeff Greenfield Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 448 pages Publisher: Putnam Adult – (2011-03-08) ISBN / EAN: 0399157069 / 9780399157066

The writer Trevanian spoofed the spy genre in the 1970’s with a series of four novels; The Eiger Sanction, The Loo Sanction, The Main and Shibumi.

Nicholai Hel, a handsome and charming assassin who is fascinated with Eastern culture, is the main character in the cult classic Shibumi. He reappears today in a prequel, Satori by Don Winslow (Savages). The Wall Street Journal interviews Savage about reimagining this classic.

Satori Don Winslow Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 512 pages Publisher: Grand Central Publishing – (2011-03-07) ISBN / EAN: 0446561924 / 9780446561921

The earlier book was re-released in 2005.

Shibumi: A Novel Trevanian Retail Price: $15.00 Paperback: 480 pages Publisher: Broadway – (2005-05-10) ISBN / EAN: 1400098033 / 9781400098033

Publishers have been searching for him all over Scandinavia, but maybe the next Stieg Larsson actually resides on this continent, in Dallas, Texas. And, maybe he’s a she.

USA Today thinks so. Reviewer Carol Memmot (who, back in January, called Three Seconds by Scandinavians Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom a worthy Larsson successor. It then hit the NYT Hardcover Fiction list) says that the main character in American Taylor Stevens’ debut thriller The Informationist, “evokes the spirit and intelligence of th gutsy, damaged Salander, but she’s far from derivative.”

She adds, “Thank goodness a sequel to this fiery novel is in the works.”

The Informationist: A Thriller Taylor Stevens Retail Price: $23.00 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Crown – (2011-03-08) ISBN / EAN: 0307717097 / 9780307717092

Large Type: Thorndike; 9781410438027; June 2011; $31.99

On NPR’s Morning Edition today, Lynn Neary interviewed Jonahan Evison, His novel, West of Here, is told from the perspectives of settlers in Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula and modern-day residents. How did Evison do his research?

…by poking around in the local libraries of towns up and down the Olympic Peninsula: “I found that at all these little libraries in Port Angeles and Sequim and Shelton and all these peninsula towns, you can find all these wonderful little tape-bound manuscripts. Some of them are 15 pages long, some of them are 100 pages long, but they’re personalized, first-person accounts of frontier living.”

West of Here Jonathan Evison Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 496 pages Publisher: Algonquin Books – (2011-02-15) ISBN / EAN: 1565129520 / 9781565129528

Audio; Highbridge; 9781615731169; $39.95

As we noted in our look-ahead to this week’s big books, two chef’s memoirs hit the shelves. Each received media coverage yesterday.

Grant Achatz was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air about recovering from tongue cancer and his book, Life, On the Line (Gotham/Penguin). As a result, it rose to #42 (from #155) on Amazon.

Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter (Random House), has been doing well all week (see our heavy holds alert) and is now at #18 on Amazon. The author appeared on the Today show.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Next Week’s Notable Nonfiction

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, author of The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe, will receive  major media exposure next week. She has written the cover story about Hilary Clinton for Tina Brown’s newly-redesigned Newsweek, which debuts next week (with a weekly book section!). The book will be featured on several NPR shows, including Morning Edition, it will be excerpted in USA Today and several reviews are scheduled.

Lemmon’s book is the story of an Afghan woman who became an entrepreneur under the Taliban, employing over 100 women, despite being banned from schools and offices, in the vein of Three Cups of Tea.

Libraries are showing modest reserves on modest orders, but interest could increase as Lemmon makes her media rounds.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe Gayle Tzemach Lemmon Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Harper – (2011-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061732370 / 9780061732379

Memoir to Watch

The Source of All Things: A Memoir by Tracy Ross (Free Press) is an exploration of the author’s childhood sexual abuse. Kirkus says, “Ross’s seesawing of emotions left her in a constant state of flux, but this uncertainty of emotion is one of the narrative’s primary strengths. Ross continually explores the boundaries of father-daughter intimacy, never demonizing her stepfather, but instead, humanizing him—a far more difficult task.”

Usual Suspects

The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream by Suze Orman (Spiegel and Grau) reassesses the American Dream — home, family, career, retirement — in view of current economic realities.

Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan by Jeff Greenfield (Putnam) is the veteran CBS News reporter and commentator’s journey in what-ifs, based on his extensive research, and has a 100,000 printing. PW calls it “fun but insubstantial.”

Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions by Guy Kawasaki (Portfolio) offers a new perspective on the art of influence, by the author of bestseller The Art of the Start.

Big Debuts

Altar of Bones by Philip Carter (Gallery Press) is a thriller by an “internationally renowned author” writing under a pseudonym (OK, so it doesn’t really count as a debut) with a 200,000-copy printing, about a mysteriously powerful altar in Siberia, the San Francisco lawyer who inherits it, and the ex-special ops agent who protects her from those who wish to control it. Library Journal says the “chase and fight scenes are adrenaline-charged, breath-holding sensations,” but Kirkus calls it a “a competent and action-filled story, if one without much attention to detail,” and PW slammed it, saying, “by the time the unsurprising ending rolls around, all suspense has been drained from the action.”

The Informationist by Taylor Stevens (Crown), is, says the publisher, a “blazingly brilliant debut [that] introduces a great new action heroine, Vanessa Michael Munroe, who doesn’t have to kick over a hornet’s nest to get attention, though her feral, take-no-prisoners attitude reflects the fire of Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander.” Kirkus adds, “the writing is stellar, the heroine grittier than Lara Croft and the African setting so vivid that readers can smell the jungle and feel the heat—a gifted debut with much promise.”

The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht (Random House) is the season’s  (and, perhaps, the year’s) major literary debut. It comes with high expectations; Obreht is the youngest of the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 fiction writers. LJ, Booklist and PW all call it varying degrees of brilliant. Boolist‘s starred review goes the furthest; “Every word, every scene, every thought is blazingly alive in this many-faceted, spellbinding, and rending novel of death, succor, and remembrance.” Only Kirkus introduces a caution; “…at times at times a bit too dense and confusing.” Laura Miller in Salon this week, finds the book too heavy on descripiton, “…no sooner does Obreht’s narrative work up a little momentum or present a masterful scene than it hits a patch of long, dozy paragraphs filled with way too much detail about the scenery.”

To Watch

Holds are mounting on light ordering for next week’s release of Carol Edgarian’s second novel, Three Stages of Amazement. This exploration of how privleged people cope (or don’t) when fate turns against them, pivots on a seemingly perfect, 40ish Bay Area couple who run into trouble when the surgeon husband needs financing for a new medical invention and gets it from his wife’s dashing and successful ex-boyfriend.

In the New York Times, Janet Maslin calls it “a fiery, deeply involving book with an eccentric streak that keeps it constantly surprising,” and compares it favorably to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, saying it handles its “high-strung, hot-blooded, restless people conflating their own private crises with the political and economic turmoil of their times” in half the space Franzen does, “with less loftiness but more soap-operatic plot tricks.” O Magazine finds it “generous and graceful and true.”

Usual Suspects

The Jungle by Clive Cussler and Jack Du Bruhl (Putnam), the eighth Oregon Files thriller, finds Juan Cabrillo and his crew of mercenaries engage in one daring rescue operation after another with progressively higher stakes. PW says, “The frenetic action moves from Afghanistan to Singapore and the Burmese jungle with lots of derring-do at sea before climaxing in a surprising locale in a fashion sure to delight series fans.”

Silent Mercy by Linda Fairstein (Dutton) finds Alexandra Cooper, the ADA who heads Manhattan’s Special Victims unit, investigating a fire at a Baptist church in Harlem. Kirkus says, “Above average for this bestselling series, though not up to the mark of Hell Gate (2010).”

Love You More by Lisa Gardner (Bantam) finds Detective D. D. Warren of the Boston police and Massachusetts state trooper Bobby Dodge together again, as partners in the investigation of a state trooper who shot and killed D.D.’s husband. Booklist gives it a starred review: “Winner of the 2010 International Thriller Award for The Neighbor, Gardner hits an even higher mark this time and will have a national marketing campaignauthor tour, TV advertising, online saturation bombing, etc.to support her.”

Fans of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series have been waiting, none to patiently, for the next volume in the series. On his Web site today, Martin finally announces an end to the six-year wait; the next volume in the series, A Dance with Dragons, will be published on Tuesday, July 12.

Addressing fans who have had their hopes dashed in the past, Martin acknowledges,

Yes, I know.  You’ve all seen publication dates before: dates in 2007, 2008, 2009.  None of those were ever hard dates, however.  Most of them… well, call it wishful thinking, boundless optimism, cockeyed dreams, honest mistakes, whatever you like.

This date is different.   This date is real.

The book will be huge, literally, at more than 900 pages.

A Dance with Dragons (Song of Ice and Fire) George R.R. Martin Retail Price: $35.00 Hardcover: 1008 pages Publisher: Bantam – (2011-07-12) ISBN / EAN: 0553801473 / 9780553801477

Entertainment Weekly simultaneously posted the news and also an exclusive new trailer for the HBO Game of Thrones series, an adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, which begins April 17.

The official Web site is at HBO.com.

One of the most-discussed titles on Tuesday’s GalleyChat was Townie, the memoir by Andre Dubus (we also hear that in lands on the upcoming NYT Extended Nonfiction Hardcover list).

One of the chat participants, Angela Carstensen, writes about Townie on SLJ‘s Adult Books for Teens.

She also points out that segments of Dubus’s ALA presentation are available on YouTube. The videos give new meaning to the term “hand-held” (if you have a tendency towards dizziness, close your eyes and listen to the audio), but they give a good sense of the style of both the author and the book.

Below, he reads from the book (Dubus is the narrator for the audiobook, from Blackstone):

In the following segment, Dubus talks about why he loves libraries and how he became a “reluctant memoirist.”

…………………….

Townie: A Memoir Andre Dubus III Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company – (2011-02-28) ISBN / EAN: 0393064662 / 9780393064667

Audio: Blackstone; UNABR, simultaneous; read by the author

The Chicago Tribune announces that the next One Chicago/One Book pick is Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. The story notes that Chicago’s Mayor Daley is very involved with the program and becomes positively “giddy” when he learns about the latest selection.

Daley, who is retiring after 22 years, will be replaced by Rahm Emmanuel. The Tribune writes that Daley’s largest cultural legacy is likely to be his support of the city’s libraries; 59 were built during his time as mayor with four new ones opening by the end of the year.

Stephen King announced on his web site yesterday that he has a new book coming this fall, titled 11/22/63. The story was picked up by several news sources (the NYT, USA Today and the AP) and the book debuted on Amazon at #56.

Below is the description from the King web site of the  1,000 page novel,

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

11/22/63: A Novel Stephen King Retail Price: $35.00 Hardcover: 960 pages Publisher: Scribner – (2011-11-08) ISBN / EAN: 1451627289 / 9781451627282

Gabrielle Hamilton, owner of Prune restaurant in New York City, is interviewed in the Dining & Wine section of today’s New York Times. Her memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter, which was released yesterday, is already in its third printing and received a rare near-rave from NYT critic Michiko Kakutani last week. Libraries are showing heavy holds on light ordering (who would expect a book by the owner of a restaurant that few people in the country have been to — it has only 30 seats — to be a hit?)

Says the interviewer,

On the page and in the kitchen, Ms. Hamilton can be charming, tempestuous, persnickety, vulgar, poetic, provocative and mothering, sometimes all in the course of a single flurry of sentences. Whatever scars she has, she is not inclined to cover them.

The prepub reviews back up that observation; Booklist calls it a “lusty, rollicking, engaging-from-page-one memoir.”

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef Gabrielle Hamilton Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Random House – (2011-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 140006872X / 9781400068722

Audio: Books on Tape; narrated by the author; 3/1/11

Below is a letter to librarians, just issued by HarperCollins. Steve Potash, OverDrive CEO has also issued a statement on the company’s web site (via Library Journal).

March 1, 2010

Open Letter to Librarians:

Over the last few days we at HarperCollins have been listening to the discussion about changes to our e-book policy. HarperCollins is committed to libraries and recognizes that they are a crucial part of our local communities. We count on librarians reading our books and spreading the word about our authors’ good works. Our goal is to continue to sell e-books to libraries, while balancing the challenges and opportunities that the growth of e-books presents to all who are actively engaged in buying, selling, lending, promoting, writing and publishing books.

We are striving to find the best model for all parties. Guiding our decisions is our goal to make sure that all of our sales channels, in both print and digital formats, remain viable, not just today but in the future. Ensuring broad distribution through booksellers and libraries provides the greatest choice for readers and the greatest opportunity for authors’ books to be discovered.

Our prior e-book policy for libraries dates back almost 10 years to a time when the number of e-readers was too small to measure. It is projected that the installed base of e-reading devices domestically will reach nearly 40 million this year. We have serious concerns that our previous e-book policy, selling e-books to libraries in perpetuity, if left unchanged, would undermine the emerging e-book eco-system, hurt the growing e-book channel, place additional pressure on physical bookstores, and in the end lead to a decrease in book sales and royalties paid to authors. We are looking to balance the mission and needs of libraries and their patrons with those of authors and booksellers, so that the library channel can thrive alongside the growing e-book retail channel.

We spent many months examining the issues before making this change. We talked to agents and distributors, had discussions with librarians, and participated in the Library Journal e-book Summit and other conferences. Twenty-six circulations can provide a year of availability for titles with the highest demand, and much longer for other titles and core backlist. If a library decides to repurchase an e-book later in the book’s life, the price will be significantly lower as it will be pegged to a paperback price point. Our hope is to make the cost per circulation for e-books less than that of the corresponding physical book. In fact, the digital list price is generally 20% lower than the print version, and sold to distributors at a discount.

We invite libraries and library distributors to partner with us as we move forward with these new policies. We look forward to ongoing discussions about changes in this space and will continue to look to collaborate on mutually beneficial opportunities.

To continue the discussion please email library.ebook@HarperCollins.com

Sincerely,

Josh Marwell
President of Sales
HarperCollinsPublishers