“An Oprah Book” will be the name of Oprah Winfrey’s new imprint with Macmillan/Flatiron Books (not to be confused with an “Oprah’s Book Club Selection,” as she styles her sporadic personal selections of books to recommend).

Oprah will select nonfiction titles for the new line with the first to be one of her own, a cookbook entitled Food, Health and Happiness: 115 On-Point Recipes for Great Meals and a Better Life (Macmillan/Flatiron Books; Jan. 3).

As we wrote in June, it is connected to her role as a Weight Watchers spokesperson as well as her investment in the company.

Oprah picked the cookbook as one of her Favorite Things for gift giving this year, even though it won’t be available until after the holidays (those who preorder it will get “a special note and gift … while supplies last” to wrap). 

The second book will be The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis by Maria Smilios (as yet no cover, pub. date, or ISBN is available).

According to Bustle, “the microhistory tells the story of 300 black nurses who worked in the tuberculosis ward at Staten Island’s Sea View Hospital, caring for patients few would dare to be around.”

According to the New York Daily News, “Fear of TB was so rampant at the time that the city had trouble hiring nurses for Sea View and ultimately recruited hundreds of black women, many from the South, to fill the ranks.” Oprah says it is a story that needs “to be shared.”

Bustle reports the account will be Smilios’ first book and will release in 2018.

The Associated Press picked up the story, and as the AP is widely syndicated, it is appearing in national as well as local outlets.

Thus far, however, word has not spread that far. A check of holds across the country shows only moderate demand on strong orders for the new cookbook.

The cast and director of the upcoming film Hidden Figures will be hosted tonight by First Lady Michelle Obama at a special White House screening.

In addition to several cast members, 97-year-old Katherine G. Johnson, played by Taraji P. Henson in the film, is also expected to attend. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year. NASA profiles her as “The Girl Who Loved to Count.”

Below is the ceremony. Johnson’s award begins at 30:24.

Hidden Figures is based on a book that is #5 on Time magazine’s list of the best nonfiction of the year, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly, released as a tie-in last month, (HC/William Morrow Paperbacks; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample). 

It is one of the hot films of the season and debuts in a limited, Oscar-qualifying run, on Christmas Day. It will open in wide release on January 6.

Early reviews are strong. The Wrap says the movie:

“not only stirringly celebrates intelligent women of color (and the very idea of science itself), but it also offers a more realistic-seeming portrayal of racism than we generally get in American movies … Hidden Figures is feel-good history, but it works, and it works on behalf of heroes from a cinematically under-served community. These smart, accomplished women had the right stuff, and so does this movie.”

Read the chat, below.

Join us for the next live chat on Wednesday, January 18th, 6 to 7 pm, ET (one hour later than usual) with Julie Bowe, to discuss her upcoming book, Big & Little Questions (According to Wren Jo Byrd).

To join the program, sign up here.

The Australian-born author of the National Book Award-winning The Great Fire (Macmillan/Picador, orig. pub. date 2003) and the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning The Transit of Venus (PRH/Penguin, orig. pub. date 1980), Shirley Hazzard, has died at age 85.

The NYT describes her fiction as “dense with meaning, subtle in implication and tense in plot, often with disaster looming [where] Catastrophes are accompanied by life’s cruelties.”

The AP writes she “wrote of love affairs disrupted and intensified by age, distance and war … of strained and cold relationships and the inevitable search for outside comfort … She was a writer of pre-digital tastes who composed on a yellow legal pad and had no interest in computers or even an answering machine. Her novels, too, had a vintage wealth of detail and introspection that led to comparisons to Henry James.”

The first story she submitted to The New Yorker, “Woollahra Road,” was “fished from the slush pile by the fiction editor William Maxwell and published in 1961,” says the NYT.

Her most recent work is the 2016 collection of essays, We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays, Shirley Hazzard, edited by Brigitta Olubas (Columbia University Press).

Ian McGuire’s blend of history, adventure, and thriller is still rising on Amazon.

Of the NYT‘s “10 Best Books of 2016,” The North Water (Macmillan/Holt; OverDrive Sample) showed the most impressive strength in terms of staying power, and now The Wall Street Journal has named it one of “The Best Mysteries of 2016,” helping the book jump again on the Amazon ratings.

WSJ writes, “The ghosts of Melville, Coleridge and Conrad haunt The North Water, Ian McGuire’s mesmerizing account of an 1859 whaling expedition plagued by ill fortune and its own bad intentions.”

Holds are surging in most systems we checked, with some showing ratios as high as 5:1.

In a recent Inside the NYT Book Review podcast, hosted by editor Pamela Paul, McGuire talks about the novel’s high-tension plot. Set in the mid-19th century on a whaling ship headed for the Arctic Circle. it features a ruthless, violent murderer and a troubled ship’s surgeon who fights him. McGuire said the idea came to him in stages. First as he worked on a biographical novel about Melville and then when he found a diary kept by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who served as a surgeon on a whaling ship.

NYTBR says “if you have read all of Conrad and Cormac McCarthy” you will want to turn to McGuire. For “all its harrowing bloodiness” the novel “is a huge amount of fun too.”

The novel is written as a tight thriller, continues NYTBR, with a gripping, quickly moving plot plot, interesting characters, and a deep thematic richness – topped by lots of twists and turns and a surprising ending.

Listen to the full podcast below. If you want to listen to just the North Water segment, listen to it on the NYT site. It begins around time stamp 34:00 (turn the little dial to fast forward).

Lit Hub, the website created in 2015 by Grove Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin and two partners to bring together “smart, engaged, entertaining writing about all things books,” has just re-launched their Book Marks section (not to be confused with the magazine Book Marks, which is still in print, but no longer updating its online book review aggregator).

When it debuted six months ago, Book Marks was tagged the “publishing equivalent of Rotten Tomatoes,” compiling reviews from over 70 consumer sources and assigning a letter grade to any book that got reviewed three times or more.

After taking criticism for the letter grades, the site has switched to a four-tiered system that characterizes reviews as Rave, Positive, Mixed, or Pan, explaining that the letters “did not convey the nuance of the reviews, and a book with a dozen middling reviews could wind up with the same grade as a book with ten raves and two pans. The grades also appeared to be a subjective assessment by Literary Hub, rather than cumulative measure of reviewer opinion.”

As Rotten Tomatoes itself demonstrates, assigning values is not a science and the Book Mark‘s new system still has some problems. For instance, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time is ranked as positive with 41 reviews, a mix of rave, positive and mixed reviews as well as single pan (for the curious, that one comes from The Millions and some might consider it more mixed than a pan). On the other hand, Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe is ranked as a rave with only 3 reviews, two raves and one positive.

Nevertheless, Book Marks is useful for many things, such as staying up to speed on titles getting review coverage, through its sections on new books, the most talked about books, the best reviewed books, the most reviewed books, and breakdowns by category (nine for fiction, 19 nonfiction).

It is also a quick way to learn more about specific titles, through review excerpts (found by clicking on each book cover) and links to the full reviews. 

We have added Book Marks to our links at the right of the site, under “Consumer Media, Book Coverage.” 

Macmillan Library @ ALA Midwinter 2017 (Booth #1818)

We’re ridiculously excited to see you in the Macmillan (adult) booth #1818 and at all of our great events at ALA Midwinter in Atlanta next month. Check out our schedule below and RSVP ASAP!

Get the full story and more at MacmillanLibrary.com!

The nominees for the 2017 Golden Globes include a number of TV shows and films with book connections. As the LA Times puts it in their rundown, so many that “if you’re more at home in a library or a bookstore than a movie theater, you’re likely to find some reading material to curl up with while the rest of your family is gathered around the television set.”

Most of the nominees are already well known, as we have noted:

• Arrival
• Elle
• Fences
• Game of Thrones
• Hidden Figures
• Lion
• Mozart in the Jungle
• The Night Manager
• Nocturnal Animals
• Outlander
• The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story

One is much less familiar, My Life as a Zucchini, an animated film from Switzerland based on Autobiographie D’une Courgette (J’Ai Lu Editions, 2003; no English translation), a YA novel by the French journalist Gilles Paris.

Selected as the Swiss entry for Best Foreign Language Film for this year’s Oscars, it just won the European Film Awards category for best European animated feature (here is its official entry page).

The story is about a young boy who becomes an orphan following the death of his alcoholic mother. Taken to an orphanage by a police officer who befriends him, the boy must learn to cope with his new life and surroundings as he interacts with other traumatized children.

Variety says “Leave it to a French-language stop-motion film to cut closer to the reality of the orphan experience than Annie, Matilda or any number of like-minded live-action melodramas … the cartoon is never afraid to be cute, but more importantly, it’s committed to being real.”

The Hollywood Reporter calls it “lovingly told and gorgeously rendered” and says “Though not as dark as the book that inspired it, nor as directly critical of the French welfare state [it is] not exactly a tale for all ages. That said, savvy distributors who know how to market high-end animated films to older audiences should get some decent mileage out of this Courgette.”

Variety reports that North American distribution rights have been sold, but so far, no release date has been announced.

In their new year-end issues, both People magazine and sister publication Entertainment Weekly name their picks of the top ten books of the year, in ranked order. 

For People, the top title is You’ll Grow Out of It (Hachette/Grand Central; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample) by Jessi Klein, head writer for Amy Schumer. People describes the book as a “hilarious, spot-on essay collection :From her horror of thongs to her most humiliating breakup, Klein’s topics — and disarming honesty — strike a chord.” This one does not appear on EW’s Top Ten. It is a #7 on Time magazine’s list.

For Entertainment Weekly, it’s a debut that received attention when it was released in August, Nathan Hill’s  The Nix (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample). 

EW says that it’s hard to describe the novel, but that “Hill’s magnificently overstuff debut contains multitude and ten some … It’s not just that Hill is a  brilliantly surreal social satirist … it’s that he does it all with so much wit and style and heart.”

Neither list is online yet. Download our spreadsheet with the rankings, People and Ent. Weekly Top Ten, 2016

Of the other publications that picked number one titles, most picked this year’s National Book Award winner in fiction.

Amazon Editors

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (PRH/Doubleday; RH Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample

New York magazine

The Underground Railroad

Time magazine, Fiction

The Underground Railroad

Time magazine, Nonfiction

John Lewis, March: Book Three, (Top Shelf Productions)

LIBRARIANS! Today is the day. Check your lists & count down your 10 fave books published in 2016, 1 per day. TITLE in caps, tag #libfaves16

— Robin B (@robinsbooks) December 12, 2016

It’s going to be a big weekend in theaters with the opening of the new Star Wars movie, Rogue One this Friday (see titles to know for tie-ins). Nevertheless, a new film adaptation of a novel by Patricia Highsmith, A Kind of Murder, starring Patrick Wilson and Jessica Biel, also dares to debut, although it is set for release in just a limited number of theaters as well as on demand.

Reviewing it when it was featured at the Tribeca Film Festical in April, Variety was not enthusiastic, calling  it a “stylish adaptation,” but although the “thrills are mitigated by convoluted plotting and suspect character behavior, the film’s uniquely bleak twist on classic noir conventions is enlivening.”

Based Highsmith’s The Blunderer, 1954 available in a 2001 trade paperback from Norton.There are no tie-ins.

Also on Friday, Amazon debuts the second season of their well-received adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s classic 1954 SF title, The Man in the High Castle.

A tie-in was released last year, timed to the first season.

The Man in the High Castle (Tie-In)
HMH/ Mariner Books 
Trade Paperback 

Reflecting their major investment in the upcoming adaptation of
A Series of Unfortunate Events by Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, (HarperCollins, 1999 – 2006), Netflix is ramping up their promotional efforts. The third and probably not the final trailer was released last week.

The series begins streaming on January 13.

Expect to see more series from Netflix, which has is cutting back on movies in favor of original programming. As the company’s chief content officer noted at a recent conference, only one third of their customers watch movies.

No tie-ins have been announced.

Publishers are hurrying to get books out in the aftermath of the election, reports PW. At least three new titles are already in the works, each focused on how progressives can respond to the Trump presidency.

In a very fast turn-around, two will be released before Inauguration Day:

What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump’s America, ed. by Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians (Melville House) continues a tradition for the indie publisher. Melville also issued as similar work following the election of George W. Bush. The essay collection includes pieces from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Gloria Steinem, Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, and others. Edited by the publisher Dennis Johnson, it offers advice on what upset voters can do during the next four years.

The Trump Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Living Through What You Hoped Would Never Happen, Gene Stone (HC/Dey Street Books). Quoting the book’s editor, PW reports it is “aimed at people looking for answers and ways to mobilize following Trump’s victory. In the book, Stone gives a background on the different issues that are at stake over the next four years and provides lists of organizations and resources for promoting progressive action.”

Also in the works  is another collection of essays,  Radical Hope (PRH/Vintage), which the editor says are “socially conscious love letters in the tradition of ‘My Dungeon Shook,’ the first essay in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.” It does not yet have a release date but is expected in early 2017.

Already signed up are several political books set to make noise in 2017, as PW reports in their Spring Adult Announcements issue (Children’s Announcements are coming Jan 30).Their picks include:

Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom, Condoleezza Rice (Hachette/Twelve, May 2.)

How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016, P. J. O’Rourke (Atlantic Monthly Press, Mar. 7)

How Liberty Can Change the World, Gary E. Johnson (HC/Broadside, June 13)

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, Cass R. Sunstein (Princeton Univ., Mar. 28)

After weeks of seeming to snub his Nobel Prize, Bob Dylan won many over at Saturday night’s Nobel Banquet, without even attending. His letter of thanks, read by Azita Raji, the American ambassador to Sweden, was applauded by the NYT as “a warm, humble statement.” In it, he explains that his songs are,

“the vital center of almost everything I do … Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, ‘Are my songs literature?’ … So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.”

That answer was driven home by one of the Nobel Committee members who said at the event that Dylan is,

“a singer worthy of a place beside the Greek bards, beside Ovid, beside the Romantic visionaries, beside the kings and queens of the blues, beside the forgotten masters of brilliant standards. If people in the literary world groan one must remind them that the gods don’t write, they dance and they sing.”

Patti Smith, who, as The Rolling Stone reports, was invited to perform before the announcement of Dylan’s Nobel, chose to sing his 1962 protest song, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” She got tangled in the long and complicated lyrics, halting at one point to say “I’m sorry, I’m so nervous,” and received a round of applause. She recovered so well that she brought many in the audience to tears. 

It’s such a slow week in terms of publishing output that even James Patterson is releasing only one new title (technically, two, but one is a re-release of an earlier BookShots compilation). It’s a childrens book, written with frequent collaborator, and best selling childrens author in his own right (the Mr. Lemoncello series), Chris Grabenstein. Word of Mouse (Hachette/Jimmy Patterson; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample) arrives with strong pre-pub reviews, including a star from Booklist, which goes so far as to say blue mouse Isaiah, is destined to join the pantheon of mice in children’s lit, including Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Avi’s Poppy, and Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux.

The titles covered here, and a few other notable titles arriving next week, are listed with ordering information and alternate formats, on our downloadable spreadsheet, EarlyWord New Title Radar Week of Dec 12, 2016.

Peer Picks

No LibraryReads or Indie Next picks arrive this week, reflecting the slowdown of the publishing schedule as the year draws to a close.

Tie-ins

Two very different movies with book tie-ins open next week.

The Spanish language film Julieta is based on three linked short stories from Alice Munro’s collection Runaway (“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”).

Opening on Dec. 21st, the film is written and directed by Academy Award-winner Pedro Almodóvar and stars Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte along with Daniel Grao, Inma Cuesta, Darío Grandinetti, Michelle Jenner, and Rossy de Palma.

The Guardian gave it five stars, calling it “Almodóvar’s best film in a decade” and describing it as “a sumptuous and heartbreaking study of the viral nature of guilt, the mystery of memory and the often unendurable power of love.”

American critics were less impressed. The Hollywood Reporter calls it “A tie-me-downer of a pastiche” while Variety says it is “far from this reformed renegade’s strongest or most entertaining work.”

There is a tie-in: Julieta (Movie Tie-in Edition): Three Stories That Inspired the Movie, Alice Munro (PRH/Vintage; OverDrive Sample).

More Star Wars tie-ins arrive this week for Rogue One, debuting in theaters on Dec. 16.

Star Wars: Rogue One: The Ultimate Visual Guide is by Pablo Hidalgo (PRH/DK Children),  LucasFilm’s Creative Executive, which means, as described this week in an interview on NPR, his job is to “know absolutely everything there is to know about Star Wars. As the universe expands [and] to make sure everything stays accurate and in sync — a Star Wars story consultant, if you will.” 

Another overview of the film’s visual is The Art of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story by Josh Kushins (Abrams), which provides conception art from the film as well as essays on how the look of the film was developed. Storyboards, paintings, and designs for costumes, vehicles, and the new characters area also included.

Other Star War tie-ins arriving this week are for younger readers, a reference guide and a leveled reader:

Star Wars Rogue One Rebel Dossier, Jason Fry (Hachette/Disney Lucasfilm), for ages 8 to 12.

DK Readers L4: Star Wars: Rogue One: Secret Mission, Jason Fry (PRH/DK Children; also in trade pbk).

For our full list of upcoming adaptations, download our Books to Movies and TV and link to our listing of tie-ins.