EarlyWord

If anyone has a crack at making a book of aphorisms a bestseller, it’s economist and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Best known for his long-running business bestseller The Black Swan, he’s back with The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms. Among his  incisive pronouncements:

• “You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.”
• “You remember e-mails you sent that were not answered better than e-mails you did not answer.”

Janet Maslin in New York Times sums up the book’s appeal:

Mr. Taleb is so calculatedly abrasive in this smart, attention-getting little book that he achieves his main objective. “A good maxim,” he writes, “allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.”

Orders are modest at libraries we checked, but given Taleb’s track record, this could be one to watch.

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms Nassim Nicholas Taleb Retail Price: $18.00 Hardcover: 128 pages Publisher: Random House – (2010-11-30) ISBN / EAN: 1400069971 / 9781400069972

Other Notable Nonfiction On Sale Next Week

The Essential American by Jackie Gingrich Cushman (Regnery) is a collection of 25 documents and speeches that Newt Gingrich’s daughter considers critical to understanding United States history. She recently appeared on Fox News to promote it.

Make Miracles in Forty Days: Turning What You Have into What You Want by Melody Beattie (Simon & Schuster) outlines a program of self improvement via gratitude, surrender, and connecting with our essential power.

A Voice from Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth by Louis Auchincloss (Houghton Mifflin) explores the late author’s connection with New York City. Kirkus says, “the author’s prose is lapidary, graceful and eminently readable. In a world of postmodern letters, Auchincloss draws a curtain on a premodern, Whartonesque way of life.”

Next week, a new window opens on the Julia Child legend, with As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, edited by Joan Reardon, a collection of Child’s correspondence with her close friend and unofficial literary agent. The two women first encountered each other in 1952, when DeVoto responded to Child’s fan letter to her husband after reading an article he wrote about knives, and became soul mates as Childs was writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking (DeVoto is portrayed in the film Julie & Julia by Deborah Rush).

Entertainment Weekly gives it a “B”: “While their conversations can drag a bit — weather, health, and politics get too much space — the book is an absorbing portrait of an unexpected friendship.”

So far, library holds are in line with modest orders at libraries we checked – but that may change as more media arrives.

As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 432 pages Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – (2010-12-01) ISBN / EAN: 0547417713 / 9780547417714

Usual Suspects On Sale Next Week

Rescue: A Novel by Anita Shreve (Little, Brown) follows a paramedic worried that his daughter is becoming an alcoholic, like his troubled ex-wife. Library Journal says, “a solid read, though not the author’s most compelling or dazzling work. Excellent fodder for book clubs; there is plenty to discuss in the protagonists’ motivations, decisions, and characterization.”

Of Love and Evil by Anne Rice (Knopf) is the second entry in the supernatural Songs of the Seraphim series, involving a divine vigilante dispensing justice in Renaissance Italy. Kirkus says, “The plot’s intense; equally so are Rice’s meditations, while never breaking the seamlessness of the story line, on the nature of love and evil. A bullet of a book—and an absolute bull’s eye.”

Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell (Putnam) is the 18th novel with detective Kay Scarpetta.

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore (Twelve) finds a literary investigator caught up in a murder case. Library Journal says, “constant switching of narrators can be jarring, but Moore does an excellent job of making his characters and settings feel real, using his thorough knowledge of the Holmes stories to good effect.”

Clouds Without Rain by P. L. Gaus (Plume) is an Indie Next Pick for December that won bookseller praise for its slowly unravelling mystery set in Amish country, “with a good many surprises along the way. Another excellent entry in this series.”

UPDATE: We’ve received several correct answers — these are all based on movies. However, we are looking for a more SPECIFIC answer!

HINT: These movies based on books are tied together by a person who will receive a major award on Jan. 22

To take your mind off all you have to do between now and tomorrow’s feast, we offer the following quiz.

Below is a list of books. If they were in a display, what would tie them together (other than the obvious)?

Bonus question: Why would this display be particularly relevant right now?

Please try to answer without the aid of reference books or Google (in this case, we DON’T want you to cite a source!)

Fiction

• Austen, Jane, Emma
• Chabon, Michael, Wonder Boys
• Condon, Richard, The Manchurian Candidate
• Connelly, Joe, Bringing Out the Dead
• Cunningham, Michael, The Hours
• Erian, Alicia, Towelhead
• Foer, Jonathan Safran, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• Goldsmith, Olivia, The First Wives Club
• Gregory, Philippa,  The Other Boleyn Girl
• Grisham, John, The Firm
• Heller, Zoe,  Notes on a Scandal
• Irving, Washington,  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• Kureishi, Hanif,  Venus
• Larsson, Stieg,  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Levin, Ira,  The Stepford Wives
• McCarthy, Cormac,  Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men
• Portis, Charles, True Grit
• Price, Richard,  Freedomland
• Russo, Robert,  Nobody’s Fool
• Sinclair, Upton, Oil!
• Tidyman, Ernest, Shaft
• Yates, Richard,  Revolutionary Road

Nonfiction

• Bayley, John, Elegy for Iris
• Goldsmith, Barbara,  Little Gloria… Happy at Last
• Gordon, Barbara,  I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can
• Harr, Jonathan, A Civil Action
• Lewis, Michael,  Moneyball
• McCourt, Frank, Angela’s Ashes
• Mezrich, Ben,  Accidental Billionaires
• Powell, Julie,  Julie & Julia
• Rawicz, Slavomir,  The Long Walk
• Schiff, Stacy,  Cleopatra
• Waizkin, Fred, Searching for Bobby Fischer

Childrens

• Dahl, Roald, Fantastic Mr. Fox
• Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events

Coming March 11th is an animated feature based on Berkeley Brethed’s Mars Needs Moms.

Below is the trailer (that’s Joan Cusack’s voice as Mom).

…………………………

Official Web Site: Disney.com/MarsNeedsMoms

Philomel is releasing a tie-in edition in January:

Mars Needs Moms! Berkeley Breathed Retail Price: $16.99 Hardcover: 40 pages Publisher: Philomel – (2010-01-06) ISBN / EAN: 039924736X / 9780399247361

NPR’s Fresh Air veered into practical territory last night, interviewing the author of a book on caring for aging dogs. The book zoomed up Amazon’s sales rankings to #39.

Good Old Dog: Expert Advice for Keeping Your Aging Dog Happy, Healthy, and Comfortable Faculty of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts Univer Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – (2010-11-22) ISBN / EAN: 0547232829 / 9780547232829

Based on the legal thriller by Michael Connelly, The Lincoln Lawyer, starring Matthew McConaughey, is scheduled to arrive in theaters on March 18. Below is the first trailer.

Director: Brad Furman
Starring:

Matthew McConaughey … Mickey Haller
Ryan Phillippe … Louis Roulet
John Leguizamo
Marisa Tomei
Michaela Conlin … Heidi Sobel
William H. Macy

Official Web site: TheLincolnLawyerMovie.com

Tie-in:

British actor Daniel Day-Lewis has played several fictional American figures in the movies. He is about to take on an iconic real-life American figure, as the star of the movie Lincoln, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. Steven Spielberg will direct. The screenplay is being writtern by Tony Kushner (Angels in America). Filming is expected to begin in the fall of 2011, with release sometime in late 2012.

In other Lincoln-movies-based-on-books news, casting has begun for Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, produced by Tim Burton and directed by Timur Bekmambetov. The movie will begin shooting in New Orleans in March.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln Doris Kearns Goodwin Retail Price: $21.00 Paperback: 944 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster – (2006-09-26) ISBN / EAN: 0743270754 / 9780743270755

Here’s an idea for a book display — “Guilty Pleasures.” NPR beat us to it, with their “My Guilty Pleasure” series, in which writers talk about “the books they love but are embarrassed to be seen reading.”

Last night, Lionel Shriver (author of National Book Award finalist, So Much for That) said her guilty pleasure is an erotic historical novel, As Meat Loves Salt, by Maria McCann, sending the book to #62 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

As Meat Loves Salt (Harvest Original) Maria McCann Retail Price: $30.95 Paperback: 565 pages Publisher: Harvest Books – (2003-01-07) ISBN / EAN: 015601226X / 9780156012263

Martin Scorsese’s documentary about Fran Lebowitz, Public Speaking premiered on HBO last night (it will continue to be aired on HBO and is also available on HBO On Demand).

The tie-in, a reissue of the 1994 Fran Lebowitz Reader (which in turn is a reissue of her two books, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies) rose to #240 on Amazon sales rankings as a result.

The Fran Lebowitz Reader Fran Lebowitz Retail Price: $15.95 Paperback: 352 pages Publisher: Vintage – (1994-11-08) ISBN / EAN: 0679761802 / 9780679761808

One of EarlyWord‘s most clicked-on stories from the past year is NPR’s Best Cookbooks of 2009, so we’re happy to announce NPR’s Best Cookbooks of 2010 is here.

Even though you can Google nearly any recipe you want, T. Susan Chang tells Liane Hanson on Weekend Edition Saturday that this was an amazing year for cookbooks. In putting together this list, she stuck to the books that everyday cooks would want to use. The common thread of these books is that the “authors take the trouble to tell you everything you need to know to do the recipes. The short, cute cookbooks with almost nothing on the page, those are the ones to look out for, because they will double cross you.”

Curiously, the book that received the largest Amazon sales bump is The Food Substitutions Bible, from Canadian publisher, Robert Rose (distributed by Firefly). It rose to #53 from a lowly #18,937, proving that you can’t Google everything.

The Food Substitutions Bible: More Than 6,500 Substitutions for Ingredients, Equipment and Techniques David Joachim Retail Price: $24.95 Paperback: 696 pages Publisher: Robert Rose – (2010-09-02) ISBN / EAN: 0778802450 / 9780778802457

Above: The currently sought-after edition and two earlier versions of Twain’s Autobiography

Wondering why you haven’t received your orders of the Mark Twain autobiography?

The New York Times reports that the publisher, the University of California Press, did not anticipate the demand. The same is true for booksellers, who are discovering, to their regret, that it has become the desired gift book of the season.

According to the NYT, the original print run was 50,000 (which probably seemed aggressive at the time). The U. of Cal. Press uses a small printer in Michigan that has been working overtime to produce 30,000 copies a week and has engaged larger trucks so they can transport more copies in each shipment to warehouses.

In libraries, holds are growing and outpacing the other surprise hits of the season. They are slightly higher than Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra and the Booker winner, The Finkler Question, but not quite as high as Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken.

Part of the allure of the book is that the autobiography was supposedly held back for 100 years. But the director of the Mark Twain Project, Robert Hirst, told NPR recently,

In spite of these efforts at suppression, however, most of the autobiography has surfaced over the years, and the supposed “embargo” has only led to increased interest in and sales for the book.

Hirst also says that the reader “might find [this edition] a bit of a slow read at times” because  it,

…includes the numerous false starts Twain made before he settled into the dictation….It is heavy slogging. But I would recommend what Mark Twain would recommend: If you’re bored with it, SKIP.

The good news: you published the winner of the National Book Award in fiction.

The bad news: you only printed 8,000 copies

Publisher Bruce McPherson tells the Wall Street Journal that another printing of Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule should be available by Dec. 3.

So far, however, library demand is not going through the roof. At four large library systems we checked, the number of holds for this year’s Booker winner, The Finkler Question, is seven times those for Lord of Misrule.

We’re willing to bet that this is the first National Book Award winner to be reviewed by The Daily Racing Form.

Congrats to Gordon’s home town public library, Kalamazoo P.L. They nabbed the author for a program on Dec. 3rd.

The film adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s novel, Barney’s Version, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, will be released in a limited number of theaters on Dec. 24, to qualify it for the Oscars. It will open across the country on January 14.

The first full-length trailer has hit the web (we showed you an earlier version back in August).

——–
Director: Richard J. Lewis

Starring:

Dustin Hoffman … Izzy
Rosamund Pike … Miriam
Paul Giamatti … Barney Panofsky
Minnie Driver … Mrs. P
Rachelle Lefevre … Clara

Official Website: BarneysVersion.com

Barney’s Version (Vintage International) Mordecai Richler Retail Price: $15.95 Paperback: 432 pages Publisher: Vintage – (2010-05-04) ISBN / EAN: 030747688X / 9780307476883

Sarah Palin hits the road next week to promote her new compilation on American virtues, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag (Harper). Her tour starts on November 23 in Phoenix, Arizona at a Barnes & Noble at 6 p.m., according to the Daily Beast, which notes that she will appear on the busiest Christmas shopping days of the year, including Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.

Most libraries we checked had orders in line with substanial reserves.

America by Heart : Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag Sarah Palin Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Harper – (2010-11-23) ISBN / EAN: 0062010964 / 9780062010964

Other Notable Nonfiction on Sale Next Week

Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris (Random House) is the third volume in the landmark biography of Teddy Roosevelt, chronicling his return to politics after his presidency. Kirkus declares “Roosevelt never fails to fascinate, and Morris provides a highly readable, strong finish to his decades-long marathon.” It’s currently rising on Amazon (now at #143).

Whiter Shades of Pale: The Stuff White People Like, Coast to Coast, from Seattle’s Sweaters to Maine’s Microbrews by Christian Lander (Random House Trade Paperbacks) is the followup to the humor hit Stuff White People Like. Although most libraries ordered the first book, several we checked haven’t ordered this one (unlike its predecessor, it wasn’t reviewed prepub).

Next week’s media darling is shaping up to be An Object of Beauty, the third novel by actor, author and art collector Steve Martin, which follows an ambitious young woman as she cuts a swath through the New York art world.

Entertainment Weekly gives it an A-:

A dramedy of manners that doubles as an immersion course in the rarefied world of high-end art…. It takes a certain nimbleness to play the dual roles of proxy art-history professor and compelling storyteller without falling off the literary balance beam. Martin, wry, wise, and keenly observant, rarely misses a step.

The New York Times just ran a profile of Martin, noting that he received “a little pushback from Sotheby’s, which plays a small but slightly controversial role in the book, when one of the characters, a Sotheby’s employee, attempts a bidding scheme there. The people at the auction house were not pleased.” It just broke into the Top 100 on Amazon and is rising.

Libraries we checked had orders in line with substantial reserves.

An Object of Beauty Steve Martin Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Grand Central Publishing – (2010-11-23) ISBN / EAN: 0446573647 / 9780446573641

Ususal Suspects on Sale Next Week

The Athena Project by Brad Thor (Atria) is the debut of a new thrille rseries about an elite all-female counter-terrorism unit. Deadline reports that Warner Bros. just picked up the film rights.

The Emperor’s Tomb (Cotton Malone Series #6) by Steve Berry finds ex-federal agent Cotton Malone and old heartthrob Cassiopeia Vitt “on a dangerous mission to retrieve a priceless Chinese lamp from the third century B.C.E. in Berry’s rousing fifth thriller…. A goose-pimpleraising showdown in a remote monastery–is worth the wait.”

Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card (Simon Pulse) gets a starred review from Booklist: “Card’s latest title has much in common with his Ender Wiggins books: precocious teens with complementary special talents, callously manipulative government authorities, endlessly creative worlds, and Card’s refusal to dumb down a plot for a young audience.”

Night Whispers by Erin Hunter (HarperCollins) is book three in the feline fantasy Warriors: Omen of the Stars series.