EarlyWord

Fans are mourning the end of Downton Abbey this Sunday, March 6. The series has encouraged many to look into the history of the time and has made best sellers of tie-ins, including the latest,  Downton Abbey – A Celebration: The Official Companion to All Six Seasons by Jessica Fellowes, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press. 11/10/15) as well as a book about one of the series’ inspirations, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle by The Countess of Carnarvon, (PRH/Broadway).

Solace may be found in news that those associated with Downton will live on in other shows.

Showrunner Julian Fellowes follows up with an adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne starring Ian McShane in the title role, Alison Brie and Tom Hollander, along with Cressida Bonas making her TV debut (Prince Harry’s ex-girlfriend, she brings an added element of media excitement). It begins in the U.K. this Sunday, but there is no news on when it will appear in the U.S.

Fellowes is also working an NBC series The Gilded Age, switching locales to New York in the late 19th century. Set to air later this year, Fellowes tells Parade magazine that he was attracted to the time and place, because, “you find this extraordinary renaissance period of artistic patronage and moneymaking, and a sort of development of a European aristocratic way of life, but in an American style … The Old World was dying, and America was just getting ready to fly!”

He will also publish a serialized novel Belgravia, beginning in April. According to Deadline, it is “Modeled along the lines of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers” and will be delivered weekly in text and audio versions. A hardcover of the entire series, as well as an audio, is set for July.

Favorite actors from the series also have new projects on their agendas. The New York Post offers a rundown, which includes the following;

Hugh Bonneville (Lord Robert Crawley) joins Gillian Anderson in the film The Viceroy’s House where he will play Lord Mountbatten (with Anderson as Lady Mountbatten).

Joanne Froggatt (Anna Bates) changes her goody two shoes and follows the footsteps of a serial killer. She will star in the ITV production Dark Angel, a miniseries about Victorian serial killer Mary Ann Cotton,  playing the lead.  It will air on PBS Masterpiece some time this year..

Penelope Wilton (Isabel Crawley) got nabbed by Steven Spielberg for his adaption of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. She will co-star with Rebecca Hall and Bill Hader this July. As the New York Post puts it, “If the first director who hires you after Downton is Steven Spielberg, you can rest on your laurels.”

On its first week of publication, PAX by Sara Pennypacker, illustrated by Jon Klassen (Harper/Balzer + Bray; OverDrive Sample) hit the NYT‘s Children’s Middle Grade Hardcover best seller list at #2 and shot up to #1 the week after, where it has ruled for the last four weeks.

About a twelve-year-old boy who is separated from his pet fox named Pax, it has received media attention from NPR, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and SLJ.

Word has reached Hollywood. It has been acquired by Sidney Kimmel Entertainment in a bidding war for film rights. Deadline reports it will be produced as a live-action feature.

Pat Conroy, who once told CBS News that “I always thought that if I told the story of the South, I would tell the history of the whole world,” has died of pancreatic cancer.

Conroy wrote The Prince of Tides, which dominated best seller lists for close to a year, The Great Santini, Beach Music, South of Broad, and several other novels and works of nonfiction, several of which were adapted into successful films.

Upon his death on March 4, the NYT wrote that Conroy’s books,

“captivated readers with their openly emotional tone, lurid family stories and lush prose that often reached its most affecting, lyrical pitch when evoking the wetlands around Beaufort, S.C.”

The paper further reports that Conroy was at work “on both a novel and a memoir about living in Atlanta in the 1970s” when he died. There is no news on whether or not those works will be completed. When he announced his condition on Facebook a few weeks ago, Conroy said “I owe you a novel and I intend to deliver it.”

The USA Today obituary features an illustrated tribute with clips from the films adapted from Conroy’s novels. The Washington Post provides segments of Conroy talking about his career, readers, and luck as a writer. The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly, and NPR all offer tributes as well.

Based on James Patterson’s 2011 novel for kids, the movie Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life is set for release on October 7th, 2016. The first trailer has just been released.

Director Steve Carr (Paul Blart: Mall Cop), comparing this movie to his earlier family films (Daddy Day Care, Dr. Dolittle 2), tells Entertainment Weekly, “This book came along and I found it’s a better version of the movies that I’ve been making,”

Tie-ins:
Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life
Chris Tebbetts, James Patterson, Laura Park
Hachette/jimmy patterson; Hardcover, August 23, 2016

Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life
Chris Tebbetts, James Patterson, Laura Park
Hachette/jimmy patterson; Paperback; August 23, 2016

Holds queues are growing quickly for the debut novel The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney (HC/Ecco; HarperAudio), just announced as the #1 Indie Next pick for April.

Entertainment Weekly calls it “one of 2016’s most talked-about debuts,” borne out by its appearance on several other most anticipated lists for the spring. Librarians are also fan, it delighted GalleyChatters and is a LibraryReads pick for March.

Jennifer Oleinik, University Book Store, Seattle, WA offers this summary:

“Welcome to the strikingly dysfunctional Plumb family: four siblings connected by little more than ‘The Nest,’ a joint trust fund that each has earmarked to support their unrealistic lifestyles. When Leo, the older brother and the center of the Plumb family universe, injures himself and a 19-year-old waitress in a scandalous car accident and endangers ‘The Nest’ just months before the funds are to be made available, the siblings come together for damage control. Sweeney artfully touches on each family member as they scramble to save the precarious lives they have built for themselves, bringing light and humor to her characters’ various plights. Funny, thoughtful, and filled with unique and complex characters — this book is a must-read.”

The memoir Lab Girl, Hope Jahren (PRH/Knopf; OverDrive Sample) also makes the list.
It too is picking up attention, with the WSJ selecting it as one of the six “The Hottest Spring Nonfiction Books.”

Pete Mulvihill, Green Apple Books, San Francisco, CA says that:

“This book has it all: nature, love, science, drama, heartbreak, joy, and plenty of dirt. Not since Cheryl Strayed’s Wild have I read such a rich and compelling nonfiction narrative. Lab Girl is the story of Jahren’s life in science, and her writing on the wonders of nature will renew your sense of awe. But more than that, it is an exploration of friendship, mental illness, parenthood, and the messiness of life. The only flaw — these pages fly by too quickly, leaving you wondering what you could possibly read next that will be just as good.”

The full list of bookseller picks, which is notably wide ranging this month, includes titles from big name authors (Augusten Burroughs, Tracy Chevalier, and Lisa Scottoline), another debut, and more nonfiction. Featured as well are two more titles that are also March LibraryReads picks, The Summer Before the War and Jane Steele.

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series moves closer to the big screen with Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey set to star. Entertainment Weekly reports confirmation of long-standing rumors that Elba will play the gunslinger, joining.McConaughey as the man in black.

Efforts to adapt the series date back to at least 2007.  King told EW he is “delighted” and “surprised” that the series, which spans eight novels and flows into short stories and comics, is finally getting adapted:

“The thing is, it’s been a looong trip from the books to the film …When you think about it, I started these stories as a senior in college, sitting in a little sh-tty cabin beside the river in Maine, and finally this thing is actually in pre-production now.”

With all those titles to choose from, King says the film will not start at the beginning with 1982’s The Gunslinger (PRH/NAL, trade pbk. 2003)

“[The movie] starts in media res, in the middle of the story instead of at the beginning, which may upset some of the fans a little bit, but they’ll get behind it, because it is the story.”

EW speculates on which book might take center stage, guessing it could be “The Waste Lands  (PRH/NAL, trade pbk 2003.), the third book in the series, which is where much of King’s broader tower mythology began to coalesce.”

As recently as Oscar Sunday, Elba had been rumored to be a key contender for the next 007. While that could still happen, it is certain that Elba has his next hero character all lined up.

Sony plans to release the movie on Jan. 13, 2017 (UPDATE: Release moved to 2/17/17).

This month Costco’s book buyer, Pennie Clark Ianniciello, calls attention to a sleeper hit and its follow-up.

The influential Costco buyer is well known for bringing new attention to titles re-released in trade paperback, such as The Art Forger, The Orchardist and Beautiful Ruins, resulting in each book rising or making its debut on best seller lists.

This month she mixes it up, going back in time to a book first reviewed in the trades in 2009, Kathleen Grissom’s debut, The Kitchen House (S&S/Touchstone; OverDrive Sample), also setting up the author’s forthcoming second novel.

The Kitchen House is likely already in most collections. While the sleeper languished at first it became a huge book club hit based on the PR efforts of Grissom. So remarkable was its rise that in 2012 The Wall Street Journal ran a story on its rags to riches turn around (link may require a subscription).

Now Pennie is pushing it again, saying the antebellum story of a white indentured servant
has her “ready for Grissom’s follow-up novel,”
Glory Over Everything: Beyond the Kitchen House,(S&S; S&S Audio; April).

The Kitchen House is still in demand with
active holds at many libraries we checked and Glory Over Everything already showing
solid demand.

The woman who brought the term “full frontal snogging” into US parlance has died at 63. British author Louise Rennison, wrote several hilarious YA novels, including Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging (HarperTeen, 1999). The first in The Confessions of Georgia Nicholson series, it was adapted as a movie in 2008.

A tribute in the Guardian attests, “Rennison understood the unique, farcical horror of being a teenage girl. Throughout the books, Georgia’s insecurities are detailed in all their vivid, obsessional power.” Entertainment Weekly calls her teenage protagonist Georgia Nicholson. “spunky, somewhat self-absorbed, and absolutely hysterical.” The Telegraph says she “taught a generation of teenage girls to see the funny side of life.”

The cause of death had not been reported.

On Fresh Air yesterday, Nancy Jo Sales talked about her new book American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, (PRH/Knopf; BOT and RH Audio; OverDrive Sample).

The book has received earlier media attention, including a Katie Couric special on ABC’s Nightline. As a result, was already fairly high on Amazon’s sales rankings, but Fresh Air kicked it up to #5.

Holds are strong on modest ordering. As we wrote earlier, this was a drop-in title and therefore was released too late for review coverage from the prepub media.

Debuting last night on HBO, a documentary titled, Mavis! about Staple Singers’s lead, Mavis Staples.

The film is getting kudos from many sources, including the Daily Beast, which proclaims, “50 Years Before Beyoncé’s Black Lives Matter Anthem, Mavis Staples Led a Movement.”

Staples, released a new album, Livin’ on a High Note last month.

The author of the following book on the group is featured on the documentary.

I’ll Take You There:
Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the Music That Shaped the Civil Rights Era, Greg Kot

Trade Paperback

The political clout of a large and growing segment of women voters is analyzed by Rebecca Traister in All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (Simon & Schuster).

A writer at large for New York Magazine and a noted figure in journalism and historical/political research related to women, Traiter’s newest book is getting a wide coverage. The author appears today on CBS This Morning:

This book has been heavily anticipated. In 2014, Traister appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition, when it was still  in progress, giving an overview of her findings.

Thus far, library orders are very light but media attention may fuel demand .

Ironically, for a year in which most of the Oscar categories were dominated by literary adaptations, the Best Picture winner, Spotlight was one of the few not based on a novel. The film does, however, have a book connection. Based on the story of the Boston Globe‘s Pulitzer Prize winning investigation into charges of sexual abuse in the Catholic church, the articles were published in book form in 2003 and re-released as a tie-in, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight, The Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe, (Hachette/Back Bay).

If the Oscars had a category for Book That Benefited Most from Film Adaptation, the winner this year would be Michael Punke’s The Revenant (Macmillian/Picador), which propelled the 2002 novel from obscurity to best seller lists. It also won in three official Oscar categories, Best Actor, Director and Cinematography.

The author, while able to attend the Oscars, is prohibited by his day job from appearing on the red carpet, the New York Times reports in a profile. As the United States ambassador to the World Trade Organization, he is not allowed to do any publicity for the movie, or even his own book.

Also benefiting from its film incarnation is Andy Weir’s The Martian (PRH/Broadway), which made its own unlikely journey from a series Weir offered for free on his web site to a best selling book, with the film adaptation bringing it to even wider readership. Despite its being nominated in six categories, the Academy passed over the movie, denying it a single win.

Both movies got special attention from Oscars host Chris Rock in the show’s opening parody.