Continuing our celebration of the many authors Jon Stewart has featured during his tenure as host of The Daily Show, we present the following interview with Studs Terkel for his book, And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey (Norton, 2005). He died 2 years after his interview, at age 96.

Terkel may have been, as he said, “deaf as a post,” but clearly his greatest joy was listening to ordinary people.

“If you like to read, we’ve got some news for you. The second half of 2015 is straight-up, stunningly chock-full of amazing books” proclaims the online literary magazine The Millions introducing the second part of their list of the year’s “Most Anticipated” upcoming books.

A handy overview of the season by literary insiders, the list contains over eighty titles, including the big children’s book of the season, The Marvels (Scholastic) by Brian Selznick which The Millions says “weaves together two seemingly unrelated stories told in two seemingly unrelated forms: a largely visual tale that begins with an 18th-century shipwreck, and a largely prose one that begins in London in 1990.”

The Millions follows up their big (mostly literary fiction) list with a Nonfiction list.

On June 18^th Pope Francis entered the climate change debate with his 184-page papal letter calling the issue a “principal challenge” of our age, placing the cause firmly at the door of human activity, and saying “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

His comments and call for action centered within a moral and religious context triggered headlines and OpEds.

The letter has been available free online, but on August 4th Melville House will release it in print under the title Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality: On Care for Our Common Home.

The independent publisher has a history of making special reports such as this more widely accessible in book form. Last December they published The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture, which sold out its initial 50,000 print run in a single day.

The publication will arrive just before the  Pope come to the US at the end of September for a three-stop whirlwind tour.

Our chat has ended, you can read the transcript below.

For information on our upcoming chats, as well as an archive of previous chats, link here.

This is getting confusing. Earlier this week,  Harper Lee’s lawyer Tonya Carter hinted in an article in the Wall Street Journal that there may be yet another unpublished Harper Lee manuscript in the safe deposit box where Go Set A Watchman was discovered, and that it may be “an earlier draft of Watchman, or of Mockingbird, or even, as early correspondence indicates it might be, a third book bridging the two.”

Back in March, the New Yorker ran a story about yet another unpublished book by Lee, a crime novel titled The Reverend. Based on a true story, it is about a minister who took out insurance policies on several family members, only for them to die mysteriously. Four pages of it exist, pages that Lee sent to the lawyer who worked on the case and shared his files with her.

CNN now reports that there may have been a full manuscript for the book. Harper Lee’s long-time friend, Wayne Flynt says he was told by Lee’s sister Louise Conner that she read the completed manuscript and found it “far superior to” To Kill a Mockingbird or to the true crime story Harper Lee helped Truman Capote research, In Cold Blood.

Flynt doesn’t know if it still exists, however, saying to CNN, “Could [Lee] have given a copy of the manuscript to somebody, and somebody’s been sitting on it all these years, and will the publication of Go Set a Watchman drag it out of wherever it is? I don’t know. Will it be found as Tonja Carter, the lawyer, goes through more and more of [Lee’s older sister] Alice’s papers?”

It’s becoming more and more likely that Go Set a Watchman will not be Lee’s final published book.

Today we continue our look at Jon Stewart’s coverage of books on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. As we noted earlier, after 9/11, Stewart began to feature authors on several topics he became known for, almost as if he were educating himself along with his audience.

One of this favorite targets has been tv news coverage. At the end of 2002, he interviewed Ann Coulter for the first (and only) time about her book Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right. Clearly in disagreement with her points (including that there “are several bad Republicans, but there are no good Democrats”), he ended by saying that talking to her felt  “like when I see something on National Geographic. I don’t understand, but I like to learn.”

Time warp note: Coulter mentions a LexisNexis search the way we would a Google search today.

The following year, he continued exploring the topic with several other authors, from conservatives Dick Morris (Off with Their Heads: Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media & Business) and Bernard Goldberg (Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite) to Al Franken (Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right) and journalism professoe, Eric Alterman (What Liberal Media? The Truth About Biaxs and the News).

With the final Hunger Games film arriving in November, there’s strong interest in what star Jennifer Lawrence will turn to next. Announced today, she has signed to play the lead in the film adaptation of The Rosie Project (S&S), the debut novel by Australian Graeme Simsion that became a best seller here in 2013.

Don’t hold your breath. The star, who will seen this Christmas as the star of the movie Joy directed by David O. Russell (not based on a book), has a few other projects in the works. She is currently filming Marvel’s superhero movie X-Men: Apocalypse. She is also set for Passenger, a Sony sci-fi love story from an original script which also stars Chris Pratt and is listed for release in 2016. She has signed to star as war photographer Lynsey Addario in It’s What I Do, based on Addario’s memoir (Penguin Press, 2015) a Warner Bros. movie to be directed by Steven Spielberg (who also has several projects in the works, so who knows when his schedule will mesh with hers).

In May of this year, The Hollywood Reporter said she was still planning to produce two movies;

The Rules of Inheritance based on the book by Claire Bidwell Smith (Penguin Group, 2012)

The Glass Castle based on the memoir by Jeannette Walls (S&S/Scribner, 2005)

Earlier, it was announced that she would star in director Gary Ross’s new film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden for Universal.  According to IMDb, that project is still in the works.

Movie scheduling can be challenging. No wonder, as The Hollywood Reporter puts it, “The [Rosie] project is now on a fast-track search for a director,” because “Sony is clearly intent on staying in the business of Lawrence” and wants to be in front of the other studios with claims on her.

Coming October 16, Goosebumps, the movie, in 3-D, of course.

It’s less an adaptation of the Goosebumps books and more a movie in which they are referenced. Jack Black plays R.L. Stine, the books’ creator, who keeps the ghosts and monsters from each book locked in the manuscripts stored in his library. A kid new to the neighborhood discovers them and before you can say “Don’t open them, Pandora,” sets them loose.

The tie-ins, coming from Scholastic, are based on the movie (see our listing of  Upcoming — Tie-ins).

Breaking through the chatter of Watchman, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s history of America and racism is moving up the Amazon charts and collecting long holds queues.

As we reported last week, Between the World and Me (RH/Spiegel & Grau; OverDrive Sample) is getting media attention. Holds are well over 3:1 in many locations and at least one library has ordered extra copies to support book discussion groups.

Expect demand to continue, building on Coates’s appearance on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday and an upcoming appearance on the Daily Show next week.

Not only a touchstone book of the moment, it is a title that is likely to be a core work in the subject for years to come. Blurbed by Toni Morrision as “required reading,” you will not lose out by adding copies.

Coates’s first book, a memoir entitled The Beautiful Struggle (RH/Spiegel & Grau; OverDrive Sample, 2009), is also rising on Amazon and holds are growing.

The first trailer has been released for the movie Brooklyn, based on the 2009 novel by Colm Toibin.

Considered an Oscar contender after it was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival, it is set for release on Nov. 6., starring Saoirse Ronan and directed by John Crowley. The screenplay is by Nick Hornby.

Tie-in:

According the the Sunday Times of London, the film version of The Girl on the Train will be set in upstate New York

The book, set in London, was inspired by author Paula Hawkins’ own commute. She tells the Times, “I’m not really concerned about the repositioning as I think it is the type of story that could take place in any commuter town.” She adds that she will not be work on the movie, saying, “I don’t want to be involved … let them get on with it.”

British actress Emily Blunt is in talks to star in the DreamWorks film directed by The Help’s Tate Taylor. There’s no word on whether she will adopt an American accent for the role. No word yet on when it will begin filming, Blunt is currently at work on another movie, The Huntsman, scheduled for release in April, 2016.

With Comedy Central’s The Daily Show on hiatus until next week and Jon Stewart’s impending exodus from the show coming on August 6, we’ve been looking at some of  the many authors Stewart has featured on the show.

Stewart often features authors he disagrees with, but sometimes they find common ground.

Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan appeared on th show in December of 2001 for her book about Ronald Reagan When Character Was King (Viking), Stewart disagreed  with her assessment of Reagan (“I still have my McGovern button”), but did not argue with her sense that, after 9/11, Geroge W. Bush showed signs go going from a dilletant to a leader.

In 2008. when she returned to talk about her book, Patriotic Grace: What It Is And Why We Need It Now, (HarperCollins) both were disillusioned with Bush. About the economic crisis, Noonan said the President was acting “more like a commentator on the events, rather than a leader of the events.” Stewart responded, “He seems like … it’s his senior year of college, it’s the last three months, and he’s been playing ultimate frisbee all week and they throw him out there and he’s just like, ‘What are we doing today? Economic collapse? What the hell, I”m out of here in three months, who cares.’ ”

Stewart ended by saying he is very upset by the lack of real discourse on important issues and asks for reassurance, Noonan expresses the hope that “This economic crisis will break this thing out of the stupid, small narrow rut we are in and maybe each of these men [Barack Obama and John MCCain who were running for President at the time] will come forward and be their best selves and make this campaign serious.”

One of the still lingering concerns about the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman is whether the aging author was manipulated into agreeing to it, particularly since the discovery of the manuscript and decision to publish it came after the death of Lee’s sister and caretaker, Alice Lee.

But there is a completely opposite theory, that Alice Lee’s death allowed her younger sister to finally do as she pleases.

Interviewing Charles Shields, author of author of the biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, Neely Tucker of the Washington Post asks if Shields sees merits in the theory. He replies, “I agree entirely. Unfortunately, Ms. Carter [Lee’s lawyer] is becoming the fall person and I think she is taking direction from a woman who is quite up in her years and may want a little fillip in her years and have the little extra perk of being on the map again … I have to think that there’s a certain amount of joy in at last publishing the book Alice would never let her publish.”

The interview, which was shown on on C-Span2″s BookTV over the weekend is available online (the section referred to above begins at time stamp 42:00).

Interviewer Tucker has had his own experience trying to learn more about the Lee sisters. He wrote  “To shill a mockingbird: How a manuscript’s discovery became Harper Lee’s ‘new’ novel.”

Israel’s former ambassador to the United States and current Knesset member, Michael B. Oren’s memoir,  Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide (Random House; Random House Audio; OverDrive Sample) is on the cover of this week’s NYT Sunday Book Review and is moving up Amazon’s sales rankings.

Holds are increasing as well. Several libraries that bought it lightly adding copies.

The book, a behind-the-scenes account of serving as ambassador and the fraught relationship between President Obama and Israel’s Prime Minister, is getting widely divergent responses.

Writing for the New York Post, John Podhoretz, editor of the conservative magazine Commentary, says “I’m not sure that in the annals of diplomatic history there’s ever been anything quite like this astonishing account of Oren’s four years (2009-2013) as Israel’s ambassador in Washington.”

While calling it “remarkably frank,” Jacob Heilbrunn, reviewing for this week’s NYT Sunday Book Review says “it’s difficult to avoid the impression that Oren continues to carry a large chip on his shoulder … [he is] stuck in a time warp.”

Looking for another way to get oriented to popular books or ideas for book discussion? Consider dipping into Slate’s Audio Book Club, a monthly podcast of lengthy conversations about newish titles.

If book discussion groups were an English Lit. class they would be something like Slate’s podcast. Three interested and invested readers – armed with copious notes – gather to discuss a book in full detail, spoilers included. Participants tend to be picky, and even with books they enjoy are never shy about pointing out weaknesses.

Sometimes the conversation also veers into larger topics. This month the three reviewers took up the subject of genre as they discussed Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (RH/Knopf; RH & BOT Audio; Thorndike; OverDrive Sample).

For all those increasingly confused and frustrated by genre borders it makes for interesting listening. The Slate readers conclude that Mandel intentionally plays around with genre, winking at conventions as she does so (despite her contention that she writes literary fiction).

Previous podcasts have covered All the Light We Cannot See, H is for Hawk, and Girl on the Train.

Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman is up next, in August.

(Note: it is called an audio book club because the conversations are delivered via podcast. They do not discuss audiobooks).