National Book Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Robert Stone died on Saturday at his home in Key West. He was 77.

The New York Times, in addition to an obituary, publishes an appreciation of his work by Michiko Kakutani, who says he was “one of the few writers to capture the apocalyptic madness of America in the 1960s and ‘70s.”

The books she finds particularly noteworthy are:

A Hall of Mirrors, (HMH, 1966)

Dog Soldiers, (HMH, 1974) — National Book Award winner

A Flag for Sunrise, (RH/Knopf, 1981) — finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize

Damascus Gate, (HMH, 1998)

Children of Light, (RH/Knopf, 1986)

Bay of Souls (HMH, 2003)

Prime Green, memoir, (HarperPerennial, 2007)

Death of the Black-Haired Girl, (HMH, 2013)

The film adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand’s long-running best seller Unbroken has served to keep that book on the NYT Best Seller List in hardcover for 189 weeks. In addition, the tie-in is #1 on the paperback list after 23 weeks and YA version is #8 on that list after 8 weeks.

Now a new title joins the pack, Zamperini’s own, which he finished just before his death at 97 last year. Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In: Lessons from an Extraordinary Life by Louis Zamperini, David Rensin, (HarperCollins/Dey Street Books; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample) debuts on the new hardcover nonfiction list at #9.

Reviewing it when it came out in November, USA Today warned that other than shedding “more light on the reality of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), which afflicted Zamperini,” it doesn’t go much beyond Hillenbrand’s book. It does, however, exude “the nothing-to-lose honesty of a nonagenarian whose to-hell-and-back history results in a spiritual self-satisfaction.”

Holds are light in most libraries.

Unbroken isn’t the only movie causing a rise in sales for related books.

Debuting on this week’s NYT paperback nonfiction list at #10 is Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges, (Princeton U.P.), the basis for The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing.

It joins Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (RH/Bantam), at #5 after six weeks, returning to the lists after its original publication in 1988 as a result of the movie, The Theory of Everything, which is actually based on the memoir by Hawking’s wife Jane from 2007, now re-eeleased as a tie-in, Travelling to Infinity: The True Story Behind The Theory of Everything by Jane Hawking, (Alma Books, November 7, 2014). NOTE: Thanks to Kate Hull for the update on the tie-in.

Making history, the holds leader of the titles arriving next week is a debut, which is getting a flurry of advance reviews, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, (Penguin/Riverhead, Jan. 13; BOT Audio Clip; OverDrive Sample). If you’re thinking that the many Gone Girl comparisons may lead to a movie, you are correct. Film rights were won by Dreamworks prior to publication.

Close behind Hawkins is Tami Hoag’s next psychological thriller, Cold, Cold Heart (Penguin/Dutton).

All the titles covered here, and several more notable titles arriving next week, are listed, with ordering information and alternate formats, on our downloadable spreadsheet, EarlyWord New Title Radar, Week of 1/12/15.

Advance Attention

The Magician’s Lie, Greer Macallister, (Sourcebooks Landmark; Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample)

Arriving with three major picks — IndieNext, this week’s People magazine, (a “richly imagined thriller”) and LibraryReads, which gives it the following recommendation:

“Arden is a famous illusionist whose show involves sawing a man in half, but one night, she grabs an axe instead of a knife and her husband is found dead under the stage. Can Arden, an expert at deception, get away with murder–or is she really innocent? Recommended to anyone who likes historical fiction, strong women characters, and surprisingly twisty plots.” — Paula Jones, Brockton Public Library, Brockton, MA

West of Sunset, Stewart O’Nan, (Penguin/Viking; OverDrive Sample)

A favorite on GalleyChat in September, O’Nan’s latest focuses on F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood. In her Edelweiss review Darien Library’s Collection Development manager Jennifer Dayton said, “This is a portrait of a man drowning in longing for lost chances, lost loves and lost worlds. I loved it.” It is also the lead review in this issue of Entertainment Weekly, with a solid  B+ and is an IndieNext Pick:

“This novel begins after F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda have streaked across the Jazz Age sky like bright, shiny shooting stars. Scott is in Hollywood working as a script doctor and shakily holding on to sobriety; Zelda is in a mental hospital clinging to sanity just as tenuously. Unaccustomed to the workaday world, Scott struggles to prove his worth in Hollywood by showing up to work on time, paying his bills, and living a life of quiet desperation. Gone are the days of wine and roses; Scott must now learn to live as if there is a tomorrow. O’Nan offers a subtle portrait of an American icon as an ordinary man attempting to redefine himself after nearly losing it all.” — Kerry Spaulding, University Book Store, Mill Creek, WA 

Outline, Rachel Cusk, (Macmillan/FSG; Blackstone Audio OverDrive Sample)

We already noted the killer advance review from Dwight Garner in the NYT. It is being followed by another in Sunday’s NYT Book Review.

Media Hits

The First Bad Man, Miranda July, (S&S/Scribner; S&S Audio)

The minimalist cover signals something unusual (the back cover is more conventional, filled with quotes from Lena Dunham, Dave Eggers, Hilton Als and A.M. Homes). Several libraries have not ordered it, probably because the pre-pub reviews, while strong, made it sound challenging, or even peculiar (“will delight the open-minded reader looking for something new,” LJ). Those libraries that have bought are showing holds.

Miranda July, experimental artist, filmmaker, and writer, is a media darling who even has a handbag named after her. A feature in the current issue of Elle magazine calls her a “polymath” (a characteristic parodied by The Onion two years ago in a piece titled “Miranda July Called Before Congress To Explain Exactly What Her Whole Thing Is“). Don’t check her online calendar if you’re prone to wondering what you’re doing with your own life. She is also profiled in this Sunday’s NYT Book Review and is scheduled for a feature on NPR’s Weekend Edition. Expect more coverage in Vogue, O Magazine, Marie Claire, and Harper’s Bazaar. UPDATE: the daily NYT has joined in, with a review by Michiko Kakutani, saying that the book’s scenes are described in “deliberately grotesque, even repellent terms,” and with a their own profile. This is the link to Sunday’s NPR Weekend Edition interview.

The Work: My Search for a Life That Matters, Wes Moore, (RH/Spiegel & Grau; BOT Audio Clip; OverDrive Sample)

In 2010, the author published The Other Wes Moore, a parallel look at his own life and the life of another black man, also living in Baltimore and also named Wes Moore. While the author of the book went from fatherless delinquent to becoming an investment banker, Rhodes scholar, and an aide to Condoleezza Rice, the other Wes Moore ended up in prison. That book received media attention, as will the follow up:

Comedy Central Daily Show – some time this month
MSNBC Morning Joe – 1/12
HBO Real Time with Bill Mahr – 1/16

ANNOUNCING

February LibraryReads Picks

Number One Pick

A SPOOL OF BLUE THREAD
Anne Tyler, (RH/Knopf)

A TOUCH OF STARDUST
Kate Alcott

RH/Doubleday

MY SUNSHINE AWAY
M.O. Walsh

Penguin/Putnam

THE SECRETS OF SIR RICHARD KENWORTHY
Julia Quinn

HarperCollins/Avon

HALF THE WORLD
Joe Abercrombie

RH/Ballantine/Del Rey

FINDING JAKE
Bryan Reardon

HarperCollins/Morrow

A DARKER SHADE OF MAGIC
V. E. Schwab

Macmillan/Tor Books

A MURDER OF MAGPIES
Judith Flanders

Macmillan/Minotaur

THE SIEGE WINTER
Ariana Franklin, Samantha Norman

HarperCollins/Morrow

DREAMING SPIES: Laurie R. King

RH/Bantam

Topping the February LibraryReads list of the month’s top 10 titles, chosen by library staff from across the country, is Anne Tyler’s latest novel,  A Spool of Blue Thread, (Knopf; RH Audio; 2/10).

Also on the list is GalleyChat favorite, A Touch of Stardust by Kate Alcott (RH/Doubleday; RH Audio; 2/17), a novel that features real-life screwball comedian, Carole Lombard, and My Sunshine Away by M.O. Walsh, (Penguin/Putnam; Penguin Audio; 2/10), also a much-discussed title on GalleyChat, (join us for a chat with the author on Jan. 21).

Check Edelweiss and NetGalley for digital ARC’s. They are generally available until publication day.

And don’t forget to nominate your favorite upcoming titles, with publication dates of March or later (how-to specifics here).

LibraryReads also provides FREE downloadable marketing materials so you can easily:

• Post online banner ads on your library’s website

• Include LibraryReads-recommended titles in your library’s newsletter

• Print copies of the monthly flyer to post on your community bulletin board and have available as handouts

• Print copies of the horizontal banner for patrons to use as bookmarks

More attention is on the way for America’s Bitter Pill, (Random House; OverDrive Sample), Steven Brill’s investigation into the health care system, the high cost of drugs, and the corruption systemic in the business of staying well. Featured on the cover of this Sunday’s New York Time’s Book Review, the author is scheduled for an appearance on this week’s CBS 60 Minutes.

After Brill’s appearance on Monday’s Daily Show, the book broke into Amazon’s top 100.

Holds are high in libraries that have bought modest quantities and many have yet to place orders. Fair warning: this is a book on the rise, and it may be destined to become a core title on health care for some years to come. As the Times puts it in their fairly glowing review, Brill “has pulled off something extraordinary — a thriller about market structure, government organization and billing practices, by turns optimistic and pessimistic, by turns superficial and insightful, but always interesting, and deadly important.”

Actor Paul Rudd will appear this summer as the diminutive superhero, Ant-Man.

He’s also set to star, reports Variety, in an adaptation of a novel that librarians embraced, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison (Workman/Algonquin; Highbridge Audio; Thorndike Large Print).

Shooting is scheduled to begin this month.

The novel that is shaping up to be the debut of the season The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, (Penguin/Riverhead, Jan. 13; BOT Audio Clip; OverDrive Sample) continues to rack up holds after Janet Maslin’s NYT review on Monday.

Holds are likely to continue. The novel is on Entertainment Weekly‘s “Must List” for the week at #9 (“a gripping down-the-rabbit-hole thriller”) and is a People pick (Gone Girl fans will devour this psychological thriller … ends with a twist that no one … will see coming.”)

Expect to see The Girl on the Train on best seller lists in a couple of weeks.

However, the book is not the top pick for either magazine. Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar RH/Ballantine; RH Large Print; RH Audio; OverDrive Sample; audio clip) is #3  on Entertainment Weekly‘s Must List. “Fiction and history merge seamlessly in this dazzling novel about an incredible circle of bohemian artists in early-20th-century London — particularly the rivalry between two famous sisters, writer Virginia Woolf and painter Vanessa Bell.” This coming Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, says “Parmar’s portrait brings Vanessa out of the shadows, into fully realized, shining visibility.” Both a LibraryReads and an IndieNext pick, it is showing holds, probably based on the author’s interview on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday.

People‘s Book of the Week is the weight-loss memoir by food blogger Andie Mitchell, It Was Me All Along, (RH/Clarkson Potter; BOT Audio Clip; OverDrive Sample; ). It is also covered by the New York Post and the Washington Post).

The latest addition to the Marvel film universe is a tiny superhero, Ant-Man, featured on the cover of the new issue of Entertainment Weekly.

In the role of the unlikely superhero is a somewhat unlikely comic actor, Paul Rudd (echoes of Chris Pratt in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy).

The first trailer for the live-action film adaptation, which opens July 17th, was shown at the end of the first episode of Marvel’s Agent Carter on ABC Tuesday night.

If you’re not fully conversant with Marvel comics, Entertainment Weekly offers a Ant-Man primer to help the uninitiated make sense of the  trailer.

A dizzying number of tie-ins are on their way, including an Ant-Man “prose novel” (the NYT discovered “reverse adaptations” this week), as well as leveled readers and chapter books for kids and compilations of the original comics. See the full list in our catalog of media tie-ins on Edelweiss.

The site FiveThirtyEight wrapped up the year by declaring that there are far too many best of the year lists and then wading right in to offer a fascinating analysis of consensus among them (best books lists show the least, as a result of the sheer volume of titles published — far more than the number of movies released or even TV shows aired).

We’ve wrapped up our spreadsheets of all the lists (that is, until the ALA Awards are announced):

2014-Best-Books-Adult-Fiction-V-6

2014-Best-Books-Adult-Nonfiction-Version-4

2014-Best-Books-Childrens-and-YA-V.7

They now include titles from several lists that squeezed in at the end of the year:

Salon Top Ten Books — 12/29

USA Today – Ten Books We Loved Reading — 12/23

Booklist Editors Choice, Adult and Youth — 12/18  — Usually released in January, Booklist, like many others this year, released their lists early

Comparing our top titles to FiveThirtyEight’s, you’ll see several significant differences, because, well, we had little consensus on the lists we used.

But to us, it’s more interesting to look at the titles that made the top of certain lists, but appeared on few others. For instance, Time magazine picked as #2 in nonfiction a book about mixed martial arts, Thrown by Kerry Howley (Sarabande Books), Booklist picked a children’s book as top of the list that isn’t on other lists, The Lion and the Bird by Marianne Dubuc, (Enchanted Lion Books) and the NYT‘s Michiko Kakutani picked as one of her ten favorites a book of short stories, The Dog by Jack Livings (Macmillan/FSG), not to be confused with another book with the same title, Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog, a Booker longlist title, picked by the NYT Book Review and a PW top ten title.

If you really want to drive yourself crazy about what you may have missed last year, check out the best overlooked books lists:

The Overlooked Books of 2014 – Slate

Overlooked Books – Huffington Post

Overlooked Books – Flavorwire

Or, just relax and enjoy Entertainment Weekly‘s picks of the 5 Worst Books of 2014.

If anyone can make you want to read an unconventional literary novel, Dwight Garner can. His review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline,(Macmillan/FSG; Ebook; Blackstone Audio;1/13/15) in today’s New York Times makes you ready to throw caution aside and dive into a “a poised and cerebral novel that has little in the way of straightforward plot.”

The review alone is worth reading, if only for the quote from W. H. Auden, “Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation,” which is apt for a book that is described by the publisher as “a novel in ten conversations.”

If Garner’s review doesn’t convince you, consider the three starred prepub reviews (Kirkus is the holdout, but the review reads like someone just forgot to add the star).

George Pelecanos spoke for nearly 40 minutes on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday (listen here), about his new short story collection, The Martini Shot (Hachette/Little, Brown; OverDrive Sample). He begins by reading a gripping section of one of the stories, “String Music,” and goes on to discuss everything from his experiences writing for The Wire, adoption, and the day the cops called him and said “”Would you like to come in or would you like us to come arrest you?” after he pulled a crazy stupid stunt in a car.

Pelecanos’s website includes a story from the collection, “Miss Mary’s Room,” which first appeared in Playboy. In addition to it and “String Music,” The Martini Shot includes five other stories and a novella, two of which are new.

Holds are currently within reason, but Pelecanos’s name and rising media attention makes this a book to watch.

News of the many award nominations for Julianne Moore’s performance as a victim of early onset Alzheimer’s disease in Still Alice has brought attention to the movie even though it won’t open in most cities until February (it had a limited Oscar-qualifying run in early Dec., will open in  NYC and L.A. on Jan 16, before expanding to more theaters).

The book it is based on, Still Alice by Lisa Genova (S&S/Gallery, 2009), is also rising on Amazon sales rankings (now at #26 and rising) and shows growing holds in libraries.

One of the film’s producers, Maria Shriver, featured the author in a segment on the Today Show (a slightly different version was featured on last night’s NBC Nightly News).

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Genova tells the Boston Globe that the success of both the book and the movie are “humbling” surprises. Unable to get an agent for the book, she self-published it. Her guerrilla marketing was so successful that she then landed an agent and a mainstream publisher, Simon & Schuster. For the movie rights, she went with a “very small new production company in London,” because she felt, “they really understood the intent of the story.”

Genova, a neuroscientist, has published two novels since, both dealing with brain disorders. Left Neglected is about the results of a brain injury and Love Anthony, on autism. In her next novel, Inside the O’Briens, (S&S/Gallery” S&S Audio, 4/7/14), she writes about a family dealing with Huntington’s Disease.

Tie-ins:

Still Alice, Lisa Genova
S&S.Gallery: December 16, 2014
Trade Paperback

Mass Market, S&S/Pocket Books

Audio CD, &S Audio

In the Washington Post, Patrick Anderson gives high praise to Tim Johnston’s Descent, (Workman/Algonquin; OverDrive Sample; Jan 6), saying it is the most powerful thriller he’s read that uses the popular theme of a missing girl — more powerful than Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, or Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know. He adds, “The story unfolds brilliantly, always surprisingly, but the glory of Descent lies not in its plot but in the quality of the writing.”

On NPR’s web site, Alan Cheuse uses a different comparison, saying, “Tim Johnston has written a book that makes Gone Girl seem gimmicky and forced.”

Check your catalogs; several libraries have not yet ordered it. Those that have are showing holds, heavy in some areas.

You may not have the resources that Mark Zuckerberg has, but now you can read like he does.

As a new year’s resolution, he has set himself a goal of reading a book every two weeks and has created a Facebook page, A Year of Books, that invites others to join in.

He says he will choose books that “emphasize learning about new cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies.”

We’re not sure how the first title fits that definition. By the former editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, Moises Naim, it is The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used To Be, (Perseus/Basic Books, 2013).

The author, exuberantly interviewed on CNN (the host marvels that Zuckerberg will have to read 24 pages a day! to meet his goal), says the book may have special meaning for Zuckerberg, a member of the new power elite that disrupted the old, but at a time when power itself offers diminishing returns (see the Washington Post review for more on his Naim’s thesis). Zuckerberg says he’s interested in it because it “explores how the world is shifting to give individual people more power that was traditionally only held by large governments, militaries and other organizations. The trend towards giving people more power is one I believe in deeply.”

The End of Power sold out on Amazon within hours of the announcement, but the publisher was able to quickly resupply it. Good thing. The window for this is short. Zuckerberg is scheduled to announce his next book on January 16.

Libraries we checked are showing holds that outstrip modest inventories.