Gwendoline Christie, who plays Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones, is set to star in the film adaptation of The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken (Hachette/Disney-Hyperion).
The first in the YA dystopian trilogy, it features a group of teens with special powers who are persecuted by the government and are on the run hoping to find a sanctuary.

The news, announced by the Hollywood Reporter, caused a flurry of excitement on fan sites.

The cast already includes another fan favorite, Amanda Sternberg, who played Rue in The Hunger Games. She also stars as Maddy Whittier in the upcoming adaptation of Nicole Yoon’s Everything, Everything, set for release in May.

One of Time magazine’s Most Influential Teens 2016, Sternberg is described as:

“one of her generation’s leading social activists, especially regarding race, representation and gender identity. As a result, she’s earned some high-profile admirers. Among them: Gloria Steinem, who sat for a one-on-one interview with Stenberg for Teen Vogue, and Beyoncé …

Fans have more to look forward to. As theThe Hollywood Reporter notes, “a host of young up-and-comers [are] on the call sheet.”

Jennifer Yuh Nelson (Kung Fu Panda) directs, in her live-action debut.

The movie, still in pre-production, is expected to premiere in September 2018.

Rising on Amazon, currently at #72, and building holds is Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, Kory Stamper (PRH/ Pantheon; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample).

The NYT ran an illustrated feature in today’s paper and online yesterday, saying that Stamper is a word-nerd cult figure, with a joyful and invested following on social media. Of they book the paper writes it:

“mixes memoiristic meditations on the lexicographic life along with a detailed description of the brain-twisting work of writing dictionaries [it] describes [Stamper’s] own initiation into the art of lexicography, which involves wrestling with the continuous evolution of language. She walks the reader, chapter by chapter, through different aspects of a definition, including grammar, pronunciation, etymology and more.”

The Atlantic says it is an “eloquent love letter to letters themselves … a cheerful and thoughtful rebuke of the cult of the grammar scolds.”

Sites as diverse as the A.V. Club and The Economist weigh in as well.

The majority of libraries we checked have strong holds on very light orders or have not purchased at all.

Below is a sample of one of Stamper’s popular videos:

Megan Mullally (Will & Grace, Infinity Baby) and husband Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation, The Founder), have bought the film rights George Saunders’s NYT bestseller, Lincoln in the Bardo (PRH/RH; RH Audio/BOT; Overdrive Sample).

The couple will produce alongside the author. Both worked on the audiobook version with him.

“I am thrilled to be in artistic cahoots with Megan and Nick, two artists I’ve long admired,” Saunders told Deadline Hollywood, “This is going to be big fun. My hope is that we can find a way to make the experience of getting this movie made as wild and enjoyable and unpredictable as the experience of writing it — I am so happy to have such fearless companions on the trip.”

The A.V. Club points to the challenges facing the adaptation, “The book has more than 150 narrators … then there’s the matter of the archival texts intercutting the musings of Willie and his new neighbors. And that’s all before you get into those neighbors’ appearances.” However, the producers have already dealt with those issues for the audiobook version.

The Romance Writers of America announced on Tuesday the finalists for the RITA Awards for romance fiction.

There are 13 categories include over 80 nominees (a good opportunity for displays, see The Romance Dish for useful descriptions of all 13 classifications).

Among the finalists are popular authors such as Sabrina York, Tessa Dare, Elizabeth Hoyt, Sabrina Jeffries, J R Ward and Loretta Chase, whose Dukes Prefer Blondes (HC/Avon; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample), part of her Dressmakers series, appears in the Historical Romance: Long category.

Attesting to the growing reach of self-published novels, 11 of the nominees come from the authors’ own imprints, including  Always a Bridesmaid by Lizzie Shane (Create Space; OverDrive Sample), in the Contemporary Romance: Long category.

RWA’s the Golden Heart award nominees for unpublished manuscripts were also released.

All the winners will be announced on July 27.

One of the many lists soon to come, New York magazine has published their “Spring Book Preview,” a list of ten choices ranging across nonfiction and fiction, big names and new authors.

Among the big names is Joshua Ferris for The Dinner Party and Other Stories (Hachette/Little Brown; Blackstone Audio). New York magazine comments, “Ferris’s three novels have earned him a reputation as a high-concept high-wire artist … His stories, by comparison, are compact gems of timing and everyday absurdity.”

One of the debuts comes from award-winning reporter Omar El Akkad who was born in Egypt and now lives in Portland, OR.  A dystopian novel set in 2074,  American War (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample), portrays a much smaller U.S., cue to global warming that “enters its second Civil War … Told through the lens of a young Southern refugee who comes of age in a time of horror … terrifying in its prescient vision of the future.”

Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman (Harper; HarperAudio) gets one of the nonfiction nods. The magazine says “Zinoman presents a well-rounded portrait of the late-night legend … a must-read for any comedy fan.”

The full list is online.

Colin Dexter has died, age 86. He created the character Chief Inspector Morse, the beloved, curmudgeonly detective based in Oxford who likes opera, poetry, and has a fiendishly clever mind.

The first book in the series is Last Bus to Woodstock was published in 1975. The final book, #13, The Remorseful Day, was published 24 years later in 1999. The books were adapted into the Inspector Morse TV series that ran on PBS from 1987 until 2000. The show spun-off two sequels, one about Morse’s partner, Inspector Lewis, and one about a younger Morse, Endeavour.

“He was one of the greatest crime novelists of the 20th century and deserves to be ranked alongside Chandler, Christie and Doyle,” Andrew Gulli, the editor of the mystery magazine The Strand, told the NYT.

The paper also reports that he won two Golden Dagger awards from the Crime Writers’ Association of Britain and, in 1997, he received the organization’s lifetime achievement award, the Diamond Dagger.

Dexter killed off Morse in his last book, using for the title a line from an A. E. Housman poem, “How Clear, How Lovely Bright,” as a way of saying goodbye:

How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.

Jane Mayer’s 2016 best seller, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (PRH/Doubleday; RH Large Print; RH Audio/BOT; trade paperback; OverDrive Sample) is back in the news, and rising again on Amazon, jumping from #468 to #48, after the author published a new piece for this week’s The New Yorker entitled “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind The Trump Presidency.”

Mayer was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday about the subjects of the story, Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who have “been major backers of Breitbart News and Steve Bannon’s other projects for years, and they were influential in getting Bannon and Kellyanne Conway into leadership positions in the Trump campaign.”

Dark Money was one of The New York Time’s 10 Best Books of 2016 and is currently a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, which recognizes a “book of extraordinary originality and lasting influence.” The winner of that award will be announced on Monday.

Most libraries we checked still have holds queues.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer and bestselling author of Lean In, is set to publish s new title next month, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT), co-written with Adam Grant, author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.

The book is based on personal experience, as Sandberg writes on Facebook:

“A few weeks after my husband Dave died, I was talking to my friend Phil Deutch about a father-son activity that Dave was not here to do. We came up with a plan for someone to fill in so my son would not have to miss out. I cried, ‘But I want Dave.’ Phil put his arm around me and said, ‘Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.’ That became my mantra, and for the past two years I’ve tried hard to find meaning and happiness in the wake of our despair.”

On the strength of that post, picked up by Bustle and InStyle, which headlines their story, “You’ll Definitely Want to Read Sheryl Sandberg’s Empowering New Book,” it soared up Amazon’s sales rankings, and is currently at #9.

Thus far, library holds queues are light. Keep in mind, however, that Lean In got off to a slow start.

Misty Copeland, the first African American woman to be a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre, has published a new book, Ballerina Body: Dancing and Eating Your Way to a Leaner, Stronger, and More Graceful You (Hachette/Grand Central Life & Style; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample).

It is rising on Amazon’s rankings thanks to an appearance on CBS This Morning, jumping from #920 to #36.

A clearly admiring panel of hosts talked with Copeland about the mental and emotional strength it takes to be a star athlete and dancer, calling the book “inspiring.”

It is Copeland’s third book, after her memoir Life In Motion and the children’s book Firebird. This time she stresses understanding health as a long journey, discovering what works for each person, and creating an individual version of a healthy image.

Rising on Amazon is a nonfiction account of a fabled sea-faring mystery, Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition by Paul Watson (Norton; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample), about the sad fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew aboard the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. The book not only details the doomed Arctic expedition seeking the Northwest Passage, but also the historic search for the lost ships and the modern discovery of their find. It leaped to #79 on Amazon’s sales rankings after the author appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition.

In a brief, but wide ranging conversation, Watson details some of the search, telling NPR that Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, was “extraordinarily assertive” and forced the Royal Navy to search for her husband and even lured the United States into looking for him.

The book is also getting newspaper coverage.

The Seattle Times calls it eloquent and “more valuable than most of what comes from the cottage industry of Franklin books.”

In an illustrated story, the Dallas News says that Watson “handles the complexity of the search admirably well.”

Watson has a much longer segment on Think, a program on the public radio station KERA in North Texas. Below is the Morning Edition segment:

Gucci Mane, who The New York Times calls “one of hip-hop’s most prolific and admired artists” is releasing his memoir, The Autobiography of Gucci Mane (S&S, Sept. 19, 2017).

Given his large social media presence (over 3 million followers on Twitter alone), his announcement of the book and its arresting jacket sent it climbing on Amazon where it is now in the Top 100 (at #100).

The publisher says “In his extraordinary autobiography, the legend takes us to his roots in Alabama, the streets of East Atlanta, the trap house, and the studio where he found his voice as a peerless rapper. He reflects on his inimitable career and in the process confronts his dark past—years behind bars, the murder charge, drug addiction, career highs and lows—the making of a trap god. It is one of the greatest comeback stories in the history of music.”

For those unfamiliar with “trap music,” the Guardian described the Atlanta-based genre last year, calling Gucci Mane one of the “holy trinity of trap”

The announcement was covered by Billboard and New York Magazine, along with a number of pop culture and music sites.

No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America, by Ron Powers (Hachette; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) is rising on Amazon after the author talked with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. It moved from #9,883 to #54.

Powers was  the co-author of Flags Of Our Fathers, about the men who were featured in an iconic WWII photo as they raised the America flag on Iwo Jima. A long-running best seller, it was also the basis of a film directed by Clint Eastwood.

Powers’ new book, says Gross, “is both a memoir about his sons and a history of how the mentally ill have been treated medically, legally and socially.” Both of Powers’s sons suffer with schizophrenia, one of them committed suicide and the other attempted it.

The intimate and warm interview mixes personal story with medical explanation and the social history of the illness.

After spending over two years (and counting) on the NYT bestseller list and building months long holds queues in libraries (some systems are still working through their lists), Marie Kondo is back atop the Amazon sales rankings thanks to a feature on CBS Sunday Morning.

It seems there are still a few people who haven’t discovered Kondo. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, moved back up to #1, after dropping to #34 and her second book, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up (both from Ten Speed Press), is #15, after falling to #1,320.

Life-Changing Magic is a global sensation. It has been translated into 40 languages and has sold over 7 million copies. NYT ran a feature about her last July, writing her “name is now a verb  … [her] life has become a philosophy.” The Wall Street Journal even applied her methods to digital life.

As an aid to those facing spring cleaning, CSB Sunday Morning offers a short profile of her system, including her special ways of folding clothes so they can be stacked upright in drawers. They also note she is working on a smart phone app and training a horde of cleaning consultants.

When he was in his 20s Christopher Thomas Knight became a hermit, living in self-imposed isolation in the Maine woods for close to 30 years. His story, and that of his arrest for a string of robberies, is the subject of the new book The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, Michael Finkel (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample).

It debuts on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction best seller list at #11 this week, having been both a LibraryReads and an Indie Next pick and is receiving some belated critical attention.

The NYT reviews it, saying it will have “mass appeal … It’s campfire-friendly and thermos-ready, easily drained in one warm, rummy slug. It also raises a variety of profound questions — about the role of solitude, about the value of suffering, about the diversity of human needs.”

The Atlantic says that Knight “avoided humanity with the guile of a samurai … He entered the woods like a suicide, leaving his keys inside the car. He had no destination, nor a map; he carried a tent but had never spent a night in one before. Most of his family members and friends assumed he had died. In one sense they were right.”

USA Today gives it three out of four stars and writes it is an “intriguing account of Knight’s capture and confessions, and while it amasses the inventive details of Knight’s solitary life, it can’t quite explain the man himself. Knight is opaque — more than a loner, hardly a lunatic.”

The 2014 GQ story that launched the book is the magazine’s most-read story ever. They now offer an interview with Finkel.

The Guardian runs an illustrated extract.

Holds vary widely across the systems we checked, with a high of 8:1 and a low below 1:1. However, if the GQ article is any guide, this is the kind of book that grows an audience over time.

Box offices are reeling from the opening this weekend of Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast. Next week brings another live-action adaptation, based on quite different material.

The film version of Daniel Clowes’s 2010 graphic novel Wilson, starring Woody Harrelson, Laura Dern, and Judy Greer opens in a limited run on March 24, after having premiered at Sundance.

It is getting mixed reviews. Variety writes, “There are laughs, but the hipster factor is wearing thin.” The Guardian says “The filmic take … wants to stand up for the weirdos – but instead makes you yearn for silence.”

However, The Independent says it is a film to “watch out for,” writing “director Craig Johnson display[s] a knack for finding humor and warmth in the darkest of places.” Comics Bulletin is more positive still, giving it 4 out of 5 stars and saying “While the film adaptation may suffer from problems in pacing and storytelling, it is this love that is conveyed in the key moments of Harrelson’s performance that skirts incredibly close to being, well, incredible.”

A new paperback edition timed for the film came out in early February, Wilson, Daniel Clowes (Drawn and Quarterly).