Even before Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them opens in theaters on Nov. 18, Deadline is reporting that Johnny Deep will star alongside Eddie Redmayne in the upcoming sequel.

There is no word yet on his role, but Deadline says that it might be revealed via a Depp cameo in the first film.

Also making news, J.K. Rowling, who is the screenwriter for the film and serving as one of the producers, announced earlier in the month that there will be five films in the franchise. As we had noted earlier, the original plan was to create a trilogy: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2 (2018) and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 3 (2020).

The screenplay of the first film will be published on Nov. 19, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay, JK Rowling (Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine Books).

The final trailer for the film is also available:

After “spirited bidding,” Variety reports that AMC bought the rights to the TV adaption of Dietland by Sarai Walker (HMH; Highbridge Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Marti Noxon will head the project. She is the co-creator of UnREAL and has worked on hits such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Mad Men says Den of Geek.

The show, “envisoned as a mix of character drama and revenge fantasy with a feminist perspective,”is expected to skip the pilot stage and go directly to series next year, according to Variety.

Walker’s debut novel, an Indie Next pick, made a number of end of year best lists in 2015.

Entertainment Weekly gave it an A, writing “If Amy Schumer turned her subversive feminist sketches into a novel, dark on the inside but coated with a glossy, palatable sheen, it would probably look a lot like Dietland—a thrilling, incendiary manifesto disguised as a beach read.”

The author of the children’s classic Tuck Everlasting (Macmillan/Square Fish) has died from lung cancer. Natalie Babbitt was 84 years old.

In addition to Tuck, which as been adapted into films and a Broadway play, Babbitt is also known for the Newbery Honor book Kneeknock Rise and the National Book Award finalist The Devil’s Storybook (both from (Macmillan/Square Fish). Five of her books have been named ALA Notable Children’s Books.

Her other honors include the inaugural E.B. White Award for achievement in children’s literature and being the U.S. nominee for the biennial international Hans Christian Andersen Award.

Bustle reports that Tuck, which marked its 40th anniversary in 2015, has sold over 3.5 million copies since publication and has never been out of print.

Her most recent published  book was The Moon Over High Street (Scholastic/Michael di Capua Books, 2011).

The next in the Marvel line of comic adaptations opens on Friday, Doctor Strange, an expected blockbuster.

It is about an arrogant surgeon who suffers from a career-ending accident and seeks the mystic arts in an effort to heal himself, only to discover powerful beings and other dimensions.

Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Doctor Strange along with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Benedict Wong, Michael Stuhlbarg, Benjamin Bratt, Scott Adkins, Mads Mikkelsen, and Tilda Swinton.

Early reviews are good. Variety calls it “Marvel’s most satisfying entry since Spider-Man 2, and a throwback to M. Night Shyamalan’s soul-searching identity-crisis epic Unbreakable, which remains the gold standard for thinking people’s superhero movies.”

Entertainment Weekly gives it a B+, writing it “mostly works very, very well” and crediting Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton for the success, “two actors, who in addition to being intelligent, top-shelf stars both project a slightly alien, otherworldy air [and make the film] accessible and seductively engrossing … It’s eye candy and brain candy.”

There are tie-ins as well as related titles, including the film’s novelization, Marvel’s Doctor Strange: The Junior Novel, Marvel (Hachette/Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; OverDrive Sample) and Marvel’s Doctor Strange Prelude, Brian K. Vaughan, Jason Aaron, Stan Lee, et al. (Hachette/Marvel), a collection of previous comics highlighting the origin story and some of his adventures.

Airing on The Hallmark Channel Nov. 5 is The Mistletoe Promise. Based on the novel by the “King of Christmas Fiction,” Richard Paul Evans, it stars Jaime King, Luke Macfarlane, and Lochlyn Munro.

It’s part of Hallmark’s “Countdown to Christmas,” which began on Saturday. It’s “Holiday Movies! All Day! All Night” through Christmas and beyond.

Hallmark describes the romance as “a chance meeting between two strangers who share a disdain for Christmas results in The Mistletoe Promise, a pact to help them navigate their holiday complications – together. But as they spend more time with each other and experience the magic of Christmas the phony couple discovers there may be more to their contract than business.”

There is not a direct tie-in but the book is still available (S&S; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample) as are the other two volumes in the “Mistletoe” collection, The Mistletoe Inn (S&S; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample),  last year’s seasonal offering, and The Mistletoe Secret (S&S; S&S Aduio), publishing on Nov. 15.

Eighteen genre novels get featured in a series of three new overviews in this week’s NYT book section.

The novelist Charles Finch takes on thrillers, casting a critical eye over some of the offerings but deeply enjoying The Fall Guy, James Lasdun (Norton; OverDrive Sample), about two men caught up in a competition over a woman, one of whom is destined to fulfill the title.

Finch calls it “exceptionally entertaining … a cross of literary fiction, thriller and mystery” that reads like “early Ian McEwan or late Patricia Highsmith.”

He says that Lasdun cleverly crafts the story, “His clues never seem like clues until they bind tightly around one of the three leads” and that the novel is “exactly what a literary thriller should be: intelligent, careful, swift, unsettling.”

It is also a November Indie Next pick.

Reviewing six Horror titles, film critic Terrence Rafferty (who wrote a piece on Thrillers featuring killer women in June) very much likes  the small press offering The Fisherman by John Langan (Word Horde), the story of two grief-burdened fisherman who cast their lines in possibly magical waters.

He calls it “superb” and says that Langan “manages to sustain the focused effect of a short story or a poem over the course of a long horror narrative.”

Rafferty continues that the novel is “unusually dense with ideas and images” and full of “elegant prose.” In the end, he says, readers feel a “sad urgency on every page” of this “strange and terrifying” tale.

In her largely non-committal survey of six True-Crime offerings, Marilyn Stasio picks The Thieves of Threadneedle Street: The Incredible True Story of the American Forgers Who Nearly Broke the Bank of England (Norton/ Pegasus; OverDrive Sample), Nicholas Booth as a good bet.

It is the tale of a masterful 19th century forgery case that Stasio calls a “jaunty caper” led by a man who was no stranger to international long cons.

The author of Mislaid (HC/Ecco, 2015), which made the National Book Award Longlist in 2015, as well as many best books lists, and most recently Nicotine (HC/Ecco; Harper Audio; OverDrive Sample), an Indie Next pick, is a reviewer favorite.

Laura Miller, the books and culture columnist for Slate, tries to understand why Zink is so beloved, while reviewing her newest novel as well.

She is a fearless writer, not worried about a backlash in the form of a “moral, political, or artistic reproach” says Miller. Perhaps this is because she was already mature, 51 years old, when she broke big in writing circles, and the fact that she is far from a product of the “MFA approach/”

Miller says that while reading her work she seems “to be the only novelist who truly does not give a fuck what you think of her.”

Second, she writes as she wishes, without regards to accepted rules. “Her willingness to simply tell you a story without adopting all the elaborate pretenses of dramatic realism, with its carefully constructed, allusive snapshots” is a big draw Miller contends.

Third is her style.  She has a “fundamentally comic sensibility” and excels at “Romantic farce.” She is also “remarkably subtle—too sympathetic, perhaps, to qualify as satire, but uninclined to let anyone off the hook.”

Finally, and most of all says Miller, she is willing to simply let her stories be, “the most transgressive thing of all about Zink’s work [is] that it has nothing it wants to teach us.”

As for Nicotine, Miller concludes “It spills out like the endlessly unfolding events of life itself, in discernible patterns of the wholesome and the toxic but refusing to stay still long enough to resolve into some kind of life lesson.”

The NYT features the author of A Man Called Ove (S&S/Atria, July 2014) and other bestsellers this weekend, highlighting his improbable rise to celebrity status.

Like his character Ove, Fredrik Backman is something of an unlikely star. He was largely ignored by publishers who either rejected his debut novel or simple ignored his query letters. He worked night and weekend shifts as a forklift driver to afford time to write during the day and for a while, it seemed like it would all be for nothing. One publisher told him his work had no “commercial potential.”

Now his debut novel is a feature film and a breakout hit. It has sold over “2.8 million copies worldwide, making the book one of Sweden’s most popular literary exports since Stieg Larsson’s thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” writes the NYT.

The novel’s appeal is global, selling in 38 languages, but its start in the US was, similar to its reception by Swedish publishers, rocky.

Reports the NYT, “it sold steadily but in modest numbers. Then sales surged. It landed on the best-seller list 18 months after it was first published and has remained there for 42 weeks. Demand has been so unrelenting that Atria Books has reprinted the novel 40 times and now has more than a million copies in print.”

The US publisher credits the surge to independent booksellers, “who placed big orders and pressed it on customers. The Book Bin in Northbrook, Ill., has sold around 1,000 copies, largely based on word-of-mouth recommendations.”

The Daily Beast has also examined the novel’s word-of-mouth success.

Librarians have adopted Backman as their own as well, making Britt-Marie Was Here (S&S/Atria Books) a #1 LibraryReads pick and My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry (S&S/Atria) a LibraryReads selection. Galleychatters have also followed Backman with great interest.

The success of Ove fueled the sales of others of Backman’s quirky novels and has led, as we noted earlier, to more book deals. The first of which hits shelves on on Nov. 1, the novella, And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer And Longer (S&S/Atria). Deadline Hollywood reports, that like Ove, it “centers on an elderly man, who struggles to hold on to his memories, face his regrets and help his son and grandson prepare for his death.” It will be issued in a “small-format hardcover,” with illustrations. His next novel will be Beartown (S&S/Atria, May 2, 2017).

In a very Ove take on life, Backman finds fame a problem. “Everyone keeps telling you how great you are and what a great writer you are” he tells the NYT. “They want selfies, and that’s not healthy, because you start liking that … You still have to write like you’re writing for 20 people, or you’re going to freak out.”

This week’s big book is a kids title, the next in the series that spawned so many others, Jeff Kinney’s Double Down: Diary of a Wimpy Kid #11 (Abrams/Amulet Books; Recorded Books).

On the adult side, there’s a new Harry Bosch title by Michael Connelly, The Wrong Side of Goodbye (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample) as well as one by Danielle Steel, The Award (PRH/Delacorte Press; Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample).

The unlikely success of Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove brought a deal to publish more, 3 new novels plus a novella. Arriving this week is the first, the novella And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer And Longer (S&S/Atria; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample). The publisher’s description indicates it treads familiar ground, about an “elderly man’s struggle to hold on to his most precious memories, and his family’s efforts to care for him even as they must find a way to let go.”

A new month, a new set of James Patterson’s BookShots, including Taking the Titanic (Hachette/BookShots; Hachette Audio; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample), which replaces the belatedly announced and quickly dropped title, The Murder of Stephen King. Patterson is the lead author on Killer Chef (Hachette/BookShots; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample), about the poisoning of diners in New Orleans.

The other two offerings are in the less-successful BookShots Flames series, Dazzling: The Diamond Trilogy, Part I, Elizabeth Hayley, James Patterson (Hachette/BookShots; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample) and Bodyguard, Jessica Linden, James Patterson (Hachette/BookShots; OverDrive Sample).

Arriving just after an Italian journalist claimed to have uncovered her true identity is Elena Ferrante’s own Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (PRH/Europa; Blackstone Audio). Alexander Chee writes in New Republic, that “Ferrante records her 24-year fight against the manipulation of her authorial identity.”

Also arriving is a second work by Ferrante, this one, amazingly, for kids, The Beach at Night (PRH/Europa). The Washington Post calls it “The latest Elena Ferrante controversy” because, as reviewer Nora Krug puts it, “Though compelling and vivid, the book is also deeply chilling, and its vaguely sexual undertones are troubling.”

The titles highlighted here, along with many other notable titles arriving this week, are listed with ordering information and alternate formats on our downloadable spreadsheet, Early Word New Title Radar, Week of Oct. 31, 2016.

Awards

The Sun Is Also a Star, Nicola Yoon (PRH/Delacorte Press; Listening Library; OverDrive Sample) arrives this week. It is one of five finalists in the Young People’s Lit category for the National Book Awards (winner to be announced in two weeks, on Nov. 16).

The Lyrics: 1961-2012, Bob Dylan (S&S). Dylan finally acknowledged being awarded the Nobel in Literature recently and in an interview with the Telegraph says he will attend the actual ceremony on December 10 “if at all possible.”

 Media Attention

Between Two Worlds: Lessons from the Other Side, Tyler Henry (S&S/Gallery Books; OverDrive Sample). A memoir by the star of E!’s reality series Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry. Expect a small media wave with appearances on Nightline and E! News Daily.

Peer Picks

Two peer picks publish this week, including the #1 LibraryReads and #1 Indie Next selection for November, Faithful by Alice Hoffman (S&S; S&S Audio).

“With only a touch of her usual magical realism, Hoffman crafts a tale that still manages to enchant. In Faithful, a young girl who survives a car accident that almost kills her best friend spends the next decade doing penance to try and alleviate her guilt. Despite her best efforts to avoid it, love, hope, and forgiveness patiently shadow her as she slowly heals. Shelby is a complex character and through her internal growth Hoffman reveals that she is a person worthy of love, a bit of sorcery that readers will hold dear. Simply irresistible.” — Sharon Layburn, South Huntington Public Library, Huntington Station, NY

Additional Buzz: It also impressed Canadian librarians, featuring on their Loan Stars list.

Cabo de Gata, Eugen Ruge (Macmillan/Graywolf Press; OverDrive Sample) publishes this week as well and is among the November selections on the Indie Next list.

“Bored, anchorless, and alone, a man leaves Berlin for a tiny Andalusian fishing village where he plans to write a novel. Instead, he encounters a cranky hotelier, green tomatoes, an Englishman who acts like an American, an American who acts like an Englishman, a very quiet bartender, a mysterious cat, and, possibly, the meaning of everything — or lack thereof. This slim, playful novel will speak to anyone who has ever questioned the path they were on — or whether there is a path at all.” —Sam Kaas, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA

Tie-ins

Lion (Movie Tie-In), Saroo Brierley (PRH/NAL; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) comes out this week as a tie in to the upcoming Nov 25th movie of the same name.

As we have previously written, it is a memoir of an amazing journey of loss and recovery originally titled A Long Way Home, (PRH/Viking, 2014, trade paperback, 2015).

In the book, Brierley recounts how he was separated from his family in rural India at age 4, when he climbed aboard a train and was carried over a thousand miles away to a city he did not know. He wound up in an orphanage, was adopted and relocated to Tasmania.

The film stars Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, Nicole Kidman, and David Wenham. They join a cast of actors well-known in India, including Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Priyanka Bose, and Tannishtha Chatterjee. The inspirational tear-jerker is directed by Garth Davis (Top of the Lake).

It debuts in the Friday after Thanksgiving time slot which is not just prime time to attract families looking for entertainment, but also good timing for awards. Vanity Fair reports the film is “Already on Awards-Season Short Lists.”

Fans of the hit TV show Mr. Robot can read Elliot Alderson’s personal journal with MR. ROBOT: Red Wheelbarrow: (eps1.91_redwheelbarr0w.txt), Sam Esmail and Courtney Looney (Abrams).

According to ars TECHNICA “Red Wheelbarrow is essentially Elliot’s marble notebook from when he was in prison, and he’s transparent this time (no more lies). The notebook is what Elliot asked Hot Carla to burn, but… she didn’t.”

As reported by Tor.com, the creators say the book is “its own story, and you’re only ever going to hear this story with this book.”

The title, as many may suspect, is indeed a reference to the poem by William Carlos Williams.

The film Nocturnal Animals opens in limited release on Nov. 18 and in wide distribution on Dec. 9.

It is a psychological thriller written and directed by fashion designer and filmmaker Tom Ford (A Single Man), based on the 1993 novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright.

The ensemble cast features Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Armie Hammer, Laura Linney, Andrea Riseborough, and Michael Sheen.

It is getting praise in early viewings. Variety says that Ford has created “another winner, an ambitious high-wire noir thriller.”

The Hollywood Reporter writes “David Lynch meets Alfred Hitchcock meets Douglas Sirk in Nocturnal Animals, a sumptuously entertaining noir melodrama laced with vicious crime and psychological suspense, which more than delivers on the promise of A Single Man.”

A tie-in edition, with the original title, comes out this week: Tony and Susan, Austin Wright (Hachette/Grand Central Publishing; OverDrive Sample).

The last tie-in of the week is for a work not yet in post-production, the start of a crime trilogy that will form the basis of an upcoming TV series.

Entertainment Weekly says it features “Ravi Chandra Singh, a London private investigator who handles “cases so high-profile that they never make the headlines” with his bevy of happily corrupt colleagues, like a hacker from Hong Konk, a Nigerian lawyer, and a brilliant stoner. When Ravi starts to see visions of Hindu gods as he becomes overwhelmed by his complex cases, he has to figure out if he’s completely delusional — or if he might actually be a modern day shaman.”

Sendhil Ramamurthy (Heroes) is signed to star in the still-in-development adaptation, EW reports.

For our full list of upcoming adaptations, download our Books to Movies and TV and link to our listing of tie-ins.

Downton Abbey favorite Lily James is set to star as Juliet Ashton in the film adaptation of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer (PR/Dial, 2008), reports Deadline Hollywood.

Mike Newell (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Love in the Time of Cholera) will direct the film, re-titled Guernsey.

Don’t  make plans for a popcorn themed book club meeting just yet. This is at least the third set of actors/directors associated with the somewhat troubled adaptation.

In 2013 the BBC reported that a project helmed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Kate Winslet had been tabled with Simon Curits taking over direction and a new, unnamed, actress replacing Winslet.

As we noted in February, the project has had several big names attached with little outcome. Rosamund Pike was reportedly in talks to star at the start of the year.

Filming for this latest attempt has yet to begin. The project currently has a 2018 completion date according to IMDb.

Two professors of politics at New York University have written a hot title, The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith (Perseus/PGW/Legato/PublicAffairs; Tantor Media; OverDrive Sample).

The cynical and insightful guide to ruling was first published in 2011, but is gaining new attention thanks to a video that has gone viral:

The new exposure has caused the book to make an astounding leap on the Amazon rankings. Like a corrupt wanna-be ruler, it has conducted a coup on the list and moved from #63,499 to #2 yesterday. It is now at #40.

In their 2011 review, WSJ compared it to Freakonomics and called it “lucidly written, shrewdly argued.” [subscription may be required].

A new take on Sherlock Holmes variations has Sarah Wendell excited for the launch of the first in Sherry Thomas’s romantic historical mystery series, A Study In Scarlet Women: The Lady Sherlock Series (PRH/Berkley; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Reviewing for NPR Books, the co-founder of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and the author of Everything I Know About Love, I Learned From Romance Novels, says that the “Gender-flipped Sherlock Holmes” story demands “a few hours of uninterrupted time — a rare thing, I know — to read it. You’ll probably finish it, and start the first page over again, because it’s that good.”

Stressing the novel’s strength in storytelling and style, Wendell concludes, “Thomas’s use of language, the way she uses gender reversal to conceal revelations, and the intricacies of her plotting mean that I will rediscover more things to relish in A Study in Scarlet Women each time I reread it … If you’re standing between me and my copy, you should probably move out of the way.”

Libraries that bought low are seeking spikes in holds as high as 5:1.

To mark the upcoming film premiere of The Dark Tower, Stephen King has written children’s book, Charlie the Choo-Choo: From the world of The Dark Tower, Beryl Evans, illustrated by Ned Dameron (S&S/Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers; 11/22/16).

Like J.K. Rowling’s publications of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them or The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Charlie the Choo-Choo is a fictional book mentioned in The Waste Lands, book three of the Dark Tower series. Entertainment Weekly says the book helps lead the character Jake in the direction of the Gunslinger.

It is written by “Beryl Evans” a character in the Dark Tower series and King uses that pseudonym on the cover of the real publication, under  a blurb in his own name: “If I were ever to write a children’s book, it would be just like this!”

It is illustrated by the real life artist Ned Dameron who created some of the art in King’s The Waste Lands, including, says EW, the cover of Charlie the Choo-Choo.

The picture book, about a sentient train who is best friends with his engineer Bob, first attracted attention during Comic-Con when it was offered as a real-life Easter egg for devoted fans, who stood in line, reports EW, in hopes of getting one of 150 copies signed by an actress playing the role of Evans.

The site Dread Central offers a full synopsis and six page spreads.

Only one book related film comes out this week, but it is a big one, the adaptation of Dan Brown’s Inferno.

Ron Howard and Tom Hanks both return to the film series with Howard directing and Hanks starring once more as Robert Langdon. Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything, Rogue One), Irrfan Khan (Jurassic World, Life of Pi), Omar Sy (The Intouchables), and Ben Foster (Lone Survivor) also star.

Thus far reviews are not great. The Guardian calls it “horrifically dull” and “fantastically boring” and adds the “story and character … are as flat as old, cold pancakes.”

Variety agrees, writing “the film more or less goes through the popcorn motions, but with less technical finesse (and even less mischievous irony) than one might expect from the Howard imprint.”

The Wrap says “Absurdity outweighs the thrills in Ron Howard‘s lifeless three-quel, a movie that’s not at all good — but never so bad as to be entertaining.”

In a pan of both book and film, The Telegraph writes “Ron Howard and Tom Hanks do perfect justice to Dan Brown’s book – tragically.”

There are multiple tie-ins:

Inferno (Movie Tie-in Edition), Dan Brown
Trade Paperback, (PRH/Anchor)
Mass Market, (PRH/Anchor)
Audio CD (PRH/Random House Audio)
Inferno (Movie Tie-in edition en Espanyol), (PRH/ Vintage Espanyol)

As we have previously posted, Brown’s next Robert Langdon book will be Origin (PRH/Doubleday; Sep 26, 2017; ISBN 9780385514231), the fifth in the series.

The movie premieres on October 28, 2016.

Beren and Lúthien, the star-crossed lovers of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, will have their own book reports Entertainment Weekly, Beren and Lúthien, edited by Christopher Tolkien (HMH, May 4, 2017). [Note: The cover, left, is from the UK edition, published there by HarperCollins.]

As Tor.com describes the story “Beren, a mortal man, falls in love with the elf Lúthien, thus inspiring legends and songs, as well as providing a model for the love of Aragorn and Arwen during the events of The Lord of the Rings.”

The Bookseller reports the story “has evolved since it was first written in 1917, and has been reworked in various forms, including poetry. To reflect this, the new book opens with Tolkien’s original text, before including passages from later texts that rework the tale.”

The book is edited by Tolkien’s son and will feature illustrations by Alan Lee, who won an Academy Award for his work on the third film of The Lord of the Rings cycle. He has also won the World Fantasy Award and the Kate Greenaway Medal.

The tale was personally important to Tolkien, reports Entertainment Weekly, so much so that the gravestone for the author and his wife refer to them as Beren and Lúthien.

Tor.com offers a introduction to Lúthien, calling her “Tolkien’s Badass Elf Princess.”

For those who recall the films, Aragorn sings the song of Lúthien in the first movie:

There have been several books about the Notorious RBG, also known as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The first book written by her, appropriately titled, My Own Words (Simon & Schuster; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample) debuts on this week’s hardcover NYT nonfiction best seller list.

She was the focus of the most recent edition of the NewsHour Bookshelf. Gwen Ifill interviews Ginsburg, opening with a question on how she became a cult icon.

Ginsburg says it has been “utterly amazing” and credits a second year law student at NYU who started the Notorious RBG Tumbler blog, posting Ginsburg’s dissent to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act (that post eventually led to a book, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik, HarperCollins/Dey Street Books, an unexpected hit last year).

Ifill says her reputation as a “folk hero” also has something to do with the way she writes and takes on her colleagues.

Ginsburg also says that until Jimmy Carter’s presidency it was unrealistic that a woman could ever be appointed to the Supreme Court. When she graduated there was not a single woman on any Federal bench. Carter, although he never got to appoint a Supreme Court Justice, changed that by appointing women to the Federal bench, paving the way for Ginsburg.

As we noted earlier, Ginsburg wears a special collar when she is on the dissenting side. The end of the PBS piece reveals she wears a gold lace one when she is with the majority opinion.

Holds to copies are not huge, but some systems are showing spikes of 5:1 ratios.