The November Slate book club is an intense conversation regarding Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (RH/Doubleday; OverDrive Sample).

Laura Bennett, Andrew Kahn, Dan Kois, and Katy Waldman, all of Slate, gathered to talk about Hanya Yanagihara’s novel just a few weeks before she discovers if the book wins the National Book Award (to be announced Nov.18).

In what might be the best expression of the group’s reaction, one of the panelists said she has never had as complicated a relationship with a novel, finding it both riveting and deeply unpleasant, a book she could not stop reading even as she found herself emotionally manipulated at every turn.

Another National Book Award finalist, Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, will be the subject of the December discussion.

NPR has one, Mark Zuckerberg has one. And now Costco has started their own book club.

The first pick is Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper, released in trade paperback today by S&S.

The club is announced in the June issue of COSTCO Connection, with a plot summary, “This debut novel tells the story of Etta, who, in her 80s, sets out to walk from her home in Saskatchewan to the ocean. Leaving behind her husband, Otto, Etta is joined by James, a coyote. And, she is trailed by Russell, who has always loved her.”

It also happens to be one of the titles that librarian and book club guru, Nancy Pearl recently selected as one of her under-the-radar summer picks on NPR’s Morning Edition. Nancy credits it for involving character development, saying that the book is a page turner in the less traditional sense of the term, because it “makes you want to find out more about [each character] … as you turn the pages, you delve deeper into their hopes and where they are at the moment in their life.”

The COSTCO Connection features an accompanying story on how to develop a book club and they’ve hit on some crossover potential, noting that Costco warehouses carry many items useful to book clubs beyond books, like food, beverages, folding tables and chairs.

Also featured in the June issue is Costco book buyer Pennie Clark Ianniciello’s pick for the month, one of our favorites, Wiley Cash’s A Land More Kind Than Home. (HarperCollins/Morrow Paperbacks).

Ianniciello has long been recognized in the book business for giving a new life in trade paperback to debuts and below-the-radar titles.

She’s not the only influential Costco buyer, the company’s wine buyer, Annette Alvarez Peters, is recognized as a major influence in that business (Costco is the largest importer of French wine in the world).

So this month’s COSTCO Connection  article on “the exciting flavors of sauvignon blanc” could enjoy cross over with reading clubs, not to mention the Italian cheeses in another article (Pecorino Romano is noted as pairing well with sauvignon blanc).

Check your holds on Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample), announced today as  the second pick in NPR’s Morning Edition Book Club.

NPR asks a well-known writer to select each book for the club and to explain the reasons for that choice on the show. Gillian Flynn did the honors for this one, saying that Atkinson exhibits a “vast humanity for her characters, [an] incredible empathy… and is an author that can make readers weep on one page and laugh on the next.”

A God in Ruins is a companion of sorts to the bestselling Life After Life, (Hachette/Little, Brown OverDrive Sample), following a character from the first book, Ursula Todd’s younger brother Teddy. It is the story of a life strongly affected by war and is told through three generations – Teddy, his daughter, and grandchildren.

Flynn says readers will enjoy dissecting the book’s many characters and will have differing opinions about them, making it a good book group pick.

NPR provides a reading guide and instructions on how to post questions and comments via Facebook, Instagram and  Twitter  (using #morningeditionbookclub). Atkinson will appear on Morning Edition June 16^th to answer those questions and discuss the book.

A God in Ruins follows Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories Of 33 Men Buried In A Chilean Mine And The Miracle That Set Them Free by Hector Tobar (Macmillan/FSG; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample). As we reported, the push from NPR helped that nonfiction account take off. A movie based on the story, titled The 33, starring Antonio Banderas, Juliette Binoche and Gabriel Byrne will be released November 13.

Libraries have plenty of hardcover copies of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch but it is still welcome news that the trade paperback edition (Hachette/Back Bay Books; ISBN 9780316055444; $20.00) hits the shelves this week, just in time for book club picks and kits.

It has also just been announced as the COSTCO book buyer’s pick for April.

It is the rare review that begins with such exuberant praise as “the most dazzling, most unsettling, most oh-my-God-listen-up novel you’ll read,” but that is the beginning of Ron Charles’s rave in yesterday’s Washington Post for T. Geronimo Johnson’s Welcome to Braggsville (HaperCollins/Morrow, Feb. 17; OverDrive Sample), a novel Charles goes on to claim will “shock and disturb” even as Johnson’s “narration has such athleticism that you feel energized just running alongside him — or even several strides behind.”

David L. Ulin of the LA Times shares Charles’s enthusiasm, opening his review with “when was the last time you were shocked by a turn in a novel? Not merely surprised or astonished but actually stunned?” and goes on to call Johnson’s novel “audacious, unpredictable, exuberant and even tragic, in the most classic meaning of the word.”

Welcome to Braggsville is an IndieNext pick for February, with the following recommendation,

“In Welcome to Braggsville, Johnson explores cultural, social, and regional diversity in a world increasingly driven by social media. His satirical and ironic style portrays a UC Berkeley — ‘Berzerkeley’ — student from Georgia who, along with his friends, goes back to his hometown to challenge an annual Southern tradition and inadvertently sets off a chain of events resulting in tragic consequences. Johnson’s creative language play envelops the reader in the Deep South with the impact of a razor-sharp Lynyrd Skynyrd riff.”

Johnson has jumped from a literary nonprofit publisher (Coffee House Press) to HarperCollins with his second novel (after his debut Hold It ‘Til It Hurts, which was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award). For your readers willing to be challenged, lift some quotes from Charles’s review, which also makes it sound like a strong book club candidate.

The next pick in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s fast-paced book club is:

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, Sudhir Venkatesh (Penguin Press, 2008; HarperCollins Audio; Overdrive Sample)

The book was widely discussed when it was published and hit the extended NYT best seller list for one week in hardcover.  NY Times review.

Previous A Year of Books picks:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker, (Penguin/Viking, 2011)

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used To Be, Moises Naim, (Perseus/Basic Books, 2013)

The new NPR Morning Edition book club wrapped up today with a discussion of the first selection, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free by Hector Tobar (Macmillan/FSG; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample; Oct), picked in December by bookstore owner and author Ann Patchett.

The book, which has hit the lower rungs of the NYT best seller list as a result of the selection, is also one of five finalists for the NBCC Nonfiction Award, announced yesterday and  has been made into a movie, titled The 33, starring Antonio Banderas, Juliette Binoche and Gabriel Byrne. Currently in post-production, the release date has not yet been announced.

The next title in the club will be announced soon; we will let you know when it is.

[Note: the following is from our regular GalleyChatter columnist, Robin Beerbower]

Librarian friends on Edelweiss have been busy marking and reviewing hot e-galleys. Below are a few that have interested us the most. I will be writing about new titles rising to the top of TBR piles; if you want to join in, please friend me.

The March GalleyChat round-up featured The Bees by Laline Paull, (HarperCollins/Ecco, May), and it has since received even more buzz with seven librarians giving it “much love” on Edelweiss. Vicki Nesting said “Every once in a while a book that you never expected captures your imagination.” I’m keeping my fingers crossed this will be a top LibraryReads choice for May (the second image, above, is from the back cover of the book).

A few lucky librarians have received a sweet little drawstring bag marked with a skull and crossbones containing an ARC of Taylor Stevens’ The Catch, (RH/Crown, July). Fourth in the popular Vanessa Michael Munroe series, the “informationist” goes to Africa and gets involved with kidnappings and Somali pirates. Might be a good fiction match for Captain Phillips.

It’s been four years since book group favorite Jane Smiley has published an adult book, so it’s no wonder there is high anticipation for her next book Some Luck, (RH/Knopf, October), the first in an epic trilogy featuring a farm family.

On Edelweiss Jen Dayton raved about Lily King’s Euphoria, (Grove/Atlantic, June), a novel loosely based on Margaret Mead’s journals, saying “King’s language is as lush as the landscape…” It has received “much love” from five peers and the publisher compares this to Horan’s Loving Frank and McLain’s The Paris Wife.

Last year, I loved Ann Hood’s The Obituary Writer so much that I selected it as a Thorndike Peer Pick. Many of us are excited to see Hood has a new one coming, The Italian Wife (W.W. Norton, Sept.), a multi-generational novel about an Italian family in America. I’ll be watching closely for the e-galley tentatively scheduled for April.

Paul Doiron’s fifth in the Game Warden Mike Bowditch mysteries, The Bone Orchard, (Macmillan/Minotaur, July), has snagged the interest of a number of Edelweiss friends.

This atmospheric series set in Maine are good for those who like C. J. Box and William Kent Krueger.

Set a story on a beach and I’ll read it, so I am pleased two of my favorite authors have galleys available for their June books. Nancy Thayer’s Nantucket Sisters, (RH/Ballantine), and Elin Hilderbrand’s The Matchmaker, (Hachette/ Little, Brown), are not only perfect for fans of women’s fiction but they also have covers that scream “stuff me into your beach bag.”

We’re looking forward to hearing out what you’re reading. Join us on Twitter for GalleyChat, this coming Tuesday, April 1 (we kid you not), from 4 to 5 p.m. EST (4:30 for virtual cocktails), #ewgc.

This week, Colbert outstrips Jon Stewart in terms of the number of authors on their shows.

Last night, The Colbert Report featured NPR journalist David Folkenflik for his book on Rupert “Murdoch’s media empire, his influence on world leaders and the extent of the News Corp phone-hacking scandal.”

Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires, David Folkenflik, (Perseus/PublicAffairs)

The author was  interviewed earlier on Salon and on NPR’s Morning Edition. MediaMatters covered “5 Of The Most Interesting Stories From David Folkenflik’s Upcoming Murdoch Biography.”

Video below:

Coming up

Tonight, Colbert

Dr. J: The Autobiography. Julius Erving, Karl Taro Greenfeld, (Harper; HarperLuxe)

Wednesday, The Daily Show:

Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam’s Madame Nhu, Monique Brinson Demery, (Perseus/PublicAffairs)

According to the show’s  description, the book “uncovers the mystery behind the woman whom author David Halberstam once called ‘the beautiful but diabolic sex dicta tress.’ ”

Thursday, Colbert

The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease, Daniel Lieberman, (RH/Pantheon; RH Audio)

Many libraries still have holds lists for Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, which HarperCollins just released in paperback. It’s a novel that seems ripe for a movie adaptation (great locations — just look at that cover — and the multiple story lines involve the movie business. Note also, that it has been a hit in audio).

Unsurprisingly, the book was optioned shortly after publication and now comes the news that Todd Field has signed on as the director. He has had experience with book adaptations, having won acclaim for his film Little Children, based on the novel by Tom Perrotta.

In 2011, it was announced that an earlier title by Walter, The Financial Lives of Poets, was  going to be adapted as Bailout, by independent filmmaker Michael Winterbottom, starring Jack Black, but there’s been no news on it for over a year.

Walter’s most recent book, a collection of short stories, We Live in Water (Harper Perennial original paperback), was published in February.

Author Christopher Paul Curtis appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered to discuss his book, The Watson Go to Birmingham – 1963, (RH/Yearling, 1995), the January pick for The Back Seat Book Club (a club for the kids who hear NPR from that spot as they are being ferried from place to place).

For February, the Club is featuring two titles, published over fifty years apart, but with a similar theme; the prejudice that kids from other countries face from their American school mates.
 
The classic The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes (HMH), about a young Polish girl who is mercilessly teased, was published in 1944 and won a Newbery Honor. Shooting Kabul  by N. H. Senzai, (S&S, Paula Wiseman), the story of an 11-year-old who moves to California from Kabul, came out in 2010.
 
In addition to inviting questions from kids, NPR also invites them to send in photos of the places and people they love (the boy in Shooting Kabul finds solace in photography). Selected photos will be featured on the NPR web site.

If, like me, you’ve had trouble grasping why Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife is such a literary sensation (on at least 19 Best Books lists, finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Orange Prize), the Huffington Post is here to help, kicking off their book club with a month-long look at the novel, the first of ten books that will be featured in the club.

HuffPo is utilizing multiple online communication tools for the club — readers can comment on the Book Club page, via Twitter  and Facebook. They can even upload images of themselves reading the book via Flickr and sign up for weekly reading assignments. Huffington Post‘s Book Editor, Andrew Losowsky says they also “want to join your real-world community, teaming up with local book clubs and independent bookstores, hosting both online discussion and real-world events,” (we assume he meant to include libraries, since the Books section recently launched a series on the importance of libraries).

The first session of the club ends on Feb. 7th, with a live event in New York.

Kenneth Branagh may have abandoned plans to direct an adaptation of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. In August, Variety reported that he was planning to begin production on Guernsey in the spring of 2012. Now, that publication announces that Branagh is set to direct Italian Shoes, based on the book by Swedish writer Henning Mankell (New Press, 2009). Branagh starred in the English-language adaptation of the author’s crime-thriller series Wallander for the BBC.

Italian Shoes is decidedly not a crime thriller, however. It’s the story of an aging former surgeon, living alone on a remote island. Various women from his past come to visit and help him regain the desire to live. Reviewing it, the Boston Globe noted, “…if the plot seems like something out of a film by Mankell’s father-in-law, the late Ingmar Bergman, the prose isn’t any sunnier.” Even so, the reviewer was amazed to report, “But you know something? Italian Shoes is a good read.”

Branagh continues his career in front of the camera, playing Sir Laurence Olivier in My Week With Marilyn, based on the book by Colin Clark, released for the first time here as a tie-in. The Oscar buzzed movie opens this Thanksgiving. Two new clips, featuring Michelle Williams as Marilyn, were released yesterday.

My Week with Marilyn Colin Clark Retail Price: $16.00 Paperback: 336 pages Publisher: Weinstein Books – (2011-10-04) ISBN / EAN: 1602861498 / 9781602861497

Also on audio from Dreamscape and on OverDrive.

Good news for books groups. Publishers are speeding up the release of paperback reprints, which traditionally arrive a year after the hardcover, reports the New York Times. The wait for Room by Emma Donoghue took only eight months. Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! (Vintage Contemporaries) arrives in trade paperback this week, with new cover art, a mere five months after its hardcover publication in February.

When a book is doing well in hardcover, however, publishers still hold off. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest has been out for a year and is not yet in paperback. It was more than two years before The Help arrived in softcover.

NPR inaugurated a social networking book club experiment in January with Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken.

For March, they turn to a book that has been a long-lasting trade paperback best seller (currently at #2 after 57 weeks), Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

Adding a new twist, NPR invites books clubs to apply for the opportunity to receive a personal call or videochat from the author.

Cutting for Stone Abraham Verghese Retail Price: $15.95 Paperback: 688 pages Publisher: Vintage – (2010-01-26) ISBN / EAN: 0375714367 / 9780375714368

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