Showtime has optioned Mat Johnson’s novel Loving Day (RH/ Spiegel & Grau; OverDrive Sample) as a potential comedy series. According to Deadline  talks are “underway with high-end writers to collaborate with the author on penning the adaptation.”

About a mixed race man and the daughter he never knew he had, the novel has received a fair amount of critical attention:

NPR’s reviewer, Michael Schaub, heaped praise on it, calling it a “beautiful, triumphant miracle of a book.”

Jim Ruland’s review in the Los Angeles Times was equally strong, “To say that Loving Day is a book about race is like saying Moby-Dick is a book about whales. Indeed, the subtitle to Mat Johnson’s exceptional novel could read “the whiteness of the mixed male.” [His] riff on racial identity starts as a scene, turns into an episode and morphs into a motif that never lets up. His unrelenting examination of blackness, whiteness and everything in between is handled with ruthless candor and riotous humor.”

Writing for The New York Times, Baz Dreisinger calls it a “ribald, incisive the novel … [that] ultimately triumphs because it is razor-sharp, sci-fi-flavored satire in the vein of George Schuyler, playfully evocative of black folklore à la Joel Chandler Harris — yet it never feels like a cold theoretical exercise. Loving Day is that rare mélange: cerebral comedy with pathos.”

It’s no surprise that the success of HBO’s Game of Thrones is spawning a whole new appreciation for the genre in the TV world. Variety trumpets that “Game of Thrones Leads Fantasy TV’s Transformation from Geek to Chic” noting,  “On tap for the 2015-16 season are no fewer than five series based on literary works that deal with magic, monsters, mythical realms or heroic quests.”

Those five series listed below:

MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles — ten episode series to begin January, 2016. Based on Terry Brooks’ Shannara series, the first in the book series is Sword Of Shannara, but the first in the TV series will be based on the second book Elfstones Of Shannara. Tie-in — see our movie and TV tie-ins.

Syfy’s The Magicians  — twelve episode series to begin January, 2016. Based on Lev Grossman’s  The Magicians fantasy trilogy (The Magicians, 2009; The Magician King, and The Magician’s Land). No tie-ins have been announced.

ABC Family’s Shadowhunters — Early 2016. Cassandra Clare’s YA series beginning with The Mortal Instruments: City Of Bones, (S&S/ M.K. McElderry Books, 2007). It was also made into a movie in 2013. Plans to turn it into a franchise when it flopped at the box office. the producers think it will do better as a TV series. Tie-ins — see our movie and TV tie-ins. Web site: Shadowhunterstv.com

NBC’s Emerald City — 2016, A “modern reimagining” of Frank L. Baum Wizard of Oz, with stories drawn from all 14 books in the series. No tie-in has been announced.

Starz’s American Gods — 2016. Based on Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, (HarperCollins/Morrow, 2001). No tie-in has been announced.

Philip K. Dick is having something of a moment … yet again.

Long beloved in the SF world, his novels and short stories have also long been adapted into movies including Total Recall, The Adjustment Bureau, Minority Report, Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly.

Now Dick is poised to make a splash on the small screen with a TV version of Minority Report (actually a sequel to the movie starring Tom Cruise, which was in turn based on the 2002 short story by Dick). airing on FOX beginning Sept. 21 and an adaption of The Man in the High Castle streaming via Amazon Prime starting Nov. 20 (poster at left, above and the cover of the most recent reissue of the book, HMH, 2012. No tie-in has been announced).

The Man in the High Castle, an alternative history in which the Axis powers won WWII and are ruling America, is getting a lot of attention. We wrote about its premier at Comic-Con, Entertainment Weekly is on board with frequent coverage, and the series is getting play in both mainstream media and specialized blogs.

Jeff Jensen writing for Entertainment Weekly reviewed the entire Amazon line up under the headline “Amazon pilot reviews: The Man in the High Castle is king” and said of the opener “this well-cast, well-acted, swell-looking pilot is by far the most polished of the group. It’s engrossing despite its stately pace, and a triumph of world building. [It] could be Amazon’s first successful attempt at big saga TV.”

Amazon says it is their most-watched pilot to date, reports Newsweek, also quoting executive producer Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files) “[the story] raises all kinds of questions about reality and what it means to be human in an inhuman world … The chance to dramatize it was just irresistible.”

Den of Geek has posted an interview with several of the executive producers, including Dick’s daughter Isa Dick-Hackett, David W. Zucker (The Good Wife), and Spotnitz. When asked just what it was about Dick’s writing that makes it so perennially popular his daughter replied:

He would be astounded that we’re sitting here talking about titles of 50-60 years past. Maybe people have caught up to his work. I think with every film adaptation the following grows and hopefully it brings people back to the written work. When he talked about technology it wasn’t just about the technology itself. It was about the how it impacted human beings and what it means to be human. What is reality? Those are universal questions and I think it is part of the draw.

The first episode of The Man in the High Castle is currently available free on Amazon. Trailer, below.

The promo is beginning for the HBO series Westworld.

Headlines such as HBO’s Westworld Looks Like a Thrilling Take on Michael Crichton’s Sci-Fi Parable may make it sound like it’s based on a book, but the reference is to Crichton’s film, which he wrote and directed in 1973.

There is a book connection, however. The screenplay was published as a mass market paperback at the time of the movie.

Just for fun, here’s the trailer for the original movie.

The series is set to begin some time in 2016. No tie-in has been announced.

Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör (Quirk; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) is now a “put pilot’ for Fox (translation: “one that will definitely air”) with plans to create an hour-long series inspired by the quirky book.

Horrorstör, with a cover resembling an IKEA catalog and a nifty layout replete with furniture ads, was a September 2014 LibraryReads pick. It follows the fate of several workers of a big box home store who discover the company warehouse was built on top of a prison and is now haunted.

The TV show tweeks the haunted house plot to create an ongoing story. Deadline reports that “the store actually preys upon its customers’ desires to a supernatural degree, selling products that make their wishes and fantasies come true in unexpected and insidious ways.”

The O.C. and Gossip Girl creator Josh Schwartz is part of the production team, which also includes Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind). An air date has yet to be set.

Two of HBO’s most successful series feature cities in crisis, The Wire, about the drug wars in West Baltimore and Treme about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The creator of both, David Simon, next turns his attention to Yonkers, New York in the 1980’s when the racially divided city was further torn apart by a court-ordered public housing project.

Show Me a Hero, a six-part series set to debut this coming Sunday, August 16, is adapted from the book of the same title by journalist Lisa Belkin. The NYT says it “arrives at a particularly relevant moment” as debates over public housing continue to rage.

Oscar Isaac stars as Mayor Wasicsko. The cast also includes Catherine Keener, Jim Belushi, Bob Balaban and Winona Ryder.

Belkin’s book is being released in a new edition, with an afterword that examines Yonkers today.

Show Me A Hero : A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race, and Redemption
Lisa Belkin
Hachette/Back Bay Books:September 1, 2015
Paperback; $17.00

In his final week hosting the Daily Show, Jon Stewart uncharacteristically did not interview any authors, but he did a shout out to a book coming in October, Do Unto Animals, (Workman, Artisan), by an author he knows well, Tracey Stewart.

As a result the book has been rising on Amazon’s sales rankings and is currently
at #7.

Stewart’s final episode airs tonight. The show resumes on Sept. 28 with Trevor Noah as host.

In the on-going battle between the big screen and the small screen, Netflix made a splash by buying the rights to a major new movie, directed by Cary Fugunaka and starring Idris Elba. Beasts of No Nation. It is based on the 2005 novel by  Uzodinma Iweala about child soldiers in West Africa.

There’s one problem. To be eligible for Oscar consideration, the movie has to open in theaters. While many theaters refuse to book movies that will be released simultaneously on cable, Netflix has managed to make a deal with Landmark Theatres to premier the movie in 19 cities on the same day it begins streaming on Netflix, October 16.

The first trailer was just released:

Tie-in:

Beasts of No Nation Movie Tie-in 
Uzodinma Iweala
Harper Perennial: September 29, 2015,

The author won New York Public Library’s 2006 Young Lions Fiction Award. The book won  praise from a wide range of publications, including the NYT Book Review

Director Fugunaka was scheduled to direct Stephen King’s It, but dropped out weeks before production. Next up for him is a TV adaptation of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist for TNT. The author recently joined as producer.

Britain’s Carnival Films, the production company behind hits such as Downton Abbey and Agatha Christie’s Poirot is gearing up for a second season of Grantchester, to air on PBS Masterpiece in 2016, according to Deadline Hollywood.

Based on the short stories by James Runcie, the first season drew from the collection Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death (Bloomsbury; Movie-tie in ed.; OverDrive Sample). The new season appears to be based on Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night (Macmillan/Bloomsbury; OverDrive Sample; the publisher tells EarlyWord that a movie tie-in is likely, but has not yet been announced).

If you missed the first season, Grantchester features a dishy village vicar who solves crimes around his tiny hamlet outside of Cambridge, England and ventures further afield as well. Full of jazz music, anguished flashbacks to WWII, and frustrated romance, the sprightly paced 1950s set whodunits showcase well-drawn characters, a fabulous setting, and a not quite cozy tone.

Reviews were generally positive on both sides of the ocean when season one debuted. The Telegraph wrote “Stop it, I’m hooked. Sign me up. I’ll give you my cat and house to see what happens next.”

The LA Times called the show “guilelessly entertaining” and said that while it “lulls more than it grabs [like a] good sermon, you may think you’re only barely listening until you realize you’re fully immersed.”

The New York Times had a different view, however, claiming that Grantchester will be “breezy fun for fans of the form, though the more discerning will be put off by how rudimentary the actual murder mysteries are after being squeezed into 50 minutes (half the norm for this type of show). Others are liable to find it faintly ridiculous, more of a haiku than an actual drama.”

The show created demand for the book and holds spiked at some locations beyond a 3:1 ratio.

Continuing his somewhat incongruous attention to books, Seth Meyers featured graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel on yesterday’s Late Night show, devoting the entire second half to her book Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2006) and its Tony-winning Broadway musical adaptation.

Meyers asked Bechdel to share the impetus behind Fun Home. Although it’s covered in the book, Bechdel’s recounting added emotional depth to  the story of  her coming out while in college and how that ultimately revealed her father’s hidden homosexual infidelity. He died shortly after in an accident that may have actually been a suicide.

That sad moment was balanced against a scene from the play, staged on Meyers set, in which the Broadway cast performed “Changing My Major.”

Holds are spiking in some libraries beyond ratios of 6:1 while a few libraries we checked had copies on the shelf.

A cast album is also available:

Tesori, Jeanine, composer, Fun home: a new Broadway musical, (PS Classics)

Seth Meyers has brought something unusual to late night TV, authors.

Tonight, he goes another step further, featuring graphic novelist Alison Bechdel as well as a scene ftrom the Tony Award winning play based on her book Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2006). According to TheatreMania, this will be the first time a Broadway show has been performed on Late Night.

True to form, two of the four guests featured by Jon Stewart during his next-to-last week as host of The Daily Show are authors.

Last night, it was historian David McCullough, filling in at the last moment for presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who inexplicably backed out of his scheduled appearance. Cruz missed his chance if his goal was to promote his book, A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America (HarperCollins/Broadside Books; 6/30/15). McCullough’s The Wright Brothers,(S&S, 5/5/15), already a best seller, jumped up Amazons’ sales ranking as a result of the appearance.

On Wednesday Stewart will bring back one of his favorite guests, Doris Kearns Goodwin. Her latest book is The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, which they discussed when it was published in 2011.

Goodwin’s first appearance on the Daily Show, at the end of 2005, was to discuss her previous title Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

Since then, Goodwin  has been on the show several times, bringing her perspective on the history of the presidency to discussions of George W. Bush’s final State Of The Union speech (lacking substance, he appears as if “he’s ready to go back to the ranch”), whether Obama would win the 2008 election (“Yes”), then his first hundred days (Goodwin, “he’s doing pretty well”; Stewart was more skeptical) and his first State of the Union address (“he’s failing to articulate a clear legislative vision”)

A BBC TV series based on Bernard Cornwell’s The Saxon Tales, titled The Last Kingdom, after the first book in the series, is to premiere on BBC America on Oct. 10.

No full trailer yet, the following is just a teaser:

The Last Kingdom tie-in
Bernard Cornwell
Harper Papberbacks: September 22, 2015
9780062438621, 006243862X
Paperback; $15.99 USD

The ninth book in the series Warriors of the Storm, is coming in January (Harper; HarperAudio; HarperLuxe).

An unexpected venue has begun featuring novelists. The Wall Street Journal writes that Seth Meyers has created a “Late Night Literary Salon” on his TV show that boosts book sales.

When Hanya Yanagihara the author of the literary doorstopper, A Little Life, (RH/Doubleday, March) was invited to appear on the show, she assumed someone was playing a joke on her. Fortunately, she accepted. Meyers spoke to her for over six minutes, a long time for television and the interview caused sales to rise an impressive 54% according to BookScan. Meyers’s interview with Marlon James for A Brief History of Seven Killings (RH/Riverhead, 2014) resulted in a 31% sales bump. Those spikes are nothing, however, compared to the 500% jump Linda Fairstein saw after her appearance for Terminal City (Penguin/Dutton, June).

Other authors have not fared as well. Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (Hachette/Little, Brown, 2014) did not rise, but even so he told WSJ that “plugging a book is often a humbling enterprise… being on Seth’s show was the opposite. It was a gift.”

Meyers apparently reads very widely and picks the authors he wants to meet. As Marlon James says of his booking on the show, “I first just thought, well, my publicist is working overtime, which she is. But the idea that behind his booking was simply that he fell in love with these books just kind of blew my mind … it’s just not one of those things you expect.”

Meyers has featured authors who are no strangers to TV, such as Stephen King and George R.R. Martin as well and, according to the WSJ, Judy Blume and Junot Díaz are up soon.

A sample, below, in which Martin knights Meyers.

We end our tribute to Jon Stewart for his attention to books and reading as host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with one of our favorites. This one is not an author interview, but a segment in which Stewart quotes the “Statement of Purpose of the Boston Public Library,” perhaps the only time it’s ever been quoted on national television.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart returns from hiatus next week. On Thursday, Stewart will interview Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of Between the World and Me (RH/Spiegel & Grau). In his New York Times column today, “Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White,” David Brooks calls the book “a mind-altering account of the black male experience. Every conscientious American should read it.”

Stewart’s final day as host is August 6. His replacement Trevor Noah debuts on Sept 28. Here’s hoping he’s a reader.