It’s brief, but here it is:

Three clips are also available.

The 4-hour series, which was a hit with critics at the Venice Film Festival, will begin airing on HBO on Sunday, Nov. 2.

Tie-in:

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
Random House Trade Paperbacks, 10/28/14

The new issue of Entertainment Weekly challenges readers with the question, “Do YOU Know Elena Ferrante?” (story not online yet).

If you don’t, you’re in good company. It turns out the author of this “rare interview” with Ferrante (Vogue also has one this month) hadn’t heard of her either until this summer, although “the Italian author’s urgent, blistering fiction has made her something of a cult sensation here in America.”

Attesting to that cult status, the New Yorker‘s redoubtable critic James Wood profiled Ferrante last year calling her “one of Italy’s best-known least-known contemporary writers … Compared with Ferrante, Thomas Pynchon is a publicity profligate.” Just last week, the New York Times Magazine asked three authors to address the question, “Who is Elena Ferrante?”

Entertainment Weekly goes on to call her Neapolitan series of novels, the third of which, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, was just released, “an intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends Lila and Elena, Bright and passionate girls from a raucous neighborhood in world-class Naples. Ferrante writes with such aggression  and unnerving psychological insight about the messy complexity of female friendship that the real world can drop away when you’re reading her,”

In the U.S., Ferrante is published by  Europa Editions.

The Neapolitan series:

#1  My Brilliant Friend, 2012  — OverDrive Sample

#2 The Story of a New Name, 2013 — OverDrive Sample

#3 Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, 9/2/14 — OverDrive Sample

Other titles available in the U.S, (all also from Europa Editions):

The Days of Abandonment, 2005 — OverDrive Sample

Troubling Love,  2008 — OverDrive Sample

The Lost Daughter, 2008 — OverDrive Sample

The first review of HBO’s four-hour mini-series based on Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, (Random House, 2008) has arrived and it’s a rave.

The series premiered at the Venice Film Festival yesterday. The Hollywood Reporter calls it, “emotionally satisfying, funny-sad …  directed with an impeccable balance of sensitivity and humor by Lisa Cholodenko [The Kids Are All Right].”

UPDATE: More reviews have appeared and it’s a hit with the critics — Variety calls it “finely crafted, wonderfully cast,” but fears it may lose audiences; IndieWire hails it as “the biggest positive surprise at Venice” and the U.K.’s Telegraph calls it simply, “brilliant.”

Three clips are now available via IndieWire. Below is Clip #3, featuring Bill Murray with Frances MacDermond as Olive, who optioned the book and produced the series with Tom Hanks, among others. Click here for Clip 1 and Clip 2.

The series will be shown on HBO beginning Sunday, Nov. 2.

Tie-in:

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
Random House Trade Paperbacks, 10/28/14

HBO’s miniseries based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout (Random House, 2008) is scheduled to debut on Sunday, Nov. 2. The first two parts will be shown that night, followed by the final two parts the next night.

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right), with Tom Hanks and Frances McDormand producing, the series stars:

Frances McDormand … Olive Kitteridge

Richard Jenkins … Henry Kitteridge (Olive’s husband)

John Gallagher Jr. … Christopher Kitteridge, (Olive and Henry’s son)

Cory Michael Smith … Kevin Coulson, (Olive’s former student)

Zoe Kazan … Denise Thibodeau, (works with Henry at the pharmacy)

Brady Corbet … Henry Thibodeau, (married to Denise)

Rosemarie DeWitt … Rachel Coulson

Unfortunately, no trailers have been released yet.

Official Web Site: HBO.com/Olive-Kitteridge

Tie-in:

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
Random House Trade Paperbacks: October 28, 2014
Trade Paperback: $15.00 USD / $15.00 CAD

Arriving at #32 on today’s USA Best-Selling Books list is a debut that has been a growing critical hit, We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas., (S&S; S&S Audio). 

The novel is also a hit in the U.K., where is on the long list for the Guardian First Book Award. The author was interviewed in that publication  yesterday.

As we noted in our earlier story, Big Books of the Fall, holds are growing in libraries.

Featured yesterday on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, was Richard Flanagan, the author of one of the books on the Man Booker Award long list, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (RH/Knopf).

The author is a favorite of Seattle Public Library’s David Wright who says he is, “a consummate stylist, but with a style that is in service to the realities he’s writing about, which are often deeply painful and tragic. That is certainly true in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which depicts with a fair amount of detail the horrific experience of POWs in WWII (Flanagan’s father was a survivor of the Thai-Burma death railway) … He is so skillful in showing how these events affect mens’ lives … his writing is devastating, generous, and deeply caring.”

The book is being published tomorrow. Several libraries are showing heavy holds on light ordering.

Author Sarah Bird escapes the Austin, Texas, heat to be interviewed in cooler Seattle by librarian Nancy Pearl.

She explains why her latest novel,  Above The China Sea,(RH/Knopf, 5/27/14; Recorded Books) is considered a “stunning departure” from her earlier books.

For more of Nancy’s favorites, listen to her on Seattle’s KUOW radio station.

One of our Penguin First Flights authors was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered on Saturday, Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You, (Penguin Press). Host Arun Rath says the reader is hooked from the book’s opening line, “Lydia is dead, but they don’t know it yet.”

Learn more about how the Ng structured the novel in  our online chat with the author.

Become a member of Penguin’s First Flights program here.

Published by a very small press in Great Britain (it was only their second book) and coming in September from Coffee House Press in the U.S., A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, the author’s debut novel, won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, announced in London last night.

The book, which the 37-year-old author wrote ten years ago, was initially rejected by agents and publishers who considered it too difficult to sell. The author put it away until she tried again with Galley Beggar Press, a start-up in the author’s home town of Norwich. It received glowing reviews that acknowledged the book’s unconventional language, described by the Guardian as “devoid of commas, a fractured, poetic, pre-conscious voice, pregnant with full stops and half rhymes … But it actually feels like language anyone could read and understand. Its subject matter is the real difficulty, the story of a young girl, struggling to deal with her older brother’s illness – a brain tumour – and the abuse she experiences.” It went on to win the newly-created Goldsmith’s Prize for Literature and was published in paperback by Macmillan/Faber & Faber.

McBride won over competition from several literary heavy weighs, including Donna Tartt, for The Goldfinch. She says she has “nearly finished” a second novel.

When Amazon began their fight with publisher Hachette, they may not have taken into account the fact that Stephen Colbert is published by Hachette.

Colbert explains the situation below and shows Bezos what he thinks of it.

Colbert brings on “fellow Amazon victim,” Sherman Alexie, who is also published by Hachette.

Since debut authors are most at risk from Amazon’s tactics, Alexie helps one of them by recommending viewers pre-order California, by Edan Lapucki, (Hachette/Little, Brown, July 8; audio from Dreamscape) via Powells.

The book has appeared earlier on summer reading lists, including the Pittsburgh Post Gazette‘s, with the following recommendation,

When the American economy collapses and anarchy reigns in the land, a couple from Los Angeles head for the hills where they have to forage for food and improvise shelter. They are quickly confronted by stark choices and must figure out whether reconnecting with other survivors would be worth the aggravation that comes with being a part of civilization.

Last year’s National Book Award winner, The Good Lord Bird by James McBride (Penguin/Riverhead; Dreamscape Audio; Thorndike) may be heading to the big screen. Liev Schreiber and Jaden Smith (The Karate Kid, After Earth) have signed to star, with author McBride taking on a role as producer. Smith will play Henry “Onion” Shackleford with  Schreiber in the role of abolitionist John Brown.

McBride’s’ Miracle At St. Anna (Penguin/Riverhead, 2002) was adapted by Spike Lee in 2008. An FX series based on the author’s book Song Yet Sung, (Penguin/Riverhead, 2008), about Harriet Tubman, was announced last fall.

After a glowing cover review in the New York Times Book Review, Family Life by Akhil Sharma (W.W. Norton) is getting even more attention. It is called the “year’s first great novel” by Salon. In a review on NPR’s All Things Considered on Thursday, Meg Waltzer says the author, “takes a simple, emotionally difficult story and makes the reader brave the ongoing pain and become fully absorbed,” and the Huffington Post designates it as the week’s “Book We’re Talking About.”

Libraries that ordered it modestly are showing heavy holds ratios.

[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.

If you heard the promo for Karen Russell’s interview on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday, and thought, “I didn’t know she had a new book out,” you are not alone.

Her new book is actually an eBook-only novella titled Sleep Donation. Dozens of writers have released eBook-only short fiction, many of them “bridge” stories between titles in a series, to tide fans over between books, (such as Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novella, High Heat, RH/Delacorte). But when an author with Russell’s literary cred does it, it gets attention.

Adding further to the media allure, this is the first release from Atavist Books, a joint venture between media mogul Barry Diller and movie producer Scott Rudin, run by former Picador USA publisher Frances Coady (more on the company here, but fair warning, this story buys the Kool Aid that it is “revolutionary,” even though there are many others in this business). Adding even more media-worthy names, it comes with an audio read by indie actress Greta Gerwig, and even has an interactive cover designed by that oxymoron, a famous book designer, Chip Kidd. Plus, it has its own website.

Unfortunately, however, it does not seem to be available to libraries.

Appropriately, the novella is about an insomnia epidemic ravaging America, the result of people paying too much attention to electronic devices (take note, Arianna Huffington; this could be a cross-promotional opportunity for your book).

In addition to the attention from Fresh Air, the novella was also the lead title in Entertainment Weekly’s book section last week, in a story titled “Let’s Get Digital” that includes Joe Hill’s short story Wolverton Station (from HarperCollins/Morrow and available to libraries), Greg Iles’s novella, The Death Factory (also HarperCollins/Morrow and available to libraries) plus upcoming titles by two other literary darlings, Column McCann’s Gone (released March 18 by another ebook-only publisher Byliner and apparently not available to libraries) and Adelle Waldman’s New Year’s, a companion story to her The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., coming in May, from the old world publisher where Francis Coady used to work, Macmillan/Picador (presumably one of those places she refers to as “print originators [who] tend to see digital as a slightly embarrassing offshoot of print.”)

After the huge success of Room, it’s no surprise that critics are vying to be the first to review author Emma Donoghue’s next book, Frog Music, (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio and Large Print), which arrives this coming Tuesday (although some libraries are showing that it is in process).

The Washington Post‘s is among the first of the consumer reviews, with Ron Charles noting, “The millions of readers who know Donoghue only from the harrowing tale of that little boy [in Room] will discover in Frog Music just how expansive and boisterous this Irish Canadian author can be … Donoghue has created a full-throated murder mystery, spiced with song and forbidden love.”

The Wall Street Journal profiles the author’s background research, in which she came up with a solution to a real-life murder that took place in San Francisco in 1876.

The film rights for Room were acquired in 2013. It is still in development as of January, according to a story in Deadline.