Zooming up to #10 on Amazon’s sales rankings on its first day of publication is a non-conformist manifesto in a conformist package (a book — or as Craig Ferguson puts it, a “BO-OK from the Beforetimes” — and from a New York publishing house). Based on a popular blog of the same title, it’s The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau.

The author says he will be doing an “Unconventional Book Tour” — collectively organized, self-funded and hitting 63 cities.

The book was not reviewed prepub; the libraries that own it are showing holds on light ordering.

The Art of Non-Conformity Chris Guillebeau Retail Price: $14.95 Paperback: 256 pages Publisher: Perigee – (2010-09-07) ISBN 9780399536106

The new Bob Woodward book on President Obama is called Obama’s Wars, according to the AP. Woodward first appearance for the book will be an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s World News on 9/27, the day of the book’s release.

Library holds are light so far.

Obama’s Wars Bob Woodward Retail Price: $30.00 Hardcover: 464 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster – (2010-09-27) ISBN / EAN: 1439172498 / 9781439172490

As the New York Times needlessly reminds us, “The fall is really a long lead-in to the holiday season, the period when bookstores see the highest volume of sales for the year.” As a result, the season tends to be filled with big names, making it difficult to break out new authors

So, it’s no surprise that fall book previews are mostly devoid of surprises. Below are recent consumer media previews (we’re linking to the previews at the right, under Books of Fall ’10 — Previews):

USA Today Fall Books — Interactive Calendar — a great, quick take on 33 titles, mostly by familiar names, with just two less well-known titles:

• Sept. 14 — The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean, Susan Casey; Doubleday big nonfiction adventure story by O Magazine editor-in-chief.

• Nov. 16 — The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner) — Nearly everyone in the US has been touched in some way by the disease, a ready audience for what advance readers are calling “a riveting and moving book.”  The esteemed Nan Graham, editor of Scribner, says the is the most important book she has published in her career.

Associated Press — Books of Fall — This overview is partcularly strong on political books and presidential bios. The lead title, also included on every other list is The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race, Grand Central.

NYT — Fall Big Books — lists Stephen Hawking’s new book as a “sleeper hit”. Well, suggesting that the universe didn’t need a god to create it is bringing attention, but Hawking is hardly an unknown, having sold plenty of copies of his earlier A Brief History of Time (although there are those that claim nobody read it). This list includes several titles by and about musicians.

Wall Street Journal — Big Books of Fall — Even though this list is limited to just five titles, the WSJ manages to pick a title that is not on any other list, The Wake of Forgiveness, Bruce Machart, saying, it “…has reminded early readers of Cormac McCarthy, John Steinbeck and Deadwood with a little less swearing.” Since this was also on of my BEA Librarian’s Shout & Share picks, I naturally think it’s a brilliant selection.

New York Magazine — Fall Books Preview: The Twenty — Tending toward the literary, this may be the only preview that picks the Booker short-listed “hall-of-mirrors picaresque,” C by Tom McCarthy (Knopf).

Among books being published this week, we’ve covered several nonfiction titles that have received advance attention:

Stephen Hawking is stirring up  religious leaders by proclaiming that the universe could have come out of chaos in The Grand Design — Hawking Challenges Newton

A book on Bob Dylan got short shrift from the prepub sources, but is featured in several consumer reviews and is New York magazine’s top title of the fall — Dylan Book Getting Advance Praise

A history of African-American migration to the North has also been widely admired (and is on the cover of the NYT BR) — WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS Rising

Other nonfiction titles to be aware of this week:

Fury: A Memoir by Koren Zailckas, Viking — following, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Zailckas discovers that her sobriety masks repressed rage. Kirkus calls it “A harrowing tale of one woman’s journey into the depths of her own psychosis.”

The Weekend That Changed Wall Street: An Eyewitness Account by Maria Bartiromo and Catherine Whitney, Portfolio — CNBC’s “Money Honey” describes the wild ride when, during a single weekend, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG were all under siege.

The Elephant’s Journey by Jose Saramago, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt — by the Portuguese winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature who died earlier this year. A “charming tale of an elephant given by the 16th-century Portuguese king João III to the Archduke of Austria” (Publishers Weekly).

Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst by Robert I. Sutton, Business Plus — from the author of The No Asshole Rule, “This entertaining, satisfying guide is a wakeup call for bosses everywhere–and a survival guide for those who work for them” (Publishers Weekly).

SuperBaby: 12 Ways to Give Your Child a Head Start in the First 3 Years, Sterling — “Bermans absorbing new book will help parents give their youngsters a nurturing head start and a firm foundation for growth and learning” (Publishers Weekly).

Prior to its publication on Tuesday, Sean Wilentz’s book Bob Dylan in America has already received an enviable amount of advance attention. New York magazine featured it as the lead title in their fall books preview and it was reviewed in the major Sunday review sections.

Wilentz, a Princeton historian, has published several books on U.S. history and politics, also received a Grammy nomination for his liner notes for the Bob Dylan Live 1964 CD set and is the “historian in residence” on the Dylan web site. Wilentz explains his personal connection to Dylan in this clip from the BOT audio:

The book rose to #250 on Sunday from #461 the day before on Amazon sales rankings; library holds are light, as are orders.

Kirkus was the only library review source to cover it, with this severe warning,

The author is capable of sometimes striking and unexpected insights linking Dylan to American precursors ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Bing Crosby, but his frequently misguided ideas and oft-leaden style weigh down the proceedings.

One for the practicing Dylanologist—general readers should approach with caution.

The Sunday review sections were much more enthusiastic:

L.A. Times — “appropriate for a historian, the book is a vision of how the past becomes part of our living present.”

NYTBR; Bringing It All Back Home — “Among those who write regularly about Dylan, Wilentz possesses the rare virtues of modesty, nuance and lucidity, and for that he should be celebrated and treasured.”

Washington Post — “a book at once deeply felt and historically layered that shows how Dylan’s artistic practice is embedded in and responsive to powerful but subtle currents of American culture.”

Bob Dylan In America Sean Wilentz Retail Price: $28.95 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: Doubleday – (2010-09-07) ISBN / EAN: 0385529880 / 9780385529884

Audio; Books on Tape; UNABR; 6 CD’s; 9780307714978; $40

Isabel Wilkerson made quite an impression when she spoke on the First Author/First Book panel at ALA Annual this year. Her book, which arrives next week, is also making an impression.

About the migration of African Americans to the North between 1915 and 1970, it’s on the cover of the 9/12 NYT Book Review, after already receiving attention in the daily NYT (the  daily newspaper’s book reviews and the Sunday Book Review are separate entities, with separate staffs and reporting structures; something people forget when they complain about the NYT covering the same title twice) and many other sources.

Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing at the NYT; this is her first book. The NYT BR says,

…written in broad imaginative strokes, this book, at 622 pages, is something of an anomaly in today’s shrinking world of nonfiction publishing: a narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah’s couch.

Wilkerson is aso interviewed in a podcast by NYT BR Editor Sam Tanenhaus.

The book is rising on Amazon’s sales rankings; it is now at #37.

NYT Daily — Janet Maslin

Entertainment Weekly gives it an unequivocal  A

The Economist, Black migration in America: From hominy grits to cold shoulder

New Yorker, Chronicling the Great Migration

The Wall Street Journal, The Great Northern Migration

One of the titles on the EarlyWord Watch List (i.e., titles we think might take off) is Ballantine’s big fiction debut of the season, Juliet by Anne Fortier. Reviews have been mixed, but even those that are generally negative end up calling it “fun,” as exhibited in the most recent, in the Washington Post Book World by Diana Gabaldon,

On the whole, the story is fun, if silly, and engaging in spots. Its modern-day characters are mostly cardboard, though

The “fun” part is clearly connecting with readers; it arrives on the 9/12  NYT fiction best seller list at # 14.

Gabaldon says this about its appeal,

The strongest point of the book is the flavorful, evocative descriptions of Siena, with its ancient neighborhoods, rivalries and family feuds, and the annual running of the Palio horse race. The Shakespearean scholarship on display is both impressive and well-handled, too, with the original Romeo and Juliet story doled out in exciting installments between Julie’s increasingly convoluted but much less interesting story.

The book will be receiving more attention, including an interview with Liane Hansen on NPR’s Weekend Edition, scheduled to run 9/12.

Juliet Anne Fortier Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 464 pages Publisher: Ballantine Books – (2010-08-24) ISBN / EAN: 0345516109 / 9780345516107

RH Audio; UNABR; 9780739384954; $40
Random House Large Print, 9780739377994; pbk; $25

Back in 2008, when EarlyWord was in its infancy, we ran this photo from a BEA ’08 booth display. It was for a book that was the first in a planned trilogy, coming out in the fall with big hopes and an announced 100,000 copy print run (doubled after the reactions at BEA). There was lots of buzz on librarian blogs, but at that point it hadn’t been reviewed and only two of the fifteen large libraries we checked had it on order. It went on to debut on best seller lists in its first week on sale.

And now, the final title in the trilogy, Mockingjay, has a total of 1.6 million copies in print since its release on August 24 (see Scholastic’s press release). A movie based on Hunger Games is scheduled to begin production early next year.

(Thanks to Angelina Benedetti, King County, WA, PL for supplying us with that photo, way back when. And, congrats, Cindy, for spotting a winner).

Today’s news is all over the release of Tony Blair’s book; interviews with him were aired on NPR’s Morning Edition as well as Good Morning America.

The L.A. Times reviewer finds Blair unusually frank. He gets kudos for writing the book himself, because “…a professional collaborator almost certainly would have manicured [that frankness] away, along with anecdotes that are unintentionally self-revealing.” The book’s simultaneous publication in the U.S. and the U.K. indicates Blair’s “…desire to be regarded as a transatlantic figure,” but, since the memoir is “…first and foremost a political biography, long stretches of it are likely to be terra incognita to most American readers.”

For a British take on the book, see the analysis by several writers for the Guardian (sex “throbs throughout many chapters of the book”).

As the AP reports in the story below, the book is causing a sensation in Britain and was #1 on Amazon UK, at the time the story aired, but it hadn’t cracked the top 100 on Amazon U.S. It has moved up since and is now at #12. Holds in libraries are still light.

Craig Ferguson satirizes our current obsession with electronic gadgets in the intro. to his interview with Laura Lippman on The Late Late Show.

Lippman, a librarian’s daughter, is showing her support for libraries by running a why-I-love-my-library essay contest; the winner will get a visit from Lippman to his or her favorite library (deadline, 9/30/10). Rules are on Lippman’s web site.

I’d Know You Anywhere: A Novel Laura Lippman Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 384 pages Publisher: William Morrow – (2010-08-17) ISBN / EAN: 0061706558 / 9780061706554

• CD available from HarperAudio 09/01/2010: $39.99; ISBN 9780061988486
• Larger Print from Harperluxe  09/01/2010: $25.99; ISBN 978006197922

Consider it her parting gift to the book business; in the final season of her show, Oprah is bringing back the Book Club. Macmillan has alerted accounts that the announcement will be made on Sept. 17th, which is also the book’s on sale date (that’s the date for the edition with the official sticker; the book might have already been published, according to the bookseller Newtonville Books Community blog).

And, guess what literary darling is published by one of Macmillan’s companies? Freedom by Jonathan Franzen is published by FSG. Would Oprah be willing to revisit the author who dissed her in the past, causing her to revoke his invitation to appear on the show? It might make for an interesting segment on forgiveness.

The price fits; Oprah #64 is $28 and so is the Franzen. However, the fake ISBN indicates Oprah’s selection is a St. Martin’s Press title. The price is puzzling, though; it doesn’t fit any titles in St. Martin’s catalog. My guess is that they would be more likely to fudge the price than the ISBN. So, ignoring the price question, here are a couple of titles that might be possibilities:

Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel Ntozake Shange, Ifa Bayeza Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 576 pages Publisher: St. Martin’s Press – (2010-09-14) ISBN / EAN: 031219899X / 9780312198992

Ntozake Shange wrote the award-winning 1975 play,  for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, which Tyler Perry just finished directing as a film. Originally announced for Martin Luther King Day weekend release, it was just moved to November and is getting Oscar buzz. Perry and Oprah are friends and were co-executive producers of the movie Precious.

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A Secret Kept Tatiana de Rosnay Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: St. Martin’s Press – (2010-09-14) ISBN / EAN: 0312593317 / 9780312593315

The follow up to de Rosnay’s best-selling Sarah’s Key is, according to Kirkus, about “the crushing cost of keeping secrets,” a recurring theme on Oprah’s show.

One of the titles on our Watch List for this week, Skippy Dies, arrives in the US after being a hit in Britain. It receives a warm welcome from the Washington Post, which says,

If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it’s nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book. Recently named to the Man Booker Prize long list, Skippy Dies is an epic crafted around, of all things, a pack of 14-year-old boys.

It’s also received an A from Entertainment Weekly, (which only granted Franzen’s Great American Novel, Freedom an A-) and 3.5 of a possible 4 stars in the 9/13 issue of People.

Although it sounds like an unlikely premise for a movie, it is currently being adapted by Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), who is also planning to direct.

Skippy Dies: A Novel Paul Murray Retail Price: $28.00 Hardcover: 672 pages Publisher: Faber & Faber – (2010-08-31) ISBN / EAN: 0865479437 / 9780865479432

According to the cliché, you’ll know you’ve mastered a language when you begin dreaming in it. Deborah Fallows tells NPR’s All Things Considered that, despite years of study, Chinese Mandarin only entered her dreams in the form of “dictionary dreams,” where she desperately tried to find the words she needed.

In her book, Dreaming in Chinese, Fallows tells the story of moving to Shanghai to live with her husband. Despite how difficult it was to learn, it was the language that helped her begin to understand Chinese culture.

As a result of the interview, the book rose to #120 on Amazon sales rankings, from a lowly #44,298 yesterday.

The book wasn’t reviewed prepub, but it is reviewed in the September issue of O, The Oprah Magazine and in National Geographic Traveler.

Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love, And Language Deborah Fallows Retail Price: $22.00 Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Walker & Company – (2010-08-31) ISBN / EAN: 0802779131 / 9780802779137

We can’t help but cringe at the title of a new book that criticizes current treatments for prostate cancer; Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers.

It’s been rising on Amazons sales rankings (currently at #207, from #28,021 yesterday), based on coverage in the New York Times Well Column on Monday. The book’s authors point out that only 1 man in 48 is saved by prostate surgery; the others would be better off if it was treated as a chronic condition.

The NYT columnist finds the book’s arguments persuasive, even though he happens to be one of the 48 who was saved by surgery, which uncovered the fact that his cancer was more advanced than his doctors had originally thought.

Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers: No More Unnecessary Biopsies, Radical Treatment or Loss of Sexual Potency Mark Scholz M.D., Ralph Blum Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Other Press – (2010-08-24) ISBN / EAN: 1590513428 / 9781590513422

In her new book, Dirty Sexy Politics, launching today, Meghan McCain says that Sarah Palin brought “drama, stress, complications, panic and loads of uncertainty” to her father’s presidential campaign.

She kicked off her media blitz with George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America today. A clearly smitten Stephanopoulos says the book is “…sassy, it is saucy and just what you’d expect from a the first daughter of a presidential candidate ever fired by her father’s campaign.” He calls her a “fun writer” and winds up by calling it a “terrific book.”

The book was embargoed, so there have been no reviews to date.

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Dirty Sexy Politics Meghan Mccain Retail Price: $23.99 Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Hyperion – (2010-08-31) ISBN / EAN: 1401323774 / 9781401323776