Olympic gold medal soccer player Alex Morgan, currently playing for the Portland Thorns, scores with the first book in a planned middle grade series, The Kicks. Book one, Saving the Team (S&S Young Readers), debuts on the NYT Middle Grade Best Seller list at #7 during its in its first week on sale.

The second book in the series, Sabotage Season will be published in September. A third one  is in the works.

The “New Adult” genre has been labeled as the hot new category by the media (see USA Today and the NYT). Many of the titles had their success as self-published e-books, showing up on combined best seller lists, such as USA Today‘s and the NYT‘s combined adult lists.

One of the first “New Adult” titles to hit the NYT Young Adult list appeared last week, due to a change in the way the Times calculates the lists. Back in December, YA and Middle Grade lists, formerly lumped together under “Chapter Books,” were separated out, but more importantly for the “New Adult” category, the sales of e-books and print were combined.

On the YA list at #6, after two weeks is a title that won’t be released in print until August, While it Lasts, by Abbi Glines. A self-published success as an e-book, it was acquired by S&S’s Simon Pulse imprint last fall. A recent $1.99 offer for the e-book edition helped to propel sales, landing it on the list.

Glines’ earlier “New Adult” series, The Vincent Brothers was released by Simon Pulse in December, with an “Extended and Uncut” steamier version released as e-book only. A print boxed set (with “double the sexiness and seduction”) arrives in October.

While It Lasts is the third in the Sea Breeze series; Breathe will be published by Simon Pulse on June 4. Because of Low follows in July and Just for Now in late August.

Landing next week are several titles from big names who need no introductions. John Grisham continues his series featuring 13-year-old  legal prodigy, Theodore Boone (you may have to squint to see the title on the cover; it’s The Activist) … Friends Elephant & Piggie return in their 19th adventure in Mo Willems’ A Big Guy Took My Ball!  … Jennifer Brown again keys in to a hot teen subject, with a book on sexting, about a girl who sends her bodyfriend a picture that even a Thousand Words can’t take back.

The titles highlighted here and more arriving next week are on our downloadable spreadsheet, Kids New Title Radar, Week of May 20.

Picture Books

Ben Rides On, Matt Davies, (Macmillan/Roaring Brook Press)

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Matt Davies ventures into the world of children’s books with his first title. While it addresses the familiar theme of facing a bully, the subject is made fresh with illustrations that recall David Catrow crossed with Ralph Steadman and capture Ben’s big feelings as he faces his nemesis.

How to Negotiate Everything Lisa Lutz, Illus. Jaime Temairik, (S & S BYR)

Not familiar with co-author David Spellman, (featured on the cover)? As a fan of Lisa Lutz’s Spellman Files mystery series, I am pleased to report that her first picture book exhibits her dry sense of humor and appreciation of the absurd, beginning with her faux co-author, the lawyer/older brother/ “good child” from her adult books. Sammy, the protagonist dispenses advice on how to get to “yes” whether making a deal for an ice cream or negotiating for a pet. Illustrator Jaime Temairik wows in her picture book debut with an animated cartoon style and judicious use of infographics.

 P.S. Be Eleven, Rita Williams-Garcia, (HarperCollins/Amisted)

The sequel to the Coretta Scott King Award winner (and Newbery honor title), One Crazy Summer has received starred reviews from all the prepub sources. In this story, the three sisters return to Brooklyn from their summer in California with their mother and the Black Panthers, portrayed in the previous book. The title, P.S. Be Eleven comes from their mother’s letters to her oldest daughter, Delphine; a caution to not grow up too fast.

Hotly anticipated ever since its release was announced in January, the big book of next week is Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed. Can it live up to expectations set by the author’s previous titles? Entertainment Weekly thinks so … A debut that begins in another strife-torn area of the world, We Need New Names gets a rare advance rave from the NYT‘s Michiko Kakutani … Alex Grecian, whose first mystery, The Yard was a librarian favorite, publishes a sequel, The Black Country… Norwegian author Jo Nesbo releases a new thriller, The Redeemer,  and Jeff Shaara views the Siege of Vicksburg in The Chain of Thunder … plus, released for the first time is a previously unpublished long narrative poem by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Full ordering information for all the titles highlighted here, plus many more, are available on our downloadable spreadsheet, New Title Radar, Week of May 20.

Watch List

We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo, (Hachette/Little, Brown)

Called a “deeply felt and fiercely written debut novel,” in an early review by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, this debut is about a young woman escaping the brutality of Zimbabwe to live with her aunt in “Destroyedmichygen” (Detroit, Michigan). Says Kakutani, “Darling is 10 when we first meet her, and the voice Ms. Bulawayo has fashioned for her is utterly distinctive — by turns unsparing and lyrical, unsentimental and poetic, spiky and meditative.” It is also an IndieNext pick for June.

Media Magnets

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, George Packer, (Macmillan/FSG)

The author of the award-winning The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, Packer writes here about the U.S. “unwinding” into polarized factions and warns that it is  “a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working.” Says the New Yorker (for which Packer is a staff writer), “Packer unpacks the current state of United States democracy by weaving together profiles of Americans as varied as tobacco farmers, Washington insiders, Newt Gingrich, and Jay-Z.”

Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success, Phil Jackson with Hugh Delehanty, (Penguin Press)

Prepub attention (in the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune, of course) is already causing legendary basketball coach Jackson’s memoir cum self-help leadership book to rise on Amazon

Margaret Thatcher: From Grantham to the Falklands, Charles Moore, (RH/Knopf)

This authorized biography is scheduled for coverage next week on the CBS Early Show, NPR’s Diane Rehm Show and MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art speech to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts’ 2012 graduating class became a viral hit. Released in book form (HarperCollins/Morrow) this week, it is rising on Amazon.

John Green’s speech to the graduating class of Butler University may not be far behind.

Predating both of them is David Foster Wallace’s speech to Kenyon College in 2005, a viral success later released in book form, This Is Water, (Hachette/Little,Brown). Recently, a short film based on the original was posted to YouTube and has been viewed nearly 5 million times in just ten days.

The “raining-on-the-parade” genre may have begun with a speech that wasn’t actually a speech. It was column by Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune in 1997 about what she would say if she had been asked to give a commencement address (which she hadn’t). An urban legend grew up that this was actually a speech given by Kurt Vonnegut at an MIT graduation. Vonnegut ruefully said he wished that were true, but it wasn’t. The column ended up being published as a gift book by Andrews and McMeel as Wear Sunscreen (the one piece of advice that Shmich found irrefutable) and re-released in a 10th anniversay edition in 2008. Baz Lurhmann turned it into a music video “Everyone’s Free to Wear Sunscreen.”

In a review that will be appear in the print NYT tomorrow, Dwight Garner writes that Emma Brockes’s account of trying to piece together the mysteries of her mother’s past, She Left Me the Gun (Penguin Press), is “…one of those memoirs that remind you why you liked memoirs in the first place, back before every featherhead in your writers’ group was trying to peddle one. It has the density of a very good novel.”

That quote is only topped by a those from the book itself, such as, “Being an only child is a bit like being Spanish: you have your dinner late, you go to bed late, and, with all the grown-up parties you get dragged to, you wind up eating a lot of hors d’oeuvres.”

The onslaught of coverage of Dan Browns Inferno, (RH/Doubleday; RH Audio; BOT Audio; RH/Vintage espanol; RH large print), releasing tomorrow, continues today with the first review, by Janet Maslin’s in the New York Times. An unabashed Dan Brown/Robert Langdon fan, she is equally enthusiastic about this new outing.

Reviewing The Da Vinci Code in 2003, she said that in this “gleefully erudite suspense novel, Mr. Brown takes the format he has been developing through three earlier novels and fine-tunes it to blockbuster perfection” and prophetically, that, his is “a name you will want to remember,”

Admitting that the “early sections of Inferno come so close to self-parody that Mr. Brown seems to have lost his bearings — as has Langdon, who begins the book in a hospital bed with a case of amnesia that dulls his showy wits,” she goes on to say, “Inferno is jampacked with tricks. And that shaky opening turns out to be one of them.”

The author is scheduled to appear this week on NBC’s Today Show, Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, PBS’s Charlie Rose and NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Library holds, while heavy, are not nearly as high as they were on Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl at its peak, averaging 2:1 on fairly aggressive ordering.

The blockbuster of the summer, Dan Brown’s Inferno, (RH/Doubleday), arrives on Tuesday, with an announced 4 million copy first printing, forcing below the radar any other title that dares to show its cover next week. But a few other books will appear;  some publishers use the reverse logic that the increased foot traffic in stores works to other book’s advantage.

Many librarians will be cheering the release of the 8th in Stuart MacBride’s Logan McRae mystery series, Close to the Bone, (HarperCollins). Beloved for his dark humor in Scotland, he is less known here. HarperCollins is in the midst of bringing all his books to the American readers. If you are not yet a convert, listen to this irresistible recommendation from HarperCollins’ MidWinter Buzz session.

The media will be paying attention to two quite different memoirs. Tennis legend Jimmy Connors will appear on Rock Center with Brian Williams tonight to promote his memor, called, of course, The Outsider, (Harper). This Sunday, Jessica Buchanan appears on 60 Minutes to promote her memoir, Impossible Odds, (S&S/Atria) about which recounts her harrowing kidnapping in Somalia and rescue by Navy SEALs.

Also arriving next week are the tie-ins to the release of the summer’s next long-delayed, much-anticipated movie, World War Z, starring Brad Pitt which hits theaters on June 21.

All the titles mentioned here, plus the other notable books arriving next week, are listed on our downloadable spreadsheet, 
Download the New Title Radar for May 2013
.

Likely to be the most-reviewed debut of the year, Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (RH/Hogarth) is also the only English-language novel about the conflicts in Chechnya. It happens to arrive just as the American public has become more aware of that troubled history.

It also happens to arrive with a good deal of fanfare. One of the first consumer reviews, Dwight Garner’s appears in the print edition of the NYT tomorrow. Noting that, since it is based on true stories of torture during the Chechen wars, it “can be sickening reading,” but he says it is leavened by the “human warmth and comedy [Marra] smuggles, like samizdat, into his busy story.” The review is only intermittently laudatory, however. Garner admits, “I admired this novel more than I warmed to it.”

There were no negatives in the review on NPR’s All Things Considered last night from a surprising source. Meg Wolitzer, who has written that men’s fiction gets more serious literary attention than does women’s, delivered a rave for this book by a male novelist, calling it “an absorbing novel about unspeakable things” that is “highly, deeply readable.”

UPDATE: Washington Post’s Ron Charles is also a fan, calling it “a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles … At the risk of raising your expectations too high, I have to say you simply must read this book.” If you’re going to read just one review of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, this the one. It is the most thoughtful and literate.

Expect many more reviews in the next couple of weeks. Library holds are still light at this point, but growing.

“Full of sex, intrigue and clues based on Victorian poetry, Elanor Dymott’s Every Contact Leaves a Trace [Norton; Brilliance Audio] is a literary mystery about a murder at Oxford University,” writes Maureen Corrigan on NPR’s Web site in reviewing this debut novel.

Arriving here this week from the UK, where it garnered strong reviews and was voted on to the long list for the Author’s Club’s Best First Novel Award, it did not do so well with prepub reviewers here. As a result, libraries ordered it very lightly. All four reviews complained that it is overlong (Booklist, “this novel would have been twice as good at half the length”), with chilly protagonists (Kirkus, “Readers will have difficulty embracing Alex and Rachel, since neither exhibits any warmth or even a quirkiness that might make them interesting”), while sprinkling in a few bland kudos (LJ, “should satisfy readers who hang in until the end;” Booklist, “the author’s deft evocation of mood and place marks her as a writer to watch;” PW, “patient and forgiving readers of Gone Girl and The Secret History will be drawn in by its contemplation”).

Donna Tartt’s best selling first novel The Secret History, (RH/Knopf, 1992) has become reviewers’ shorthand for books that feature a murder among a close-knit group of students in a rarefied university setting. The UK’s Guardian also made the comparison, but to Dymott’s advantage, “Outwardly, her novel bears all the hallmarks of the Tartt school of academic intrigue. Yet past the atmospheric cover and the cordon of epigraphs lies a quite exceptional novel… [showing] a thoroughgoing confidence and ease with the rules of its genre, an appealing way of wearing its learning lightly, and a melancholy perceptiveness.”

Such strong opposing reactions make this a book to watch.

Who knew that writing a popular series of books could be so dangerous? The WSJ reports that Charlaine Harris has opted out of doing a tour for her upcoming 13th Sookie Stackhouse book, Dead Ever After (Penguin/Ace, releasing Tuesday) because fans have been so vocal in their disappointment that it is the final book in the series.

Harris is planning a new series, set in small West Texas town, featuring “..familiar characters and supernatural themes, which could help draw Sookie fans to the books.” As a bridge, Ace will release a short story next spring featuring both Sookie and the main character of the new series (no publishing information yet, but it is likely to be an ebook-only title).

She has also written an epilogue to the Sookie series, After Dead, (Penguin/Ace), an A to Z listing of over 100 characters, with information on what happens to each of them, coming in November.

In October, she will release the first in a series of graphic novels, Cemetery Girl, in which a girl who is left for dead in a graveyard, wakes up with no idea how she got there and the unsettling ability to see spirits (9780425256664; listed in the publishers catalog, on page 24).

The watchword next week is “heavily anticipated,” as proved by the number of titles that have already received attention. Sarah Jessica Parker is the unexpected champion of the literary debut, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, reviewing it in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, and promoting it in the Wall Street Journal. Veteran author John le Carré publishes his 23rd book, which is either the best he’s ever written, or the worst, according to which critic you trust. And, Charlaine Harris closes the book on her long-running vampire series, the basis for the popular TV series True Blood, with Dead Ever After. Leading the pack in holds is John Sandford’s Silken Prey. Check our downloadable spreadsheet for these and many other titles arriving next week, New Title Radar, Week of 5.6.13.

With all these big names, some below-the-radar titles are looking for attention:

The Other Typist, Suzanne Rindell, (Penguin/Putnam/Einhorn; Penguin Audio)

The first novel by poet Rindell about a typist working in a New York precinct in the ’20’s, who falls in with a flapper, is singled out as a favorite by one of our GalleyChatters, Jen Dayton, from Darien P.L. Kirkus calls it a “a pitch-black comedy” with a “dollop of Alfred Hitchcock, a dollop of Patricia Highsmith.”

Murder as a Fine Art, David Morrell, (Hachette/Mulholland)

The real-life author Thomas De Quincey is suspected of being the “artist of death” in Victorian London, committing a number of ghastly murders. Entertainment Weekly gives it an unequivocal “A.”

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, audio read by Jake Gyllenhaal, Brilliance Audio

The imminent arrival of Baz Luhrmann’s movie, has made Gatsby the best seller Fitzgerald fervently hoped it would be in his own day. Also arriving is this new audio version, narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal, who is NOT in the movie. E! Online, giving rare attention to audio, claims it “Makes Us Swoon as Much as Leonardo DiCaprio.” Check your own pulse, below:

Get ready for Rick Yancey‘s The 5th Wave to fulfill heavy expectations when it arrives next week. The first in a new series, it is one of many  debuting from both well-known and first time authors with the arrival of the summer publishing season. Also look for  the first collaboration  between two bestselling YA authors, Andrea Cremer and David Levithan in a book young people in love, somewhat complicated by the fact that one of them is invisible.

All the titles highlighted here and more, are available on our downloadable spreadsheet, Kids New Title Radar, Week of 5.6.13

Picture Books

Yoo-Hoo, Ladybug! Mem Fox, Laura Ljungkvist, (S&S/ Beach Lane Books)

Mem Fox is the master of the early childhood read aloud (Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes). Her rhythmic rhyming text is just right for the seek-and –find pictures. (Hint: to find her in the spread below, consider which vehicle a ladybug would drive).

—

If You Want to See a Whale Julie Fogliano, Erin Stead (Roaring Brook Press )

A quiet, playful and imaginative take from the award-winning team that brought us the 2012, And Then It’s Spring.

The Great Lollipop Caper, Dan Krall, (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)

The whole family will enjoy this edgy silly fun with its cartoon-y graphic illustrations. The book trailer reflects the book’s spirit:

Beginning Readers

Pancakes, Pancakes, Eric Carle,  (Simon Spotlight )

Rooster Is Off to See the World, Eric Carle, (Simon Spotlight)

Classic Carle titles return in their original format (we know and love them as picture books, but they were originally easy-to-read books). These are particularly welcome as interesting low-level readers are the most difficult to find. Newly fluent kids eat them up like popcorn.

Chapter Book

Sugar, Jewell Parker Rhodes, (Hachette/Little, Brown BYR)

A gripping historic fiction tale of friendship set on a Southern sugar plantation from the author of the Coretta Scott King honor, Ninth Ward,

Middle Grade

Doll Bones, Holly Black, Eliza Wheeler (S&S/McElderry;Listening Library:

Black returns to her Spiderwick audience with this gripping creepy middle grade horror tale. Do not read before bedtime. You have been warned.

Young Adult

The Lucy Variations , Sara Zarr (Hachette/Little, Brown BYR)

Zarr’s is always the first galley I read from the Little, Brown galley pile. I can’t say it better than Kirkus, in a starred review, “What makes Lucy’s story especially appealing is the very realistic way this ‘entitled brat’ (as grandfather called her) acts out as she experiments with new identities. … The combination of sympathetic main character and unusual social and cultural world makes this satisfying coming-of-age story stand out.”

The 5th Wave, Rick Yancey, (Penguin/Putnam)

Arriving with a major promotional campaign from Penguin, this cross between King’s The Stand and Hunger Games is s a roller coaster ride. My heart was in my throat the entire read. Entertainment Weekly featured the book trailer, with the headline, “Is this the Next Big Thing?” The answer is “Yes.”

Reboot, Amy Tintera, (HarperTeen)

There’s been enthusiasm on YA GalleyChat for this new addition to the dystopian genre, readers calling it “Dark and twist-y, with well rounded characters.” The only prepub review, from Kirkus, is equally enthusiastic, characterizing it as a “compulsively readable science-fiction debut [that] will appeal widely… Superb concepts and plotting will hook readers from the start… [with] plenty [for] those who appreciate romance.”

The new edition of the often-attacked “bible” of American psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders known as  D.S.M., is about to be released and, predictably, it is being preceded by controversy.

The NYT ‘s Dwight Garner examines two books that lead the alarm, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg, (Penguin/Blue Rider; Tantor Audio, 5/13) and Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life by Allen Frances, (HarperCollins/Morrow, 5/14) saying, they are “unalike yet deeply alike, as if they were vastly dissimilar Rube Goldberg devices that each ultimately drop the same antacid tablet into the same glass of water.”

Both, he says, are “repetitive and overlong,” and would have made better magazine articles, but, “Mr. Greenberg is a fresher, funnier writer. He paces the psychiatric stage as if he were part George Carlin, part Gregory House.”

Diane Sawyer’s heavily promoted interview with Amanda Knox aired on ABC’s Nightline last night.

The full interview is available here. Knox’s book, Waiting to Be Heard, (Harper; HarperLuxe, HarperAudio), released yesterday, rose to #11 on Amazon’s sales rankings as a result.

Entertainment Weekly reviewed it, giving it a “B.”