Ouch! In a review that will surely be a candidate for the next “Hatchet Job of the Year Award,” Michiko Kakutani excoriates John  le Carré’s 23rd novel, A Delicate Truth, (Penguin/Viking; Penguin Audio; Thorndike Large Print), which releases next week.

Earlier, one of Kakutani’s colleagues, Dwight Garner, wrote glowingly about the author in  New York Times Magazine, under the headline, “John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age,” calling A Delicate Truth, “an elegant yet embittered indictment of extraordinary rendition, American right-wing evangelical excess and the corporatization of warfare. It has a gently flickering love story and a jangling ending. And le Carré has not lost his ability to sketch, in a line or two, an entire character.” And, in the UK, The Guardian reports that, with this book, the author returns in “top form.”

Kakutani admits that the book offers one worthwhile bit, in the form of its “atmospheric, movielike opening.” Hollywood sees a movie in it; film rights were sold before publication. It was announced last week that screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed ) has been hired to write the adaptation.

The book already has a movie-like trailer.

Quick! Grab your galleys for Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (RH/ Hogarth). If you don’t have a print copy, digital ARC’s are available on Edelweiss and on NetGalley.

According to the Wall Street Journal, this debut novel set in Chechnya and arriving next week, is the hot new accessory. Sarah Jessica Parker is a huge supporter and has been working to help get the word out it.

The WSJ sits in on a book discussion, organized by the publisher and featuring the actress with a group of women in New York’s Tribeca nieghborhood,

…the conversation moved from the surprise that despite the lucidity with which Mr. Marra describes the environment in the novel, he had actually never visited Chechnya; to how people responded to the book’s leaps back and forth in time; to the pockets of humor, warmth and charm in this seemingly bleak fictional canvas; to whether the recent events in Boston would bring more people to the novel.

There’s more enthusiasm, it’s

• the number one IndieNext pick for May
• an NPR “First Read“
• on PW‘s list of  books  “Most Anticipated for Spring,” which mentions yet another supporter, “Ann Patchett [who] came on board early, calling the book ‘simply spectacular. Not since Everything Is Illuminated have I read a first novel so ambitious and fully realized.'”
• received three starred prepub reviews (the only holdout being Kirkus, which gave it a strong review, but complained that some plot elements were contrived.)

Mark Leibovich, author of the forthcoming THIS TOWN

The embargo that reporters will be racing to break this summer is the one for This Town, (Penguin/Blue Rider), by the New York Times Magazine‘s chief national correspondent, Mark Leibovich, arriving July 16.

POLITICO’s chief political reporter, Mike Allen and co-founder, Jim VandeHei try a clever, very insidery, end-run by reporting on Leibovich’s reporting in an effort to find out who should “worry most about his book.” And, guess what? They conclude that POLITICO itself, and specifically Mike Allen, are part of that elite group.

Originally called The Club, the book’s title has since been changed to This Town. POLITICO notes that the subtitle, “for reasons we cannot fathom, will soon be changed from The Way It Works in Suck Up City to Two Parties and a Funeral — Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital.” The funeral refers to the one that was held for Tim Russert, which POLITCO describes as an event “where Washington’s self-obsession – and lack of self-awareness – was on full display.”

Libraries have ordered the book (LJ‘s Barbara Hoffert featured it in a Prepub Alert column in October; it was originally scheduled for release in April) and it appears on catalogs under the old title. Holds are light at this point.

The pub date for Dan Brown’s next book, Inferno, (RH/Doubleday; RH Large Print; Vintage Espanol; RH Audio) is May 14. It turns out that is no accident. RH/Doubleday’s Suzanne Herz tells the Wall Street Journal‘s “Speakeasy” blog, that if you write the date backwards, it become 3.1415, which is the value of pi.

She  leaves it up to fans to try to piece together why that would be important to the plot, which the publisher describes this way,

In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces…Dante’s Inferno.

Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante’s dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust…before the world is irrevocably altered.

The Inferno is the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which was just released in a  new translation by Clive James (Norton).

Don’t worry; this is a Fifty Shades title that libraries won’t have to fit into their budgets.

Vintage Books announced today that they are releasing Fifty Shades of Grey: Inner Goddess (A Journal) on May 1.

It combines the author;s writing advice with lined pages for readers to record their own “inner goddess” thoughts (via The Hollywood Reporter).

The title of the next Dan Brown book, Inferno, (RH/Doubleday; Vintage Espanol; RH Audio) was revealed on the Today Show in January. Today, they revealed the cover.

Does the art include codes and clues to the book’s contents (beyond the fact that it has to do with Dante, his most famous book, and his home town)?

The Wall Street Journal tried asking the source, the jacket designer, but got little more than a “yes.”

It will be published on May 14.

Jenni Rivera, an American singer who became popular in Mexico for developing an “urban ranchera” style of music, was killed in a plane crash in December. Today, the Atria imprint of S&S announced that her memoir will be released in July, in both Spanish and English.

Both editions immediately moved up Amazon’s sales rankings, with the Spanish-language title, Inquebrantable, (S&S/Atria) rising higher, currently at #79, well above the English-language Unbreakable at #230.

This is just the second time we’ve seen a Spanish-language edition outstrip the English; the first was La Reina Del Sur, (Alfaguara), the tie-in to Telemundo’s popular 2011 telenovela. It did not break into Amazon’s Top 100, however.

Speaking of Harry Potter, David Heyman, who produced the movie adaptations, was signed by DreamWorks last fall to do the same for the debut YA novel, Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo (Macmillan/Holt BYR; 2012).

A script writer is now in place (chillingly, his name is Christopher Kyle, who shares a name with the recently killed author of  American Sniper), according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Shadow and Bone was praised by the NYT Book Review and appeared on the NYT Chapter Book Best Seller list for one week, at #8. The second book in the planned trilogy, Siege and Storm (Macmillan/Holt BYR), is scheduled for release this June.

Bradley Cooper told Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air on Thursday that he is moving ahead with plans to portray Chris Kyle, who was killed on a shooting range last week, in a film adaptation of the former SEAL’s best selling memoir, American Sniper. He bought the rights last May and says he learned about Kyle’s killing while meeting with veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder  at Walter Reed Hospital.

Kyle had another book in the works, American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms, (HarperCollins/Morrow; HarperLuxe). Publishers Weekly reports it will be released, as planned, on May 14, with the “”the full support of the Kyle family and friends.”

The summer publishing season kicks off in high gear this coming May. Dan Brown’s new book, Inferno arrives on May 14 (see below), followed two weeks later by Khaled Hosseini’s new book, And the Mountains Echoed, (Penguin/Riverhead; Thorndike will release the large print version). In the a press release, Hosseini, whose previous titles are The Kite Runner (Penguin/Riverhead, 2007) and A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Penguin/Riverhead, 2007) said,

I am forever drawn to family as a recurring central theme of my writing. My earlier novels were at heart tales of fatherhood and motherhood. My new novel is a multi-generational family story as well, this time revolving around brothers and sisters, and the ways in which they love, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for each other.

On the Today Show this morning, the title of Dan Brown’s next book was revealed. Inferno will be released on Tuesday, May 14th and again features symbologist Robert Langdon. According to publisher Doubleday’s plot description,

In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology, Robert Langdon, is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces…Dante’s Inferno.

Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante’s dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust…before the world is irrevocably altered.

The Today Show revealed the title by enlisting fans in a contest that was so popular, it brought down the host site:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Below are the various formats, with ISBN’s and prices. We will update this post with the Today Show video as soon as it is available.

Inferno, by Dan Brown, (RH/Knopf/Doubleday), 5/14/13

Hardcover, ISBN: 9780385537858;  $29.95/$33.00 CAN

Ebook, iSBN: 9780385537865; $14.99/$16.99 CAN

Audio CD, ISBN: 9780804128766; $50.00/$55.00 CAN

BOT CD  9780804128780

Abridged CD: 9780804147972;  $30.00/$35.00 CAN

Large Print ISBN: 9780804121064; $30.00/$35.00 CAN

We know how Janus felt; we had barely caught our breath from the multitude of 2012 best books lists (our selected links at right) when the first of  2013 reared their heads.

Huffington Post, “Best Books Of 2013?: Our Picks For The Year’s Biggest Reads”

The Atlantic, “Books to Look Forward to in 2013”

Flavorwire, “Flavorpill’s 30 Most Anticipated Books of 2013“

The Huffington Post gets it right that the title The World’s Strongest Librarian (Penguin/Gotham, May 2) will “win over bookstores and libraries;” it got our attention. Subtitled A Memoir of Tourette’s, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family, it’s by Josh Hanagarne, a librarian at Salt Lake City Public Library who writes a blog about books and weight lifting.

Also on the HuffPo list, as well as Flavorpill’s, is a novelization of a life that is ripe for it, Zelda Fitzgerald’s (but, wait, haven’t dozens of others, including her husband, already done that?);  Z, by Therese Anne Fowler (Macmillan/St. Martin’s, March 26). Notes The Atlantic, “we’ll gladly read a hundred novelizations of her life. Especially if they’re all like this one, which lets us into a 17-year-old Zelda’s head.”

Anticipation is already high for Stephen King’s Dr. Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, coming on Sept. 24 (just before the premiere of the new film adaptation of his debut novel, Carrie) as well as  Elizabeth Strout’s The Burgess Boys,(Random House) her next novel after her 2009 Pulitzer  Prize winner, Olive Kitteridge.

The next title by the author of  The Hunger Games will be a picture book for ages 4 and up, The Year of the Jungle, (Scholastic, 9780545425162; 9/10/13). Based Collins’ experiences as a child when her father was serving in Vietnam, it will be illustrated by James Proimos.

The Scholastic press release also announces that the paperback edition of Catching Fire will be released next summer (Scholastic, 9780545586177, $12.99; 6/4/13) as well as redesigned paperback editions of the author’s middle grade series, The Underland Chronicles.

Khaled Hosseini told the AP today that his third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, (Penguin/Riverhead, 978-1594631764) will be a “a multi-generational family story … this time revolving around brothers and sisters, and the ways in which they love, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for each other.” It’s set to release on May 21st.

Hosseini’s first book, The Kite Runner, published in 2003, became a word of mouth hit after it was published in trade paperback, gradually climbing the NYT list and remaining on it for two years. His second, A Thousand Splendid Suns, released in 2007, debuted on the NYT hardcover list at #1 and remained in that spot for 16 weeks. It continued in the top ten for a total of nearly 50 weeks.

As the media frenzy heats up for the first of Peter Jackson’s projected trilogy of movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, arriving in theaters on Dec. 14, news arrives that a previously unpublished 200-page narrative poem, The Fall of Arthur will be released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on May 23, 2013.

Tolkien, who died in 1973,  appointed his son Christopher as his literary executor. In addition to the forthcoming book, the younger Tolkein has edited all of his father’s posthumous titles, from The Silmarillion in 1977 to The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún in 2009 (like the forthcoming title, this is a long narrative verse, which, even Christopher Tolkien admitted, was likely to “put off” fans of The Lord of the Ring).

Christopher Tolkein, now 87, who sued New Line Cinema for nonpayment of royalties from The Lord of the Rings movies, recently expressed dismay over the way his father’s work is now perceived, telling the French newspaper, Le Monde in July (translation here), that the films’ creators,

…eviscerated [The Lord of the Rings] by making it an action movie for young people 15 to 25. And it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film….The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has gone too far for me. Such commercialisation has reduced the esthetic and philosophical impact of this creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: turning my head away.

Perhaps he will be cheered by the news that Stephen Colbert will have a cameo role in film two or three of the series.