EarlyWord

The 2016 shortlists for the National Book Awards have just been posted on the New Yorker site.

Tweet your opinions on the selections using #nbawards.

Winners will be announced on Nov. 16.

The live chat has now ended. You can read it below.

Join us for the next live chat with Alex George, author of Setting Free the Kites, on Wednesday, Nov. 16, 4 to 5 p.m., ET.

To join the program, sign up here.

Dogs have the ability to create “a picture of the world through smell” says Alexandra Horowitz in her new book Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell (S&S/Scribner; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample). It is rising on Amazon’s sales rankings after a feature on NPR’s Fresh Air, bounding up the charts to #94 from #8,258.

During the program Horowitz discusses how dog’s snouts work, that they can smell what time of day it is, and their work conducting search and rescue, bomb and drug detection, and cancer diagnosis. They can even smell electronics law officers want to locate. So amazing is their ability that they can smell a trace sent at a measurement of a trillionth of a gram.

Horowitz explains that dogs breathe differently than humans and their exhale, through the side of their nose, helps them hold onto scents longer, “It’s like a circular breathing of smelling. It also creates a little puff on the ground, a puff of air that might actually allow more odor molecules to come up toward their nose to be sniffed.”

She also discusses how important dog’s interactions with different smells are, warning, says NPR, “that pulling dogs away from smell-rich environments, such as fire hydrants and tree trunks, can cause them to lose their predisposition to smell.”

When we force dogs away from their smelling time and into the visual world we recognize, Horowitz says dogs “start attending to our pointing and our gestures and our facial expressions more, and less to smells.” She continues:

“I really am trying to counter what I and lots of owners have done our whole lives, which is discourage smelling. In fact, instead I’m trying to embrace it. So on a ‘smell walk,’ I just let the dog choose what we’re going to do, where we’re going to go, and how long we’re going to stay there. … I just let the dog take charge. Sometimes our walks are pretty much standing around, actually, but I think the dog is enjoying himself.”

The interview connected with listeners, so much so that an older book by Horowitz also saw a jump. Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (S&S/Scribner; Tantor Media; OverDrive Sample). It  rose from #8,761 all the way to #302 on Amazon’s rankings.

For those who prefer cats, a report published yesterday in the The Wall Street Journal [subscription may be required] says watching cute cat videos makes people feel “significantly happier, more content and more energized … as well as less anxious, less annoyed and less sad.” Do yourself a favor and watch this:

Back to the dogs, here is the Fresh Air interview:

The first trailer for the Netflix adaptation of Daniel Handler’s (aka Lemony Snicket) A Series of Unfortunate Events (HarperCollins) has just been released. In keeping with the books’ tongue-in-cheek tone, it is not a traditional trailer. Rather than building anticipation with a litany of exciting scenes and major stars, just one character appears, Patrick Warburton as Lemony Snicket, wandering through the dimly-lit stage set, warning people to “look away.”

The entire series will be available on Netflix beginning January 13, 2017 (which happens to be a Friday).

Watch closely, several visual jokes are embedded in the teaser.

According to Neil Patrick Harris, who plays Count Olaf in the show, the series is Netflix’s most expensive production to date. While co-hosting Live! with Kelly last month, he described the new adaptation as “super dark … a much darker take on the material than has been seen before”  but also “fun” and “exciting” and said it’s been planned as a “four-quadrant show,” to appeal to kids, teens, 20-somethings, and adults. The eight-episode first season will cover the first four titles in the 13-book series.

So far, no tie-ins have been announced.

Below is an archived version of the October GalleyChat, featuring librarians discussing their favorite forthcoming books.

Join us for the next live chat on Tuesday, Nov. 1 (details here).

The author of The Women of Brewster Place, a debut that earned the National Book Award, has died at 66 of heart failure, reports the NYT.

In addition to her best-known novel, she also wrote seven others including Linden Hills, Bailey’s Cafe, Mama Day, and The Men of Brewster Place. In all her novels, says the NYT, Naylor “addressed social issues including poverty, racism, sexism and gay rights, usually through intricately drawn black female characters.”

In 1989, The Women of Brewster Place was made into a miniseries by Oprah Winfrey, bringing even more attention to her writing.

Headlining their appreciation “Rest in Power,” Ebony writes Naylor’s “beautiful and complex portrayals of the lives of Black women inspired a generation of writers … A pioneer [she] fearlessly explored issues of race, sexuality, and spirituality in her work, opening the door for a wave of contemporary … writers like Bebe More-Campbell, Eric Jerome Dickey, Tina McElroy Ansa and others.”

Winston Groom has just published first novel in nearly 20 years, a Western, inspired by a story about J.P. Morgan and Pancho Villa,  El Paso (Norton/Liveright; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample).

In an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered, Groom says he gave up writing fiction after Forrest Gump because he could not find a subject that captured his interest:

“I think that every novelist of the kind of novels that I write has in them maybe one really good book … but the trouble with so many novelists is that they keep on writing novels even when they run out of ideas. … So I was thinking, after the commercial success of Forrest Gump, that I didn’t really have any ideas that really grabbed me.”

He wrote nonfiction instead, on the history of the Civil War and WWI and WWII. He also wrote books about the West, all of which might have helped him imagine his next novel.

He tells NPR that a friend of his, “Eddie Morgan (a distant relative of the late J.P. Morgan), used to talk about his family’s million-acre cattle ranch in northern Mexico, and how Pancho Villa attacked it in 1916 … had the ranch manager sabered to death and then kidnapped his children.” Groom thought he could make a story of that.

The result says NPR is “a sprawling, 400-plus-page novel [that] takes place during the Mexican Revolution and follows a railroad tycoon on a manhunt across the High Sierras to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren from Pancho Villa. The book’s made-up characters interact with historical figures a lot like they did in Forrest Gump: Lt. George S. Patton … the cowboy movie star Tom Mix, the Socialist journalist John Reed and the Civil War writer Ambrose Bierce.”

In their review, Kirkus says “It’s not Lonesome Dove, but Groom’s Searcher’s-like rescue pursuit and his allusive homage to Treasure of the Sierra Madre make for an entertaining Western story.” Publishers Weekly calls it a “historically vivid and marvelously complex tale.”

El Paso is running at a rough 2:1 ratio, but Forrest Gump did not break big until after the film was made so keep an eye out for another possible sleeper hit.

Many major book awards will be announced soon. The New York Times offers a guide to the contenders, beginning with the Nobel Prize in Literature, to be announced a week later than usual this year, on Oct. 13. It’s the most difficult to predict, both because the voting process is secretive and because the prize is often awarded less for literary excellence than for political reasons. As Philip Roth, a perennial contender, once remarked, “I wonder if I had called ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ ‘The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism,’ if I would thereby have earned the favor of the Swedish Academy.” With so little to go on, the NYT reports on betting in the U.K., which is led by usual suspect Haruki Murakami and the Syrian poet Adonis.

The Man Booker Prize, which will be announced on Oct. 25, is easier because the judges have announced a shortlist of six titles. The two U.S. contenders were published here in 2015 (as a U.K. award, eligibility is based on U.K. publication dates) and have track records. The Sellout by Paul Blatty (Macmillan/FSG, 3/3/15; OverDrive Sample) won the National Book Critics Circle Award last year and Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen (PRH/Penguin; OverDrive Sample; 8/18/15) was on the shortlist. On the other hand, David Szalay’s  All That Man Is (Macmillan/Graywolf; OverDrive Sample; 10/4/16) has just been released here and is just beginning to receive consumer reviews. The NYT does not hazard a guess at who will win.

The U.K.’s Guardian offers analyses of the list from the perspective of one of the judges, who claims to love them all, and from the odds makers who put Deborah Levy in the lead for Hot Milk (Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA; OverDrive Sample; 7/12/16), described by the judge as “like Virginia Woolf with good jokes.” Don’t take much stock in the odds, however, as the Guardian notes, “the frontrunner hardly ever wins.”

The fiction and nonfiction longlists for National Book Awards are also analyzed, but not the poetry and young people’s lit. longlists. The shortlists will be announced on Oct. 6.

In a twist on the movie trailer, Dan Brown, Google, and Sony Entertainment have partnered to create a puzzle game for fans of Robert Langdon.

USA Today reports the three-week run of games, called Inferno Journey Through Hell, is designed to increase interest in the forthcoming film, Inferno, opening October 28.

Brown told the paper that “It’s always been of interest to me to create a treasure hunt online where people who don’t have the opportunity to travel can take the quest virtually and interact with real works of art and locations and have the experience from their living room or office.”

It is also a giant product placement for Google as the clues needed to solve the puzzles are “hidden in various Google products such as Google Maps, Gmail, Google Search and Google Play as well as on social-media platforms,” reports USA Today.  Players can win weekly prizes including a trip to Florence, Venice, Rome and Milan.

Brown serves as an executive producer for the film and says that director Ron Howard and lead actor Tom Hanks “very generously pretend I’m relevant, but once the screenplay’s done, my part in the movie is complete and I can just watch what really becomes a different telling of my story.”

Traditional forms of marketing are also being unleashed, including a series of trailers. The latest below:

And several tie-ins:

Inferno (Movie Tie-in Edition), Dan Brown

Trade Paperback, (PRH/Anchor)
Mass Market, (PRH/Anchor)
Audio CD (PRH/Random House Audio)
Inferno (Movie Tie-in edition en Espanol), (PRH/ Vintage Espanol)

The backlash to the uproar over the purported unmasking of the true identity of the author behind the pseudonym Elena Ferrante, is best and most amusingly summarized by NPR’s “The Two Way.”

The controversy brings new attention to a collection of essays, interviews and letters by the author that will be released in the U.S. in November, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, Elena Ferrante, Ann Goldstein, (Europa Editions). The title is a Neapolitan word that, as Ferrante explained in an interview in the Paris Review, means “bits and pieces of uncertain origin which rattle around in your head, not always comfortably.”

An all-star cast is set to bring one of Simon Winchester’s most beloved nonfiction accounts to the the screen, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (HC/Harper Perennial, 1998; OverDrive Sample).

Mel Gibson and Sean Penn will star in the film about James Murray, the 19th century professor who compiled the OED.

Deadline Hollywood reports that Gibson will play Murray and that the project is a passion of his. He has been working on getting the adaptation made for “nearly two decades.” Penn will play Dr. W.C. Minor, the “madman” who contributed thousands of entries to the dictionary.

Ioan Gruffudd (Fantastic Four) is set to join the cast and Entertainment Weekly reports that Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones) will also feature in the film.

This is another turn in what may count as a comeback for Gibson. He is “fresh off the back of Venice Film Festival hit Hacksaw Ridge, a World War II drama” says Deadline, and he got strong reviews for this year’s Blood Father.

A premiere date has not been announced.

Looking for October titles to please genre fans? io9 surveys the Science Fiction and Fantasy field and highlights 21 titles coming out this month to suggest to readers and include in displays.

Among them is Alex Award-winner Wesley Chu’s new stand-alone title, The Rise of Io (PRH/Angry Robot; OverDrive Sample), described as what happens when an “intergalactic small-time crook” is overtaken by a “body-swapping alien” who is conducting a murder investigation.

Shakespeare is rarely classed as SF or Fantasy, but Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed  (PRH/Hogarth; RH Audio/BOT), is also on the list, described as her “fresh take” on The Tempest.  It is just one of many Atwood upcoming projects, including her debut graphic novel. She is also consulting on Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale,starring Joseph Fiennes and Elisabeth Moss, which begins shooting in Toronto this fall.

Based on the cult hit TV series, The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost (Macmillan/Flatiron Books; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample) offers “a deeper examination of the tiny town’s history and its many deep and troubling mysteries.” New attention will also be brought to series in the form of a revival, to air in 2017.

Crosstalk by Connie Willis (PRH/Del Rey; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample) blends genres. A LibraryReads pick for this month, it is described it as “he perfect romantic comedy for the digital age,” Also on the list is Ken Liu’s The Wall of Storms (S&S/Saga; S&S Audio), the sequel to the highly regarded Grace of Kings. It has also received high praise in a review on the NPR site this week, saying that “It surpasses The Grace of Kings in every way, by every conceivable metric, and is — astonishingly — perfectly readable as a standalone.”

We don’t get the obsession with finding out who the real Elena Ferrante is, but the news media is currently atwitter because The New York Review of Books published an article on Sunday that purports to have uncovered the identity of the true author of the internationally best selling Neapolitan Novels.

The story is by an Italian business journalist who did what business journalist do, he followed the money, noting a dramatic increase in royalties to Italian translator Anita Raja. Based on style, she has been one of the leading contenders for the Ferrante mantle. The increase began about the same time that the Ferrante books started taking off. Bingo.

Many news sources are covering the story, including the New York Times. An opinion piece in the Guardian offers wise advice, “if you want to know who Elena Ferrante is, there is a very simple way to find out. Read her books.”

The Tim Burton adaptation of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was tops at the box office, this weekend, propelling the book further up Amazon’s sales rankings. Unfortunately, the high expectations for Disney’s Queen of Katwe, were not met in its expanded release, although it did well with critics.

After much drum-rolling, The Girl on the Train finally pulls into theaters this coming Friday. Directed by Tate Taylor (The Help), it stars Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, Haley Bennett, Justin Theroux, and Luke Evans.

No reviews yet, but the NYT and the WSJ [subscription maybe required] ran features on the film last week. Apparently the film version scared the author, reports NYT, “It’s a shocking film in parts, really frightening … It’s an odd thing, because I actually know what’s happening, but it felt really fresh to me.” Tie-ins were released in August.

James Patterson moves in to the lucrative family movie genre with the adaptation of his  Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life.

Directed by Steve Carr (Daddy Day Care), it stars Griffin Gluck, Lauren Graham, Rob Riggle, Retta, and Thomas Barbusca. It opens Oct. 7.

A tie-in came out in August.

The Great Gilly Hopkins. an adaptation of Katherine Paterson’s 1978 National Book Award-winning children’s novel of the same name (it also was a Newbery Honor Award title) also opens this weekend, with a simultaneous release on VOD.

The family film is directed by Stephen Herek (101 Dalmatians) and stars Sophie Nélisse, Julia Stiles, Glenn Close, Kathy Bates, Octavia Spencer, Bill Cobbs, and Billy Magnussen. No tie-in has been released.

The book version of the most popular class at Stanford tops the latest NYT‘s Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous list.

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample) applies the principles of design thinking to the career planning/self-help movement, teaching readers how to solve problems in creative ways and craft a more meaningful and fulfilling life.

The book has received media attention including coverage in the NYT, WSJ, [subscription maybe required], and Forbes. Fast Company offers the most exhaustive report, highlighting the point of view and processes of Burnett (the executive director of Stanford’s design program) and Evans (who has worked at Apple and is a co-founded Electronic Arts).

The magazine reports the goal is to change higher education, as Evans puts it, of “forming you into the person that will go out into the world, effect change, and be a leader. … [inviting ] people to live intentionally, in a generative, thoughtful way, and we give them a bunch of tools.”

Burnett says that class fits the anxiety of our current times very well, “The thing that’s true about design problems is that you don’t know what the solution is going to look like … You can’t know the future, but you can know what’s available and you can prototype different versions of the you that you might become.”

The class is so difficult to get into and so transformational that Evans says “We’ve had students literally teach the class on the side to their friends who weren’t enrolled.”

The same approach seems to be fueling library demand where holds have skyrocketed in some systems, topping 6:1 ratios.

Below is the book trailer:

But the following discussion gives more insight into the authors’ process and thinking: