EarlyWord

Reviews be damned, Paula Hawkins’s Into the Water (PRH/Riverhead; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample) can now be declared a #1 best seller. In its second week on sale, it moved to that spot on the new USA Today Best Selling Books list, jumping from #4 and knocking James Patterson off his perch in just one week. This practically guarantees it will be #1 on the NYT list later this week.

Holds are growing, reflecting the considerable interest in the author and some recent PR, via media interviews and her U.S. book tour. Patron demand is catching up. After a rather sluggish start, especially when compared to the pre-pub holds for her debut, lists have grown and libraries have placed multiple re-oreders.

The controversy surrounding the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, which some say “glamorizes” teen suicide, has brought new attention to the YA novel it is based on, one that has been challenged since it was published ten years ago.

Last night, Nightline showed another side of the story, reporting on a group of Michigan high school students who used the show as the inspiration to talk publicly about the events that made each of consider suicide, creating a video for their fellow students titled “13 Reasons Why Not.”

The result has been a dramatic change in the school’s culture, one that was deeply needed, says one of the participants in the project. As the book’s author Jay Asher has said, it is much more dangerous to try to shut down the conversation than to bring it into the open.

Time to crank up the betting on which actor will play Israeli art restorer, spy and assassin Gabriel Allon from Daniel Silva’s New York Times bestselling novels. Deadline reports that MGM Television, has bought the rights to the books.

Silva has published 16 titles in the series beginning with The Kill Artist in 2000, but says he’s been waiting for the “right time and the right partner” to adapt the books. The partner he chose is currently hot, having produced Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and FX’s Fargo. As MGM Motion Pictures president Jonathan Glickman notes, the books have been hot for some time, saying bidding was “highly competitive” and the rights “have been sought after for years.”

The 17th title in the series, House of Spies will be published on July 17th (HarperCollins/Harper; HarperAudio; HarperLuxe)

NPR’s All Things Considered featured Michael Ruhlman’s Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America (Abrams; RH Audio/BOT), moving the book up Amazon’s rankings and driving holds. Libraries are seeing reserve ratios well over 3:1, in one case 10:1.

The interview takes place in an actual grocery store. Surveying the plenty spread out in the aisles, Ruhlman says a grocery store is “the best of America and the worst of America.”

Grocery stores are run with such narrow margins that they cannot stand to lose a customer, which is why they ask as at checkout if you found everything you were looking for. Not finding something is why shoppers change stores.

Because of the ease of online buying for commodity items like orange juice and cereal, Ruhlman thinks thinks grocery stores will shrink, selling only specialized items that customers want to pick by hand. The future will look more like the past, when stores were smaller and more specialized.

As a literary side note, a recent NYT Weddings column details Ruhlman’s long-held crush on Ann Hood (The Book That Matters) which last 20 years and led to a wedding last month (with Laura Lippman officiating).

Bill Gates took to Twitter on Monday and sent Steven Pinker’s 2010 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (PRH/Penguin; RH Audio; OverDrive Sample), soaring to the top of the Amazon sales charts, where it is currently the best selling book across the site.

In a series of tweets offering advice to graduates, Gates says “If I could give each of you a graduation present, it would be this — the most inspiring book I’ve ever read.” The story has caught the attention of the new media. Both the Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly covered it. It’s also a favorite of fellow tech billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg who gave it a bump in early 2015, when he picked it for his Facebook book club.

In the book Pinker insists that, despite what many think, the world is actually becoming a better place.

The impact on holds is mixed. Some libraries have copies on the shelf while others are seeing holds topping 10:1.

Julia Roberts will star in and produce a big screen adaptation of Cynthia Swanson’s 2015 debut novel The Bookseller (HC/Harper; HarperLuxe; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample), reports Variety.

The novel was not widely reviewed. It made the NYT eBook bestseller list for a week and rose to #85 on the USA Today list. It was also an Indie Next pick:

“In 1962, 38-year-old Kitty Miller lives unconventionally. She’s an unmarried working woman who is running a bookstore with her best friend. But at night, in her dreams, it’s a different story. There, Kitty (now Kathryn) explores the path not taken. She’s the married mother of three. It’s the life that might have been, and the novel explores both Kitty’s waking and dream lives in alternating chapters. Swanson’s enjoyable debut really gets interesting when the lines between waking and dreaming, fantasy and reality, begin to blur.” —Susan Tunis, Bookshop West Portal, San Francisco, CA

A starred review in LJ said, “This is a stunner of a debut novel … Kitty/Katharyn’s journey is intriguing, redolent with issues of family, independence, friendship, and free will. This will especially resonate with fans of the movie Sliding Doors and the authors Anna Quindlen and Anita Shreve.”

This marks the latest in a run of book-based films for Roberts, who, like Reese Witherspoon, has had success with adaptations. Early in her career she starred in the film version of John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief . She is now set to star in and produce Harlan Coben’s Fool Me Once and, with Viola Davis, will feature in the film version of Jodi Picoult’s Small Great Things.

The TV adaptation of Stephen King’s 2014 novel Mr. Mercedes has wrapped. It will air on August 9 on AT&T’s Audience Network, a satellite service most widely available via DirecTV.

David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies) created the series and Jack Bender (Game of Thrones; Under the Dome) directs multiple episodes. It stars Brendan Gleeson (28 Days Later) as the detective who comes out of retirement to stop the serial killer, Mr. Mercedes, played by Harry Treadaway (City of Ember).

A mass market paperback tie-in edition comes out on July 25, Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (S&S/Pocket; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample) [art work not available, the above image is from the 2015 mass market edition].

A departure for King, the novel is less horror than hard-boiled. The NYT review lauded “King’s affectionate awareness of the hard-boiled tradition and his point of departure from it” adding “King is clearly having fun, and so are we.” It won the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Novel.

As we posted earlier, this is only one of many King adaptations in the works.

Well-known for hating screen adaptations of her work, Ursula K. Le Guin just sold the rights to one of her most famous novels, the 1969 Hugo and Nebula award winning The Left Hand of Darkness, an iconic work of feminist science fiction.

The studio Critical Content (responsible for the TV version of Limitless), reports Variety, will create a limited series based on the book with Le Guin serving as a consulting producer.

The novel is part of her Hainish Cycle and explores the ways sex and gender shape a culture. Variety speculates that the audience avidly following Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale will seek out Le Guin’s story as it is another “allegory about sexual politics and power.”

If your collection needs fresh copies, the novel has been republished a number of times, most recently in October 2016 in hardback as part of the Penguin Galaxy series with an introduction by Neil Gaiman: The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin (PRH/Penguin; BBC Audio; OverDrive Sample).

This is the second time this year that Le Guin has agreed to sell the rights to her work. In February she sold the 1966 SF novella Planet Of Exile, also part of the Hainish Cycle.

If the conversation around “adulting” hits a nerve, meet Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska.

Sasse is concerned with what he regards as the slow-to-nonexistent development of independent and thriving adults in the US and has written a book on the subject, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis–and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample). It is zooming up the Amazon rankings, thanks to his appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation yesterday and CBS This Morning today, moving from #43 to #7.

He tells Face the Nation‘s John Dickerson, “this book is 100 percent not about politics, and it’s 99 percent not about policy. It’s about this new category of perpetual adolescence.”  However, as one of the Republicans who expressed reservations about the firing of James Comey as Director of the FBI, that subject dominates the  interview. Sasse finally gets to promote the book towards the end, saying it’s about the recent phenomenon of  “perpetual adolescence …Peter Pan’s Neverland is a hell … we don’t want [to] have our kids caught at a place where they’re not learning how to be adults.”

He followed up with an appearance on CBS This Morning, which also focused on the firing of Comey.

Sasse is making the media rounds. He is scheduled to appear tonight on Late Night with Seth Meyers. He has been on NPR’s On Point, the NYT has an interview, Sasse himself writes an essay for the Wall Street Journal (subscription maybe required), MarketWatch offers a summary, and Time covers it in an article titled “Ben Sasse Explains Why His New Book Is Really, Truly Not About Running for President.”

The heavily promoted adaptation of Nicola Yoon’s debut YA novel  Everything, Everything opens on May 19. The book debuted at #1 on the NYT  Young Adult best seller list and stayed on it for over a year. The release of the trailer in February brought the book back to the list, again at #1

About a teen girl confined to her house because of severe allergies, the novel earned a glowing NYT review (“gorgeous and lyrical”) and an A- review from Entertainment Weekly (a “complex,” “fresh, moving debut”).

The film stars Amandla Stenberg (who played Rue in The Hunger Games) and Nick Robinson (Zach in Jurassic World). Stella Meghie (Jean of the Joneses) directs.

Tie-in:  Everything, Everything Movie Tie-in Edition, (in hardcover: PRH/Delacorte Press; April 18, 2017; ISBN 9781524769802; 18.99; Listening Library; also in paperback: PRH/Ember; April 4, 2017; ISBN 9781524769604; $10.99).

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul premieres on May 19. It is based on the 9th title in the popular kids series written by Jeff Kinney.

The three previous films in the series have been commercial, although not critical successes. The new film, featuring a fresh cast including Alicia Silverstone, Tom Everett Scott, Charlie Wright, and Jason Drucker, follows a family road trip.

Tie-in: Diary of a Wimpy Kid # 9: Long Haul: The Long Haul by Jeff Kinney (Abrams; OverDrive Sample).

Also opening May 19th is Wakefield, an adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s short story of the same name. Starring Bryan Cranston and Jennifer Garner, it tells the story of a man who “vanishes” but really only hides in his garage spying on the lives of his family and neighbors.

Both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter posted reviews in 2016 when the film was making the festival circuit. While praising Cranston’s performance, Variety says the ending is “a cop-out.” The Hollywood Reporter agrees that Cranston “is the whole show” and calls the film “decreasingly convincing.”

It opens in limited release . There is no tie-in. The short story was published in The New Yorker in 2008.

Airing on May 21st is A Bundle of Trouble, a Hallmark adaptation of Charlaine Harris’s Aurora Teagarden series featuring a crime-solving librarian.

There are nine books in the series. This newest adaptation is based on the sixth, titled A Fool And His Honey (PRH/Berkley; OverDrive Sample). This is also the 6th Hallmark adaptation, following A Bone To Pick, Real Murders, Three Bedrooms One Corpse, The Julius House, and Dead Over Heels.

The show stars Candace Cameron Bure (Full House) as the librarian sleuth. There is no tie-in, although the book is still available. See the Hallmark site for a preview (unfortunately we cannot embed the clip).

As we posted in the May 15th Titles to Know, HBO is adapting The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust by Diana B. Henriques (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Griffin; Tantor Media; OverDrive Sample).

It premieres May 20 and stars Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer. Barry Levinson directs.

See our earlier post for more details.

Presidential aide Ivanka Trump’s Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, (PRH/Portfolio; Penguin Audio/BOT) is technically a #1 best seller, having hit that number on the Wall Street Journal‘s Business Book list. Other numbers are not so sunny. It debuts on the USA Today general list at #53.

The Huffington Post reveals just how bad the sales are, reporting “In the book’s first five days on the market, Trump sold 10,445 print copies,” comparing that to Sheryl Sandberg’s book on female empowerment, Lean In, (PRH/Knopf) which sold 74,176 print copies in its first week, going on to sell many more and become a recognized catch phrase as well as a movement.

Reviews have been universally scathing. In this case, negative press may not be better than no press at all.

Both the movie poster, left, and a clip have been released for Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, based on Brian Selznick’s 2011 illustrated novel. The movie will debut at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18 and in US theaters in limited release on October 20, with the promise of a wide release sometime in mid-November.

The book, set in 1927 and 1977, features two deaf children, Ben and Rose, each within their own time line, each secretly longing for different lives. As the story unfolds, the tales of both children weave back and forth before finally coming together.

The film co-stars Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams. Oakes Fegley (Pete’s Dragon) plays Ben and newcomer Millicent Simmonds, who is deaf, plays Rose.

Selznick wrote the adapted screenplay. Below he describes how he wrote the novel:

Expect some creative film making to match the creativity of the novel. Movie Pilot writes “Rose’s half of the movie will be shot as a silent film! This will allow the movie to stay faithful to the novel, capture the world through the eyes of Rose, and recreate the aesthetic of the silent film era.”

Wonderstruck is the sixth film that Roadside has distributed with Amazon Studios. The two companies biggest success so far is Manchester by the Sea, which won two Oscars and was the biggest box office success to date for both companies.

The fight to keep theaters viable in an age of streaming services and high definition TV has led the Cannes Festival, like many film events, including the Oscars, to limit eligibility to movies  that are released to theaters before hitting small screens.

Things are becoming more complex now that streaming services have also gotten in to producing their own movies. Overturning their rule against streaming services sast year, Cannes accepted five of Amazon Studios films as entries into the competition, because Amazon execs “promised that, unlike Netflix, all of their films will go out in theaters, holding to the traditional 90-day theatrical window,” writes the Hollywood Reporter, adding that it makes business sense for Amazon,

“Unlike Netflix, which operates its streaming service in virtually every country in the world … Amazon’s Prime Video service is not available in France, in Italy, in Canada, Spain, Australia, Russia or Brazil. A global day-and-date rollout, the cornerstone of Netflix’ release strategy, still is impossible for Amazon.”

Journalist and former Random House publisher Harold Evans entertained NPR’s Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday, with his pet peeves about the misuse of the English language.

As a result of their lively exchange, Evans’s new book, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters (Hachette/Little, Brown; OverDrive Sample) made a major leap up Amazon’s rankings, rising from #25,848 to #32.

The book addresses the “garbage” littering our prose. He particularly hates “zombie words,” nouns that are turned into verbs, because they drain “the sentences of vigor and immediacy,” he says, “It’s like a virus.”

The book is “a punchy follow-up to an earlier journalistic primer (Essential English for Journalists, Editors and Writers) that’s still a standard at many British universities,” notes The Hollywood Reporter in a lengthy interview with Evans, that focuses on the documentary Attacking the Devil, about Evans’s early journalistic fight against the drug thalidomide.

Evans stars in the doc, which the The Weinstein Co. will distribute in the US. A feature film is also in the works and Hugh Grant is “said to be among the contenders vying for the lead.” Although Evans jokes, “I think I may hold out for Brad Pitt to play me. He’s a better likeness, don’t you think?”

Professor and author Barbara Oakley gets a double lift from The Wall Street Journal. An article titled “How a Polymath Mastered Math – and So Can You,” explores how Oakley, after flunking math through grade school, taught herself to master the subject, eventually earning a degree in electrical engineering. Now a professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan, she teaches what the paper says is the “world’s most popular MOOC” the massive open online course “Learning How to Learn.”

The article mentions two of her books. Her newest, Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential (PRH/ TarcherPerigee; Penguin Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample) and 2014’s A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) (also PRH/ TarcherPerigee; OverDrive Sample).

The books are rising on Amazon’s rankings as a result. Mindshift jumped from #643 to #32 and Numbers rose from #751 to #52.

Big Little Lies producer and star Reese Witherspoon has issued a “Great Book Alert!” to her 9.7 million followers on Instagram, about the LibraryReads pick Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman (PRH/Pamela Dorman; Penguin Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample).

Just a few days later, Deadline Hollywood, reported that she will produce the film version and likely star.

The actress and Hollywood powerhouse when it comes to adapting books, says the novel is “Beautifully written and INCREDIBLY funny … I fell in LOVE with Eleanor, an eccentric and regimented loner whose life beautifully unfolds after a chance encounter with a stranger; I think you will fall in love too!”

Her rave review adds star power to what is already a buzzy debut, as does the fact that she also added it to her rwbookclub on Instagram.