Book Deals: Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellow, and author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell's The Antidote, a novel set in 1930s Uz, Nebraska, as the dust storm leaves financial and ecological ruin in its wake, following the stories of a prairie witch whose body serves as a vault for peoples' memories and secrets, a Polish farmer and his untamable niece, and a Black photographer with a time-traveling camera; offering a retelling of a catastrophe brought on by colonialism of Indigenous land theft and willful blindness passed through generations; and an untitled story collection, to Knopf. • MacArthur winner, Guggenheim Fellow, and regular New Yorker contributor Donald Antrim's My Eliot, the author's first novel in more than 20 years, in which our protagonist “Donald Antrim” sits down to read his late father's treatise on T.S. Eliot, determined to come to terms, at last, with the ghost of his old man, to Random House. • NFL reporter and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mike Silver's untitled book on Kyle Shanahan, Sean McVay, and their group of young coaches—close friends and rivals—who have revolutionized professional football over the last decade, to Norton. • Sian Hughes's Pearl, the Booker-longlisted tale of a woman looking back on growing up in a small English village in the wake of her mother's disappearance, to Knopf. • Author of Red Clocks Leni Zumas's Wolf Bells, a novel set in an intergenerational group home whose ideals—and already precarious existence—are threatened when two children on the run from authorities ask for safe harbor, to Algonquin. • Writer for Sports Illustrated Chris Ballard's Ice Mile, pitched as Born to Run meets Breath for cold water swimming, a narrative exploration of our obsession with cold water, to Simon & Schuster.
Adaptation Announcements: Leave the World Behind—the Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, and Ethan Hawke-starring movie adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel—will open the 37th AFI Fest next month. • Neon acquired worldwide rights for Ava DuVernay's Origin—a biopic inspired by the life and work of Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson—ahead of its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
Awards Circuit: Here’s the longlist for the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction.
