Alfred A. Knopf

Yeah.

His publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, announced that Between Books will be released on May 25, 2027, and in the People article, McEwan is quoted describing the origin of this nonfiction debut.

Let's hear it.

He says, and this is a direct quote, "I started out contemplating a ragbag of disparate pieces and ended up with what I hope is an emotional and intellectual journey."

To apologize for a masterpiece.

Yes.

He essentially warned his publisher that he was delivering a highly niche, unmarketable manuscript.

And Dan Franklin's response is now like the stuff of publishing legend.

Her new novel is called Exit Party.

It is available now from Alfred A. Knopf.

It is a novel of doubles and shadow worlds and fractured timelines.

And it is set, or it begins, I should say, in Los Angeles in the year 2031, in the aftermath of the Second Civil War in the United States of America.

To sign up for the Other People Book Club or to get some Other People merch, just visit the show's official website, otherppl.com.

Okay, so my guest once again is Emily St. John Mandel.

Her new novel is called Exit Party, available from Knopf.

This is Emily's third time on The Other People Show.

And it was over – kind of lunch thinking and talking about Coney Island and New York and friends past and present that we came up with this idea of doing a series on the history of New York and that the Coney Island film was really a kind of proof of concept of the story of this extraordinary city so we you know jumped in and began thinking how would you tell the story not encyclopedically but narratively from Henry Hudson down to the present

Yeah, I had been already begun work on a book I was doing about New York and the movies, which finally came out as Celluloid Skyline that Alfred Knopf published.

But I was sort of deep in the middle of that and had the idea maybe we could make a film out of that.

And people said, well, have you thought about talking to Ken or Rick Burns? And I said, well, Rick's a more or less a classmate of mine.

And Mike knew that so powerfully, so... to his wonderful partner, Carmen Bullosa, another extraordinary writer and New Yorker.

I want to say our hearts are out to you with the loss of Mike, but to Mike, we wouldn't be the same without you.

I'd also like to say, in terms of a sort of a companion or equivalent on the printed page of the series, we could draw a modest cough to our own companion volume, New York and Illustrated History, uh which we updated to include the content of the new episodes a couple of years ago so there's a new edition uh which is available from alfred knopf and you know i was looking at the other day and i was struck at the it does never mind our own writing and our own research the contributors alone Include among them, get ready, Mike Wallace, Ken Jackson, Robert Caro, David Levering Lewis, Philip Lopate, Marshall Berman, Suketu Mehta, Esther Fuchs, Adam Gopnik, Robert Stern, who also recently passed away, and I'm forgetting a couple of folks in there somewhere, but Carol Birkin.

There's no other book, in my humble opinion, where the greatest thinkers about New York are brought together in a single place, and that book has something from all of them, and in fact, fantastic essays or redacted Q&As from all of them.

Dave is really interested in being an art director and And he has a publishing company called McSweeney's that we also kind of do side publications of some of our books with.

McSweeney's will publish at the same time as Knopf, per se.

I mean, for example, on The Eyes of the Impossible, we did a wooden cover that...

And this book started because Dave was like, I want to make a book with a die cut wood, hardwood cover.

What is it like to promote a book in the year 2026?

I think that I have a very atypical experience of book promotion because I had these three novels published by a really small press, and then I jumped to Knopf in the US, HarperCollins Canada, and Pan Macmillan in the UK for, for Station Eleven, and I've been with those three publishers ever since.

And because Station Eleven was so successful, that, that meant that a lot of marketing resources have been poured into the subsequent books.

So I think that that gives me a really unusual experience, and I think that it's not normal at all.

Ten years of work handed back.

A friend sent the manuscript over to Knopf, where an editor named Judith Jones read it, cooked from it, and then fought for it against the skepticism of the people above her.

The book was Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

It came out in 1961, 524 recipes, and it changed the way an entire country ate.

And Stuart Prophet, a very well-known publisher, says, that's what you should write about.

And that draft manuscript was then bought by Alfred Knopf, a publishing house in New York, And I was edited by a remarkable editor, Victoria Wilson, who imposed two conditions.

One, two conditions before she would buy the manuscript.

One, I will be the only editor.