Two Literary Giants Will Release New Books This Summer
This week, authors Milan Kundera and Harper Lee announced plans to publish new books.
Happily, reports of the novel’s death have been greatly exaggerated: this week, two renowned novelists who have long lain dormant announced plans to publish new books.
Thirteen years after the publication of his last novel, Ignorance, Czech sensation Milan Kundera will finally release a new novel, The Festival of Insignificance. The cheerfully titled book met with critical acclaim in Italy, Spain, and France, where it has already been released. An English edition, to be published with HarperCollins, will join its European counterparts this June. The author of celebrated works like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Life Is Elsewhere, and, most famously, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera has long been a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. His philosophically infused books, many of which focus on the 1989 Velvet Revolution, deftly explore the intimate relationship between comedy and tragedy.
Somewhat closer to home, American darling Harper Lee will end her 54 year hiatus with the publication of a highly anticipated second novel this July, also with HarperCollins. The book, titled Go Set a Watchman, is a sequel to Lee’s much-loved debut novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. (However, debates have since ensued on how much say Lee — who is currently in a nursing home and in the past has famously refused to publish another book — has had in the book’s release.) According to the press release issued by Lee’s publisher, Lee wrote Go Set a Watchman before she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, but she was advised by her editors to write another book focusing on the protagonist, a character named Scout. The result was the classic that is now a core part of high school curriculums all over the country. Lee believed the manuscript of Go Set a Watchman was lost — but she was surprised when her lawyer and friend rediscovered it last fall.
And so are we. Our summer reading lists have just grown in the best possible way. Now we just have to cope with the unbearable lightness of waiting.
