Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan’s next novel MANHATTAN BEACH, her sixth work of fiction, will be published on October 3 — her first book with Nan Graham at Scribner. (In 2013, Jordan Pavlin at Knopf spoke about losing Egan to Scribner in a lengthy Poets & Writers interview: “It took me about four months to peel myself off the floor. That was one of the hardest moments in my professional life. I wish her only the best and I miss her terribly.”)
Set in the World War II era, the new novel tells the intertwined stories of the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s only female diver, her father who works for both the union and the mob, and a nightclub owner. Egan says in the announcement, “Exhilarating though it was to immerse myself in an underworld of gangsters and sailors, the real imaginative leap in Manhattan Beach was into a time when the rules governing female behavior were still so rigid. The underground nature of female strength and sexuality allowed for a heroine-driven adventure story that would be hard to cast in contemporary America.”
In another announcement, Tina Brown’s book about her media days will be published in November. Now called VANITY FAIR DIARIES it will chronicle her eight years at the magazine and will be published by Holt, with Gillian Blake editing. When Brown first made a deal with the publisher in 2013, the project was announced as MEDIA BEAST, covering her broader life in magazine journalism, and Sara Bershtel was to edit for Holt’s Metropolitan imprint.
A spokesperson tells us that once Brown began thoroughly reviewing her diaries from the Vanity Fair years, both parties agreed “it was a one-of-a-kind time capsule, social history and memoir–very much a book in itself” — and a better fit for the Holt list. They say Brown “may write a more full memoir down the line.”
The basis — Brown’s daily diary — remains the same. Holt president Steve Rubin promises in the new announcement, “Tina’s book will paint an intimate, incendiary portrait of that flashy time – a gilded, giddy decade. She’ll also spill some dirt on some of the flamboyant explosions around her, many of which she ignited herself. This will be a tell-all for the centuries.”