Harper president and publisher Jonathan Burnham has acquired North American rights to The Land of Sweet Forever: Stories and Essays, by the late To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee, from Tonja Carter, executor of the Harper Lee Estate, and Michael Dean of Andrew Nurnberg Associates, the U.K.–based representatives of the estate. The book, which will be published on October 21, features several unseen short stories from Lee's early years, as well as an introduction by Casey Cep, Lee's authorized biographer and the author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.
The Land of Sweet Forever contains eight short stories written before Lee began work in earnest on the novel that would become To Kill a Mockingbird, during which time she was was submitting her short fiction to journals and periodicals. The typescripts of these stories were among the papers Lee left in her New York City apartment upon her death in 2016. In 2024, Lee's estate decided to publish the stories alongside eight nonfiction pieces by Lee, which appeared in a range of publications between 1961 and 2006, collected together for the first time.
The Land of Sweet Forever will be published in the U.K. and Commonwealth by Hutchinson Heinemann, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK; in Denmark by Lindhardt og Ringhof; in Germany by Penguin Verlag, an imprint of Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe; and in Italy by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore. Further territories to be confirmed in the coming weeks.
