The next book from Jonathan Franzen will be the first volume in a trilogy. Crossroads, the author's first novel since 2015's Purity, will be released next October, Franzen’s publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux announced today, kicking off the new A Key to All Mythologies series.
According to FSG, the trilogy tells the story of a Midwestern family across three generations, “mirroring the preoccupations and dilemmas of the United States from the Vietnam War to the 2020s.” Jonathan Galassi, president of FSG, acquired exclusive North American rights and non-exclusive open market rights from Susan Golomb at Writers House.
In its announcement, FSG explained how the name of the series came about: “Crossroads is the beginning of a story that encompasses all the ‘mythologies’—the political, religious, and intellectual crosscurrents—that have animated and troubled American life in recent decades.”
“Franzen has been universally recognized as the leading novelist of his generation, an inheritor of Steinbeck and Faulkner,” Galassi said in a statement. “He has been telling us the inner history of contemporary America in novel after novel, from The Twenty-Seventh City to The Corrections to Freedom, culminating now in A Key to All Mythologies.”
