Excerpt from The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Anyway, in a week or two, all of those books would be gone—the not-good ones, the competent but undistinguished ones, even the few that might actually be exceptional—and the New Fiction section would be full of other new novels. Newer new novels. So who even cared?

It was the agent, Matilda, who waded into all of this uncertainty, referencing directly the supposedly-being-written novel (News to her! But she was delighted! ) and suggesting she apply to one of the artists' colonies—or not actually, technically apply, since Matilda had an author who was on the admissions committee and could prioritize the special circumstances of a celebrated literary widow attempting to write a novel of her own. She herself hadn't heard about these colonies, not even from her late husband, and she did find that interesting. Had Jake never talked about them because he'd never been admitted to one, either as a young writer (not promising enough?) or later, as a blindingly successful one (too successful to deserve a residency, not when there were so many struggling writers out there!). She was surprised to learn that a dozen or more of these places were tucked into rural spots all over the country, from New England to—astonishingly—Whidbey Island, Washington, where she had spent a number of illicit weekends with her boss during her Seattle years. And apparently, according to Matilda at any rate, every one of these would be ecstatic to host her in support of the theoretical novel she was theoretically writing.

The colony to which she (or, more accurately, Matilda) had submitted her request for a residency was located in a New England town not so different from the one she'd grown up in, and comprised the home and expansive grounds of a nineteenth-century composer. She had a room in the main house, where the writers (and artists and composers) gathered for breakfast and dinner, and a little cabin down a path carpeted with pine needles, where she took herself each morning, like Little Red Riding Hood, except in this case the basket of food was delivered to her at lunchtime, set carefully on the back porch by a man who then drove away. The basket contained wax paper–wrapped sandwiches, an apple, and a cookie. Inside, the cabin was rustic and spare, with a book of testimonials from writers who'd worked there, a rocking chair, a fireplace, and a narrow cot on which she lay, staring at the cobwebs hanging from the rafters: empty, untroubled, mildly curious as to what she was supposed to be doing with herself.

The cardinal rule of the place was that no one should interrupt an artist at work (any one of them might be grappling with "Kubla Khan"!), so she was entirely alone for hours at a time. That was a powerful luxury. She'd been on the road for months by then, chatting away about Jake's posthumous novel (and even more frequently: his tragic, premature death), and she was thoroughly sick of other people. All of that concern, all of the personal offerings of tantamount mourning (my mother, my father, my brother, my sister, my husband also! ) which was somehow meant to bind these strangers to her. After the first day or two at the colony, when she understood that no one would bother her for glorious hours at a time, she relaxed.

She was, of course, not writing "Kubla Khan." She was not writing anything, not for her first week in that little cabin, anyway. She spent the days moving from the cot to the rocking chair, lighting her fire (it was spring, but still very cold) and keeping it going, napping in the afternoons. She absolutely appreciated the stillness and warmth and the fact that her cell phone got terrible reception here. She spent a day reading a biography of the American composer whose home she was living in, and went for a few afternoon drives around southern New Hampshire. When evening came, she returned to the dining room in the main house and listened to the faux self-effacement of her fellow colonists, who preferred not to say outright how important they felt themselves to be. After dinner there was the occasional artist-talk about the sculpture or composition or performance art commission in progress elsewhere on the colony grounds. Two of the men—an aggressively atonal composer and a writer of metafiction—were having an obvious liaison, but this was abruptly ended by a surprise visit from one of their spouses, after which a toxic bitterness settled between them and emanated throughout the larger group. A silent elderly woman, apparently famous for her poetry, departed, and a ferocious young person replaced her, making each dinner a combative scene of barely suppressed hostility.

Excerpted from The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz. Copyright © 2024 by Jean Hanff Korelitz. Excerpted by permission of Celadon. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.