And Other Stories has acquired a three-book deal with Morgan Talty in a “unprecedented” sum for the publisher following a four-way auction.
Senior editor Tara Tobler acquired UK, Europe and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, for two fiction titles and UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, for a memoir from Rebecca Friedman Literary Agency via Angelique Tran Van Sang at Felicity Bryan Associates. Talty’s “gorgeous” debut novel Fire Exit will be published in September 2024 and his short story collection Night of the Living Rez will be published in 2025.
Talty’s short story collection has already been published in the US with Tin House Books in 2022 and won the PEN/Robert W Bingham Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Best First Book. His debut novel is a “genuinely original examination of the costs we pay to tell ourselves certain stories about who we are and where we come from”.
Tobler commented: “Morgan is a beautiful writer, full of dignified, quiet sentences, wonderfully balanced narrative arcs, intricate layered theming that makes itself gently (never obtrusively) felt, and characters whose fullness is palpable even though they’re often not especially chatty. There’s an incredible strength and clarity of spirit shining through his words, a frank directness, an honesty, a sense of humility and courage, and this is true of the fiction and non-fiction alike.
“Morgan’s got this capacity to find solid ground amidst uncertainty, to stand there, to take stock, seek truth, to seek a truth inseparable from kindness… to me his writing feels like a way up and out of the worst parts of the moment we’re inhabiting.”
