Anniversary Celebration of a Bestseller

Ten years, thirty-one languages and a great deal of correspondence about one particular chapter. The anniversary edition arrives this spring, and this is the evening built around it.

The evening

It opens with the reading everybody expects — the orchard, from the top — and then does something that has not been done before. The anniversary edition restores the ending as it stood in the fourth draft, the one the author’s editor talked her out of over a long lunch in 2015. Elena will read it in full, publicly, for the first time.

Marcus, who was her agent then and still is, will then explain on stage why he agreed with the editor. This is expected to be lively.

The second half is questions, unfiltered and unscreened, for as long as the theater will let us stay.

Why come

Because a book’s history is normally sealed the day it is printed. The versions that lost, the arguments that shaped it, the sentence that a stranger removed and was right to remove — none of that is usually available to readers. For one night it will be, with both parties to the argument on the same stage and neither of them entirely conceding.

Anyone who has ever finished the novel and wanted to argue with its last twenty pages will find this evening very satisfying.

How to take part

Tickets are on sale through the theater and include a copy of the anniversary edition, collected on the way out. Signing follows the event in the foyer; earlier editions and battered paperbacks are more than welcome, and the more battered the better.

If you have a question you would rather not ask aloud, cards will be on every seat and read from the stage anonymously.