John Green is trading fiction for fact with his next book.
The bestselling author of young adult novels like The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska will make his adult nonfiction debut next year with The Anthropocene Reviewed, publisher Dutton said in a news release.
The book will be an essay collection based on Green’s WNYC podcast, in which he rates different facets of the Anthropocene Epoch—that would be the one we’re currently in—on a scale of one to five stars. (Diet Dr Pepper earned a rating of four and a half stars from Green, while viral meningitis scored one paltry star.)
“Before I was a novelist, before I was a YouTuber, I was a book reviewer,” Green said. “The format still fascinates me. As I’ve been revising and expanding the essays for The Anthropocene Reviewed, I’ve begun to understand these reviews as an attempt to chart the contradictions of human life as I experience it—how we can be so compassionate and so cruel, so persistent and so quick to despair, and how consciousness is at once depraved in its meaninglessness and profoundly sacred in its meaning.”
The book, which Dutton Books for Young Readers publisher Julie Strauss-Gabel called “remarkable,” will contain topics Green has covered in his podcast along with some new ones, Dutton said.
The Anthropocene Reviewed is slated for publication on May 18, 2021.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
