Author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott’s next novel will be published serially via a Substack newsletter, The New York Times reports.
On Saturday, Scott posted the first pages of a novel titled Last Days in Two Nations (A History in Eighteen Minds) on her Substack. The following day, she shared a prologue to the book.
Scott was educated at Princeton University, where she studied creative writing with Toni Morrison, who praised Scott as “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative writing classes.” Scott made her debut in 2005 with the novel The Testing of Luther Albright, published by Harper under the name MacKenzie Bezos; she was married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos from 1993 to 2019. Her next book was another novel, Traps, published by Knopf in 2013.
Scott, who has a reputation for being intensely private, has in recent years made headlines with her philanthropy, giving away billions to charities and colleges.
Last Days in Two Nations (A History in Eighteen Minds) will span 80,000 words. The prologue begins with the sentence “In a cemetery beyond the Badlands, twenty-four of the original members of the Church of the Long Tomorrow lie in unmarked graves.”
Scott posted a release schedule for the remainder of the book, with installments to be posted throughout the remainder of August. According to the Times article, an aide for Scott did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
