Garth Risk Hallberg's Debut Novel CITY ON FIRE Sells for $2 Million

Garth Risk Hallberg's sprawling debut novel CITY ON FIRE, over 900 pages long, has been picked up by Knopf for $2 million, according to The New York Times.

Following an intense bidding war for the manuscript from the former New York Times Book Review contributor, Hallberg's is set to be published, though no date has been announced.

Knopf editor Diana Miller described the novel as "off the charts in its ambition, its powers of observation, its ability to be at once intellectual and emotionally generous."

Chris Parris-Lamb, Hallberg's agent, confirmed that the mysterious piece will "revolve around a central mystery: what exactly is going on behind the locked steel doors of a derelict townhouse in the East Village, and what might it have to do with the shooting in Central Park in the novel's opening act?"

Acclaimed producer Scott Rudin picked up the film rights to the yet-to-be published works last month, saying: "The scale of it, the vision of it, the big political ideas, how tightly knitted all the stories are to each other and how densely and pleasurably plotted it is, made me feel like, for the purposes of a movie, he had done the lion's share of the work that anyone would have to do. It doesn't need to be massively reinvented to be a movie."

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Photo courtesy of Jordan Alport

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