Tomorrow, and Tomorrow...and Salt Lake City
Bestselling author Gabrielle Zevin hosted by Tanner Humanities Center
Author Gabrielle Zevin is featured speaker at Tanner Humanities Center event Oct. 7. Her book “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” tells the fictional tale of video game creators. (Photo credit: Hans Canosa / Courtesy of Knopf)
The granular nature of culture production these days means that more often than not we first encounter a text as a movie version before reading the book upon which it is based. To that point, it’s arguable that more people will see Christopher Nolan’s epic film “The Odyssey,” before they read Homer’s classic tale of the same name in whatever translation they happen to lay their hands on.
And so it was with author Gabrielle Zevin’s 2014 novel The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. After watching the 2022 comedy-drama feature directed by her partner Hans Canosa, I sought out the book and its charming story about a crotchety bookshop owner/widower who has adopted an abandoned infant and whose lives together are upturned by a persistent publisher’s sales rep from New York.
Tomorrow x3
This time around, with Zevin’s blockbuster Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the tables have been turned. Zevin will be in Salt Lake City October 7, 2026 as part of the University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center season of annual events. Among other collaborators, her appearance is being feted during the statewide, weeks-long Utah Humanities Book Festival. The celebrated author will be reading from and signing copies of this, her latest book, named to the New York Times list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
The 2022 novel which follows two friends across thirty years as they build video games and learn about the different forms of success and failure has spent over a year on the New York Times Best Seller List and was chosen a best book of the year by more than twenty-five publications. Her publisher, Knopf, which initially printed 60,000 copies, has reprinted the book 21 times to keep up with runaway sales.
This before the movie version, currently in the works, first sees its first flicker on the big screen.
Author of 10 books written over the past two decades, Zevin has logged a circuitous arguably perplexing literary journey, one that is emblematic of the flexing, unpredictable and at times infuriating (for authors) path of the big five commercial publishers. In many ways, as the New York Times has pointed out, agents, publishers and readers have had to become reacquainted with an author who sold 850,000 copies of the critically acclaimed A.J. Filkry just twelve years ago. (One major news outlet actually referred to her current blockbuster as her “debut.”)
This time around, however, no one will be forgetting Zevin for the literary superstar she is now, possibly supercharged by Jimmy Fallon from the Tonight Show, who in 2022 selected Tomorrow as the first pick of his broadcast segment rebranded as the Fallon Book Club.
The success of Tomorrow is partly due, not in spite of but because of the roller-coaster ride Zevin found herself on after her auspicious arrival in the literary scene followed by works that, while critically acclaimed, largely failed to find an audience. This left her in a “slump,” according to the article in the Times. “She needed a distraction,” the article reads, “so she turned, as she often does, to video games. But when she tried to play the adventure game Gold Rush, she discovered that the version she had played obsessively as a kid no longer existed. It felt like a chapter of her childhood had been erased. ‘This part of my life was gone,’ she said.”
There were other video games from her youth which seemed to have migrated to digital landfills or, if they were lucky, to preservation archives (as in Pong, which I obsessed over, five years before Zevin was born). One of those early games, Alley Cat, turned out to be an analogue to her own young life of isolation—the feline avatar jumping on the screen from window to window. But when Zevin turned to researching her subject of game programming and design, “It seemed that the subject was so vast, and I knew that if it were to work, it would have to be probably better than anything I had done before,” she is quoted as saying.
“Story of two game designers,” Zevin recorded in an early notebook about the project. “The games they make are their lives." Thus Tomorrow was born.
Stratospheric success
Clearly for Zevin, the game of authorship leading to stratospheric publishing success, has paid off, despite the ups and downs like in 2007 when she published two books, one of which “Margarettown,” while critically acclaimed as an adult novel, failed commercially, and the other one, the young-adult title “Elsewhere,” went on to sell more than 350,000 copies.
Director of the Tanner Humanities Center Scott Black acknowledges that the Tomorrow is a “viral,” sensation, appealing “to a broad range of students and faculty in games, arts, and humanities—and to anyone who wants a great story about making games, building a business, and growing up with a best friend."
As a former director of the Utah Humanities Book Festival—a partner with the Tanner Humanities Center and the U’s College of Humanities—I understand that Zevin’s gifts and the journey they took to notoriety (or not) fashion a conundrum, one that many authors (and readers) in their own realm live with, work through and, eventually are inspired by. And while the world awaits Zevin’s completion of the screenplay for the film version of Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow the title of which references Macbeth and highlights the contrast between the unlimited, "infinite" nature of gaming and the limited, consequential nature of real life, the 400-plus-page book is in-hand today.
In a world in which literature is endlessly reiterated and repackaged, storytelling will always be at the heart of things, the heart of the humanities which, after all, is about the “human” and the “ties” that bind and liberate us.
The Tanner Humanities Center and the College of Humanities at the University of Utah are here to happily remind us of that.
Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow | Wednesday, October 7, 2026 | 7:00 p.m. | Salt Lake City Public Library, Nancy Tessman Auditorium | 210 E. 400 S.
Book sale and author signing provided by Kings English Bookshop. Additional support from Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts & Parks, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Public Library, and O.C. Tanner.
About the Tanner Humanities Center
Founded in 1988, the Tanner Humanities Center supports academic research, public engagement, and educational programming in the humanities. The center offers fellowships for researchers from the University of Utah and other institutions, lecture series for the campus and community, reading groups, and professional development programs for educators. The Center was endowed in 1995 through a generous gift from the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Family Foundation.
About the Utah Humanities Book Festival
The annual Utah Humanities Book Festival, staged by Utah Humanities, is the Beehive State’s oldest and only statewide book festival and has become Utah’s signature literary event. This year is the festival’s 29th iteration.