Author Cancelling Book About Russian Family Turns Heads

Author Elizabeth Gilbert on Monday caused a stir online after announcing that her forthcoming Russia-set novel, The Snow Forest, will not be published as originally planned.

Gilbert is best known for her highly successful 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which has sold over 10 million copies and was famously adapted into a 2010 film with Julia Roberts. She has published several other books over the years, including the novels City of Girls and The Signature of All Things.

Her next work of fiction, The Snow Forest, was set to release in February 2024. The novel was, as she described it, "set in the middle of Siberia in the middle of the last century and told the story of a group of individuals who made a decision to remove themselves from society to resist the Soviet government and to try to defend nature against industrialization."

Now, however, plans to release the novel have been scrapped, with Gilbert citing numerous negative reactions she received about the Russian setting from Ukrainians. She now says that the Russian setting is inappropriate given the country's ongoing invasion of Ukraine that began last February, "no matter what the subject of it is."

"Over the course of this weekend, I have received an enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers, expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment, and pain, about the fact that I would choose to release a book into the world right now," Gilbert said in a video statement posted to Twitter. "I want to say that I have heard these messages and read these messages, and I respect them. As a result, I'm making a course correction, and I'm removing the book from its publication schedule. It is not the time for this book to be published. And I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are all continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm."

Gilbert's statement left open the possibility that the book might be released some day under different geopolitical circumstances.

Nevertheless, the decision stirred a considerable reaction online, with numerous figures from inside and outside of the publishing industry weighing in.

"Self-censorship is still censorship," Washington Post opinion columnist Helaine Olen tweeted. "The decision by Elizabeth Gilbert to cancel her book does nothing for the Ukraine. This is sentimentality mistaken for politics."

"I've come back around on the Elizabeth Gilbert stuff. It's good she canceled the book. No more books until we figure out what's going on with people," author Gabriel Bump tweeted. "Shut it all down."

Author Adam O'Fallon Price noted the irony of Gilbert's decision, given that the book concerns characters who are also at odds with the Russian government, even if they also happen to be Russian.

"I applaud Elizabeth Gilbert's choice to not publish a book about people resisting the Russian government, in order to avoid doing harm to people resisting the Russian government," he tweeted.

"Putin's Russia is a far right imperialist and terrorist state that deserves all the opprobrium directed at it," author Lincoln Michel added. "But this seems very weird to me. I mean the author's decision but... no book should be set in historical Russia now?"

"Fully respect any author's right to voluntarily withdraw their own title from publication, but this feels like an absurd over correction, and I'm baffled that it was called for in the first place," author Otegha K. Uwagba tweeted.

Newsweek reached out to the novel's publisher Riverhead Books via email for comment.