Crown to Publish Rachel Maddow's PREQUEL: AN AMERICAN'S FIGHT AGAINST FACISM
Rachel Maddow – © 2023 NBCUniversal Media LLC™
On October 17, 2023, Crown will publish PREQUEL: An American Fight Against Fascism, the new book from #1 New York Times bestselling author Rachel Maddow. World publishing rights for the book were acquired by Crown SVP, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief, Gillian Blake from Laurie Liss of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Maddow herself announced the book’s publication last night on her Emmy Award–winning The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.
Inspired by the research for her #1 Apple podcast, Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, from MSNBC, PREQUEL traces the rise of a radical strain of authoritarianism that has been alive and well in America for the better part of a century. Taking readers back to the early days of World War II, Maddow, with her inimitable wit and humor, introduces us to a clandestine network of far-far-right American radicals, united by one goal: to overthrow the U.S. government and install authoritarian rule. Through a series of sophisticated and shockingly well-funded efforts—including an astonishing amount of support among serving members of Congress—these extremists would bring America into a much closer flirtation with fascism than we want to remember. Through the heroic resistance of journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens, their goal was never achieved…but the seeds of extremism were planted and have reached forward through history into our present. As we navigate through our own disquieting times, PREQUEL offers a roadmap from U.S. history, marked both with heroics to emulate and traps and pitfalls to avoid.
As Maddow writes, “calculated efforts to undermine democracy, to foment a coup, to spread disinformation across the country, to overturn elections by force of arms with members of Congress helping and running interference—all these things add up to a terrible episode for a country like ours to live through, but they are not unprecedented. Our current American struggle along these lines, it turns out, has a prequel.”
About Rachel Maddow
Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award–winning The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, as well as the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Drift and Blowout, and the New York Times bestselling co-author of Bag Man. Maddow has also written, produced and hosted three original podcasts for MSNBC—Rachel Maddow Presents: Bag Man, Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, and most recently the six-episode series Rachel Maddow Presents: Deja News, which debuted in June at #1 on Apple Podcasts. Maddow received a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University and earned her doctorate in political science at Oxford University. She lives in New York City and Massachusetts with her partner, artist Susan Mikula.