The tour for the biggest book of John Green's career runs through twenty cities this fall. In Boise, it plays at the 2,002-seat Morrison Center. In Washington, it plays at Lisner Auditorium, and in Los Angeles, at the Saban Theatre. In Salt Lake City, on Saturday, October 10, it plays West High School, a public school at 241 North 300 West, a few blocks from Temple Square.
The King's English Bookshop is producing the Salt Lake stop in partnership with Utah Humanities, whose statewide book festival runs through October. Of the twenty cities on the tour, only three host book festivals: the Bookmarks Festival in Winston-Salem, the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison, and the Utah Humanities Book Festival here. Utah made that list fifteen months after the festival's parent organization lost half its budget.
The book is "Hollywood, Ending," which Dutton publishes on September 22. Green posted the tour schedule on Monday, and Penguin Random House's announcement confirms the rest: his first novel in nearly a decade, his first written for adults, a special guest joining him in conversation at every stop. The publisher has not said who. The novel follows two rising actors, Kai Laramie and Juniper Castillo, who are cast in a biopic called "Andy Warhol Never Gets Old" and then watch the film and their private lives become public property. It runs in dual points of view from the first days on location to the premiere, setting the two actors against Warhol's own life at the dawn of celebrity culture. "I've spent the last eight years finding my way through this story," Green said in the publisher's announcement.
The scale of the launch is significant. Green has more than 60 million books in print in more than 60 languages. He is hand-signing 85,000 copies and streaming the signing sessions on his YouTube channel.
Fifteen months ago, none of this seemed likely to touch Utah. On April 2, 2025, Utah Humanities received notice that the Department of Government Efficiency had terminated its operating grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The loss exceeded $1 million, half the organization's operating budget, and the same federal money it had distributed to Utah communities since 1975. The organization paused its 50-year-old grants program, scaled back its Humanities in the Wild events, and let go of its program assistants. The Book Festival, which Utah Humanities calls the state's oldest and only statewide book festival, took a 30 percent cut.
The festival survived anyway, because the institutions around it decided it would. Libraries, bookstores, universities, and publishers absorbed the costs that the federal grant was used to cover. Kase Johnstun, who runs the festival for the Utah Center for the Book, told the Deseret News last fall: "We're just glad to be here this year." The 2025 edition went forward with a full statewide slate and brought back the Utah Book Awards after ten years. Donors met a $50,000 Mellon Foundation challenge and doubled it. The festival began in 1998 as the Great Salt Lake Book Festival, a one-day event with 30 authors at Westminster College. It now reaches upwards of 12,000 Utahns each fall, and The King's English has been a presenting partner since that first year.
The high school gives the evening a different atmosphere from a Ticketmaster hall. Every ticket includes an autographed copy of the book. Doors open at 6, the event runs from 7 to 8:30, parking is free, and if you buy a ticket and can't attend, King's English will hold your book at the shop for two weeks or ship it for seven dollars. The bookstore says tickets are moving quickly.
October in Salt Lake City is getting crowded, too. A separate, newly created citywide event, the Salt Lake Book Festival, launches the same month with Jodi Picoult as its first headliner. The federal grant that funded the older festival's infrastructure has not been renewed. The authors came anyway.
