Good morning, Hank.

It's Tuesday. My new book, Everything Is Tuberculosis, comes out March 18, it is available for pre-order  now, and I even get to show you the cover today!

So, okay, people who are only somewhat familiar  with my work might wonder whether Everything Is Tuberculosis is a young adult novel, like The  Fault in Our Stars or Turtles All the Way Down. Uh, it is not. For reasons I'll get into, it's not  the opposite of my previous work, but it definitely is different.

So five years ago, I didn't know that tuberculosis  was still, for lack of a better term, a thing. I thought of TB as a disease that struck down  19th-century, capital-R  Romantic poets, not as, like,  a present-tense phenomenon. But then in 2019, I visited a tuberculosis hospital in Sierra Leone,  where I met a boy who shared the same name as my son.

And when I came home from that  experience, I was obsessed with tuberculosis. When I came home, I learned that TB remains  the deadliest infectious disease in the world, a distinction it has held   for most of human history. What's different now, and has been different  since the 1950s, is that tuberculosis is curable.

And I began to wonder, how did we end up in this  insane situation where over a million people are dying every year of a disease we know how to  prevent and cure? What does that say about the world we share and the worlds we might share? And so, I began a somewhat obsessive search to understand TB, both from, like, a biomedical  perspective, but also from a human one.

Everything Is Tuberculosis is a science story  about how we came to understand TB as an infectious disease and eventually developed  a cure for it, but it’s also a human story about why we've done such a terrible job of distributing  that cure to the people who need it most. And especially, it's the story of one boy trying  to survive drug-resistant tuberculosis. I started  out writing about tuberculosis because writing is sort of how I think, and I wanted to remember  everything I was learning, both from tuberculosis survivors and from experts.

But eventually, I put  aside the novel I'd been working on and started writing exclusively about tuberculosis. And in  time, I came to see it as a book about how tuberculosis has shaped so much of our world  and still does. I mean, TB shaped our geography.

It gave us towns like Colorado Springs and  Asheville, North Carolina. It profoundly shaped our history. And we, in turn, have shaped TB  because the disease follows the trails of injustice that we blazed for it.

And now it's a book! Hank, this is a rather significant departure for me in terms of writing,  but in other ways, it's very similar to my other books. It's a story of hope and grit  in an unjust world, a story of why we go on and how we carry each other through, or don't.  Oh, and here's the cover!

I love it so much! I've been very lucky throughout my career  in the cover department, but I don't know that I've ever been quite this lucky.  Two other things. There is the small matter of the boxes behind me.

I am signing 100,000  copies of Everything Is Tuberculosis. You can pre-order your signed copy in the doobly-doo  below or at everythingistb.com. I know I said after last time, I wasn't ever going to sign,  like, hundreds of thousands of books again, but I'm not signing hundreds of thousands of books,  I'm signing ONE hundred thousand books.

Also, there is an audiobook narrated by me that is available for pre-order now if you prefer  to read on audio. It is not  signed, but only because  I haven't yet figured out how to sign digitally. That reminds me, I've been livestreaming a bunch  of my signing sessions over at johnschannel, and if you want to hang out with me in, like,  a really low-stress way where I'm just signing my name over and over again, you can do that.  There is a link in the doobly-doo.

So, Hank, Everything Is Tuberculosis will come out just after the 20th anniversary of my  first novel, Looking for Alaska. And if you'd told  me 20 years ago that I would write, like, a nonfiction book about tuberculosis, I think my  first response would have been like, “I'm still writing? That's so cool.” But my second response  would have been, “Huh.

Really?” I didn't know back then that tuberculosis was something  you could still get, let alone that between a quarter and a third of all living humans have  been infected with it. I certainly never imagined myself as a nonfiction writer, but this has been  one of the most joyful and heartbreaking writing experiences of my life, precisely because it is  a true story. It's a short book, but I hope it can be an important book in the lives  of those who read it.

And I hope that it can accelerate the movement toward making  tuberculosis what it should have been a long time ago: history. Hank, once again,  Everything Is Tuberculosis comes out March 18. Signed copies are available for pre-order now.

I will see you on Friday.