Anne Tyler
Melissa Golden for The Wall Street Journal
Is she or isn’t she retiring?

 Anne Tyler’s new novel, “A Spool of Blue Thread,” comes out on Tuesday, bringing with it a fair amount of confusion over whether it is her last. “In Praise of Anne Tyler and Her Final Novel,” read a recent headline in the Sydney Morning Herald. Ms. Tyler “gifts us with her 20th novel, which she has told interviewers will be her final finished work,” says a Barnes & Noble blurb. An Amazon review said after a long career Ms. Tyler “has the end in sight.”

 Ms. Tyler recently cleared things up, sort of. The 73-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner whose career spans more than 50 years said in an interview that even if she never wrote again, she would not announce her retirement.
“I have no idea whether I’ll do another [book], but I would never put myself in the position of saying I wouldn’t or would—I mean, it’s just too iffy,” Ms. Tyler said last month at her home in Baltimore. “It depends on whether something arrives or not.”
Knopf, her longtime publisher, puts the best-selling writer squarely in the not-retiring column: “Anne is, as I speak to you today, a working novelist with every intention of writing and publishing more books down the road,” said Paul Bogaards, a Knopf spokesman.
In fact, this can’t be Ms. Tyler’s last novel because she has already written another one, a modern take on “The Taming of the Shrew” that she dashed off even faster than usual. The book is part of a series reinterpreting Shakespeare that starts publishing next year.
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 A Spool of Blue Thread - Penguin Random House NZ - 13 February - NZ$36.99