Ayn Rand has a new novel out. Sort of.

Rand’s 1934 play Ideal, about an actress who seeks out six of her fans to discover whether they’re willing to fight in real life for the ideals they claim to find inspiring in her performances onscreen, has been available for a while; it’s collected in both The Early Ayn Rand and Three Plays.

But Rand apparently also wrote the story in novel form, and this is now being released in a new volume, Ideal: The Novel and the Play

As with the recent publication of a Harper Lee manuscript, there are of course grounds for worry over the possibility of undisclosed editorial “cleaning up” of the manuscript – particularly in light of the Rand estate’s shabby record of unreliability in dealing with posthumous Rand material (see, e.g., here and here). But we’ll hope for the best.