Understanding Dave Eggers

A National Book Award Finalist, a New York Times bestseller and one of the most highly-acclaimed books of the year, A Hologram for the King is a sprawling novel about the decline of American industry from one of the most important, socially-aware novelists of our time. In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman named Alan Clay pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter's college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy's gale-force winds. This taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment--and a moving story of how we got here.

What Is the What is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee in war-ravaged southern Sudan who flees from his village in the mid-1980s and becomes one of the so-called Lost Boys. Valentino’s travels bring him in contact with enemy soldiers, with liberation rebels, with hyenas and lions, with disease and starvation, and with deadly murahaleen (militias on horseback)–the same sort who currently terrorize Darfur. Eventually Deng is resettled in the United States with almost 4000 other young Sudanese men, and a very different struggle begins. Based closely on true experiences, What Is the What is heartbreaking and arresting, filled with adventure, suspense, tragedy, and, finally, triumph.

LONGLISTED 2015 – International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award The Circle is the exhilarating new novel from Dave Eggers, bestselling author of A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award. When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Circle comes an exciting new follow-up. When the world’s largest search engine/social media company, The Circle, merges with the planet’s dominant e-commerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous—and, oddly enough, most beloved—monopoly ever known: The Every. Delaney Wells is an unlikely new hire. A former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic, she charms her way into an entry-level job with one goal in mind: to take down the company from within. With her compatriot, the not-at-all-ambitious Wes Kavakian, they look for the company’s weaknesses, hoping to free humanity from all-encompassing surveillance and the emoji-driven infantilization of the species. But does anyone want what Delaney is fighting to save? Does humanity truly want to be free? Studded with unforgettable characters and lacerating set pieces, The Every blends satire and terror, while keeping the reader in breathless suspense about the fate of the company—and the human animal.

"I think this book is kind of malleable. I've never really wanted to put it away and be done with it forever -- the second I first 'finished' it, I wanted to dig back in and change everything around. So I'm looking forward to getting back into the text, and straightening and focusing and deleting. Most of all, I'm thrilled that Vintage will be letting me include all the cool chase scenes, previously censored." -- Dave Eggers The literary sensation of the year, a book that redefines both family and narrative for the twenty-first century. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his seven-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an instant classic that will be read in paperback for decades to come. PAPERBACK EDITION -- 15% MORE STAGGERING - Eggers has written 15,000 additional words for the Vintage Canada edition, including an entirely new appendix.

Discover an underground world full of tunnels and mystery in this middle-grade adventure from the bestselling, Pulitzer-nominated author of Heroes of the Frontier and Her Right Foot. What if nothing was as it seemed? What if the ground beneath your feet was not made of solid earth and stone but had been hollowed into hundreds of tunnels and passageways? What if there were mysterious forces in these tunnels, mere inches below you as you sit in class or eat a banana? What if it were up to just two kids to stop these forces? What would it feel like to know the fate of an entire town rested on your shoulders? Twelve-year-old Gran Flowerpetal is about to find out. When Gran's friend, the difficult-to-impress Catalina Catalan, presses a silver handle into a hillside and opens a doorway underground, he knows that she is extraordinary and brave, and that he will have no choice but to follow her, and help her save the town (and the known world). With luck on their side, and some discarded hockey sticks for good measure, they might just emerge as heroes. In The Lifters, critically acclaimed author Dave Eggers establishes himself as a storyteller who can entertain and inspire readers of any age.

From a beloved author, a spare, powerful story of two men, Western contractors sent to work far from home, tasked with paving a road to the capital in a dangerous and largely lawless country. Four and Five are partners, working for the same company, sent without passports to a nation recovering from ten years of civil war. Together, operating under pseudonyms and anonymous to potential kidnappers, they are given a new machine, the RS-90, and tasked with building a highway that connects the country's far-flung villages with the capital. Four, nicknamed "The Clock," is one of the highway's most experienced operators, never falling short of his assigned schedule. He drives the RS-90, stopping only to sleep and eat the food provided by the company. But Five is an agent of chaos: speeding ahead on his vehicle, chatting and joking with locals, eating at nearby bars and roadside food stands, he threatens the schedule, breaks protocol, and endangers the work that they must complete in time for a planned government parade. His every action draws Four's ire, but when illness, corruption, and theft compromise their high-stakes mission, Four and Five discover danger far greater than anything they could pose to one another.

An “entertaining and profoundly original” (San Francisco Chronicle) moving and hilarious tale of two friends who fly around the world trying to give away a lot of money and free themselves from a profound loss. • From the bestselling author of The Circle. “Nobody writes better than Dave Eggers about young men who aspire to be, at the same time, authentic and sincere.” —The New York Times Book Review "You Shall Know Our Velocity! is the work of a wildly talented writer.... Like Kerouac's book, Eggers's could inspire a generation as much as it documents it." —LA Weekly