Robert Pinsky on Book Reviews

A tipster has pointed us to a mention of what seems to be a new Dave Eggers novel on the back cover of a catalog from a Dutch publisher. the title translates loosely to A Hologram for the King. A description from a Dutch bookselling site (again translated poorly by Google Translate) suggest that the book will follow an American in Saudi Arabia where he tries to sell holographic technology to King Abdullah. We’ve seen no other mentions of this book anywhere, and so far McSweeney’s hasn’t responded to our questions. Anyone out there know more?

“It’s likely Lucia would have felt more comfortable watching a bull be gored in a Mexico City arena or huddling among winos on a corner in Oakland than she ever felt at her first place on posh Mapleton Hill.” Elizabeth Geoghegan for The Paris Review on Lucia Berlin, whose A Manual For Cleaning Women is out now.

Tim Waterstone (of the giant UK chain Waterstones) will soon launch a new platform that publishes shorter works. (Like several other companies, it’s been dubbed “the Spotify of books.”)

Recommended Reading: Here’s some helpful advice we all could use — how to raise a mensch: “Less obvious but equally central values that Marjorie Ingall highlights include having a healthy distrust of authority. Jews come from a vertiginously long tradition of ‘questioning, yammering, challenging and disputing,’ she writes. ‘The Talmud, the compendium of Jewish law, is pretty much a bunch of dudes contradicting one another. Each page is a big box of text in the middle, and wrapped around it like a frame is lots of ‘Wait, you think what?’ '”