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?
Is a New Dave Eggers Novel on the Way?
Translating the Untranslatable
Five years ago, Jacques Lezra was asked to translate a book of untranslateable words. “The project provided me, and my co-editors,” he writes, “with a vivid sense of the history of how people think, and how societies think differently from one another.” This week, the fruits of their labor were published by Princeton University Press, and to celebrate the occasion, the publisher has released six PDFs of sample entries: begriff, kitsch, media, polis, right, and saudade.
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Hinchas Nuevos
Hinchas de Poesía, which is “a digital codex of contemporary Pan-American writing,” has just released their 11th issue, and it’s certainly worth checking out.
Challenging the Able-Bodied Gaze
"I hate the idea that you must write every day because I really can’t do that. Sometimes the aching bones in my body will not allow it." Electric Literature interviews three writers—Keah Brown, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Jillian Weise—about disability, publishing, and accessibility. From our archives: Wang's 2016 Year in Reading entry.
The real Susan Orlean diet
The Skinny is acclaimed author Susan Orlean's strangest work, hands down: a half-serious diet book that advises women, among other things, to cover tempting food with bleach. Not one to follow her own advice, Orlean's diary of a week of eating for Grub Street features yogurt breakfasts, crackers eaten over sinks, and other basically realistic, bleach-free culinary adventures.
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Billionaire Book Critic
If you thought Bill Gates was content donating millions of dollars to charities around the world and hiding out in his exorbitantly expensive mansion compound, think again! The Microsoft founder and tech mogul reviews books on his personal blog, Gates Notes–and those reviews actually drive sales. Move over "Colbert Bump," the Gates Bump is here to stay.
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only sell to the rich or deranged
The folks at BookRide, the blog of London's beloved antiquarian bookstore Any Amount Books, have published a handy set of guidelines for curmudgeonly booksellers. When Kyo Maclear visited The Monkey's Paw in Toronto, it would seem that they had yet to stumble upon this code of curmudgeonly conduct.
Emazing
Fans of the French Oulipo movement will know about A Void, the Georges Perec novel written entirely without the use of the letter “e.” What very few readers of any kind know, however, is that in 1939, thirty years before Perec’s novel was published, Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a book in English, Gadsby, that hewed to these same constraints. At The Atlantic, Nikhil Sonnad investigates how this experiment plays out in the book.
Max – At the Antiquarian Book Show show in Manhattan two weeks ago, I saw a copy of the unpublished Hologram for the King ms for sale at a booth by http://lopezbooks.com/ for $350. It was marked as a copy that had been sent to the National Book Awards for consideration? It seemed pretty strange to me, and I wasn’t entirely sure I believed that was the source… and didn’t know how legit it was to be selling it at the fair either. But that was the title and it looked fairly real at least!
He had a piece in McSweeney’s 38 titled “Chapter One,” which was about an American businessman in Saudi Arabia trying to get an audience with the king. It didn’t get into holograms, but definitely sounds like the same novel.