Once again, another Dave Eggers novel is coming with barely any notice. Knopf will publish Eggers’s latest, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, on June 17. The title is longer than the plot description, but the new novel will follow a man named Thomas who interrogates a NASA astronaut about their connection.
Yes, More Eggers on the Way
Kill Your Crutches
“Other favorites I’ve found myself overusing include 'she nodded,' 'she raised her eyebrows,' and 'she walked home slowly / she slowly walked home.'” Maria Murnane writes for the Amazon Author Insights blog (full disclosure: Amazon helps us keep the lights on around here!) about how to watch out for crutch words.
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I “Love” This.
I'm glad someone started this blog of unnecessary quotations marks for me. (via @narrativemag).
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Bob Dylan’s Paintings
Bob Dylan is in a little hot water amid allegations that his "original" paintings are actually rendered from other people's photographs.
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An Irish Books Mule
Anne Enright remarks on Irish censorship, and she recalls the time her own mother was used “as a books mule.”
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Decenter and Frisk
According to Gilles Deleuze, "the lives of philosophers are rarely interesting." This may have come as a surprise to Jacques Derrida, who once spent a couple days in jail after cops in the Prague airport tried to frame him for smuggling weed. (This incident gets ample coverage in a new biography of the scholar).
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Amazon responds to Hachette furor
Amazon, whose tense negotiations with Hachette in the past months have led them to slow ship-times for its books, offered last night "to fund 50% of an author pool—to be allocated by Hachette—to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%." Of course, Hachette may find calculating and allocating damages awkward so soon after authors flexed their social-media muscle. Sidebar: Amazon claimed "989 of 1000" items sold would be unaffected by this continuing "business interruption," which might mean a full 1.1 percent of their business comes from just one mid-sized traditional publisher—heartening news from an unlikely source.
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We know Eggers doesn’t do any research for his novels – as he proudly informed us in the publicity push for his last laugher – but this sort of turn-around guarantees nobody’s even editing him. So basically now he’s publishing the equivalent of a NaNoWriMo manuscript every nine months.
I’m guessing the Times will review it three times.
I read, and then skimmed, A Hologram For The King. There’s a phenomenal novel to be written about the strange economies of the Middle East, Dubai and Jeddah and all that, but this wasn’t it. Eggers has an ear for good stories, but is a supremely lazy researcher and writer. I don’t get why he thinks he can simply find within himself the credibility and knowledge to carry this stuff over.
I can only imagine a novel called A Hologram For The King, dealing with Saudi, written by a competent author.