"[...] bathroom book for the literary reader"

"If you're an avid follower of contemporary fiction — if you bookmark The Millions, subscribe to Bookforum, grind your teeth over the latest flap involving Jonathan Franzen, and, first thing, pull out the Book Review when you get the Sunday New York Times — then John Freeman’s How To Read A Novelist is the perfect, and perfectly modest, book.

     It’s a bathroom book for the literary reader, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Composed of 55 short author profiles that Freeman wrote between 2004 and 2013 for dozens of newspapers and magazines in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it’s a terrific compendium of insights into what contemporary writers are thinking and how they present themselves. The subjects range from Nobel Laureates (Toni Morrison, Orhan Pamuk, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Imre Kertész, among others), writers who deserve to be Laureates (Philip Roth, Don DeLillo), top-tier novelists from all over the world (Edmundo Paz Soldán, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Salman Rushdie), a raft of younger American hotshots (Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, William T. Vollmann, Jeffrey Eugenides, Mark Z. Danielewski), and other big names like Margaret Atwood, E.L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Haruki Murakami.
     The profiles are usually five to seven book pages and readable in 10 minutes or so: roughly what you’d get in a front-page spread in the 'arts and culture' section of a newspaper. They’re quick glimpses into an author’s life and work, and usually based on two- or three-hour interviews with the authors, held occasionally in their homes or in restaurants or, more often than not, in their publicist’s offices or in hotel rooms while they’re touring in support of their latest books."
— Cornel Bonca, Los Angeles Review of Books
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More prison talk...

"Jurors in Chicago found author and infomercial host Kevin Trudeau guilty of criminal contempt Tuesday for making false claims about his book, The Weight Loss Cure They Don't Want You to Know About. In a series of infomercials, Trudeau claimed the book revealed a 'miracle substance' discovered in the 1950s and kept secret by food companies and the government that allows people to eat anything, not exercise and not gain weight.
     In fact, the book prescribed daily exercise and a 500-calorie-a-day diet. Trudeau was charged with violating a 2004 court order prohibiting him from making false claims regarding his book. In an unexpected move, U.S. District Judge Ronald Guzman had Trudeau taken into custody immediately after determining that the author, who prosecutors think has millions of dollars stashed in overseas bank accounts, was a flight risk.

    Margaret Atwood writes about Dave Eggers' The Circle and the 'prison' of living in public: 'Publication on social media is in part a performance, as is everything "social" that human beings do; but what happens when that brightly lit arena expands so much that there is no green room in which the mascara can be removed, no cluttered, imperfect back stage where we can be "ourselves"? What happens to us if we must be "on" all the time? Then we're in the twenty-four-hour glare of the supervised prison. To live entirely in public is a form of solitary confinement.'"
— Annalisa Quinn, NPR
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resistance is futile

"If the long title of his breakthrough memoir, 2000′s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was not enough to indicate that Dave Eggers has always had lofty ambitions, then the frenetic tale between the book covers gave readers the first big work by one of America’s newest literary superstars. Since then, Eggers has been successful as a writer of other nonfiction, novels, and screenplays, but he really is first and foremost an idea man. He wants to help kids learn to write with his 826 National nonprofit, and spend his time publishing books and magazines through McSweeney’s.

     […] it has taken Eggers the 13 years since his breakout memoir to give us a book that truly matched A Heartbreaking Work’s gravitas — but with The Circle, Eggers has given us everything. The nearly 500-page novel performs a delicate balancing act, juggling the straight up Orwellian with a more modern-style dystopia typified by The Truman Show."
— Jason Diamond, Flavorwire
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"In Dave Eggers’s new novel, The Circle, Big Brother isn’t the government: it’s a Google-like, Facebook-like tech behemoth, called the Circle, that has a billion-odd users, controls 90 percent of the world’s searches and aspires to record and quantify everything that’s happening to everybody, everywhere in the world. The company credo is 'ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN.' Some of its other Orwellian maxims are 'SECRETS ARE LIES,' 'SHARING IS CARING' and 'PRIVACY IS THEFT.'
     Mr. Eggers’s absorbing 2012 novel, A Hologram for the King, gave us a story about a middle-aged loser that opened out into a kind of allegory about the besieged American middle class struggling to hold onto its dreams in a recessionary and newly globalized world. The new novel similarly attempts to use the coming-of-age story of a young woman to create a parable about the perils of life in a digital age in which our personal data is increasingly collected, sifted and monetized, an age of surveillance and Big Data, in which privacy is obsolete, and Maoist collectivism is the order of the day."
— Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
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David Foster Wallace Revisited

"The writer must write knowing that the reader is more intelligent than he. The reader knows something the writer and his editor do not. He knows the future, he will be there when we are gone."

— Italo Calvino (The Uses of Literature)

"The New York Times journalist A.O. Scott once described David Foster Wallace as ‘nearly impossible to quote in increments smaller than a thousand words.’
     [...] Dave Eggers dispels some misconceptions in his foreword to Infinite Jest. 'A Wallace reader gets the impression of being in a room with a very talkative and brilliant uncle or cousin who, just when he’s about to push it too far, to try our patience with too much detail, has the good sense to throw in a good lowbrow joke.’ This conversational style is equally evident in Wallace’s collections of journalism, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005). Wallace wrote on subjects ranging from Kafka to professional tennis, the campaign trail and the bizarre purgatory of cruise-ship holidays, all with the same unrelenting intelligence, eye for the absurd and determined lack of pretension.
     Wallace’s dismally early death, by his own hand at the age of 46 in 2008, means that most articles about him read like eulogies. This can only add to the doubter’s impression of him as a cultish figure, turning out worthy post-modern tomes. In fact he is entirely accessible; his writing can be hyperactive, verbose and sprawling, but he is a master of old-fashioned skills like story-telling and joke-cracking. As Zadie Smith said: ‘A visionary, a craftsman, a comedian…he’s in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us. Goddamn him.'’’
— Victoria Beale, Intelligent Life Magazine
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"On September 12th, 2008 David Foster Wallace left this strange and hazy world we inhabit. Like some choose to, Mr. Wallace left early, by his own hand. He left behind a wife, friends, students and fans. He also left behind an unfinished novel [The Pale King] that, even in its imperfect form, so far, once again showcases the man’s genius. The problem with genius is, as I’ve lamented, studied and pondered for years, it is the noisy upstairs neighbor to insanity. Van Gogh knew it. Artaud knew it. William S. Burroughs may have known it. And Wallace knew it. So when you take that into consideration, and think, 'What might this man who had and understood so much, what might he have known that tipped the scale?' you enter a dark and slippery slope. A frightening path to tread, but one that no doubt will be with me the entire time I plod sometimes quickly and in delight, other times perhaps cumbersomely through The Pale King, looking for answers that may not be inherently easy to access but will be damn enjoyable pondering. I like to think Mr. Wallace would want it that way."
— Shawn C. Baker, CHUD.com
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