The Time Keeper
Mitch Albom, 2012
Hyperion
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781401312855
Summary
A compelling fable about the first man on earth to count the hours. The man who became Father Time.
In Mitch Albom's newest work of fiction, the inventor of the world's first clock is punished for trying to measure God's greatest gift. He is banished to a cave for centuries and forced to listen to the voices of all who come after him seeking more days, more years. Eventually, with his soul nearly broken, Father Time is granted his freedom, along with a magical hourglass and a mission: a chance to redeem himself by teaching two earthly people the true meaning of time.
He returns to our world—now dominated by the hour-counting he so innocently began—and commences a journey with two unlikely partners: one a teenage girl who is about to give up on life, the other a wealthy old businessman who wants to live forever. To save himself, he must save them both. And stop the world to do so.
Told in Albom's signature spare, evocative prose, this remarkably original tale will inspire readers everywhere to reconsider their own notions of time, how they spend it and how precious it truly is. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 23, 1958
• Raised—Oaklyn, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Brandeis University; M.J., Columbia
University; M.B.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Detroit, Michigan
Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom is an American best-selling author, journalist, screenwriter, dramatist, radio, television broadcaster and musician. His books have sold over 30 million copies worldwide. Having achieved national recognition for sports writing in the earlier part of his career, he is perhaps best known for the inspirational stories and themes that weave through his books, plays and films.
Early life
Mitch Albom was born May 23, 1958 in Passaic, New Jersey. He lived in Buffalo for a little bit but then settled in Oaklyn, New Jersey which is close to Philadelphia. He grew up in a small, middle-class neighborhood from which most people never left. Mitch was once quoted as saying that his parents were very supportive and always used to say, “Don’t expect your life to finish here. There’s a big world out there. Go out and see it.”
His older sister, younger brother and he himself, all took that message to heart and traveled extensively, His siblings are currently settled in Europe. Albom once mentioned that how his parents presently say, “Great. All our kids went and saw the world and now no one comes home to have dinner on Sundays.”
Sports journalism
While living in New York, Albom developed an interest in journalism. Supporting himself by working nights in the music industry, he began to write during the day for the Queens Tribune, a weekly newspaper in Flushing, New York. His work there helped earn him entry into the Graduate School of Journalism. During his time there, to help pay his tuition he took work as a babysitter. In addition to nighttime piano playing, Albom took a part-time job with SPORT magazine.
Upon graduation, he freelanced in that field for publications such as Sports Illustrated, GEO, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and covered several Olympic sports events in Europe, paying his own way for travel and selling articles once he was there. In 1983, he was hired as a full-time feature writer for the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun Sentinel, and eventually promoted to columnist. In 1985, having won that year’s Associated Press Sports Editors award for best Sports News Story, Albom was hired as lead sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press.
During his years in Detroit he became one of the most award-winning sports writers of his era; he was named best sports columnist in the nation a record 13 times by the Associated Press Sports Editors, and won best feature writing honors from that same organization a record seven times. No other writer has received the award more than once.
He has won more than 200 other writing honors from organizations including the National Headliner Awards, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association, and National Association of Black Journalists. In 2010, Albom was awarded the APSE's Red Smith Award for lifetime achievement, presented at the annual APSE convention in Salt Lake City, Utah. Many of his columns have been collected into a series of four anthologies—the Live Albom books—published from 1988-1995.
Sports books
Albom's first non-anthology book was Bo: Life, Laughs, and the Lessons of a College Football Legend (1998), an autobiography of football coach Bo Schembechler co-written with the coach. The book became Albom's first New York Times bestseller.
Albom's next book was Fab Five: Basketball, Trash Talk, The American Dream (1993), a look into the starters on the University of Michigan men's basketball team who, as freshman, reached the NCAA championship game in 1992 and again as sophomores in 1993. The book also became a New York Times bestseller.
Tuesdays with Morrie
Albom's breakthrough book came about after a friend of his viewed Morrie Schwartz's interview with Ted Koppel on ABC News Nightline in 1995, in which Schwartz, a sociology professor, spoke about living and dying with a terminal disease, ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease).
Albom, who had been close with Schwartz during his college years at Brandeis, felt guilty about not keeping in touch so he reconnected with his former professor, visiting him in suburban Boston and eventually coming every Tuesday for discussions about life and death. Albom, seeking a way to pay for Schwartz's medical bills, sought out a publisher for a book about their visits. Although rejected by numerous publishing houses, the idea was accepted by Doubleday shortly before Schwartz's death, and Albom was able to fulfill his wish to pay off Schwartz's bills.
The book, Tuesdays with Morrie (1997) is a small volume that chronicles Albom's time spent with his professor. The initial printing was 20,000 copies. Word of mouth grew the book sales slowly and a brief appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" nudged the book onto the New York Times bestseller's list in October 1997. It steadily climbed, reaching the No. 1 position six months later. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 205 weeks. One of the top selling memoirs of all time, Tuesdays With Morrie has sold over 14 million copies and been translated into 41 languages.
Oprah Winfrey produced a television movie adaptation by the same name for ABC, starring Hank Azaria as Albom and Jack Lemmon as Morrie. It was the most-watched TV movie of 1999 and won four Emmy Awards. A two-man theater play was later co-authored by Albom and playwright Jeffrey Hatcher and opened Off Broadway in the fall of 2001, starring Alvin Epstein as Morrie and Jon Tenney as Albom.
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Albom's next foray was in fiction with The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003). The book was a fast success and again launched Albom onto the New York Times bestseller list, selling over 10 million copies in 35 languages. In 2004, it was turned into a television movie for ABC, starring Jon Voight, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Imperioli, and Jeff Daniels. The film was critically acclaimed and the most watched TV movie of the year, with 18.6 million viewers.
The Five People You Meet in Heaven is the story of Eddie, a wounded war veteran who lives what he believes is an uninspired and lonely life fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, Eddie is killed while trying to save a little girl from a falling ride. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a location but a place in which your life is explained to you by five people who were in, who affected, or were affected by, your life.
Albom has said the book was inspired by his real life uncle, Eddie Beitchman, who, like the character, served during World War II in the Philippines, and died when he was 83. Eddie told Albom, as a child, about a time he was rushed to surgery and had a near-death experience, his soul floating above the bed. There, Eddie said, he saw all his dead relatives waiting for him at the edge of the bed. Albom has said that image of people waiting when you die inspired the book's concept.
For One More Day
Albom's third novel, For One More Day (2006), spent nine months on the New York Times bestseller list after debuting at the top spot. It also reached No. 1 on USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. It was the first book to be sold by Starbucks in the launch of the Book Break Program in the fall of 2006. It has been translated into 26 languages. On December 9, 2007, the ABC aired the 2-hour television event motion picture Oprah Winfrey Presents: Mitch Albom's For One More Day, which starred Michael Imperioli and Ellen Burstyn. Burstyn received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for her role as Posey Benetto.
For One More Day is “Chick” Benetto, a retired baseball player who, facing the pain of unrealized dreams, alcoholism, divorce, and an estrangement from his grown daughter, returns to his childhood home and attempts suicide. There he meets his long dead mother, who welcomes him as if nothing ever happened. The book explores the question, “What would you do if you had one more day with someone you’ve lost?”
Albom has said his relationship with his own mother was largely behind the story of that book, and that several incidents in For One More Day are actual events from his childhood.
Have a Little Faith
His first nonfiction book since Tuesdays was published, Have a Little Faith (2009) recounts Albom's experiences which led to him writing the eulogy for Albert L. Lewis, a Rabbi from his hometown in New Jersey. The book is written in the same vein as Tuesdays With Morrie, in which the main character, Mitch, goes through several heartfelt conversations with the Rabbi in order to better know and understand the man that he would one day eulogize. Through this experience, Albom writes, his own sense of faith was reawakened, leading him to make contact with Henry Covington, the African-American pastor of the I Am My Brother's Keeper church, in Detroit, where Albom was then living. Covington, a past drug addict, dealer, and ex-convict, ministered to a congregation of largely homeless men and women in a church so poor that the roof leaked when it rained. From his relationships with these two very different men of faith, Albom writes about the difference faith can make in the world.
The Time Keeper
Albom's third work of fiction, The Time Keeper (2012) is fablistic tale about the inventor of the world's first clock who is punished for trying to measure God's greatest gift. He is banished to a cave for centuries and forced to listen to the voices of all who come after him seeking more days, more years. Eventually, with his soul nearly broken, Father Time is granted his freedom, along with a magical hourglass and a mission: a chance to redeem himself by teaching two earthly people the true meaning of time.
The First Phone Call from Heaven
Albom's fourth work of fiction, The First Phone Call from Heaven (2013) tells the story of a small town on Lake Michigan that gets worldwide attention when its citizens start receiving phone calls from the afterlife.
The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
Told from the point of view of the Spirit of Music, Albom's fifth novel (2015) traces the life of the legendary (and fictional) super guitarist Frankie Presto and his extraordinary impact on the music of his time.
Charity work
Albom has founded a number of charitable organizations whose missions are to aid disadvantaged and homeless people. The groups have raised funds to pay for resuce services, youth programs, beds, kitchen, food, and daycare.
• The Dream Fund at the College for Creative Studies (CCS) was started by Albom in 1992. Its purpose is to provide funding for under-served children to participate in the arts and to instill confidence in our youth. Since its founding, CCS has used the Dream Fund to support visual, performing, summer “Week at a Time” youth scholarships, community art programs, and even the Detroit 300 project in 2001. The Dream Fund has raised over $115,000 in scholarships since its inception.
• S.A.Y. Detroit (which stands for Super All Year Detroit) is an umbrella organization for charities dedicated to improving the lives of the neediest—including A Time to Help, S.A.Y. Detroit Family Health Clinic, and A Hole in the Roof Foundation. S.A.Y. distributes money to shelters in Detroit for projects specifically designed to help the plight of those in need. Its projects to date include the building of a state-of-the-art kitchen at the Michigan Veterans Foundation shelter and a day-care center at COTS for children of homeless women
• A Time To Help was established in 1997 as a means of galvanizing the people of Detroit to volunteer on a regular basis. The group has staged more than 100 monthly projects ranging from building houses, delivering meals, beautifying city streets, running adoption fairs, repairing homeless shelters, packing food, and hosting an annual Christmas party to a shelter for battered women.
• A Hole in the Roof Foundation helps faith groups of any denomination, who care for the homeless, to repair the spaces in which they carry out their work and offer their services. The seed that gave root to the Foundation—and also inspired its name—is the I Am My Brother's Keeper church in Detroit, MI. Here, despite a gaping hole in the roof, and no matter how harsh the weather, the pastor tends to his community to provide spiritual nourishment and a sanctuary for the homeless. (Adapted from Wikiipedia. First retrieved 9/18/2013.)
Book Reviews
A writer with soul.
Los Angeles Times
Once again, Albom gets to the heart of a topic that touches us all. Take time to read this book
Lincoln Journal Star
A compelling and uplifting moral tale...will inspire and satisdy readers in search of a more meditative approach to life in a fast-paced yet wonderful world.
Irish Independent
A wonderful fantasy with characters both human and mythical
Rabbi Jason Miller - Huffington Post
Think of Mitch Albom as the Babe Ruth of popular literature, hitting the ball out of the park every time he's at bat.
Time
There's comfort in Albom's unwavering conviction that our lives have meaning.
People
This is an unforgettable story, poignant, inspirational and beautifully written. Splendid"
Image
"This exquisitely wrought story has all the magic of a fairytale, but at its core are searching questions about the meaning of life and death, and time... How these three [characters] come together is beautifully conceived, by a writer whose prose is itself perfectly measured.
Good Book Guide (UK)
Albom turns his attention to Father Time in his new fabulist page-turner. Long ago—before a word like "ago" had any meaning—a man named Dor began to chart the passage of time, immediately realizing that "all his days were numbered," and so were his wife's.... With a clever conceit and frequent shifts in perspective, Albom deftly juggles multiple narratives to craft an inspiring tale that will please his fans and newcomers alike.
Publishers Weekly
A story that weaves together religion, philosophy and common sense like classic fables that readers may remember from childhood and reminds people how to try to live each day.
Bookreporter.com
Cleverly constructed fable and "heartrending morality play reminiscent of both A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life.
Booklist
Albom seems to have taken the template for his novel from a corporate report, each page studded with boldfaced passages that would seem to signal something momentous; a person in a hurry could well read just those boldfaced passages and emerge with a pretty good idea of the storyline, which is plenty predictable in any event.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.
Lookaway, Lookaway
Wilton Bernhardt, 2013
St. Martin's Press
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250020833
Summary
Jerene Jarvis Johnston and her husband Duke are exemplars of Charlotte, North Carolina’s high society, where old Southern money—and older Southern secrets—meet the new wealth of bankers, boom-era speculators, and carpetbagging social climbers.
Steely and implacable, Jerene presides over her family’s legacy of paintings at the Mint Museum; Duke, the one-time college golden boy and descendant of a Confederate general, whose promising political career was mysteriously short-circuited, has settled into a comfortable semi-senescence as a Civil War re-enactor. Jerene’s brother Gaston is an infamously dissolute bestselling historical novelist who has never managed to begin his long-dreamed-of literary masterpiece, while their sister Dillard is a prisoner of unfortunate life decisions that have made her a near-recluse.
And the four Johnston children wander perpetually toward scandal and mishap. Annie, the smart but matrimonially reckless real estate maven; Bo, a minister at war with his congregation; Joshua, prone to a series of gay misadventures, and Jerilyn, damaged but dutiful to her expected role as debutante and eventual society bride. Jerene must prove tireless in preserving the family's legacy, Duke’s fragile honor, and what's left of the dwindling family fortune. She will stop at nothing to keep what she has—but is it too much to ask for one ounce of cooperation from her heedless family?
In Lookaway, Lookaway, Wilton Barnhardt has written a headlong, hilarious narrative of a family coming apart, a society changing beyond recognition, and an unforgettable woman striving to pull it all together. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., Michigan State University; M.Phil,
Oxford University
• Currently—lives in Raleigh, North Carolina
Wilton Barnhardt is a former reporter for Sports Illustrated and is the author of Emma Who Saved My Life (1989), Gospel (1993), Show World (1999), and Lookaway, Lookaway (2013).
Barnhardt took his B.A. at Michigan State University, and was a graduate student at Brasenose College, University of Oxford, where he read for an M.Phil. in English. He teaches fiction-writing to undergraduate and graduate students at the North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he is a faculty member in the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/18/2013.)
For a longer and much funnier version of his bio, visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
A dishier array of secrets animates Lookaway, Lookaway, Wilton Barnhardt’s big, enveloping novel about a status-conscious North Carolina family.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Lacerating but affectionate, as exuberant as it is shrewd, Lookaway, Lookaway is a Southern novel so sure-footed the only real question for Barnhardt is, "What took you so long?"…Southern literature is full of humor but strangely short on satire. Barnhardt gleefully leaps into this gap like a man with a very long to-do list, eviscerating rituals and rascals ranging from sorority rush and Civil War re-enactments to back-stabbing church ladies…. Lookaway, Lookaway is that rare thing: an excellent long novel that's not long enough.
Malcolm Jones - New York Times Book Review
Sprawling, generous, delightful.... I didn't want it to end. Lookaway is both dishy an dliterary, but like all good novels, there's a nourishing quality as well.
Charlotte Observer
Scathing yet touching, this is a delicious saga of Old South meets New, a story of America lurching toward the future.
People
One helluva barn burner.
Elle
North Carolina native Barnhardt’s frothy, satirical latest is Southern gothic at its most decadent and dysfunctional.... [T]he sprawling saga of an esteemed clan’s fall from grace and fortune spools out in fits and starts.... As the scandals pile up...this mess of a family has nowhere left to go but up—well, not if they can help it.
Publishers Weekly
Told with great humor and precision, Barnhardt's fourth novel (after Show World) is a searing look at the new South, with all its contradictions. Verdict: Fans of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections will appreciate this satisfying, multigenerational tale. A fresh take on the family saga told with both Southern charm and pathos. —Jennifer B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll., Northeast
Library Journal
Dixieland was never so dishy nor dysfunctional as in Barnhardt’s ribald send-up of the conflagration that ensues when Old South tradition confronts New South tackiness…. Barnhardt’s satirical scorching of southern culture comes in second only to Sherman’s fiery march.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [A] revelation: witty, savage and bighearted all at once, it is the Southern novel for the 21st century. The Jarvis-Johnston clan is a Charlotte, N.C., family of distinction; they have all that matters to society.... But, as each family member is revealed...the ruin of the family becomes imminent.... Barnhardt masterfully reimagines the Southern gothic: There is every kind of sordid deed committed, but there is also an abundance of humanity and grace.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Lookaway, Lookaway is filled with memorable characters: indomitable Jerene, wounded but charismatic Duke, savagely funny Gaston, the adult Johnston children. Who is your favorite and why?
2. Though contemporary, this is definitely a “Southern” novel. Could this take place in another part of the country? What does it mean to be Southern anymore? Is it a nostalgia kept alive by a few old Civil war-enthusiasts and deluded High Society matrons, or is there really such a thing as “Southern”?
3. What is Jerene Johnston doing five years from the end of the novel? She’s a survivor, of course, but what will her life look like?
4. Self-destructive doesn’t even begin to describe the Johnstons. Who do you think is responsible for the family’s dysfunction? Is Duke’s failure to live up to his promise the start of it or does it go back even farther?
5. Bo and Kate once thought they would form a model Christian couple, with Bo emphasizing the institutional church life and Kate always hankering for the mission fields and the active, even radical faith. At the end of the book, have they gone their separate ways for good? How much did their differing views of religion contribute to their break-up?
6. What happens to Jerene’s family art collection? Who inherits it?
7. None of the Johnston children should write a romantic advice column. But who will end up the happiest? Is it improbably possible that Nonso and Joshua will have the best chance of living happily ever after? Despite Duke and Jerene’s solid union, none of the children seems to have figured out how to make a good match or marriage. Is there a reason for that?
8. Gaston adds himself to the pile of badly behaving, flagrantly drunken/unhappy Southern male writers (Faulkner, Wolfe, Dickey, Penn Warren, Capote, Tennessee Williams, et al). Is Norma correct—do these men just play at “Southern writer” or is there something especially destructive that lurks in the Southern literary profession?
9. What will Annie’s relationship with her mother be like after her father passes away? Will they be estranged or make some kind of détente? At the end of the book, Annie is free of the South and the pressures of the family? Will she be happier?
10. Race. Most chapters brush against (or take head-on) the inescapable topic of race in the South. The bad old days of Jim Crow may be gone, but how does the ever-changing mechanics of race-awareness and racism, overt as well as passive, limit and influence the white characters’ lives?
11. Class. Mrs. Johnston swears a couple can hail from different countries, different races or religions, but providing they share their class in common it might work out. Annie insists “class” is dead as a concept in America and that love will overcome all. Is Jerene right?
12. The Civil War—still alive, in some mutated fashion, in the South. (Maybe even still being fought.) Does anyone care about the war anywhere else in the country? Has a defeat for a lost and inglorious cause 150+ years ago truly cast that long and lasting a shadow over the American South?
13. Lookaway, Lookaway pokes a lot of fun at the Old Confederacy’s concepts of honor and the glorious gesture. Is Gaston and Duke’s final such gesture, their “honorable” solution to the inevitable decay and indignity that awaits them, merely ludicrous or is it actually chivalrous, a last romantic gesture and quest for a kind of nobility?
14. Humor is central to Barnhardt’s telling of the story. While the characters are strong and dominant, they are also really funny—intentionally or otherwise. Why is a sense of humor so important when reading this book? Which character do you think is the funniest and why?
15. Dorrie and Kate are the book’s outsiders, the eyes and thoughts of the reader. Are they changed for the better by entangling themselves with the Johnstons, or damaged? Does Kate depart the South for the mission fields mostly to escape the Johnstons and their values? Will Dorrie continue to be a faithful friend to Joshua and to Jerene?
16. Granted, Jerene is adept at fraud and petty criminality (particularly where shaking people down for money is concerned) and could probably kill detractors with her bare hands, but aren’t her sins in the service of her family? Or is she motivated by the false god of Society’s opinion and outward appearances? Is she admirable, or at least likable? Every family has a Jerene to some degree…in your family, is it you?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul
Bob Shacochis, 2013
Grove/Atlantic
640 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802119827
Summary
Renowned through four award-winning books for his gritty and revelatory visions of the Caribbean, Bob Shacochis returns to occupied Haiti in The Woman Who Lost Her Soul before sweeping across time and continents to unravel tangled knots of romance, espionage, and vengeance.
In riveting prose, Shacochis builds a complex and disturbing story about the coming of age of America in a pre-9/11 world. When humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington travels to Haiti to investigate the murder of a beautiful and seductive photojournalist, he is confronted with a dangerous landscape riddled with poverty, corruption, and voodoo.
It’s the late 1990s, a time of brutal guerrilla warfare and civilian kidnappings, and everyone has secrets. The journalist, whom he knew years before as Jackie Scott, had a bigger investment in Haiti than it seemed, and to make sense of her death, Tom must plunge back into a thorny past and his complicated ties to both Jackie and Eville Burnette, a member of Special Forces who has been assigned to protect her.
From the violent, bandit-dominated terrain of World War II Dubrovnik to the exquisitely rendered Istanbul in the 1980s, Shacochis brandishes Jackie’s shadowy family history with daring agility. Caught between her first love and the unsavory attentions of her father—an elite spy and quintessential Cold War warrior pressuring his daughter to follow in his footsteps—seventeen-year-old Jackie hatches a desperate escape plan that puts her on course to becoming the soulless woman Tom equally feared and desired.
Set over fifty years and in four countries backdropped by different wars, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul is a magnum opus that brings to life, through the mystique and allure of history, an intricate portrait of catastrophic events that led up to the war on terror and the America we are today. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 9, 1951
• Raised—McLean, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Missouri; Iowa
Writers' Workshop
• Awards—National Book Award's First Work of Fiction
• Currently—lives in Tallahassee, Florida
Bob Shacochis is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary journalist. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.
Shacochis was born in Pennsylvania, but grew up in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. He was educated at the University of Missouri and the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and currently teaches creative writing at Florida State University.
Books
in 1985, Shacochis published his first short-story collection, Easy in the Islands. It received the National Book Award in category First Work of Fiction. The stories are set in various Caribbean locales and reflect the author's experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Grenadines.
His second story collection, The Next New World, was released in 1990. It widens the author's milieu, containing stories set in Florida and the islands of the Caribbean but also in Northern Virginia and the mid-Atlantic coast.
In 1993, Shacochis published his first novel, Swimming in the Volcano, which became a finalist for the National Book Award. Heavily concerned with politics, elaborate in style and description, and immersed in descriptions of nature and outdoor pursuits, his fiction reflects the influence of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, J.P. Donleavy, and especially Ernest Hemingway.
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, his second novel, published in 2013, examines U.S. foreign policy and details how espionage not only reflects a nation’s character but can also endanger its soul.
Journalism
In the years since, Shacochis has worked primarily as a journalist and war correspondent. A longtime culinary aficionado, Shacochis served as a cooking columnist for GQ magazine, writing the "Dining In" column, which combined often humorous anecdotes with recipes. The "Dining In" columns are collected in Domesticity, a hybrid cookbook/essay collection.
He is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, and was instrumental, along with other literary journalists recruited by then-editor Mark Bryant, including Jon Krakauer, Tim Cahill, and Bruce Barcott, in establishing Outside's popular and critical success.
Shacochis is also a contributing editor to Harper's, which sent him to Haiti in 1994 to cover the uprising against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the island nation's first democratically elected President, and the subsequent intervention by US Army Special Forces, with whom Shacochis traveled for nearly a year covering the invasion.
The experience resulted in his 1999 The Immaculate Invasion, Shacochis's first full-length book of nonfiction. Shacochis's nonfiction generally fits into the tradition of the New Journalism popularized by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson in the 1960s and 1970s. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/18/2013.)
Book Reviews
[This] novel is about not one but two contemporary wars, both of them endless: the war on terror and the war on drugs. The America Shacochis describes in this huge, carefully plotted, ideologically challenging book has somehow become one with the woman who lost her soul. But how did she lose her soul? That’s the question at the heart of the novel, but one thing we know: her father is responsible for the loss.... [T]he country the old man has helped to create seems to be on a crusade that, in its pursuit of vengeance and the endless war, looks a lot like jihad
Engrossing...a soaring literary epic about the forces that have driven us to the 9/11 age.... Shacochis darts around the globe over the span of five decades like a sorcerer of world history: Locations shift, time swirls, characters reappear in new disguises with new names. He’s always so relentlessly captivating that you don’t dare fall behind.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
This novel amounts to a prequel of sorts to the war on terror, an epic examination of American foreign policy and loss of innocence, a worthy successor to the darkest works of Graham Greene and John le Carre.... Elegiac.... [A] searching and searing meditation on the questions someone might ask a century from now: Who were these Americans? How should history judge them? And us?
Jane Ciabattari - Boston Globe
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul cannot be put down.... [I]t never loses its way or its ability to drag you along with it.... [A] wild, deadly ride. You won’t want to let go.
Glenn Garvin - Miami Herald
A big book in every sense of the word.... Shacochis is a master at the top of his game.... In this novel, he gives us real, raw-edged characters and a narrative that grips the reader from the get-go. And he does it with such gleaming word-craft and such a sure hand that the reader’s utter engagement never falters. The book is a murder-mystery, a tale of political intrigue, a love story and a fraught father-daughter psychological saga. It was 10 years in the writing and it is a masterpiece...a brilliant, beautiful page-turner.... [L]uminous writing unfurls across every blood-spattered, sweat-speckled, dust-caked page and makes The Woman Who Lost Her Soul a riveting, heartbreaking and ravishing read. It’s a novel of uncommon grace and grit that lodges like shrapnel in the psyche and works its way surely to the reader’s heart, without ever losing sight of those "terrible intimacies."
Tallahassee Democrat
A compelling and thought-provoking novel...it plays a deep game, and it will haunt your dreams... [Shacochis] controls a hugely complex plot with great skill and writes set pieces with gripping effect.... Line for line, his writing is stunning.
Colette Bancroft - Tampa Bay Times
A love story, a thriller, a family saga, a historical novel, and a political analysis of America’s tragic misadventures abroad. The novel yokes the narrative drive of the best Graham Greene and le Carré to the rhetorical force and moral rigor of Faulkner.... With a vision at once bitingly realistic and sweepingly romantic, Bob Shacochis has written what may well be the last Great American Novel. What other American writer has put as much heart into his creations, as much drive, as much history?
Askold Melnyczuk - Los Angeles Review of Books
Shacochis has written one of the most morally serious and intellectually substantive novels about the world of intelligence since Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost.
Tom Bissell - Harper's
(Starred review.) In Shacochis’s powerful novel of sex, lies, and American foreign policy....[in which] people are pulled into a vortex of personal and political destruction.... Shacochis details how espionage not only reflects a nation’s character but can also endanger its soul. Gritty characters find themselves in grueling situations against a moral and physical landscape depicted in rich language as war-torn, resilient, angry, evil, and hopeful.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [T]ruly magisterial. It opens with humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington investigating the death of Jackie Scott, a feisty photojournalist who once whipped him around in Haiti.... Eventually, she's the woman who loses her soul, as "America…at war behind the drapery of shadows and secrets" has lost its soul. Densely detailed yet immensely readable, this eye-opener...could have been titled "Why We Are in the Middle East." —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A beautifully written, Norman Mailerlike treatise on international politics, secret wars, espionage, and terrorism.... A brilliant book, likely to win prizes, with echoes of Joseph Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and John le Carre.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [S]tunning novel of love, innocence and honor lost.... Shacochis has delivered a work that belongs alongside Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene... [The Woman Who Lost Her Soul] moves like a fast-flowing river, and it is memorably, smartly written.... An often depressing, cautionary and thoroughly excellent tale of the excesses of empire, ambition and the too easily fragmented human soul.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.
Dissident Gardens
Jonathan Lethem, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307744494
Summary
An epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals.
At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs.
Her precocious and willful daughter, Miriam, equally passionate in her activism, flees Rose’s influence to embrace the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village.
These women cast spells over the men in their lives: Rose’s aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her cousin, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam’s (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son, Sergius.
Flawed and idealistic, Lethem’s characters struggle to inhabit the utopian dream in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference.
As the decades pass—from the parlor communism of the ’30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged ’70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the moment—we come to understand through Lethem’s extraordinarily vivid storytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.
Lethem’s characters may pursue their fates within History with a capital H, but his novel is—at its mesmerizing, beating heart—about love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 19, 1964
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—Bennington College (no degree)
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award; World Fantasy
Award; Macallan Gold Dagger Award
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Early life
Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Judith Frank Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant-garde painter. He was the eldest of three children. His father was Protestant (with Scottish and English ancestry) and his mother was Jewish, from a family that originated in Germany, Poland, and Russia. His brother Blake became an artist, and his sister Mara became a photographer and writer.
The family lived in a commune in the pre-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood of North Gowanus (now called Boerum Hill). Despite the racial tensions and conflicts, he later described his bohemian childhood as "thrilling" and culturally wide-reaching. He gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan, saw Star Wars twenty-one times during its original theatrical release, and read the complete works of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Lethem later said Dick’s work was "as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel."
His parents divorced when Lethem was young. When he was thirteen, his mother Judith died from a malignant brain tumor, an event which he has said haunted him and has strongly affected his writing. (Lethem discusses the direct relation between his mother and the Bob Dylan song "Like a Rolling Stone" in the 2003 Canadian documentary Complete Unknown.) In 2007, Lethem explained, "My books all have this giant, howling missing [center]—language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone."
Intending to become a visual artist like his father, Lethem attended the High School of Music & Art in New York, where he painted in a style he describes as "glib, show-offy, usually cartoonish." At Music & Art he produced his own zine, The Literary Exchange, which featured artwork and writing. He also created animated films and wrote a 125-page novel, Heroes, still unpublished.
After graduating from high school, Lethem entered Bennington College in Vermont in 1982 as a prospective art student. At Bennington, Lethem experienced an "overwhelming....collision with the realities of class—my parents’ bohemian milieu had kept me from understanding, even a little, that we were poor.... [A]t Bennington that was all demolished by an encounter with the fact of real privilege." This, coupled with the realization that he was more interested in writing than art, led Lethem to drop out halfway through his sophomore year.
He hitchhiked from Denver, Colorado, to Berkeley, California, in 1984, across "a thousand miles of desert and mountains through Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, with about 40 dollars in my pocket," describing it as "one of the stupidest and most memorable things I've ever done." He lived in California for twelve years, working as a clerk in used bookstores, including Moe's and Pegasus & Pendragon Books, and writing on his own time. Lethem published his first short story in 1989 and published several more in the early 1990s.
First novels
Lethem’s first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, is a merging of science fiction and the Chandleresque detective story, which includes talking kangaroos, radical futuristic versions of the drug scene, and cryogenic prisons. The novel was published in 1994 to little initial fanfare, but an enthusiastic review in Newsweek, which declared Gun an "audaciously assured first novel," catapulted the book to wider commercial success. It became a finalist for the 1994 Nebula Award. In the mid-1990s, film producer-director Alan J. Pakula optioned the novel's movie rights, which allowed Lethem to quit working in bookstores and devote his time to writing.
His next several books include Amnesia Moon (1995), partially inspired by Lethem's experiences hitchhiking cross-country; The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (1996), a collection of short stories; As She Climbed Across the Table (1997) about a physics researcher who falls in love with an artificially generated spatial anomaly called "Lack."
Lethem moved returned to Brooklyn in 1996, after which he published Girl in Landscape (1998) about a world populated by aliens but "very strongly influenced" by the 1956 John Wayne Western The Searchers, a movie with which Lethem is "obsessed."
In 1999, he released Motherless Brooklyn, a return to the detective theme, with a protagonist suffering from Tourette syndrome and obsessed with language. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, The Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction, and the Salon Book Award, and was named book of the year by Esquire.According to the New York Times, the mainstream success of Motherless Brooklyn made Lethem "something of a hipster celebrity," and he was referred to several times as a "genre bender." Lev Grossman of Time classed Lethem with a movement of authors similarly eager to blend literary and popular writing, including Michael Chabon (with whom Lethem is friends), Margaret Atwood, and Susanna Clarke.
In the early 2000s, Lethem published a story collection, edited two anthologies, wrote magazine pieces, and published the 55-page novella This Shape We're In (2000)—one of the first offerings from McSweeney's Books, the publishing imprint that developed from Dave Eggers' McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.
In November 2000, Lethem said that he was working on an uncharacteristically "big sprawling" novel, about a child who grows up to be a rock journalist. The novel was published in 2003 as The Fortress of Solitude. The semi-autobiographical bildungsroman features a tale of racial tensions and boyhood in Brooklyn during the late 1970s.
Lethem's second collection of short fiction, Men and Cartoons, was published in late 2004. In a 2009 interview with Armchair/Shotgun, Lethem said of short fiction:
I'm writing short stories right now, that's what I do between novels, and I love them. I'm very devoted to it.... [T]he story collections I've published are tremendously important to me. And many of the uncollected stories—or yet-to-be-collected stories—are among my proudest writings. They're very closely allied, obviously, to novel writing. But also very distinct..
In 2005 Lethem released The Disappointment Artist, his first collection of essays, and in the same year he received a MacArthur Fellowship.Mid-career novels
After Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem decided it "was time to leave Brooklyn in a literary sense anyway... I really needed to defy all that stuff about place and memory." In 2007, he returned—as a novelist—to California, where some of his earlier fiction had been set, with You Don't Love Me Yet, a novel about an upstart rock band. The novel received mixed reviews.
In early 2009, Lethem published Chronic City, set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The author claimed it was strongly influenced by Saul Bellow, Philip K. Dick, Charles G. Finney. and Hitchcock’s Vertigo and referred to it as "long and strange."
Lethem's next novel, Dissident Gardens, was in 2013. According to Lethem in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the novel concerns "American leftists," very specifically "a red-diaper baby generation trying to figure out what it all means, this legacy of American Communism." He considers it "another New York neighborhood book, very much about the life of the city.... [W]riting about Greenwich Village in 1958 was really a jump for me...as much of an imaginative leap as any of the more fantastical things I've done."
Personal life
In 1987, Lethem married the writer and artist Shelley Jackson; they were divorced by 1997. In 2000, he married Julia Rosenberg, a Canadian film executive; they divorced two years later.
Lethem's current wife is filmmaker Amy Barrett; the couple has a son. Lethem has relocated to Los Angeles, California, where he is the Disney Professor of Writing at Pomona College in Claremont. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/17/2013.)
Book Reviews
In Dissident Gardens, a novel jampacked with the human energy of a crowded subway car, Jonathan Lethem attempts a daunting feat: turning three generations' worth of American leftists into a tragicomic tale of devolution. He has couched this as a family story and written it so that someone's hot breath is always in the reader's face…It's a big book set in small spaces—kitchen, classroom, folky nightclub—that keep its battles personal at all times…[a] wild, logorrheic, hilarious and diabolical novel. Those who reflexively compare Mr. Lethem to other Jonathans, like Jonathan Franzen, would be better off invoking Philip Roth to characterize this one
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Lethem is as ambitious as Mailer, as funny as Philip Roth and as stinging as Bob Dylan.... Dissident Gardens shows Lethem in full possession of his powers as a novelist, as he smoothly segues between historical periods and internal worlds.... Erudite, beautifully written, wise, compassionate, heartbreaking and pretty much devoid of nostalgia.
Los Angeles Times
Claiming to have lost my reviewer's copy of Jonathan Lethem's Dissident Gardens, I asked his publicist at Doubleday to send a couple more galleys my way.... I wanted the additional copies so I could press them into the hands of close family and dear friends, telling them as I did so: 'Here, read the year's best novel.'"
Alexander Nazaryan - New Republic
[This] novel's powerful and polarizing cultural, political, and racial energies are animated by a typically Lethem-esque cast of zanies, communalists, sexual adventurers, innocents, druggies, dreamers, and do-gooders—cosmopolitans all—whose lives collide and clash with gut-busting humor, heart, and hubris, which Lethem delivers in his seductively vertiginous prose."
Elle
In the past two decades, Jonathan Lethem has written, co-authored or edited 23 books, picking up a MacArthur 'genius' grant along the way. He shows no signs of flagging in his rich ninth novel, Dissident Gardens, an evocative, deeply sympathetic work about three generations of New Yorkers caught up in personal and global politics...It's also no small thing that this famously Brooklynite author has brought to life some of the neglected borough of Queens — and so much life, so artfully, persuasively created. When a book pulls me for so long into a beautifully made world, there's always a strange sensation upon the last page: I feel the air yanked from me in a sigh for endings and a whoosh of wow."
Bloomberg.com
In this epic and complex new novel, Lethem considers what happened to the [American Communist Party], as well as some other questions, about maternal isolation and filial resentment..... [A] heady, swirly mix of fascinating, lonely people. Lethem’s writing, as always, packs a witty punch...and the book is as illuminating of 20th-century American history as it is of the human burden of overcoming alienation.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [A] stunning new novel.... Spanning several major events—from 1930s McCarthyism through the recent Occupy Wall Street movement—and featuring an imaginative nonlinear time sequence so that the novel's particulars arrive at unexpected moments, this work is a moving, hilarious satire of American ideology and utopian dreams.... Lethem enthusiasts may find this to be his best yet. Very highly recommended. —Lisa Block, Atlanta, Ga.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [A] a richly saturated, multigenerational novel about a fractured family of dissidents headquartered in Queens.... He shreds the folk scene, eviscerates quiz shows, [and] pays bizarre tribute to Archie Bunker.... A righteous, stupendously involving novel about the personal toll of failed political movements and the perplexing obstacles to doing good.
Booklist
A dysfunctional family embodies a dysfunctional epoch.... The setup of this novel is so frequently funny that it reads like homage to classic Philip Roth, yet the book, like the end of the 20th century, takes a darker turn, as hippie naivete leads to more dangerous activism, illusions shatter, and old age takes its toll.... In "a city gone berserk," pretty much every character struggles with identity, destiny and family. Not Lethem's tightest novel, but a depth of conviction underlies its narrative sprawl.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.
The Circle
Dave Eggers, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
497 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345807298
Summary
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, famous musicians playing on the lawn, 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 publisher.)
The book's 2017 film adaptation stars Tom Hanks and Emma Watson.
Author Bio
• Birth—March 12, 1970
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Raised—Lake Forest, Illinois
• Education—University of Illinois (no degree)
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, California
Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is known for the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and for his more recent work as a novelist and screenwriter.
He is also the founder of McSweeney's, the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia, and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His works have appeared in several magazines, most notably The New Yorker. His works have received a significant amount of critical acclaim.
Personal life
Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, one of four siblings. His father was John K. Eggers (1936–1991), an attorney. His mother, Heidi McSweeney Eggers (1940–1992), was a school teacher. When Eggers was still a child, the family moved to the upscale suburb of Lake Forest, near Chicago. He attended high school there and was a classmate of the actor Vince Vaughn. Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, intending to get a degree in journalism, but his studies were interrupted by the deaths of both of his parents in 1991–1992—his father in 1991 from brain and lung cancer, and his mother in January 1992 from stomach cancer. Both were in their 50s.
These events were chronicled in his first book, the fictionalized A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. At the time, Eggers was 21, and his younger brother, Christopher ("Toph"), was 8 years old. The two eldest siblings, Bill and Beth, were unable to commit to care for Toph; his older brother had a full-time job and his sister was enrolled in law school. As a result, Dave Eggers took the responsibility.
He left the University of Illinois and moved to Berkeley, California, with his girlfriend Kirsten and his brother. They initially moved in with Eggers's sister, Beth, and her roommate, but eventually found a place in another part of town, which they paid for with money left to them by their parents. Toph attended a small private school, and Eggers did temp work and freelance graphic design for a local newspaper. Eventually, with his friend David Moodie, he took over a local free newspaper called Cups. This gradually evolved into the satirical magazine Might.
Eggers lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is married to Vendela Vida, also a writer. They have two children.
He was one of three 2008 TED Prize recipients. His TED Prize wish was for community members to personally engage with local public schools The same year, Utne Reader named him one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World."
In 2005, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from Brown University. He delivered the baccalaureate address at the school in 2008.
Literary work
• Egger's first book was a memoir (with fictional elements), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), which focused on the author's struggle to raise his younger brother in San Francisco following the deaths of both of their parents. The book quickly became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
• In 2002, Eggers published his first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, a story about a frustrating attempt to give away money to deserving people while haphazardly traveling the globe. He has also published a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry, and three politically themed serials for Salon.com.
• In 2005, Eggers published Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, a book of interviews with former prisoners sentenced to death and later exonerated. The book was compiled with Lola Vollen, "a physician specializing in the aftermath of large-scale human rights abuses" and "a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of International Studies and a practicing clinician." Lawyer novelist Scott Turow wrote the introduction to Surviving Justice.
• Eggers' 2006 novel What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Eggers also edits the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, an annual anthology of short stories, essays, journalism, satire, and alternative comics.
• In 2009, he published Zeitoun and, as a result, was presented with the Courage in Media Award by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Zeitoun is the account of a Syrian immigrant, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, in New Orleans who was helping neighbors after Hurricane Katrina when he was arrested, imprisoned and suffered abuse. The book has been optioned by Jonathan Demme, who is working on a screenplay for an animated film-rendition of the work. To Demme, it "felt like the first in-depth immersion I’d ever had through literature or film into the Muslim-American family.... The moral was that they are like people of any other faith."
• Eggers published A Hologram for the King in July 2012, which became a finalist for the National Book Award. The novel is the story of one man's struggle to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the new realities of a global economy.
• In 2013, he released The Circle, a satirical novel about the internet's subversive power over citizen privacy. The Circle is a combination of Facebook, Google, Twitter and more, as seen through the eyes of Mae Holland, a new hire who starts in customer service.
McSweeney's
In 1998, Eggers founded McSweeney's, an independent publishing house, which takes his mother's maiden name. Apart from its book list, McSweeney's also publishes the quarterly literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the daily-updated literature and humor site McSweeney's Internet Tendency, the monthly magazine The Believer, the quarterly food journal Lucky Peach, the sports journal Grantland Quarterly (in association with sports and pop culture website Grantland), and the quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin. The publishing house also runs three additional imprints: Believer Books; McSweeney's McMullens, a children's book department; and the Collins Library.
826 National
In 2002, Eggers and educator Nínive Clements Calegari co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for kids ages 6–18 in San Francisco. It has since grown into seven chapters across the United States: Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Boston, and Washington, D.C., all under the auspices of the nonprofit organization 826 National.
In 2006, Eggers appeared at a series of fund-raising events, dubbed "Revenge of the Book–Eaters Tour," to support his educational programs. The Chicago show featured Death Cab for Cutie front man Ben Gibbard. Other performers on the tour included Sufjan Stevens, Jon Stewart, Davy Rothbart, and David Byrne.
In 2007, the Heinz Family Foundation awarded Eggers a $250,000 Heinz Award (given to recognize "extraordinary achievements by individuals"). In accordance with Eggers' wishes, the award money was given to 826 National and The Teacher Salary Project. In April 2010, under the umbrella of 826 National, Eggers launched ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization that connects donors with students to make college more affordable. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/17/2013.)
Book Reviews
This line between where technology moves from value-adding to tyrannical is the ground Eggers explores: …who has the power to decide what will be done with the endless amounts of information we unwittingly and consistently offer up from our personal devices? Eggers, successfully I think, argues that whoever has the data will own our hearts. It is a gripping concept to explore. READ MORE …
Abby Fabiaschi - LitLovers
The Circle turns into a story of suspense and the publisher said the work...raises questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy and the limits of human knowledge.
Independent (UK)
[A] stunning work of terrifying plausibility, a cautionary tale of subversive power in the digital age suavely packaged as a Silicon Valley social satire.... Eggers presents a Swiftian scenario so absurd in its logic and compelling in its motives that the worst thing possible will be for people to miss the joke. The plot moves at a casual, yet inexorable pace.... [A] worthy and entertaining read despite its slow burn.
Publishers Weekly
[P]articularly relevant to our current concerns about Internet-facilitated invasion of privacy.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. How does Mae’s behavior during her first days at work foreshadow what happens to her over the course of the novel? In what ways is she an “ideal” employee of the Circle and its aims?
2. The wings of the Circle are named after different regions of the world and time periods, such as Old West, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Machine Age, the Industrial Revolution. What do these names say about the company’s vision of historical innovation versus its future-looking work? Is there an inherent hierarchy in these names, despite their apparent equality?
3. In what ways does Annie inspire and motivate Mae in terms of the level of success that can be achieved at the Circle? Does Mae consider Annie’s position the product of Annie’s own ambition, or something she imbibed from the company’s ethos? How does knowing first about their professional relationship shape your understanding of their shared past?
4. For a company that thrives on order and efficiency, the Circle also seems to endorse—require, even—loose and extravagant socializing. What do these two seemingly opposite values say about what working for them entails? How does Mae’s value set evolve to accommodate these expectations?
5. Mae’s first serious blunder on the job is failing to respond to and attend a social event, Alistair’s Portugal brunch. How does the meeting in Dan’s office set the tone for Mae’s pushing the Circle’s networks on others?
6. Among the Three Wise Men—Ty, Bailey, and Stenton—who has a vision of what the Circle can—and should—do that seems most viable? In the end, is this trifecta of power able to prevent tyranny? What might the novel’s conclusion say about man’s reaction to power—even when humanity is apparently subsumed under technology?
7. Our first encounter with a shark in the novel is when Mae sees one from a kayak, and she complacently observes, “They were hidden in the dark water, in their black parallel world, and knowing they were there, but not knowing where or really anything else, felt, at that moment, strangely right” (p.83). Later, we see another shark that Stenton brings back from the Marianas Trench, in a cage with other sea life being viewed by Mae’s watchers: “Then, like a machine going about its work, the shark circled and stabbed until he had devoured...everything, and deposited the remains quickly, carpeting the empty aquarium in a low film of white ash” (pp. 476–77). What is essentially different about these two scenarios that garners such different behavior from these wild creatures? Do the humans that watch the shark in the aquarium—“terrified...in awe and wanting more of the same”—seem to learn anything (p.477)?
8. During one of her visits home, Mae tells Mercer, “I guess I’m just so easily bored” by what he considers a normal tempo of speech, but what Mae considers “slow motion” compared with the Circlers’ communication in person and online (p.130); and later that night, going through her Circle account to answer queries and social requests, she feels “reborn” (p.135). How much of this shortened attention span is evident in our society today? In the end, are Mae’s instantaneous relationships more or less gratifying than she expects?
9. The bracelet provided by the health clinic is a remarkable technological feat and would revolutionize health care if it existed. Mae even finds it “beautiful, a pulsing marquee of lights and charts and numbers...[her] pulse represented by a delicately rendered rose, opening and closing” (p.156). But what does this additional form of self-monitoring, along with her three work screens, contribute to Mae’s true knowledge of herself? For example, does watching their pulses rise in anticipation of sex bring Mae and Francis closer together emotionally, or push them further apart?
10. It is both a curse and a blessing that Mae is able to provide her parents with health care: while her father is able to receive the MS treatment he desperately needs, Mae seems to benefit even more from her ability to share his story online through support groups and ultimately drives those groups away. Did you ever feel that her actions became more selfish than selfless, and if so, when?
11. Even though Mae meets Kalden when she is relatively enmeshed in the constant connectivity of the Circle, she is still taken in by his holographic mystery: “his retreating form...[that] she couldn’t get a hold of.... His face had an openness, an unmistakable lack of guile.... [H]aving him out there, at least for a few days, unreachable but presumably somewhere on campus, provided a jolt of welcome frission to her hours” (pp.170–71). Why does she not feel the need to pursue him more aggressively through the knowledge databases she has available? How does this compare with the way she treats Mercer online—Mercer, about whom she presumably knows much more, given their past?
12. We see Mae involved with three very different men throughout the novel: Mercer, Francis, and Kalden. While they are on the surface wildly different, what might you say are traits they share that reveal what Mae is looking for in a relationship—and how do they satisfy these needs in their own ways? Does Mae ever seem truly happy?
13. After her conversation with Dan about skirting her social responsibilities, Mae stays up all night to boost her PartiRank and “felt a profound sense of accomplishment and possibility” (p.191). She is equally ambitious with her CE satisfaction scores, getting the highest average of any employee on the first day. Why, then, is she so offended when Francis asks for a score on his sexual performance? Where is the line between public and private, analog and digital, drawn for Circlers, and what does it mean that Mae eventually gives in to his request?
14. Does the Circle seem concerned with promoting and preserving traditional family life? In what ways does it threaten to replace biological families with a wider human family, including via transparency?
15. Kayaking is for Mae a twofold form of release: not only is it a way to expend physical energy and clear her mind, but when she steals the kayak and is caught on SeeChange cameras, it also leads to a liberation of sorts within the Circle. Does this connection, and Mae’s reaction to being caught, suggest that the Circle’s intentions are well meaning after all, or do they illustrate a more sinister shift in attitude enabled by the Circle?
16. Why do you think Ty felt the need to disguise himself in order to reach out to Mae as he did? How necessary was it for him to preserve his role as one of the Three Wise Men, even as he sought to dismantle the institution he helped create?
17. Is Annie in any sense a martyr of the Circle’s mission? Did you ever feel as if you understood the motives behind her intense devotion to her job?
18. What is the impact of having Mercer’s suicide seen by Mae through cameras—that is, indirectly? Do you think she genuinely believed she was trying to be his friend by launching the drones after him?
19. Many of the technologies the author invents in The Circle seem futuristic, but they are not so far from realities that exist now: myriad social media sites are obviously omnipresent, but the government is also developing facial recognition to screen for terrorists (The New York Times, August 20, 2013) and Google Glass seems not so unlike the camera necklace that allows for Mae’s transparency. After finishing the novel, did you find this overlap between fact and fiction unsettling? Did it affect how you personally engage with technology?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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