A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers
A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers
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A Hologram for the King

Author: Dave Eggers

Narrator: Dion Graham

Unabridged: 7 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/07/2019


Synopsis

From the bestselling author of The Circle—a taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel that takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy’s gale-force winds.

“An outstanding achievement in Eggers’s already impressive career, and an essential read.” —San Francisco Chronicle

In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter’s college tuition, and finally do something great. A novel that’s a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment—and a moving story of how we got here.

About Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers is the bestselling author of seven books, including A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award; Zeitoun, winner of the American Book Award and Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and What Is the What, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won France’s Prix Medici. That book, about Valentino Achak Deng, a survivor of the civil war in Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which operates a secondary school in South Sudan run by Mr. Deng. Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco that produces a quarterly journal, a monthly magazine, The Believer:, a quarterly DVD of short films and documentaries, Wholphin; and an oral history series, Voice of Witness. In 2002, with Nínive Calegari he cofounded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Eggers is also the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. A native of Chicago, Eggers now lives in Northern California with his wife and two children.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kim on July 30, 2012

BLAH. I'm going to need the publishing industry to start putting on warning labels for Modern American Middle-Aged Upper-Middle-Class White Male Pathetic Protagonists, because I am all done with them. No more crazy bitch ex-wives, no more weird medical issues that strike at their sense of mortality,......more

Goodreads review by Lee on October 12, 2012

A perfectly enjoyable, effortlessly proceeding, airily formatted, short novel. It's not really 312 pages, more like 250 with lots of extraneous white space between frequently occurring sections. A tone so accessible it almost seemed like a YA version of some classic salesmanzy novel teleported to 20......more

Goodreads review by Meg on June 19, 2012

This is what I imagine Dave Eggers’ thought process was like in composing Hologram: “I want to write another novel. Haven’t done that in a little while. But I want it to be socially relevant, a commentary like Zeitoun. But it would be so obvious if my protagonist were another clear victim of global cat......more

Goodreads review by Charlie on September 14, 2012

Back in the early '70s a co-worker of mine shipped off to Saudi Arabia to take a job as a construction project manager for the giant company building King Khalid Military City. John was supporting three ex-wives, and he decided making triple his U.S. salary, with no way to spend it and living beyond......more


Quotes

A National Book Award Finalist
One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
One of the Best Books of the Year from The Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle

A Hologram for the King is an outstanding achievement in Eggers’s already impressive career, and an essential read.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“[A] clear, supremely readable parable of America in the global economy that is haunting, beautifully shaped, and sad. . . . A story human enough to draw blood…. Groundbreaking.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Completely engrossing. . . . Perfect.” —Fortune
 
"Dave Eggers is a prince among men. . . . A strike against the current state of global economic injustice." —Vanity Fair

“A fascinating novel.” —The New Yorker

“Eerie, suspenseful and tightly controlled.” —The Globe and Mail
 
“A comic but deeply affecting tale about one man's travails that also provides a bright, digital snapshot of our times.” —The New York Times

“Eggers’s most fully-realized character to date. . . . True genius.” —Boston Globe

“An unforgettable read.” —Entertainment Weekly

“A novel poised on the central meridian of our times. . . . Eggers maintains an exquisite balance of irony, empathy, dark humor, and unexpected tenderness in this taut exploration of the ever-increasing price of ordinary survival. A book as heartbreaking as the global economy it explores with such beauty and ferocity.” —National Book Awards citation
 
“Eggers, continuing the worldly outlook that informed his recent books Zeitoun and What Is the What, spins this spare story—a globalized Death of a Salesman—into a tightly controlled parable of America’s international standing and a riff on middle-class decline that approaches Beckett in its absurdist despair.” —The New York Times citation for Best Books of the Year
 
“Solidly constructed and elegantly told. There is nothing inaccessible about it. . . . Clay may not be like each of us, but he is an everyman whose irrelevancy is parallel to America’s own.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“Eggers understands the pressures of American downward-mobility, and in the protagonist of his novel, Alan Clay, has created an Everyman, a post-modern Willy Loman. . . . The novel operates on a grand and global scale, but it also is intimate.” —The Chicago Tribune
 
“Fascinating. . . . A Hologram for the King, as far from home as it might seem, is an acute slice of American life.” —Tampa Bay Times
 
“A fresh surprise. . . . Strong and satisfying. As the kingless days pass, Alan ventures from the tent and hotel into the rich, unsettling realities of the Kingdom, and Eggers ventures deeper into Alan, as well as into the question that has seemingly guided Eggers’ work for years: What does it mean to be an American in a world that has places like the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, or post-Katrina New Orleans?” —San Francisco Weekly
 
“Deft and darkly comic . . . A Hologram for the King is not only a portrait of a man in midlife trying desperately to salvage his future. The book is emblematic of what Eggers sees as wrong in America today: the collapse of homegrown industry, the outsourcing of labor, a loss of confidence, soured ideals. . . . But [it] isn’t a bummer—or if it is, it’s a bummer beautifully enlivened by oddball encounters and oddball characters, by stranger-in-a-strange-land episodes. . . . A Hologram for the King moves forward—a momentum of melancholy and possibility, driven by the meditations and memories of its once-noble American salesman hero.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Eggers’s spare prose is a pleasure, and A Hologram for the King proves to be a deft blend of surreal adventure, absurd comedy and pointed observations.” —San Jose Mercury News
 
“[Hologram] has at its center a sort of moral vision quest. . . . Alan’s plight is endearing in its universality, even while being singularly his.” —Time Out Chicago
 
A Hologram for the King presents us with the Great American Novel for this not-so-great America. . . . It strikes a new note for Eggers with its pervading sense of gallows humor.” —Baltimore City Paper
 
A Hologram for the King . . . reads fast and clear, with clean, stripped-down prose and a tone at once mournful and darkly amused. . . . It’s not that this world is changing, or that it will change. The world already changed, and now everyone, whether they like it or not, is tasked with figuring out how—or if—they can adapt.” —Portland Mercury

“A Beckettian masterpiece. . . . The finest work to date from an influential figure in American letters.” –The Telegraph (UK)


Awards

  • National Book Awards