Hi, it's NPR's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. You know, it's one thing when

dystopian stories take place way, way, way, way into the future. It's a lot creepier, though,

when it seems like the story you're reading could take place in like a year or so. That's the vibe

Dave Eggers' new book The Every Gives Off.

It's a sequel to his hit book The Circle, and it satirizes technology and the ever-present

hold it has in our lives.

Now, taking on our tech overlords in fiction is its own kind of fun.

But as you'll hear Eggers tell and PR's Audi Cornish, with this book, he tried

something a little meta and pushed back against one company in a very real way.

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people helping you understand why distant

events matter here at home.

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Dave Eggers' new novel, The Every, is set in a not so distant future where a ubiquitous tech giant, called The Every, is reaching deeper and deeper into people's lives.

To publish and distribute the book, Eggers said he tried to skirt one of today's giants, but that was no easy feat. You can print a book and then you got to

distribute it. And the distributors, almost all of them have deals with Amazon where any book

that they distribute, period, is distributed on Amazon. So to work outside of them is like taking

not just the back roads, but taking the dirt roads off

the back roads off the highway to get goods to your customers. And so this is being sold at maybe

a thousand or so independent bookstores. And even then, it's just the hardcover. Just the hardcover is being sold that way. And that's the only thing that we could really control. It's interesting. The book, there's sort of Easter eggs and jokes about tech throughout, including even the length of the book, right? Well, it was funny. I wanted there, you know, there's all these things that are determined by algorithms there, like, what's the ideal type of movie?

So I said at some point that the ideal length for a book is 577 pages, which is the length of

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