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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good to bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt. This is Bookworm, and I'm about to continue a conversation

which began last week with Dave Eggers about his new novel, The Every.

A lot of novels no longer take the opportunity to define the world around us.

This one does. It's The Every by Dave Eggers.

I sometimes put Dave Eggers behind me, and then I'll get a call,

as I did, oh, a couple of years ago, from Anne Beattie, who had just read the parade,

thought it was an absolute superb book, and I went to read it right away.

I did a conversation with Dave, and I felt, oh, how sad that I let a number of his books go by.

Well, I did read The Circle, which is a novel that preceded this in the artillery of attempting

to define the times that we're living in, and now comes the every.

It really is, and listeners be aware, a novel that is about the times we're living in.

At a time some years from now, there's apparently been a second pandemic,

and people are living in relation to a corporation, which is a monopoly that is unfailing in its ability to control more than one corporation has ever controlled before.

As a result, this is a novel of nearly 600 pages because, like the great novels,

it's attempting to talk about the lives around us. Now, tell me, Dave, how long it took

you to write this? You know, when the Circle came out in 2013, I thought that was the end of me writing any

dystopian fictions. It was not something I thought I would do in the first place. I'd been

...