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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, October 2013: As a fiction writer, indie publishing icon and education activist Dave Eggers neither suffers fools gladly nor treads lightly. With his signature mix of intelligence and highly literate snark, he dives headlong into contemporary crises--Hurricane Katrina, the Sudanese civil war--through the lens of a single character whose perspective we get to know intimately. In his new novel, Eggers tackles a modern problem that doesn't always seem like one: our near constant hunger for communication. When Mae Holland takes a job at the Circle, a tech giant with a utopian culture and cultlike following (Eggers didn't call it Schmoogle, but may as well have), she quickly loses sight of her friends, family, and sense of self in favor of professional success and social acceptance. As her Circle star rises, Mae succumbs to the corporate code of full disclosure, eventually agreeing to "go transparent" and let the public watch--and comment on--her every move. "Privacy is theft," decrees the company motto; "Secrets are lies." It's not subtle, but neither were "Harrison Bergeron" and 1984, and in its best moments The Circle is equally terrifying. Let's just hope it's not prescient. --Mia Lipman
Review
Praise for The Circle
“A vivid, roaring dissent to the companies that have coaxed us to disgorge every thought and action onto the Web . . . Carries the potential to change how the world views its addicted, compliant thrall to all things digital. If you work in Silicon Valley, or just care about what goes on there, you need to pay attention.”
—Dennis K. Berman, The Wall Street Journal
“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personal data is increasingly collected, sifted and monetized, an age of surveillance and Big Data, in which privacy is obsolete, and Maoist collectivism is the order of the day. Using his fluent prose and instinctive storytelling gifts, Mr. Eggers does a nimble, and sometimes very funny, job of sending up technophiles’ naïveté, self-interest and misguided idealism. As the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier has done in several groundbreaking nonfiction books, Mr. Eggers reminds us how digital utopianism can lead to the datafication of our daily lives, how a belief in the wisdom of the crowd can lead to mob rule, how the embrace of ‘the hive mind’ can lead to a diminution of the individual. The adventures of Mr. Eggers’s heroine, Mae Holland, an ambitious new hire at the company, provide an object lesson in the dangers of drinking the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid and becoming a full-time digital ninja . . . Never less than entertaining . . . Eggers is such an engaging, tactile writer that the reader happily follows him wherever he’s going . . . A fun and inventive read.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“The particular charm and power of Eggers’s book . . . could be described as ‘topical’ or ‘timely,’ though those pedestrian words do not nearly capture its imaginative vision . . . Simply a great story, with a fascinating protagonist, sharply drawn supporting characters and an exciting, unpredictable plot . . . As scary as the story’s implications will be to some readers, the reading experience is pure pleasure.”
—Hugo Lindgren, The New York Times Magazine
“Eggers is a literary polymath . . . The Circle is funny in its skewering of Internet culture. Holland obsessively tallies the reach of her Twitter-like Zings and enthuses about a benefit for needy children that raises not money but 2.3 million ‘smiles’ (think Facebook ‘likes’). The Circle's buildings are named for epochs, so at her first party Holland gets her wine from the Industrial Revolution . . . The ideas behind "The Circle" are compelling and deeply contemporary. Holland is an everywoman, a twentysomething believer in Internet culture untroubled by the massive centralization and monetization of information, ubiquitous video surveillance and corporate invasions of privacy. Compare that to A Hologram for the King, in which a middle-aged man thoughtfully but powerlessly observes America's economic decline, realizing that his efforts to participate in globalization led to his own obsolescence. The two books together are saying something foreboding about America's place in the world: We have traded making physical things for a glossy, meaningless online culture that leaves us vulnerable to those who see that information — in the form of data, video feeds, or our own consumer desires — is power.”
—Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
“You can’t really write a 1984 for our times, because 1984 is still the 1984 of our times. But one could think of Dave Eggers’ . . . new novel The Circle as a timely and potent appendix to it. The crux of The Circle is that Big Brother is still haunting us, but in an incarnation that’s both more genial and more insidious. We have met Big Brother, and he is us . . . In The Circle Eggers has set his style and pace to technothriller: the writing is brisk and spare and efficient . . . When I finished The Circle I felt a heightened awareness of social media and the way it’s remaking our world into a living hell of constant and universal mutual observation.”
—Lev Grossman, Time
“Bravely, audaciously . . . [Eggers] takes on the online world in The Circle, a provocative novel named for the world’s most powerful Internet firm. Set in the not-so-distant future, the novel is part satire, part corporate thriller. But mostly it’s a cautionary tale about threats to privacy, freedom and democracy.”
—Bob Minsesheimer, USA Today
“Page-turning. . . . The social message of the novel is clear, but Eggers expertly weaves it into an elegantly told, compulsively readable parable for the 21st century. . . . What may be the most haunting discovery about The Circle, however, is readers’ recognition that they share the same technology-driven mentality that brings the novel’s characters to the brink of dysfunction. We too want to know everything by watching, monitoring, commenting, and interacting, and the force of Eggers’s richly allusive prose lies in his ability to expose the potential hazards of that impulse.”
—Laura Christensen, Vanity Fair
“In this taut, claustrophobic corporate thriller, Eggers comes down hard on the culture of digital over-sharing, creating a very-near-future dystopia in which all that is not forbidden is required. . . . Eggers has a keen eye for context, and the great strength of The Circle lies in its observations about the way instant, asynchronous communication has damaged our personal relationships. . . . A speculative morality tale in the vein of George Orwell . . . We go on using the social media platforms that have been used against us; we post geo-tagged photos that could lead potential criminals straight to our private homes and our children's preschools, and we do all of this with full knowledge of the possible consequences. We have closed our eyes and given our consent. Everyone else is doing it. In the digital age, it is better to be unsafe than to be left out.”
—G. Willow Wilson, San Francisco Chronicle
“Eggers surveys our privacy-annihilating, social media-infested world, recoils in horror at the inevitable consequences, and unleashes a primal scream: Enough! Stop! Stop liking and sharing and tweeting and texting! Stop it all! Readers who share Eggers’ concerns about the Facebook-opticon, the surveillance state that leaves no shred of daily life unscrutinized, this superficial, hollow sense of community spaned by digital connectivity will flock to stand before this brave rallying flag. . . . The world that the Circle is delivering to the online masses is very much our world. This isn’t science fiction . . . We need a legion of Dave Eggers in the world today, calling out the dangers.”
—Andrew Leonard, Salon
“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 . . . when you put down the book and go to check your email, you might just realize that we are living the fiction . . . [The Circle] takes place before a fall that we might really be approaching, and it’s this compelling sense of impending, unpredictable doom that makes this work of fiction feel very real, and very necessary.”
—Jason Diamond, Flavorwire
“Dave Eggers’ real heartbreaking work of staggering genius might be this one. The Circle is today’s version of dystopian classics such as George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Eggers’ novel is terrifying, funny, real, suspenseful and visionary . . . Always keeping the focus on Mae, Eggers brings up all the Big Brother issues of our time: privacy, democracy, memory, history and the quality of how we’re connecting.”
—Holly Silva, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Eggers has updated Orwell’s vision by inverting it. In 1984, the members of the Party are watched by Big Brother; in The Circle, it is the people who watch the government . . . Perhaps our need for privacy will erode as technology continues to develop and the world continues to change. Or perhaps humans will still occasionally cling to the need for privacy simply because it is an essential quality of being ‘human.’ Either way, the fact that these questions linger long after finishing this book is a testament to the multiple layers and potential lasting impact of The Circle.”
—Karl Hendricks, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“The Circle is a deft modern synthesis of Swiftian wit with Orwellian prognostication . . . a work so germane to our times that it may well come to be considered as the most on-the-money satirical commentary on the early internet age . . . The pages are full of clever, plausible, unnerving ideas that I suspect are being developed right now . . . The book is also very funny . . . A prescient, important and enjoyable book, and what I love most about The Circle is that it is telling us so much about the impact of the computer age on human beings in the only form that can do so with the requisite wit, interiority and profundity: the novel.”
—Edward Docx, The Guardian (UK)
“Eggers’s past work has tackled sociopolitical issues such as the justice system, Sudanese refugees, and the plight of public school educators. The Circle gives him a new soapbox, and if he can convince a mass audience that Google is even a little bit evil, he’ll have produced so...
See all Editorial Reviews
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, October 2013: As a fiction writer, indie publishing icon and education activist Dave Eggers neither suffers fools gladly nor treads lightly. With his signature mix of intelligence and highly literate snark, he dives headlong into contemporary crises--Hurricane Katrina, the Sudanese civil war--through the lens of a single character whose perspective we get to know intimately. In his new novel, Eggers tackles a modern problem that doesn't always seem like one: our near constant hunger for communication. When Mae Holland takes a job at the Circle, a tech giant with a utopian culture and cultlike following (Eggers didn't call it Schmoogle, but may as well have), she quickly loses sight of her friends, family, and sense of self in favor of professional success and social acceptance. As her Circle star rises, Mae succumbs to the corporate code of full disclosure, eventually agreeing to "go transparent" and let the public watch--and comment on--her every move. "Privacy is theft," decrees the company motto; "Secrets are lies." It's not subtle, but neither were "Harrison Bergeron" and 1984, and in its best moments The Circle is equally terrifying. Let's just hope it's not prescient. --Mia Lipman
Praise for The Circle
“A vivid, roaring dissent to the companies that have coaxed us to disgorge every thought and action onto the Web . . . Carries the potential to change how the world views its addicted, compliant thrall to all things digital. If you work in Silicon Valley, or just care about what goes on there, you need to pay attention.”
—Dennis K. Berman, The Wall Street Journal
“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. Using his fluent prose and instinctive storytelling gifts, Mr. Eggers does a nimble, and sometimes very funny, job of sending up technophiles’ naïveté, self-interest and misguided idealism. As the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier has done in several groundbreaking nonfiction books, Mr. Eggers reminds us how digital utopianism can lead to the datafication of our daily lives, how a belief in the wisdom of the crowd can lead to mob rule, how the embrace of ‘the hive mind’ can lead to a diminution of the individual. The adventures of Mr. Eggers’s heroine, Mae Holland, an ambitious new hire at the company, provide an object lesson in the dangers of drinking the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid and becoming a full-time digital ninja . . . Never less than entertaining . . . Eggers is such an engaging, tactile writer that the reader happily follows him wherever he’s going . . . A fun and inventive read.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“The particular charm and power of Eggers’s book . . . could be described as ‘topical’ or ‘timely,’ though those pedestrian words do not nearly capture its imaginative vision . . . Simply a great story, with a fascinating protagonist, sharply drawn supporting characters and an exciting, unpredictable plot . . . As scary as the story’s implications will be to some readers, the reading experience is pure pleasure.”
—Hugo Lindgren, The New York Times Magazine
“Eggers is a literary polymath . . . The Circle is funny in its skewering of Internet culture. Holland obsessively tallies the reach of her Twitter-like Zings and enthuses about a benefit for needy children that raises not money but 2.3 million ‘smiles’ (think Facebook ‘likes’). The Circle's buildings are named for epochs, so at her first party Holland gets her wine from the Industrial Revolution . . . The ideas behind "The Circle" are compelling and deeply contemporary. Holland is an everywoman, a twentysomething believer in Internet culture untroubled by the massive centralization and monetization of information, ubiquitous video surveillance and corporate invasions of privacy. Compare that to A Hologram for the King, in which a middle-aged man thoughtfully but powerlessly observes America's economic decline, realizing that his efforts to participate in globalization led to his own obsolescence. The two books together are saying something foreboding about America's place in the world: We have traded making physical things for a glossy, meaningless online culture that leaves us vulnerable to those who see that information — in the form of data, video feeds, or our own consumer desires — is power.”
—Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
“You can’t really write a 1984 for our times, because 1984 is still the 1984 of our times. But one could think of Dave Eggers’ . . . new novel The Circle as a timely and potent appendix to it. The crux of The Circle is that Big Brother is still haunting us, but in an incarnation that’s both more genial and more insidious. We have met Big Brother, and he is us . . . In The Circle Eggers has set his style and pace to technothriller: the writing is brisk and spare and efficient . . . When I finished The Circle I felt a heightened awareness of social media and the way it’s remaking our world into a living hell of constant and universal mutual observation.”
—Lev Grossman, Time
“Bravely, audaciously . . . [Eggers] takes on the online world in The Circle, a provocative novel named for the world’s most powerful Internet firm. Set in the not-so-distant future, the novel is part satire, part corporate thriller. But mostly it’s a cautionary tale about threats to privacy, freedom and democracy.”
—Bob Minsesheimer, USA Today
“Page-turning. . . . The social message of the novel is clear, but Eggers expertly weaves it into an elegantly told, compulsively readable parable for the 21st century. . . . What may be the most haunting discovery about The Circle, however, is readers’ recognition that they share the same technology-driven mentality that brings the novel’s characters to the brink of dysfunction. We too want to know everything by watching, monitoring, commenting, and interacting, and the force of Eggers’s richly allusive prose lies in his ability to expose the potential hazards of that impulse.”
—Laura Christensen, Vanity Fair
“In this taut, claustrophobic corporate thriller, Eggers comes down hard on the culture of digital over-sharing, creating a very-near-future dystopia in which all that is not forbidden is required. . . . Eggers has a keen eye for context, and the great strength of The Circle lies in its observations about the way instant, asynchronous communication has damaged our personal relationships. . . . A speculative morality tale in the vein of George Orwell . . . We go on using the social media platforms that have been used against us; we post geo-tagged photos that could lead potential criminals straight to our private homes and our children's preschools, and we do all of this with full knowledge of the possible consequences. We have closed our eyes and given our consent. Everyone else is doing it. In the digital age, it is better to be unsafe than to be left out.”
—G. Willow Wilson, San Francisco Chronicle
“Eggers surveys our privacy-annihilating, social media-infested world, recoils in horror at the inevitable consequences, and unleashes a primal scream: Enough! Stop! Stop liking and sharing and tweeting and texting! Stop it all! Readers who share Eggers’ concerns about the Facebook-opticon, the surveillance state that leaves no shred of daily life unscrutinized, this superficial, hollow sense of community spaned by digital connectivity will flock to stand before this brave rallying flag. . . . The world that the Circle is delivering to the online masses is very much our world. This isn’t science fiction . . . We need a legion of Dave Eggers in the world today, calling out the dangers.”
—Andrew Leonard, Salon
“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 . . . when you put down the book and go to check your email, you might just realize that we are living the fiction . . . [The Circle] takes place before a fall that we might really be approaching, and it’s this compelling sense of impending, unpredictable doom that makes this work of fiction feel very real, and very necessary.”
—Jason Diamond, Flavorwire
“Dave Eggers’ real heartbreaking work of staggering genius might be this one. The Circle is today’s version of dystopian classics such as George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Eggers’ novel is terrifying, funny, real, suspenseful and visionary . . . Always keeping the focus on Mae, Eggers brings up all the Big Brother issues of our time: privacy, democracy, memory, history and the quality of how we’re connecting.”
—Holly Silva, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Eggers has updated Orwell’s vision by inverting it. In 1984, the members of the Party are watched by Big Brother; in The Circle, it is the people who watch the government . . . Perhaps our need for privacy will erode as technology continues to develop and the world continues to change. Or perhaps humans will still occasionally cling to the need for privacy simply because it is an essential quality of being ‘human.’ Either way, the fact that these questions linger long after finishing this book is a testament to the multiple layers and potential lasting impact of The Circle.”
—Karl Hendricks, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“The Circle is a deft modern synthesis of Swiftian wit with Orwellian prognostication . . . a work so germane to our times that it may well come to be considered as the most on-the-money satirical commentary on the early internet age . . . The pages are full of clever, plausible, unnerving ideas that I suspect are being developed right now . . . The book is also very funny . . . A prescient, important and enjoyable book, and what I love most about The Circle is that it is telling us so much about the impact of the computer age on human beings in the only form that can do so with the requisite wit, interiority and profundity: the novel.”
—Edward Docx, The Guardian (UK)
“Eggers’s past work has tackled sociopolitical issues such as the justice system, Sudanese refugees, and the plight of public school educators. The Circle gives him a new soapbox, and if he can convince a mass audience that Google is even a little bit evil, he’ll have produced so...
