Missing my book-buying radar is one thing.  But a major author holding off on the release of a 500-page tome til just over one month until said tome drops?  That’s something only someone like Dave Eggers could accomplish.

Turns out that Eggers (of Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and You Shall Know Our Velocity! fame) will release a book called The Circle from Knopf in early October.  After writing fiction about Saudi Arabia and mostly non-fiction (about the Lost Boys of Sudan and Hurricane Katrina) over the last few years, The Circle sounds like an interesting departure: it’s the story of a new employee at a mysterious tech-giant some are comparing to Google or Facebook.  From the end of the publisher’s write-up:

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.

I’m a little surprised that McSweeney’s (the maker of great hardbacks and Eggers’s own company).  Even still, October 8 can’t come fast enough.  You can read the little that anyone else has to say at the LA Times or the Atlantic Wire.  WIth other new books by N. T. Wright and Jonathan Lethem dropping in September, this fall is shaping up to be a great time for quality reading.