—Then maybe I’ll stay, Alan said.
He wasn’t being sent away, after all, and he couldn’t go home yet, not empty handed like this. So he would stay. He had to. Otherwise who would be here when the King came again?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Always and most of all, VV.
Vast thanks to the staff at McSweeney’s for their work on all aspects of this book. Thank you Adam Krefman, Laura Howard, Chris Ying, Brian McMullen, Sunra Thompson, Chelsea Hogue, Andi Mudd, Juliet Litman, Sam Riley, Meagan Day, Russell Quinn, Rachel Khong, Malcolm Pullinger, Brent Hoff, Sheila Heti, Ross Simonini, Heidi Julavits, Alyson Sinclair, Scott Cohen, Eli Horowitz, Walter Green, and Chris Monks. Em-J Staples and Daniel Gumbiner helped tremendously with myriad tasks, far-flung research and the difficult home stretch. Their enthusiasm kept me strong. Extra thanks to McSweeney’s editors Ethan Nosowsky, Jordan Bass, Andrew Leland, and Michelle Quint, who had to read this book many times, and whose edits were surgical and brilliant.
This book grew out of a conversation I had back in 2008 with my brother-in-law, Scott Neumann, who traveled to the King Abdullah Economic City that year with a multinational corporation. Though this novel bears little resemblance to Scott’s time at KAEC, I was helped enormously by his great generosity in sharing his insights. Vanessa and Inger, thank you, too, for friendship and family.
There are many friends in Saudi Arabia I would like to thank, first and foremost Mamdouh Al-Harthy, guide and friend, expert and philosopher king. His hospitality can never be repaid. Thanks also go to Hasan Hatrash, poet, troublemaker and friend, and to Faiza Ambah, courageous journalist and screenwriter. She read early and later versions of this book, and offered key comments and encouragement.
For their crucial reads of the book in various forms, profound thanks go to Noor Elashi, Wajahat Ali, Lawrence Weschler, Nick Hornby, Tish Scola, Alia Malek, Roddy Doyle, Brett O’Hara, Stephen Elliott, and my brothers Bill and Toph. Heroic and repeated readings were done by the phenomenal novelist-editors Peter Ferry, Tom Barbash, and Peter Orner.
For their friendship, and expertise in matters of sales, manufacturing and consulting, vast thanks go to Paul Vida, Thomas O’Mara, Eric Vratimos, Grant Hyland, Scott Neumann, Paul Scola, and Peter Wisner.
For their guidance and advocacy over many years now, profound thanks to Andrew Wylie, Sally Willcox, Debby Klein, Lindsay Williams, Jenny Jackson, Kimberly Jaime, Luke Ingram, Sarah Chalfant, Oscar van Gelderen, Simon Prosser, Helge Malchow, Kerstin Gleba, Christine Jordis, Aurélien Masson, Brian Gray, and the many other editors, publishers and translators who have brought books like this to new audiences.
At Thomson-Shore printers in Dexter, Michigan, thanks to the entire staff: Kevin Spall, Angie Fugate, Josh Mosher, Heather Shultes, Kandy Tobias, Sue Lube, Jenny Taylor, Mike Shubel, Rich McDonald, Andrea Koerte, Rick Goss, Christina Ballard, Frankie Hall, Bill Stiffler, Mike Warren, Anthony Roberts, Tim King, Tonya Hollister, Deb Rowley, John Bennett, Paul Werstein, Jennifer Love, Alonda Young, Sandy Dean, Matt Marsh, Renee Gray, Adnan Abul-Huda, Sue Schray, Jenny Black, Debbie Duible, Steve Landers, Connie Adams, Pat Murphy, Rob Myers, Al Phillips, John Harrell, John Kepler, Darleen Van Loon, Shannon Oliver, Diane Therrian, Mary McCormick, Dave Mingus, Sandy Castle, Sherry Jones, Steve Mullins, Bill Dulisch, Ryan Yoakam, Doris Zink, Ed Stewart, Robert Parker, Terri Barlow, Thoe Tantipitham, Cody Dulish, Dave Meacham, and Vanessa Van De Car. Thanks, also, to everyone at PGW/Perseus.
Note: This book includes some of the history of Schwinn, an actual bicycle-manufacturing company based, for many decades, in Chicago. The basic dates and arc of the company represented herein are faithful to the historical record, though this is a novel, and a man named Alan Clay did not in fact work for Schwinn, and his experiences there are fictional. To read a fantastically well-reported and well-written nonfiction book on the subject of Schwinn, look for No Hands: The Rise and Fall of the Schwinn Bicycle Company, An American Institution, by Judith Crown and Glenn Coleman, published in 1996 by Henry Holt. My novel benefited greatly from that excellent book.
BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR
FICTION
A Hologram for the King
What Is the What
How We Are Hungry
You Shall Know Our Velocity
NONFICTION
Zeitoun
FOR ALL AGES
The Wild Things
MEMOIR
A Heartbreaking Work
of Staggering Genius
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave Eggers is the author of six previous books, including Zeitoun, winner of the American Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. What Is the What was a finalist for the 2006 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 co-founded 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, DC. A native of Chicago, Eggers now lives in Northern California with his wife and two children.
www.mcsweeneys.net
www.voiceofwitness.org
www.826national.org
www.scholarmatch.org
www.valentinoachakdeng.org
www.zeitounfoundation.org
Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King
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