According to Entertainment Weekly, publishing house Knopf will release a new book by Dave Eggers this summer. Titled Heroes Of The Frontier, the novel will tell the story of a mother who rents an RV so she can move with her two children from Ohio to Alaska. The publisher says the book is a “comic and rueful look at how the lives we imagine for ourselves coexist with the lives we are actually living, as well as an excoriating view of America in the 21st century.” However, you don’t need to take the publisher’s word that Heroes Of The Frontier will be an excoriating view of America in the 21st century, because Eggers has also released the first two paragraphs of the book as a preview, and you can read them below:
There is proud happiness, happiness born of doing good work in the light of day, years of worthwhile labor, and afterward being tired, and content, and surrounded by family and friends, bathed in satisfaction and ready for a deserved rest—sleep or death, it would not matter.
Then there is the happiness of one’s personal slum. The happiness of being alone, and tipsy on red wine, in the passenger seat of an ancient recreational vehicle parked somewhere in Alaska’s deep south, staring into a scribble of black trees, afraid to go to sleep for fear that at any moment someone will get past the toy lock on the RV door and murder you and your two small children sleeping above.
Among other heartbreaking works of staggering genius (get it?), Eggers is also the author of The Circle, which is currently getting a big-screen adaptation starring Tom Hanks. Heroes Of The Frontier will be in stores on July 26.