The Every was published by McSweeney’s in 2021 as a sequel to The Circle. In the intervening years, the Circle has merged with the world’s largest e-commerce platform (a thinly disguised Amazon) to create the Every — a company that controls search, social media, shopping, shipping, streaming, cloud computing, and an expanding portfolio of services that now includes healthcare, education, and criminal justice. Its campus, on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, is a closed ecosystem where employees live, work, eat, and socialize without ever leaving.
Delaney Wells, a former forest ranger and English major, takes a job at the Every with a plan: she will propose products and features so invasive, so obviously dystopian, that the public will finally rebel and demand the company’s dissolution. She suggests an app that rates every human interaction on a five-star scale. She proposes a service that monitors children’s speech for microaggressions. She designs a feature that quantifies the carbon footprint of every meal. Each proposal is accepted enthusiastically. Each is implemented. None provokes the backlash she expects.
The satire is bleaker than The Circle’s: where the first novel imagined a future that was plausible, the sequel describes a present that has already arrived. Eggers made the deliberate choice to sell the hardcover only through independent bookstores — no Amazon, no chain stores, no e-books — making the physical object itself a small act of resistance against the monopoly the novel describes.
Collecting The Every
First edition (McSweeney’s, San Francisco, 2021): Hardcover with unique randomized cover variants.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$30
- Specific cover variants may command premiums