Tom Hanks — aka Hanx — and Dave Eggers on screen

If someone were to ask Tom Hanks to write an essay "How I spent my summer vacation" Hanks — or Hanx, as he dubs himself on Twitter — would probably take up the challenge with his everyman grin. The multi-talented actor likes to write (his short story about flying to the moon, Alan Bean Plus Four, ran in The New Yorker in October. You can listen to it, below!) And given that he spent this past summer filming in Egypt he has plenty to write about. He was in the post-revolutionary country filming Dave Eggers A Hologram for the King, reuniting with Cloud Atlas director Tom Twyker who also penned the adaptation of Eggers novel.

The film costarring Tom Skerritt (Top Gun, Ted), Sarita Choudhury (Homeland), Omar Elba (Intelligence), Tracey Fairaway (Enough Said) and David Menkin (Zero Dark Thirty) will be released sometime late next year. I'll be adding it to my list of movies based on books for 2015, which I hope to get up on the site before this year ends.

Tom Hanks is clearly a fan of Dave Eggers; he's already signed on to star and produce the screen adaptation of Egger's 2013 book, The Circle with James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now) directing.

A National Book Award Finalist
One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
One of the Best Books of the Year from The Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle
In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman named Alan Clay pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter's college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together.

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. 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.

Are you excited to see these Dave Eggers novels on film? Is there a book — or two — that you'd really love to see Hollywood adapt? Check out my page Books We Wish Were Movies and let me know what novel you'd add to the list.


TOM HANKS reads his short story Alan Bean Plus Four from the New Yorker.

Why read Alan Bean Plus Four when Hanx and the New Yorker have so kindly shared the audio file?!