Dave Eggers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dave Eggers
Eggers at BookExpo America in 2018
Eggers at BookExpo America in 2018
Born (1970-03-12) March 12, 1970 (age 51)
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation
  • Writer
  • editor
  • publisher
  • philanthropist
Period1993–present
Literary movementPostmodern literature, post-postmodern, new sincerity
SpouseVendela Vida
Children2
Website
www.mcsweeneys.net www.daveeggers.net

Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Eggers is also the founder of McSweeney's, a literary journal, a co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness, and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines.

Personal life[]

Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, one of four siblings. His father, John K. Eggers (1936–1991), was an attorney, while his mother, Heidi McSweeney Eggers (1940–1992), was a school teacher. His father was Protestant and his mother was Catholic. When Eggers was still a child, the family moved to the suburb of Lake Forest, near Chicago, where he attended high school and was a classmate of actor Vince Vaughn. Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, intending to get a degree in journalism.[1] However, his studies were interrupted by the deaths of both of his parents: his father in 1991 from brain and lung cancer, and his mother in January 1992 from stomach cancer.[2]

These events were chronicled in his first book, the fictionalized A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. At the time, Eggers was 21, and his younger brother, Christopher ("Toph"), was 8 years old. The two eldest siblings, Bill and Beth, were unable to commit to care for Toph; his older brother had a full-time job and his sister was enrolled in law school. As a result, Dave Eggers took the responsibility. He left the University of Illinois and moved to Berkeley, California, with his girlfriend Kirsten and his brother. They initially moved in with Eggers' sister, Beth, and her roommate, but eventually found a place in another part of town, which they paid for with money left to them by their parents. Toph attended a small private school, and Eggers did temp work and freelance graphic design for a local newspaper. Eventually, with his friend David Moodie, he took over a local free newspaper called Cups. This gradually evolved into the satirical magazine Might.[citation needed]

Eggers lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is married to Vendela Vida, also a writer.[3] The couple have two children.[4]

Eggers's elder brother, Bill, is a researcher who has worked for several conservative think tanks, doing research promoting privatization.[5] Eggers's sister, Beth, died by suicide in November 2001.[6] Eggers briefly spoke about his sister's death during a 2002 fan interview for McSweeney's.[7]

He was one of three 2008 TED Prize recipients.[8] His TED Prize wish was for helping community members to personally engage with local public schools.[9][10] The same year, he was named one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World" by Utne Reader.[11]

In 2005, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from Brown University. He delivered the baccalaureate address at the school in 2008.[12]

Literary work[]

1990s[]

Eggers worked with Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng to tell a fictionalized account of Achak's life story

Eggers began writing as a Salon.com editor and founded Might magazine in San Francisco in the early 1990s with David Moodie and Marny Requa, while also writing a comic strip called Smarter Feller (originally Swell) for SF Weekly.[13]

Might evolved out of the small San Francisco-based independent paper Cups, and gathered a loyal following with its irreverent humour and quirky approach to the issues and personalities of the day. An article purporting to be an obituary of former 1980s child star Adam Rich (originally intended to be Back to the Future star Crispin Glover, until Glover backed-out) garnered some national attention. The magazine regularly included humour pieces, and a number of essays and non-fiction pieces by seminal 1990s writers, including "Impediments to Passion", an essay on sex in the AIDS era by David Foster Wallace.

As Eggers later recounted in his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the magazine consistently struggled to make a profit, and finally ceased publication in 1997. An anthology of the best of Might magazine's brief run, 'Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp' and Other Essays from Might Magazine, was published in late 1998. By this time, Eggers was freelancing for Esquire magazine and continuing to work for Salon.[citation needed]

2000s[]

Eggers' first book was a memoir with fictional elements, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), which focused on his struggle to raise his younger brother in San Francisco following the deaths of both of their parents. The book quickly became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The memoir was praised for its originality, idiosyncratic self-referencing, and for several innovative stylistic elements.[14] Early printings of the 2001 trade-paperback edition were published with a lengthy postscript entitled, Mistakes We Knew We Were Making.[citation needed]

In 2002, Eggers published his first fully fictional novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, a story about a frustrating attempt to give away money to deserving people while haphazardly traveling the globe. An expanded and revised version was released as Sacrament in 2003. A version without the new material in Sacrament was created and retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! for a Vintage imprint distribution. He has since published a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry, and three politically themed serials for Salon.com.[15]

In November 2005, Eggers published Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, a book of interviews with former prisoners sentenced to death and later exonerated. The book was compiled with Lola Vollen, a specialist in the aftermath of major human rights abuses and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of International Studies.[16]

Eggers's 2006 novel What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.[17] Eggers also edits the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, an annual anthology of short stories, essays, journalism, satire, and alternative comics.[citation needed]

Eggers was one of the original contributors to ESPN The Magazine and helped create its section "The Jump". He also acted as the first, anonymous "Answer Guy", a column that continued to run after he stopped working for the publication.[18]

On November 7, 2009, he was presented with the "Courage in Media" Award by the Council on American-Islamic Relations for his book Zeitoun.[19] Zeitoun was optioned by Jonathan Demme, who considered an animated film-rendition of the work. To Demme, it "felt like the first in-depth immersion I'd ever had through literature or film into the Muslim-American family. … The moral was that they are like people of any other faith, and I hope our film, if we can get it made, will also be like that." Demme, quoted in early 2011, expressed confidence that when the script was finished, he would be able to find financing, perhaps even from a major studio.[20] However, in May 2014, The Playlist reported that the film was "percolat[ing] in development".[21] Demme died in April 2017, and the project has not been heard of since.

2010s[]

In the early 2010s, after going six years without publishing substantive literary fiction following What is the What, Eggers began a three-year streak of back-to-back novels, each broadly concerned with pressing social and political issues facing the United States and the wider world in the twenty-first century. Eggers published his novel of the Great Recession and late 2000s financial crisis, A Hologram for the King, in July 2012. In October of that year, the novel was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award.[22]

Eggers followed this with The Circle, released in October 2013, and depicting the life of a young worker at a fictional San Francisco-based technology company in the near future, as she faces doubts about her vocation, due to the company's seemingly well-intentioned innovations revealing a more sinister underlying agenda. Completing the productive spell, a new novel concerning anxiety with America's place in the world, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, was published in June 2014.[23] In November 2015, Your Fathers, Where Are They... was longlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award,[24] Eggers' fifth nomination for the award following earlier nominations for The Circle, A Hologram for the King, The Wild Things, and What is the What.

In July 2016, Eggers published his sixth novel, Heroes of the Frontier.[25] Earlier the same year, a film adaptation of Eggers' earlier novel A Hologram for the King was released, to mixed reviews and middling commercial performance. The Circle, a film version of Eggers' book, starring Emma Watson, John Boyega, and Tom Hanks (who had starred in the Hologram for the King adaptation), was released in April 2017.[26] Eggers followed Heroes of the Frontier with The Monk of Mokha (2018), another nonfiction biography in a similar vein to Zeitoun, billed by the publishers as "the exhilarating true story of a young Yemeni American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee but finds himself trapped in Sana'a by civil war."[27]

Eggers ended the decade by publishing two very stylistically different novellas, written concurrently with each other. The Parade, published by Knopf in March 2019, was a spare, minimalist novella reflecting Eggers' long-standing concerns with humanitarian issues, global development, and Western perceptions of the developing world. According to the advance blurb from the publisher, the novel concerns "two men, Western contractors sent to work far from home, tasked with paving a road to the capital in a dangerous and largely lawless country."[28] Reviews were mixed: positive notices included Andrew Motion writing in The Guardian that "[Eggers'] novel may be sternly reduced in terms of its cast and language, but this leanness doesn't diminish the strength of its argument,"[29] while Ron Charles in The Washington Post demurred that The Parade "[is] a story that conforms to the West's reductive attitudes about the developing world. Writers and politicians have long generalized about those individual cultures. A novel that lumps them together into a nameless, primitive nation only plays into that tendency."[30] The Parade was followed in November 2019 by another short novella, The Captain and the Glory, billed by Eggers himself as a "allegorical satire"[31] of the Trump administration.[32] In an interview with the publishers Knopf published on the McSweeney's website, Eggers described the novel as "an attempt to understand this era by painting it in the gaudy and garish colors it really deserves ... This is part farce, part parable, and I do hope, though the Captain bears more than a passing resemblance to Trump, that the book will be readable when Trump is gone. That's part of the reason I called it "An entertainment" on the title page. It's a nod to Graham Greene but also the way I hope people will read it. It was cathartic to write and I hope cathartic to read. "[32] As with The Parade, reviews were decidedly mixed, with much criticism noting that Eggers' satire struggled to keep up with or do justice to the events of the Trump era. In a review for the Financial Times, Carl Wilkinson expressed bemusement about the purpose of the book and its intentions,[33] Hannah Barekat in The Spectator was critical for the "heavy handed" nature of the book's satire,[34] while The Guardian,[35] The Times Literary Supplement,[36] and Kirkus[37] also found the book wanting.

2020s[]

Eggers returned to the literary fold in 2021 with two new works of literary fiction. A short novella The Museum of Rain, is due for publication in June 2021, and according to the McSweeney's website, the "elegiac" short story concerns "an American Army vet in his 70s who is asked to lead a group of young grand-nieces and grand-nephews on a walk through the hills of California's Central Coast. Walking toward a setting sun, their destination is a place called The Museum of Rain, which may or may not still exist, and whose origin and meaning are elusive to all."[38] Later in 2021, Eggers' next novel, The Every, is due for release in October. The novel is billed as a follow-up to his 2013 novel The Circle.[39]

McSweeney's[]

Eggers founded McSweeney's, an independent publishing house, named for his mother's maiden name. The publishing house produces a quarterly literary journal, Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, first published in 1998; a monthly journal, The Believer, which debuted in 2003 and is edited by Eggers's wife, Vendela Vida; and, from 2005 to 2012, a quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin. Other works include The Future Dictionary of America, Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, and "Dr. and Mr. Haggis-On-Whey", all children's books of literary nonsense, which Eggers writes with his younger brother and uses as a pseudonym.[citation needed]

Ahead of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Eggers wrote an essay about the U.S. national team and soccer in the United States for The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, which contained essays about each competing team in the tournament and was published with aid from the journal Granta. According to The San Francisco Chronicle,[40] Eggers was rumored to be a possible candidate to be the new editor of The Paris Review before the Review selected Lorin Stein.

Eggers in October 2008

Visual art work[]

While at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Eggers attended art classes. After the publication of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he focused mainly on writing, but publicly returned to visual art with a solo gallery show at Electric Works, San Francisco, in 2010, called "It Is Right to Draw Their Fur."[41] The show featured many drawings of animals often paired with phrases, sometimes out of the Bible.[42] In conjunction with that exhibition, McSweeney's published a catalog featuring 25 loose-leaf prints of the work featured in the show. In 2015 Eggers had his first solo museum exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art called "The Insufferable Throne of God".[42] Eggers is represented by Electric Works a fine art gallery in San Francisco.

Outside of exhibitions, Eggers' visual art contributions include the following:

  • Provided album art for Austin rock group Paul Banks & the Carousels' album Yelling at the Sun.
  • Designed the artwork for Thrice's album Vheissu.[43]

826 National[]

In 2002, Eggers and educator Nínive Clements Calegari co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for kids ages 6–18 in San Francisco.[44] It has since grown into six chapters across the United States: Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, , Washington, D.C., and Boston, all under the auspices of the nonprofit organization 826 National.[45]

In 2006, he appeared at a series of fund-raising events, dubbed the Revenge of the Book–Eaters tour, to support these programs. The Chicago show, at the Park West theatre, featured Death Cab for Cutie front man Ben Gibbard. Other performers on the tour included Sufjan Stevens, Jon Stewart, Davy Rothbart, and David Byrne.[46] In September 2007, the Heinz Family Foundation awarded Eggers a $250,000 Heinz Award (given to recognize "extraordinary achievements by individuals") in the Arts and Humanities.[47] In accordance with Eggers's wishes, the award money was given to 826 National and The Teacher Salary Project.[48]

In April 2010, under the umbrella of 826 National, Eggers launched ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization that connects donors with students to make college more affordable.[49][50]

Musical contributions[]

  • Eggers can be heard talking with Spike Jonze during "The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton", the final track on Beck's 2006 album The Information. The third section of the track features Eggers and Jonze responding to Beck's question, "What would the ultimate record that ever could possibly be made sound like?"[51]
  • Eggers contributed lyrics to the song, "The Ghost of Rita Gonzolo", on One Ring Zero's album As Smart as We Are (2004).[52]

Awards and honors[]

Bibliography[]

Novels[]

Short stories[]

Collections:

  • Jokes Told in Heaven About Babies (2003), as Lucy Thomas, collection
  • How We Are Hungry (2004), collection of 15 short stories:
    "Another", "What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust", "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water", "On Wanting to Have Three Walls up Before She Gets Home", "Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance", "She Waits, Seething, Blooming", "Quiet", "Your Mother and I", "Naveed", "Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone", "About the Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her", "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly", "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself", "When They Learned to Yelp", "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"
  • Short Short Stories (2005), part of the Pocket Penguins series, collection of 24 short stories:
    "You Know How to Spell Elijah", "This Certain Song", "What the Water Feels Like to the Fishes", "The Weird Wife", "This Flight Attendant (Gary, Is It?) Is On Fire!", "True Story - 1986 - Midwest - USA - Tuesday", "It is Finally Time to Tell the Story", "A Circle Like Some Circles", "On Making Someone a Good Man By Calling Him a Good Man", "The Definition of Reg", "How Long It Took", "She Needed More Nuance", "The Heat and Eduardo, Part I", "Of Gretchen and de Gaulle", "The Heat and Eduardo, Part II", "Sleep to Dreamier Sleep Be Wed", "On Seeing Bob Balaban in Person Twice in One Week", "When He Started Saying 'I Appreciate It' After 'Thank You'", "You'll Have to Save That For Another Time", "Woman, Foghorn", "How Do Koreans Feel About the Germans?", "Georgia is Lost", "They Decide To Have No More Death", "Roderick Hopes"
  • How the Water Feels to the Fishes (2007), part of One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box, collection of 31 short stories:
    "Once a year", "Accident", "Old enough", "She needs a new journal", "Sooner", "The commercials of Norway", "Lily", "The boy they didn't take pictures of", "The fights not fought", "The horror", "How the water feels to the fishes", "How to do it", "Go-getters", "Deeper", "The battle between", "There are different kinds", "Alberto", "You still know that boy", "No safe harbor", "The bounty", "On making him a good man calling him a good man", "Thoughtful that way", "We can work it out", "No one knows", "The island from the window", "The anger of the horses", "California moved west", "How the air feels to the birds", "The man who", "Older than", "Steve again"

Uncollected short stories:

  • "The Man At The River" (2013)
  • "We Like You So Much and Want to Know You Better" (2013)
  • "The Alaska of Giants and Gods" (2014)
  • "Understanding the Sky" (2015)

Children's books[]

The Haggis-on-Whey World of Unbelievable Brilliance series (as "Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-On-Whey", with Christopher Eggers, picture books):

  1. Giraffes? Giraffes! (2003)
  2. Your Disgusting Head (2001)
  3. Animals of the Ocean, in Particular the Giant Squid (2006)
  4. Cold Fusion (2008)
  5. Children and the Tundra (2010)

Stand-alones:

  • When Marlana Pulled a Thread (2011), picture book
  • The Bridge Will Not Be Gray (2015), with illustrations by Tucker Nichols, picture book
  • Her Right Foot (2017), with illustrations by Shawn Harris, picture book
  • The Lifters (2018)
  • What Can a Citizen Do? (2018), with illustrations by Shawn Harris, picture book
  • Abner & Ian Get Right-Side Up (2019), with illustrations by Laura Park, picture book
  • Most of the Better Natural Things in the World (2019), with illustrations by Angel Chang, picture book
  • Tomorrow Most Likely (2019), with illustrations by Lane Smith, picture book
  • Faraway Things (2021), with illustrations by Kelly Murphy, picture book[59]

Non-fiction[]

  • A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), memoirs
  • Mistakes We Knew We Were Making (2000), memoirs
  • Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers (2005), with Daniel Moulthrop and Nínive Clements Calegari, sociology
  • Zeitoun (2009), biography
  • It Is Right to Draw Their Fur: Animal Renderings (2010), drawings
  • Visitants (2013), travels
  • The Voice of Witness reader : ten years of amplifying unheard voices. 2015.
  • Ungrateful Mammals (2017), drawings
  • The Monk of Mokha (2018), biography
  • Phoenix (2019), politics

Works edited and prefaced[]

  • (ISBN 0972178902) (Eggers wrote the foreword) (2002)
  • Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated (co-compiled with Lola Vollen; with an introduction by Scott Turow) (2005)
  • Stories Upon Stories (2016), anthology of short stories, editor and contributor
  • Some Recollections from a Busy Life: The Forgotten Story of the Real Town of Hollister, California by T.S. Hawkins (2016) (Eggers provides the introduction to a reprint of an autobiography by his great, great grandfather originally published in 1913)

Screenplays[]

Adaptations[]

References[]

  1. ^ ""Four prize-winning authors taking part in U. of I. series that begins Feb. 8" by Andrea Lynn". News Bureau, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. January 23, 2007. Archived from the original on May 14, 2007. Retrieved February 16, 2007.
  2. ^ ""Circle (Eggers) - Author Bio"]". 2018. Retrieved April 26, 2018.
  3. ^ Joshunda Sanders (August 27, 2003). "Vendela Vida floats amid S.F. literati but keeps feet, attitude firmly planted". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved February 22, 2007.
  4. ^ ""Different worlds: The many lives — novelist, social activist, literary innovator, teacher — of Dave Eggers" by Susan Larson". The Times-Picayune. February 6, 2007. Archived from the original on March 17, 2007. Retrieved February 22, 2007.
  5. ^ "William D. Eggers". Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. n.d. Archived from the original on February 12, 2007. Retrieved February 19, 2007.
  6. ^ Preston, John (December 29, 2009). "Dave Eggers interview: the heartbreak kid". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved September 22, 2010.
  7. ^ "Readers Interview Dave Eggers". McSweeney's Internet Tendency. 2002. Archived from the original on February 11, 2007. Retrieved 2007-02-19.
  8. ^ "TED Blog: Announcing 2008 TED Prize Winners". Blog.ted.com. November 21, 2007. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  9. ^ "Talks Dave Eggers: 2008 TED Prize wish: Once Upon a School" (video). TED Conference Website. March 19, 2008. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  10. ^ "TEDPrize 2008 Winner: Dave Eggers". TED Prize Website. Retrieved March 19, 2008.
  11. ^ "50 Visionaries who are changing your world". Utne Reader. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  12. ^ "Dave Eggers to deliver Brown University commencement address". May 19, 2008. Retrieved December 4, 2009.
  13. ^ ""Growing Up in Public: David Eggers and Ann Powers" by Mark Athitakis". SF Weekly. March 8, 2000. Retrieved February 21, 2007.
  14. ^ Hoffmann, Lukas (2016). Postirony: The Nonfictional Literature of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. Bielefeld: transcript. ISBN 978-3-8376-3661-1.
  15. ^ "Introducing (again) Dave Eggers". Salon.com. 2004. Archived from the original on November 17, 2006. Retrieved February 21, 2007.
  16. ^ "Surviving Justice: About the Editors". Voice of Witness. Archived from the original on July 16, 2007. Retrieved February 20, 2007.
  17. ^ "NBCC Awards Finalists". The National Book Critics Circle. Archived from the original on February 5, 2007. Retrieved March 11, 2007.
  18. ^ "Making It Up as We Go Along". ESPN the Magazine. March 11, 2008. Retrieved September 29, 2008.
  19. ^ "Announcing 'Courage in Media' Award Recipient: Author & Activist Dave Eggers". CAIR California. October 30, 2009. Archived from the original on November 6, 2009. Retrieved November 7, 2009.
  20. ^ "Rohter, Larry, "Hollywood Ignores East-West Exchange"". The New York Times. March 18, 2011. Retrieved March 20, 2011.
  21. ^ Jagernauth, Kevin (May 16, 2014). "Daniel Radcliffe To Star In Adaptation Of Dave Eggers' 'You Shall Know Our Velocity' Directed By Peter Sollett". Indiewire. Retrieved March 22, 2016.
  22. ^ "2012 National Book Awards - National Book Foundation". Nationalbook.org. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  23. ^ "Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?". Random House. Retrieved July 10, 2014.
  24. ^ "Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? - International DUBLIN Literary Award". Dublinliteraryaward.ie. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  25. ^ "Dave Eggers Journeys Into Alaska in 'Heroes of the Frontier'". The New York Times. April 5, 2016.
  26. ^ D'Alessandro, Anthony (October 7, 2016). "Tom Hanks & Emma Watson Thriller 'The Circle' Sets Spring 2017 Release". Deadline.com. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  27. ^ "The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers - PenguinRandomHouse.com". PenguinRandomhouse.com.
  28. ^ "The Parade by Dave Eggers - PenguinRandomHouse.com". PenguinRandomhouse.com.
  29. ^ Motion, Andrew (March 27, 2019). "The Parade by Dave Eggers review – a fable with a twist". The Guardian.
  30. ^ "Dave Eggers's 'The Parade' is a heartbreaking work of staggering cynicism". The Washington Post. March 12, 2019.
  31. ^ Lutz, Tom (November 22, 2019). "The Ship of State: A Conversation with Dave Eggers". Los Angeles Review of Books.
  32. ^ Jump up to: a b "An Interview With Dave Eggers About His New Novel The Captain and the Glory". McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  33. ^ "The Captain and the Glory by Dave Eggers — satire in the age of Trump". Financial Times. December 6, 2019.
  34. ^ "Dave Eggers's satire on Trump is somewhat heavy-handed: The Captain and the Glory reviewed".
  35. ^ Newman, Sandra (December 5, 2019). "The Captain and the Glory by Dave Eggers review – overfamiliar comedy". The Guardian.
  36. ^ "Clowns - in Brief Review - in Brief".
  37. ^ "An ill-advised take on "The Emperor's New Clothes" that's limp when it isn't condescending". Kirkus. October 14, 2019.
  38. ^ "The Museum of Rain". The McSweeney's Store.
  39. ^ Comerford, Ruth (February 22, 2021). "Hamish Hamilton bags 'lacerating' Eggers follow-up to The Circle". The Bookseller.
  40. ^ "Fresh Ink". Sfgate.com. February 21, 2010. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  41. ^ "Electric Works: Current and Past Exhibitions". sfelectricworks.com. Archived from the original on September 23, 2015. Retrieved October 23, 2015.
  42. ^ Jump up to: a b "Dave Eggers: Insufferable Throne of God". nevadaart.org. Retrieved October 23, 2015.
  43. ^ "Vheissu (liner notes)". Island Records. 2005. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  44. ^ "A heartwarming work of literary altruism", San Francisco Chronicle; accessed 2009-04-07
  45. ^ "826 Chapters". 826 National. Retrieved February 20, 2007.
  46. ^ "Revenge of the Book–Eaters". Bookeaters.org. 2006. Retrieved February 20, 2007.
  47. ^ "The Heinz Awards :: Dave Eggers". Heinzawards.net. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  48. ^ ""We never feel any sort of ownership" by John Freeman". Guardian Unlimited. London, UK. September 14, 2007. Retrieved September 15, 2007. An interview to Eggers
  49. ^ "About ScholarMatch". ScholarMatch. Retrieved August 26, 2018.
  50. ^ Tucker, Jill (May 21, 2010). "ScholarMatch.org offers aid to needy students". SFGate. Retrieved August 26, 2018.
  51. ^ ""I'm always in danger of being dismissed as a clown" by Chris Salmon". Guardian Unlimited. London. September 21, 2006. Retrieved February 21, 2007.
  52. ^ "As Smart As We Are (The Author Project)". One Ring Zero. Retrieved January 5, 2018.
  53. ^ "National Book Award Finalists Announced Today". Library Journal. October 10, 2012. Retrieved November 15, 2012.
  54. ^ "10 Best Books of 2012". The New York Times. November 30, 2012. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  55. ^ "Best Books of 2012 - Publishers Weekly". Publishersweekly.com. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  56. ^ Wegen Grass: US-Autor bleibt Preisverleihung fern, weser-kurier.de, 13 April 2012; accessed August 23, 2017.
  57. ^ Germany, SPIEGEL ONLINE, Hamburg. "Suche - SPIEGEL ONLINE". Spiegel.de. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  58. ^ "California Book Awards - Commonwealth Club". Commonwealthclub.org. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  59. ^ "Faraway Things + Interview with Dave Eggers". www.averyandaugustine.com. Retrieved September 2, 2021.
  60. ^ "Promised Land". IMDb.com. January 4, 2013. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  61. ^ Gerhardt, Tina (December 31, 2012). "Matt Damon Exposes Fracking in Promised Land". The Progressive.

Further reading[]

Criticism and interpretation[]

  • Altes, Liesbeth Korthals (2008) "Sincerity, Reliability, and Other Ironies — Notes on Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" in Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel (eds. Elke D'hoker and Gunther Martens). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
  • Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2013. [contains discussion of What is the What]
  • D'Amore, Jonathan. American Authorship and Autobiographical Narrative: Mailer, Wideman, Eggers. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. [joint study on works of Norman Mailer, John Edgar Wideman, and Eggers; contains discussion of ...Staggering Genius, "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making", You Shall Know Our Velocity, and What is the What]
  • den Dulk, Allard. Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers and Foer. Bloomsbury, 2014. [joint study on the works of Eggers, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Safran Foer; contains discussion of ...Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity and The Circle]
  • Funk, Wolfgang. The Literature of Reconstruction: American Literature in the New Millennium. Bloomsbury. 2015 [contains a chapter on 'reconstructing the author' in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius]
  • Galow, Timothy W. Understanding Dave Eggers. University of South Carolina Press. 2014.
  • Giles, Paul. The Global Remapping of American Literature. Princeton University Press, 2011 [contains discussion of ...Staggering Genius and What is the What]
  • Grassian, Daniel. Hybrid Fictions: American Literature and Generation X. McFarland, 2003 [contains discussion of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius]
  • Hamilton, Caroline D. "Blank Looks: Reality TV and Memoir in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Australasian Journal of American Studies, vol.28, no.2. (December 2009), pp.31-46
  • Hamilton, Caroline D. One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity. Bloomsbury, 2012.
  • Holland, Mark K. Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature. Bloomsbury, 2013. [contains discussion of ...Staggering Genius]
  • Jensen, Mikkel (2014) "A Note on a Title: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" in The Explicator. Volume 72, Issue 2.[1]
  • Mosseau, Robert. "Connecting Travel Writing, Bildungsroman, and Therapeutic Culture in Dave Eggers's Literature" in Lanzendorfer, Tim [ed.] The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel. Lexington Books, 2015. [contains discussion of You Shall Know Our Velocity and A Hologram for the King]
  • Nicol, Bran (2006) "'The Memoir as Self-Destruction': Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" in Modern Confessional Writing (ed. Jo Gill). New York: Routledge.
  • Peek, Michelle. "Humanitarian Narrative and Posthumanist Critique: Dave Eggers's What is the What. Biography. 35.1 (Winter, 2012), pp.115-136.
  • Pignagnoli, Virginia. "Sincerity, Sharing, and Authorial Discourses on the Fiction/Nonfiction Distinction: The Case of Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity" in Lanzendorfer, Tim [ed.] The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel. Lexington Books, 2015. [contains discussion of You Shall Know Our Velocity and The Circle]
  • Sommerfeld, Stephanie. "Nature Revisited: Postironic Sublimity in Dave Eggers" in Pierce, Gillian B. [ed.] The Sublime Today: Contemporary Readings in the Aesthetic. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 67-101.
  • Timmer, Nicoline. Do You Feel it Too? The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium. Rodopi, 2010. [contains discussion of ...Staggering Genius]
  • Varvogli, Aliki. Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction. Routledge, 2012. [Contains discussion of What is the What and You Shall Know Our Velocity]

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