- - - -
Just in time for Valentine's Day,
the Guardian in London has
reviewed and raved about
The Secret Language of Sleep.
And, for the rest of the week,
you can buy it for $5!
- - - -
"The characters and narrators in How We Are Hungry, in which longer
stories are
interspersed with some of Eggers's Guardian pieces, find themselves on
the edge—on the verge of breakdowns, breakups and other crises,
like the
mother in 'She Waits, Seething, Blooming', who is 'watching Elimidate,
drinking red wine spiked with gin, and is picturing hitting her only
son with
a golf club'. His narrative responds in kind, patrolling what lies on
and
beyond the far edges of speech and thought. In the work of lesser
writers—including some of those for whom Eggers has become a talisman—such
narration
can shrink into an aesthetic of studied faux-inarticulacy ... it is a
mark of
what Eggers can achieve at
his best
that his feeling for speech and its limitations rarely hits false
notes. A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and the freewheeling
Velocity
made a virtue of sheer sprawl; this collection of stories points to
another
quality, present in those books but perhaps less well noted: Eggers's
way with
significant omissions and ellipses ... As Anne Henry has pointed out, 'the gaps and lacunae so often
discussed in
twentieth-century criticism are not always empty or silent, but
filled with
pieces of type, marks which have voices of their own', and Eggers's
significant gaps and lapses similarly have their silent speeches.
Many of the
predecessors to whom Eggers can be compared—Sterne, Barthelme,
Vonnegut and,
more obliquely, Perec and Sebald—employ styles that are visibly
affected by
loss ... [These] stories and
sequences ... move and disturb in unexpected, even
shocking ways." "The man can simply write extraordinarily well ... Eggers is technically
virtuoso. He can play with language and casually pin down psychological
truth, while his pacing is so exquisite that he is more than capable of
creating a page-turner in which next to nothing happens ... How We Are Hungry is a triumph of both form and content ... Dave Eggers is
the real thing." "One of the many pleasures in reading 'How We Are Hungry,' Eggers'
recent collection of stories, is that it reminds you of his abilities
as a writer. He can dazzle ... he can move effortlessly
between classic storytelling and the more experimental." "[J]ust as A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius sniffed at the memoir's
conventions, and You Shall Know Our Velocity reinvented the road novel, How
We Are Hungry comes at short fiction from a new angle. Ranging in settings
from Tanzania to Ireland, from Egypt to a long, lonely stretch of Interstate
5 in California, these tales reinvigorate that staid old form, the short
story, with a jittery sense of adventure." "[T]here's stunning writing here. Subtle, epigrammatic, candid and
thoughtful." "It's this tension between our base and noble impulses, our so-called animal and refined natures, that gives How We Are Hungry its momentum and imparts to the best of its stories a rare and welcome grace. "A tour de force ... These pieces demonstrate the same startling geographic
range and sly descriptive acuity that animated "You Shall Know Our
Velocity." ... [Eggers's] prose is supple, transparent and surprising,
qualities most evident in "Up the Mountain," in which Eggers casts a sly
backward glance at Hemingway's "Snows of Kilimanjaro" and then dares to
improve upon it, updating its romanticism for our own guarded, unromantic
age." "If all writing had the sense of moral purpose Eggers displays, the world
would be a sharper, livelier place. I don't mean moral in the shushing
schoolmarm sort of way. What I mean is that in each of these stories there
is a sense that something very real is at stake, a sense that these lives—all lives—have some purpose. In "Up the Mountain, Coming Down Slowly" a
woman climbs Kilimanjaro seeking that purpose, and finding it unexpectedly,
tragically, in the end. The pace of the story is perfect, which means slow
like a climb up the mountain itself. This in itself is daring. Add to that
Eggers' pitch-perfect characterization of the female protagonist. The final story, too, is an unexpected miracle. ... Through the [protagonist], and the
story's improbably moving conclusion, we learn the secret of what God is,
and, movingly, acceptance of the evil that men do, here on Earth." "Typical of Eggers' generosity of spirit is the title, 'How We Are Hungry,'
which is apt and precise. These stories are not so much about what the
characters long for, but the fact that they long at all; they are empty in
some important place in the heart, and they wish it were not so. ... They
are beautiful stories, anchored in the real world, with more bodies and
objects than concepts or abstractions. There is a sense of human exuberance
in the clean, swift language. ... It looks like a classic." "[E]lectrically funny ... full of the raw stuff of lives. The pain and the
anger. Emotions that get mixed up and change from one minute to the next.
The wonder and the joy. It's all condensed and crafted, worked, that's what
fiction is. But it feels raw, and it's exhilarating." "These tales reinvigorate that staid old form, the short story, with a
jittery sense of adventure." "Haunting. A-" "Given Dave Eggers' background in writing, editing, curating, and publishing
short fiction and metafiction, it's not surprising that short stories would
turn out to be his best fiction milieu. It's only surprising that it's taken
him this long to publish his own short-fiction anthology." "In his short work, he plays with format and content alike, and the results
are as remarkable as they are intrepid." "A return to creative form. ... As always, Eggers finds his place between
outrageous humor and disastrous sadness, and his settings span the globe.
Titles like "After I Was Thrown in a River and Before I Drowned" and
"Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance" reveal plots of utter
physical or mental breakdown, and much like the rest of the collection,
don't quit resonating until long after the last sentence is finished." "While some story collections forsake the everyday for the exotic, Dave
Eggers' How We Are Hungry finds meaning in the back yards of America as
easily as amidst the surf of Costa Rica—with the revelation that
sometimes, the heaviest things we carry on a journey are our own thoughts. ... A perfect book for a resolution-making time of year." [See full reviews below.] - - - - How We Are Hungry collects 15 short stories written over the past four years. Many of the stories have been published before, and many are new. Some comments about the previously published stories:"The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water," originally published in Zoetrope: All-Story, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Fiction and was included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2004. Two of the stories in this collection—"Measuring the Jump" (now retitled) and "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water"—were recently named "Notables" in The Best American Short Stories 2004, edited by Lorrie Moore. "['Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly' is] a masterpiece ... the narration is magisterial, without a false note. ... It may well be the last great twentieth-century short story." —The Observer (London) "'After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned' is a small tour de force that ratifies [Eggers's] ability to write about anything with style and vigor and genuine emotion." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times - - - - Recent Reviews of - - - - The Oregonian Dave Eggers' new book is a collection of short stories, "How We Are Hungry." In scanning back through these pieces for images that expressed something particular, I found myself landing on sentences that delighted me for no particular reason at all. This is an important aspect to "How We Are Hungry": It's entertaining, and carries the reader along on a rush of story. The stories are varied in voice and in content, although our culture's salient pain is at the heart of each, including the one narrated by a dog. They range from a story from The New Yorker to flash fiction to one piece that exists in the form of notes for a story and another titled "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself" that is followed by blank pages. They are all, however, even in their generosity and sincerity. They are beautiful stories, anchored in the real world, with more bodies and objects than concepts or abstractions. There is a sense of human exuberance in the clean, swift language, even though they are dark and many have sad endings. A notable exception to the sad-ending thing is the story about death. That tells you something about what kind of a writer Eggers is. His irony is cosmic (although not necessarily subtle), as opposed to the easy victory of hip, self-referential language and cultural references embedded with winks. Typical of Eggers' generosity of spirit is the title, "How We Are Hungry," which is apt and precise. These stories are not so much about what the characters long for, but the fact that they long at all; they are empty in some important place in the heart, and they wish it were not so. The Graham Greene-like voice of the narrator of "Another" recalls his life while on a nightmarish ride through the Arabian desert on a horse: "I was a star, a heathen, an enemy, a nothing." Eggers does not seem to be saying that our lives are meaningless, but that we are searching so hard for the meaning that we often miss it. His characters struggle along the surface of things. In a very short story called "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," an unnamed man sees a news image from the war and paces his tiny apartment, looking out the window. The story is written in formal, stiff language, devoid of scene. It leaves the reader frustrated and anxious and worried about why that title was so long. In the story "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water," about a young woman dermatologist on vacation, a meta-fictive voice tells us what is significant in the story, and elements of nature break into their own conversations about what is important under the surface. And then there is the cost of this struggle: the flashes of rage in every story. In "Climbing the Window, Pretending to Dance," a man named Fish visits his cousin, who keeps trying to kill himself, to Fish's great inconvenience: "His chin is brown and tied together with black straight string; spiked along the suture, as if spiders had been sewn into his face." Eggers is a master of the miniature. His brushstrokes about people and setting are quick and lovely: "backpackers of the Scandinavian breed—white blond hair and bikini tops, plastic digital watches, reckless sunburns." "How We Are Hungry" is published by McSweeney's Books. The book itself is a breathtakingly beautiful object, with grosgrain end papers and a ribbon bookmark and the McSweeney's hippogriff embossed on the cover. One may not be able to reliably judge a book by its cover, but sometimes the cover is right. This one is rare-looking, and rich and important-looking. It looks like a classic. —Joanna Rose - - - - The Globe and Mail My friend heard I was reviewing Dave Eggers's new collection of stories, and phoned over to predict a kiss-up. He said, "That's what we're looking at here, right? The big kiss-up. You love that stuff. I know what kind of a review it's going to be. It's going to be dancing with your arms up." I felt this was unfair. Plus there was the tone. The tone had teeth. It's true, I'm an admirer of Eggers's McSweeney's magazine in all its excesses. And I'm on record as a fan of You Shall Know Our Velocity, the novel he published in 2002. But kissing? Dancing? Arms ... up? Maybe it was the tone that left me coldest, though. I told my friend I'd be calling it like I saw it. I used my stern voice, which people sometimes mistake for my robot voice. Talk to you later, I mentioned. Sometime. Gotta go. Bye. Had to start the review again, of course. I'd been ready to go in saying what a beautiful book this is. The black leatherette cover stamped with a gryphon! The textured endpapers, like skin from some expensive brown snake! The built-in bookmark! The helpful elastic band, also a built-in! That was no good now. I'd have to watch myself. No exclamation marks whatsoever! If there was dancing to be done, it wouldn't be by me. Start again, then. How We are Hungry gathers 15 stories, not all of which are stories. Eight are lesser items, pieces of stories, vignettes, rants, a couple of slight, smart, self-sustaining performances that wouldn't be out of place on The New Yorker's Shouts and Murmurs page. The best of them raise a smile before they're over and you forget, turning the page, what they had to say. Down at the bottom of the scale, I'd ask you to avert your eyes from page 201, where There are Some Things He Should Keep To Himself turns out to be no more than a title trailed by six blank pages. The first three are fairly funny, but not the last three. The stories that are stories have wonderful titles: Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly. The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water. After I was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned. Almost always, there are incidental animals. Sloths that come into hotel rooms to die. Sheep that wander out in front of speeding cars. Shotguns that characters consider fetching in order to shoot down cows by the side of the highway. As much as anything else, the message of this collection might be a loud alarm: WATCH OUT, YOU ANIMALS. These are stories about Pilar or Tom or Rita or a nameless narrator, each of whom arrives in a strange place. Costa Rica or Egypt. Scotland. Bakersfield, Calif. They're meeting someone from home, an old friend, mostly, someone they've never slept with, or maybe they have. Or else the friend has tried to commit suicide by walking off a motel roof. Or maybe there's no friend, just a camel ride among pyramids. Except for one about the dog in the river. The thing to say about the story-stories is that they're full of the raw stuff of lives. The pain and the anger. Emotions that get mixed up and change from one minute to the next. The wonder and the joy. It's all condensed and crafted, worked, that's what fiction is. But it feels raw, and it's exhilarating. That goes for the dog story, too, which is hard to explain, other than to say that it's as good a reason to buy this book as any other I can summon. The fast dog and God story is a marvel. And that's not even getting into how electrically funny Eggers can be. Some of it flows from the neuroses of his frenetic characters. The animals play their part. A lot of it is clear-eyed observation, a taste and an eye for the sublimely ridiculous. There's a healthy measure of pure, preposterous hilarity, some that rises to the standard set by the master preposterer himself, Charles Portis, author of two of the Five Funniest Books Available In English (5FBAE). Eggers can do slapstick, too, which takes talent to render on the page. And there's the precise and surprising play of language. Two examples and I'll leave it there: "I'd been a married man, twice; I'd been a man who turned forty among friends; I'd had pets, jobs in the foreign service, people working for me. Years after all that, somewhere in May, I found myself in Egypt, against the advice of my government, with mild diarrhea and alone." And: "The hotel in Portree had been awarded too many stars—it was well-made and charmless. Twelve different newspapers fanned out on a heavily lacquered table in the drawing room, a robust fire chewing its cereal in the corner, the ceilings were vaulted and the beds canopied, but there was a sickly tint to the lighting, the smell of rain and frustration coming through the walls." —Stephen Smith - - - - Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly: (A-) "The 15 stories in Dave Eggers' handsome new collection, How We Are Hungry, range from droll, plotless two-page stunts to long, haunting character-driven narratives. In the clever one-paragraph 'Naveed,' a young woman frets about sleeping with an attractive man she's brought home because doing so will bring her lifetime total of lovers to a 'baker's dozen' she thinks will surely upset her hypothetical future husband. Eggers is a master of these sharp, silly exercises, but he's capable of much more. In the book's finest, darkest story, 'Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly,' a woman on the cusp of middle age climbs Mount Kilimanjaro, her moods shifting fluidly from joy to regret, exhaustion, boredom, competitiveness, and, ultimately, horror." - - - - Excerpts from John Freeman's review in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Ranging in settings from Tanzania to Scotland, from Egypt to a long, lonely stretch of Interstate 5, these tales reinvigorate that staid old form, the short story, with a jittery sense of adventure. All of Eggers' characters are seekers; most of them are confused about what exactly they're seeking. ... In this sense, Eggers is beginning to resemble this generation's Jack Kerouac." "Like Lorrie Moore in 'Birds of America,' Eggers understands how movement from one place to the next can put us off balance and make us kiss the Blarney Stone out of our own neediness." "The challenge of connection—across nations, across sexes, across
families, or in some cases, across species—animates Eggers to do his best
writing. - - - - The Onion Given Dave Eggers' background in writing, editing, curating, and publishing short fiction and metafiction, it's not surprising that short stories would turn out to be his best fiction milieu. It's only surprising that it's taken him this long to publish his own short-fiction anthology. How We Are Hungry follows Eggers' various McSweeney's compilations and several volumes of the Best American Nonrequired Reading books he edits, but it's his first solo anthology, and it showcases a generally serious writer with a morsel of whimsy mixed into a lot of melancholy. Nearly half of How We Are Hungry's 15 stories are two-page intervals between longer works, but between those palate-cleansing character sketches and the performance-art silence of "There Are Some Things He Should Keep To Himself" (which consists of five blank pages), Eggers lays out a series of narratives about forlorn but determined people who sometimes seem to persist for no other reason than because life carries them forward. In spite of his generally grave subject matter, Eggers is rarely bound by conventional style; his animate and inanimate objects share perfect equality, and bizarrely unregulated metaphors abound. In the slow, incisive portrait "The Only Meaning Of The Oil-Wet Water," animals converse with their shadows, landscape features talk to each other, and the protagonist's tired arm muscles are described as "aching, shuffling their feet, children in museums." In "Quiet," as a needy man pries into a friend's sexual history, he characterizes the information as an unruly guest he's inviting to take up permanent residence in his mind: "He would defecate on my bed. He would shred my clothes, light fires on the walls. I could see him walking up the driveway and I stood at the door, knowing that I'd be a fool to bring him inside. But still I opened the door." The conceptual stretches can be daring to the point of seeming nonsensical. But then, Eggers is most compelling when he's darting out on a stylistic limb, as he does with the hilariously hyperbolic "Your Mother And I," a breezy, charming fantasy about two people improving the world. ("Anyway, we were on a roll, so we got rid of genocide ...") Similarly, "After I Was Thrown In The River And Before I Drowned" fills a dog's unpredictably inhuman point of view with the intensity of a life lived without regrets, leading to an energetic story written without restraint. That lack of regret is otherwise rare among Eggers' lonely, anomie-filled characters, but the unlimited experimentation suffuses How We Are Hungry's sly sketches, making most of them nto minor, colorful revelations. In his novel You Shall Know Our Velocity, Eggers struggled to find a functional format that would carry a full-length story. In his short work, he plays with format and content alike, and the results are as remarkable as they are intrepid. —Tasha Robinson - - - - Newcity Chicago If you believe in the short story, the real short story, then you're halfway there. A story can be a paragraph or eighty pages long and deliver the same seizing crescendo of a monstrous text. Even if a collection of shorts doesn't have the power of a Raymond Chandler assembly or the bittersweet hilarity of life like Salinger's "Nine Stories," there's still a hovering mystery that surrounds individual stories crammed together for release. Much like tracking a record album, it's all a matter of pacing and timing, ambition and restraint. Dave Eggers didn't change the world of fiction with "You Shall Know Our Velocity," his follow-up to the uber-popular "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," though it can be said that "Velocity" stays intriguing even when Eggers rolls the dice. Now he presents "How We Are Hungry," a collection of shorts he's written over the last five years or so. Some of them have appeared elsewhere, like in Zoetrope or The New Yorker, but the majority are brand new tales, and after the first few stories it's apparent that this book is the best thing he's been a part of in a long while, a return to creative form that his following must have been longing for. He can get caught up in his own cleverness, something even he could admit to, but most of his new ideas flow smoothly through the pages and prolonged sentences. As always, Eggers finds his place between outrageous humor and disastrous sadness, and his settings span the globe. Titles like "After I Was Thrown in a River and Before I Drowned" and "Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance" reveal plots of utter physical or mental breakdown, and much like the rest of the collection, don't quit resonating until long after the last sentence is finished. In "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water," God threatens the ocean with annihilation, but the ocean responds defensively: "You have no idea what's happened to me." In a lot of ways, we still don't know everything that's happened to Eggers, but we're starting to find out. —Tom Lynch - - - - The Philadelphia City Paper While some story collections forsake the everyday for the exotic, Dave Eggers' How We Are Hungry finds meaning in the back yards of America as easily as amidst the surf of Costa Rica—with the revelation that sometimes, the heaviest things we carry on a journey are our own thoughts. Eggers uses imagined and internal dialogue to convey the effort of thinking. "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" captures in two printed pages the exhausting anxiety of being confronted with disturbing events half a world away events the man in the story cannot control, but which affect him powerfully. In "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly," characters learn that ruminating can be as dangerous as hypothermia on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. Many of the stories are linked by an underlying theme of doing good and the terrible burden of caring. It is a theme that Eggers has explored before; sometimes it feels novel, while other times it feels like martyrdom—much as it seems to the characters themselves. These tales challenge the reader to action, as the central characters subtly (and not so subtly, in the case of the dog in "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned") pass judgment on those who do not do, even as the doers are not happier for the doing (again, with the exception of the dog). The book's design is reminiscent of the travel journals carried by Hemingway and others (faux leather cover, placeholder tassel, elastic closure), and the voyages contained within are well worth the trip. Its potential for inspiration and discussion, not to mention the nifty packaging, make How We Are Hungry a perfect book for a resolution-making time of year. —Jesse Delaney - - - - In This Collection - - - - "Another" (previously unpublished) "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" (first published in the U.K. Guardian) "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water" (first published in Zoetrope: All-Story) "On Wanting to Have Three Walls Up Before She Gets Home" (first published in the U.K. Guardian) "Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance" (first published in The New Yorker) "She Waits, Seething, Blooming" (first published in the U.K. Guardian) "Quiet" (previously unpublished) "Your Mother and I" (first published by Downtown for Democracy) "Naveed" (first published in the U.K. Guardian) "Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone" (published in Ninth Letter) "About the Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her" (first published in the U.K. Guardian) "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly" (published in McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales) "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned" (published in Nick Hornby's Speaking with the Angel collection) Many of the previously published stories - - - - To order How We Are Hungry,
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