How We Are Hungry - Dave Eggers

How We Are Hungry is a gripping, lyrical and soulful collection of stories from the acclaimed author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Ranging from a doomed Irish setter's tales of running and jumping ("After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned") to a bitterly comic meditation on suicide and friendship ("Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance"), and from the Egyptian desert to the asphalt of Interstate 5, these stories are Eggers at his finest. By turns devastating, clear-eyed and funn
- incredibly funny - this collection is a marvel.

Dave Eggers is the author of six previous books, includingZeitoun, winner of the American Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.What Is the Whatwas a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award and won France'sPrix Medici. That book, about Valentino Achak Deng, a survivor of the civil war in Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which operates a secondary school in South Sudan run by Mr. Deng. Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco that produces a quarterly journal, a monthly magazine,The Believer, and an oral history series, Voice of Witness. In 2002, with Nnive Calegari he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Boston and Washington, DC, and similar centers now exist in London (the Ministry of Stories), Dublin (Fighting Words) and in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Melbourne, and many other cities. A native of Chicago, Eggers now lives in Northern California with his wife and two children.

"These tales reinvigorate that staid old form, the short story, with a jittery sense of adventure.... Eggers does things that should be impossible, and he does them gracefully."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"Beautiful stories, anchored in the real world…. How We Are Hungry looks like a classic."
-The Oregonian

"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."
-The New York Times Book Review

"Electrically 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."
-The Globe and Mail

"There's plenty in this collection to remind us that, for all his noodling around, Eggers is phenomenally talented."
-Washington Post

"[The story '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 (UK)

"'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 vigour and genuine emotion."
-The New York Times