How We Are Hungry - by Dave Eggers (Paperback)

About the Book

Eggers presents his first collection of short stories. The characters are roaming, searching, and often struggling, and revelations do not always arrive on schedule. Precisely crafted and boldly experimental, "How We Are Hungry" simultaneously embraces and expands the boundaries of the short story.

Book Synopsis

In this "tour de force" (New York Times Book Review), the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of The Circle demonstrates his mastery of the short story.

"These tales reinvigorate ... the short story with a jittery sense of adventure." --San Francisco Chronicle

Including the 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"
"After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"

Review Quotes

"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

"A tour de force. . . . [Eggers'] prose is supple, transparent and surprising." --The New York Times Book Review

"The man can simply write extraordinarily well. . . . How We Are Hungry is a triumph of both form and content. . . . Dave Eggers is the real thing." --The Guardian (London)

"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." --The Oregonian

"It's [the] tension between our base and noble impulses, our so-called animal and refined natures, that gives How We Are Hungry its momentum. . . . Eggers is phenomenally talented--maybe uniquely so." --The Washington Post

"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, working, that's what fiction is. But it feels raw, and it's exhilarating. . . . And that's not even getting into how electrically funny Eggers can be." --The Globe and Mail

"'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." --The New York Times

"Haunting character-driven narratives. . . . Eggers is a master." --Entertainment Weekly

"['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)

"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." --Salon

"There's stunning writing here. Subtle, epigrammatic, candid and thoughtful." --Herald (London)

"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." --The Philadelphia City Paper

"As always, Eggers finds his place between outrageous humor and disastrous sadness. . . . [His stories] don't quit resonating until long after the last sentence is finished." --Newcity Chicago

"It's not surprising that short stories would turn out to be [Eggers'] best fiction milieu. . . . He plays with format and content alike, and the results are as remarkable as they are intrepid." --The Onion

"[These] stories and sequences . . . move and disturb in unexpected, even shocking ways." --Times Literary Supplement (U.K.)

"If all writing had the sense of moral purpose Eggers displays, the world would be a sharper, livelier place." --The Journal News

About the Author

DAVE EGGERS is the author of many books, among them The Circle, The Eyes and the Impossible, The Monk of Mokha, A Hologram for the King, What Is the What, and The Museum of Rain. He is the cofounder of 826 Valencia, a youth writing and tutoring center which has inspired dozens of similar nonprofit organizations around the world, and the founder of McSweeney's, an independent publisher. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is the recipient of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, and the American Book Award.