How We Are Hungry

Dave eggers is easily one of the most approachable authors alive today. Filled with wit and humor, it is likely any infrequent reader would fall in love with him. However, underneath this vail of seducing the illiterate, is an author who crafts stories so original and beautiful and full of meaning, that I'm convinced everyone would love his work, and this book specifically. That said, "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned" is, to me, one of the best short stories I have ever come across. It has everyhting a good story needs, and though maybe not ALL the stories in here are for everyone, surely people will find a story they love and identify so strongly with, as I have.

Dave Eggers is a great writer. Some like to say he's too ironic. Others like to say he's too sincere. And that's because he's both ironic and sincere, which makes him a paradox, and also makes him easy to misunderstand, willfully or not. And really, what we're talking about here is not Dave Eggers, but the man's writing. Remember that. Eggers' writing is ironic and sincere and beautiful and well-crafted, and it is challenging. Which means that it might not be what you think it is at first glance, even when you like it right away. Eggers has a great mind. And he has an expansive eye for detail, for characters and flaws and very real absurdities, and for the joys and pains of life. For that I thank him.

I loved the story I read from this collection in the Best Magazine Writing of 2003 because the sentences were Nabokovian. Who knew surfing could be described with sentences that make you want to cry? But reading this collection I see that Dave Eggers is up to more than pretty sentences. His stories are timely and, many of them, allegorical. They resemble George Saunders's work in that they, too, create a mirror that reflects our human condition and political situation more clearly than we were able to see it before.

Dave Eggers has always been too clever by half, and often that resulted in prose getting in the way of plot. Short stories, therefore, are the perfect medium for him, as he can dazzle with words without being bound to develop characters or advance a story (although the few longer stories in the book are surprisingly good). There's not a dud in the book; I'd love to see him publish another volume.

Just when I thought I knew what to expect from the short story or from the yawn-inducing term "short story collection," Eggers's new book came along and blew me away. The stories vary in length (some are a paragraph) and location (Egypt, Costa Rica). Some have no words at all (that should keep you guessing). But each of them is full of invention and beauty, humor and concern, joy and hunger. You don't get the feeling when reading this book, as you do with other collections, that certain stories were inserted just to pad out the pages. Each one is a surprise and stands on its own as a beautiful object. And the collection raises the bar for other short story writers. My vote for the best collection of the year. Hands down.