Dave Eggers has a new collection of short stories out titled How We Are Hungry. I picked up signed copy at ACWLP in San Francisco last week, and am just starting to read through it. I recognized some of the stories from their previous incarnations in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and the Nick Hornby-edited collection Speaking With the Angel. John Freeman praised Eggers’ book in The San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday. Here is a brief excerpt from his review:
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. In “The Only Meaning of Oil-Wet Water,” a woman flies down to Costa Rica to figure out whether her friend Hand (who reappears from “Velocity”) is a lover or merely a friend. It’s a heartbreaking little story because — if you’re the kind of person who takes time seriously — it reminds you how many near misses you have when searching for the One. What do you do with all those moments so indelibly remembered?
And here is where Eggers takes his writing to a whole new level. In “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” Eggers’ grief over his parents’ deaths was fried in a vat of irony; in contrast, these stories are raw, unfiltered but have the same quivering texture of lived experience.