Books by Dave Eggers
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review 1: Glad to be done with this wretched book. The writing is great, yes, but the content was too disturbing and/or depressing for my tastes. I kept reading, hoping for at least one uplifting, feel-good tale, but it never came (except for maybe The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador, ...
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review 1: I truly enjoyed reading about this inside account of one family's experience through Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath. The book really gives a lot of insight about the chaos that happened after the storm and how people behave in the midst of chaos. However hearing about the f...
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review 1: This story still haunts me. It is transforming in it's eery dystopian view of what a hyper-social media intensive world could turn into. Eggers follows one girl's struggle with her privacy that is slowly eroded by a Google/Apple/Facebook (fill in your own feared internet empire) ...
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review 1: I am a huge fan of this series of anthologies, and some years are incredible, some hit-or-miss, and others are just meh. This would be one of those meh years. However, that being said, I have never not read a single volume from this series and not been touched, had thoughts prov...
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review 1: I really enjoyed this volume of Nonrequired and felt like it was one of the better ones I have read. Almost every piece of fiction and nonfiction was varying degrees of good or awesome. That is actually somewhat unusual with compilations since usually the variety in stories lea...
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review 1: Most of the fiction pieces left me feeling cold and unresolved - they often seemed to have no conclusion or central point. But the nonfiction selections are almost universally fascinating and well written. Worth reading for those alone. Many of them are available elsewhere for fr...
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review 1: Many good stories - not too many funny ones this time. Either people are writing fewer quirky, humorous stories - or the team of folks picking the stories have become more serious in focus. Quite a few stories from a Hispanic perspective - the one on Cuba was really good. Anot...
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review 1: McSweeeney's Issue 38 like the other quarterlies is a really unique collection of short stories, essays, and usually other different types of story types. This issue contains a very special essay though titled The special Populations Unit: Arab Soldiers in Israel's Army by Chanan...
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review 1: Dave Eggers fills The Circle with shallow characters and bland dialog, and I know that Eggers can dive much deeper. So I tell myself that the characters and their words simply mirror the shallow world they inhabit--that Eggers is doing this very purposefully. The premise that dri...
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review 1: My first David Eggers read. I will read more. Alan is a 50-something guy with debts, baggage, and a lump on his neck that he's pretty sure is cancer. He works in sales for a large US-based IT company and is in Saudi Arabia to, essentially, sell a hologram to the king. For mos...
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review 1: I thought it was a very nice collection and was particularly enthralled by an essay of Kurt Vonnegut prose lines. But my favorite piece in the whole book was the piece Pearls Before Breakfast by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post about the time in 2007 that violinist Joshua B...
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review 1: I love this series. This one just as enjoyable as any of the others. I was a bit disappointed with Part I (which usually is just a section of funny, anecdotal-ish blurbs on this or that), but this time was mostly comprised of articles on or related to Occupy Wall Street. I though...
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review 1: A few years ago I stopped reading this series because I had reached a point in my life where I was tired of reading so damn much. The stories of that year's BANR didn't interest me at all but I attribute it to my jaded attitude towards reading. I just picked this up and didn't th...
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review 1: I didn't actually finish this. It was a bit to eclectic to keep my interest. I picked it up because of both the involvement of David Sedaris, and because I was on a short story kick at the time. But, I didn't like bouncing between arbitrary lists of slogans, comics, and sound ...
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review 1: I love the Non-Required Reading series. If you want to spend several hours learning about random things you have never heard of, but that are completely fascinating, this book is for you. The 2008 edition features lists of Kurt Vonnegut Quotes, Ron Paul Facts, and Things This G...
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review 1: This is the first issue of McSweeney's to come out after Bush's presidency and the cover says it all - REJOICE! followed by "It's too late to screw it all up, right?" on the first page. Ah, McSweeney's. A note about the design because McSweeney's has a reputation for innovative d...
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review 1: One of the coolest McSweeney's issues ever! Consists of eight small, thin hardback books--each a modern fable--that combine to make two paintings, one layered on top of the other, all held in place by little elastic bands. Very creative.It was a quick read, due to each book's sho...
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review 1: I was intrigued by this issues concept: unearthing lost forms of literature and having modern writers create their own take on them. Unfortunately, the idea is stronger than the material, though much of this is borne of the constraints of the genres, not the quality of the writin...
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review 1: McSweeney's 33 takes the form of a one shot newspaper called The San Francisco Panorama, about the size of a sunday paper. Besides the news section (brief), you get sections of investigative reportage, a sports section, a food section, a book review magazine, another magazine of ...
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review 1: A lot of good stuff -- a nice story from Colm Toibin, a great brief excerpt selected by Paul Collins, an interesting play by Wajahat Ali, and a creepy box, among other things -- but the five stars are for the Michael Chabon booklet.It's the first four chapters of Fountain City, t...
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review 1: More a 2.5. I didn't really enjoy this issue. The non-fiction was interesting and provided an odd comparison between the uprising in Egypt and whatever the hell the doomed Occupy Protests achieved, mostly because there were essays about both.The fiction mostly wasn't my cup of ...
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review 1: This is a collection of 'crime' stories from several Latin American countries. Few if any of the authors will be familiar to American readers, although a couple have novels translated into English (e.g. Alejandro Zambra). In several stories, it was hard to figure out what the cr...
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review 1: McSweeney's 43 is another fantastic collection of short fiction and nonfiction. My favorite story from this collection was TC Boyle's "Burning Bright," a piece filled with foreboding and a slow-building dread. There's also a great essay by a young woman whose father was caught up...