Eggers has founded a magazine and a publishing house, funded a wide range of youth-literacy programs through his 826 Valencia center, and co-directed an oral history program called Voice of Witness, focused on permitting survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuse to tell their stories. Among various other things, Voice of Witness sparked "Zeitoun," Eggers' latest nonfiction volume. You couldn't write a book more different from "Heartbreaking Work" if you tried. Like his 2006 novel "What Is the What," which was based on the life of a Sudanese refugee, this is a work of testimony, and almost of ventriloquism.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

But the excitement stirred by the McSweeney's e-mail had less to do with the booty on offer than with the alarming news that McSweeney's needed to raise money at all. For fans, and for those who follow book-trade news, the e-mail raised the possibility that the much-beloved publisher could become another casualty of a bankruptcy saga that has engulfed the independent-publishing world for six months.

Continue Reading...

"What Is the What" by Dave Eggers

The unusual provenance of this novel -- Eggers has written it in the first-person voice of a real man, Valentino Achak Deng, and all of the events in the story are true, although not all of them happened to Deng -- is complicated. The result is sublime simplicity, the ego-less conveyance by Eggers of Deng's plain-spoken, gentle, world-weary but never hopeless voice. One of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Deng saw his village destroyed by Arab militiamen as a little boy and fled alone into a chaotic landscape before joining a troupe of similarly dispossessed boys on an epic journey on foot to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. Hunger, thirst, lions, crocodiles and soldiers on both sides of Sudan's civil war harried all of them and killed some. Deng finally made it to the promised land of America, but we know from the start that it proved to be no paradise. The novel's framing device -- Deng imagines telling his life story to thieves who beat and bind him while robbing his house and to the jaded officials who deal with the crime's aftermath -- is inspired; instead of making him pitiful, this silent appeal emphasizes Deng's remarkable, ineradicable dignity.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Whole books were dedicated to denouncing this trend and the master's of fine arts writing programs that were accused of popping out graduates who in turn popped out minimalist stories like a chain of identical and tasteless breakfast sausages. The days of minimalism's preeminence, if it ever truly had that, are gone, but the habit of raising a hue and cry about the state of contemporary fiction has proven addictive. We read different kinds of novels now, and so we have a different sort of critic to denounce them.

Continue Reading...

Peck charges on for almost 6,000 words from there, flogging every misused dash and antecedent-less pronoun in two paragraphs from Moody's memoir "The Black Veil"; calling the book "lies" and "criminal," and then extending his fuck-you to the horse Moody rode in on. Peck lashes Moody together with Davids Foster Wallace and Eggers, Jonathans Franzen and Lethem, and assorted other Lit Boys as "heirs to the bankrupt tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is 'Ulysses'; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov ... the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis ... wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's ... and the stupid -- just plain stupid -- tomes of DeLillo."

Continue Reading...

A 17-year-old with a memoir?

A 17-year-old with a $100,000 advance to write the memoir?

A memoir blurbed by Dave Eggers ("Zoe Trope's book is unflinching") and Jonathan Safran Foer ("I'm in awe of Zoe Trope").

Well, yes.

It's been a busy few years for Zoe, and she's trying to keep a modicum of privacy in Portland: She won't allow pictures of her face to be used in the press, and she won't give out her last name or the names of her parents, older brother, or high school. "So much of it has to do with my age," she says about her decision to remain anonymous. "I didn't want people to know where I lived or where I went to school and bother me or my friends." But she doesn't kid herself. "It's really terribly easy to figure it out," she says. "Redheads named Zoe in my city? Not that many."

Continue Reading...

Hmmm ... we heard that Playboy is going back to the old days when they'd lure famous women onto their covers. Does this count? "Joe Millionaire" runner-up Sarah Kozer is the June cover babe, wearing a crotch-length white skirt, with top hat and cleavage as accessories. Unlike her behavior on the Joe show, this time she was coy, waiting until the third time the mag asked. And even then, she agreed only if they promised there'd be no full-frontal nudity. After all, she said, "I was a women's studies major." So that's why she was so good at making Evan Marriott happy in the woods! (MSNBC)

Continue Reading...

And for campaign spokesman, please consider James Frey, the rising author who has, in effect, done the thing he swore never to do: He has traded in one addiction for another. That is, he has written a ballsy, bone-deep memoir about coming off drugs -- titled "A Million Little Pieces" -- which he is now promoting with such hopped-up, synthetically fueled mania that reading his interviews becomes a form of retox.

"A Million Little Pieces" has all the hallmarks of a Publishing Event. An eye-grabbing cover: the Buñuellian image of a human hand sheathed in micro-pills. A movie-ready subject: the near-death spiral and phoenixlike rebirth of a rich suburban kid. (Boy, Interrupted.) A string of high-profile blurbers: Pat Conroy, Bret Easton Ellis, Gus Van Sant. And, most telling of all, a publicity Anschluss, engineered by Random House's genteel Nan Talese imprint.

Continue Reading...

Already, the power of the Believer is strong.

The magazine, as has been reported elsewhere, is the brainchild of novelist Heidi Julavits, author of "The Mineral Palace," and Vendela Vida, who wrote the female rites-of-passage investigation "Girls on the Verge," and is, not incidentally, Dave Eggers' fiancée.

Continue Reading...

On the other hand, Eggers is a hero to writers. At least, he's a hero to me, bucking his publishers, firing his agents, demanding this and that as he travels around -- I love the guy. It's a reliable measure of his ego, I guess, that when he formed his own publishing company he called it "McSweeney's Books" and not "Eggers' Books," and that his foundation to teach writing to underprivileged children in San Francisco -- where he lives, damn it -- isn't called "The Eggers Project" but "826 Valencia," after its address. I doubt I'd have the energy to do what Eggers does even if I weren't twice his age, or feeling like it when I look at his résumé.

Continue Reading...

"I asked her what name she wanted and she was really firm that she wanted Jennifer Pitt," Los Angeles artist Claudia Laub told Britain's Heat magazine.

Though she's kept her maiden name professionally, Aniston was reported to have changed the name on her driver's license to Pitt not long after the couple's wedding, more than a year ago.

And Laub's professional opinion is that Pitt's name may well be permanently engraved on Aniston's heart.

How does she know? It's all in the cards.

"Most people start with 100 cards," Laub says. "I think the fact that she ordered 250 says she's not letting this one go."

Either that or she owes a lot of people notes.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Misdiagnosis

"I never thought the show would last."

-- Sherry Stringfield on "ER," to which she has returned after five years off, in Self.

Continue Reading...

Melanie Griffith has checked into a Los Angeles clinic to be treated for an addiction to painkillers. It all started with a pain in the neck.

"My doctor has referred me to the Daniel Freeman Hospital in California. I'm in a step down program from the prescribed medication that I have been taking for a neck injury," Griffith said in a message addressed "to all my friends" and posted Tuesday on her (unbelievably cheesy) Web site. "I want to thank you for being so supportive ... and for the love and respect you are showing my family and me. With love and appreciation, Melanie."

Griffith has been through rehab before, for drug and alcohol problems back in the '80s.

Now if only there were a 12-step program for overly breathy voices ...

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Blowing the blooming budget

"Yes, I like flowers."

Continue Reading...

You see, I am no longer accustomed to reading book-length works. While I once devoured three or four books per week, it now takes all the energy I can muster to get through my weekly ration of New Republics, New Yorkers and Newsweeks. I confess that I read Mr. Eggers' very fine new book as I might a magazine, i.e., skipping around, perversely reading from back to front, reading as I fell asleep in bed after taking two Xanaxes. I read chapters out of order, took no notes and in a moment of panic skimmed several chapters for my own name (which, to my relief, I did not find). And I may have inadvertently overlooked a chapter. Readers should bear all of this in mind and remember that this book review, like all book reviews, is merely one person's opinions. In my case, these opinions were arrived at under other-than-ideal circumstances.

Continue Reading...

In the past month, the editor of McSweeney's, a literary quarterly that even Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham thinks is hip, and the author of a "memoir-y kind of thing" called "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," has been interviewed by the New York Times, the Village Voice, Time magazine and assorted publications too numerous to mention.

Michiko Kakutani, the famously cantankerous New York Times book reviewer, has agreed that Eggers' talent is "staggering," as have writers David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, David Sedaris and David Remnick (who published an excerpt of his book in the New Yorker under the title of "Here Come the Orphans!" earlier this year.) His readings are standing room only, the new issue of McSweeney's sells out as soon as it arrives (shipping is rather slow, as Eggers decided to have them printed in Iceland), and even his publisher ran out of review copies of the book a week before its publication date.

Continue Reading...