Product Description

"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"

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #101110 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-11
• Released on: 2005-10-11
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Look carefully at the black, dust-jacketless cover of Dave Eggers's mixed bag of a short-story collection, How We Are Hungry, and you'll see the engraved image of a gryphon, the mythological animal with the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle. It's the sort of thing that barely registers before you've begun reading. But after you've turned the last page and closed the book, there it is again -- and suddenly this hybrid beast, famed as much for its vigilant nest-tending as for its love of gold, seems a particularly apt symbol for the other unusual creatures about whom you've just read.

Animals, especially imperiled animals, make ominous cameos in nearly all of these stories. There's the wounded anteater who crashes the hotel room of two old friends, both of whom seem willing to sacrifice their friendship for a few nights of banal, artificial romance. There are the thousands of cows whose imprisonment in a beef-processing plant haunts a young man, himself imprisoned by a relative's blithe and repeated attempts at suicide. There's the sheep struck and killed on the road by a driver rendered temporarily insane with unfocused, diabolical jealousy. And in the last and most curious story, there's a chatty talking dog named Steven, who narrowly survives being thrown in a river and commits the remainder of his spared life to running, eating and playing with maximum gusto.

None of these endangered species, of course, can match the inglorious hominid biped when it comes to putting itself in harm's way. People are naturally included in Eggers's bestiary, represented as slow-moving animals whose hubris and thick-headedness combine to make them objects, most often, of pity and scorn. But every now and then, by virtue of almost accidentally manifesting a glimmer of the divine, they are redeemed. It's this tension between our base and noble impulses, our so-called animal and refined natures, that gives How We Are Hungry its momentum and imparts to the best of its stories a rare and welcome grace.

Unfortunately there's another kind of tension at work here: the tension between Dave Eggers the writer and Dave Eggers the spokesman for a particular type of self-conscious, stylized ennui. In the former role, he is gifted beyond doubt -- a fact to which anyone who was moved by A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, his Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir of raising his younger brother after the sudden death of their parents, will attest. And his debut novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, proved that he could extract genuine poignancy from the lives of wayward twentysomethings -- despite his memoir's famous disclaimer, in which he admitted that their lives "are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seem interesting to those living them at the time."

But in his other role, as the puckish avatar of post-collegiate irony, Eggers can be cloying. It was probably just a matter of time before the playful narrative subversiveness marking his earlier work (as well as McSweeney's, the smart literary journal he founded) culminated in something like "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself," a title followed by five blank pages. When John Cage introduced a silent composition or when Robert Rauschenberg painted his famous white canvases, they were curious about how audience interaction would necessarily affect the performance or the display. It doesn't work on the printed page, though, where the audience is unlikely to participate in quite the same way. It ends up feeling like a prank -- an honors student's prank, perhaps, but still a prank.

There are other moments of distracting self-consciousness in How We Are Hungry. "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water," a story that reprises a character from Eggers's novel, is riddled with the kind of authorial intrusions -- such as directly addressing readers to inform them what's salient and what's not -- that once made John Barth's short stories seem revolutionary but now seem precious. And every so often there appears a two-page story, a relic from the mercifully dormant "short-short fiction" fad that erupted some years ago; here they are little more than voice exercises, serving chiefly to illustrate how eminently reasonable Aristotle was to request that tales have a discernible beginning, middle and end.

Happily, there's plenty in this collection to remind us that, for all his noodling around, Eggers is phenomenally talented -- maybe uniquely so for such a young writer. His knack for humanizing the walking, talking demographics that are Generation X and Generation Y is on full display in a story like "Quiet," one of two in which wires clearly marked eros and agape become messily crossed -- in this instance, with violent results. In "Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance," a young man who believes he's unable to give any more of himself to a needy friend discovers, to his chagrin, that his fundamental goodness obligates him to do so.

True to his book's title, Eggers has made his task here an exploration of the different ways our behavior is determined by hunger -- for intimacy and connection, to be sure, but more generally for any kind of transcendence, however momentary. In "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly," the longest and most conventionally rewarding of these stories, a young woman climbs Kilimanjaro but is able to revel in her superhuman triumph only briefly before tumbling back down to earth, where tangled vines of poverty and social standing are still very firmly rooted.

But Eggers doesn't fault her for trying. Like the gryphon, she's a beautiful mutant: half of her fearful and heavy, the other half aching to fly heavenward. In the end, the author has an extraordinary animal give the final word on the meaning of life, the nature of God and the value of staying hungry. Not many young writers can pull off a benediction from a talking dog. Dave Eggers, it seems, is one of them.

Reviewed by Jeff Turrentine
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
In this collection, Eggers (Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) is obviously straddling the line between being a writer—and a very talented one at that—and being the spokesman for the new age of self-conscious writing. Reviewers are unanimously unhappy with a few of his literary pranks here. "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself," for example, offers up five blank pages. But when Eggers throws off our expectations and starts writing, he shines. His longer stories are original, witty, and truthful. As his characters search for transcendence, Eggers and his readers are right there with them.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
In his first collection of short stories, Eggers shows himself to be, well, serious. Gone is the charming, smirky, self-conscious narrative voice that helped make A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (1999) so popular. Aside from the story "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself," which consists of five blank pages, these short stories are unrelentingly sincere--sometimes too much so. Many of these stories feature Americans abroad--a man alone in Egypt, a woman (also alone) in Tanzania preparing to climb Kilimanjaro. In the collection's best story, "The Only Meaning of Oil-Wet Water," two old friends reunite in Costa Rica for a kind of loveless love affair. The accumulation of details--surfing together in the oil-wet water, an injured anteater in their hotel room--brings the story a haunting power. But some of the stories don't come together as well, and Eggers' fans may be disappointed that almost none crack a smile. Still, Eggers imagines emotionally and symbolically resonant scenes as well as any of his contemporaries, and this collection has several great ones. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Comparison
This is an excellent collection of short stories. Compare lethal injection with stoning. Imagine a love relationship. The relationship makes everything brighter, more clear. It confers a sort of emancipation.

In one of the stories Rita is in Tanzania with a large purple backpack. She was supposed to travel with her sister Gwen, but Gwen became pregnant. Rita feels that she has always been tormented by Gwen's thoughtfulness. She is one of five paying hikers in the climbing party among numerous porters. She climbs to the top and descends successfully.

Very human and subtly beautiful
Dave Eggers has a way of capturing the most simplistically beautiful moments of human existence and conveying them masterfully and subtly through his writing, so that when you read his work you feel elated and inspired without knowing exactly why, much as when these simple, beautiful moments occur in life. When we get caught up in a moment of emotion, when we lose control and overcome our social inhibitions and truly experience the beauty of life - these moments, these feelings are at the core of Eggers's work. The stories in this book capture different moments such as these, and while if read one at a time and apart from each other they convey somewhat anecdotal experiences, together they form a beautiful painting of life in all its purest moments. After closing this book, I felt as if I gained something. On the downside, however, a few of the stories really aren't worth much on their own, particularly the first in the collection, "Another," which may turn new readers away. I'm not sure if I would be as dissatisfied with it if it appeared later in the collection, however, because after reading a number of these stories you begin to gain a feeling for the picture each collectively convey, whether they work alone or not. On the other hand, some of the stories do work apart from the others, particularly "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly," "Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance" and "Quiet." In other words, I can appreciate the aforementioned stories as works in and of themselves, while others, "Another" and "What It Means..." for example, I can only truly appreciate as less significant parts of the collection as an entirety, ones that I am glad are there but would not particularly miss if they were left out. Taken together, the stories have a definite flow to them, and reading this book is truly a worthwhile experience - though some parts seem insignificant or anecdotal at first, together they form something very human and subtly beautiful.

A fine collection
I have been reading a lot of what I think is undue criticism about Dave Eggers How We Are Hungry. Though I can agree with many points, the fact still remains that Eggers is an exciting and wildly talented writer. The stories "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly" and "After I was Thrown in the River but Before I Drowned" are both masterful and prove that Eggers can turn just about anything into an engaging, funny, and (often) heartbreaking narrative. However, the overall quality of this book is ultimately detracted by some of the weaker stories ("The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water," "Quiet," and several of the shorter ones), yet this is not to suggest that this book isn't worth reading, or rewarding. It is. Yet, not unlike AHWOSG, this collection struggles through large sections that feel half-baked, and could do well to be edited out ("Real World" self interview, anyone?) Recommended.