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1.What Is the What (Vintage) by: Dave Eggers October 09, 2007
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $15.95 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $10.85 You Save: $5.10 (32%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $7.77
Dave Eggers' writing is superb and really allows the voice of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Sudanese Lost Boys, to really come out. It's a very touching story and gives you a view on a part of Africa most people know nothing about.

2.A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering by: Dave Eggers February 13, 2001
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: $0.33
This book is so unimaginably bad that the only way its title's words have any relevance is if they are applied to negatives. Fortunately, I borrowed the book from my mother-in-law and did not help enrich this pr-drenched hack. Genius fails both of my factors for memoir excellence by a ton. His life, if truly represented in the memoir, is dull, self-pitying, and self-aggrandizing. His is the archetypal life of `quiet desperation' gone Madison Avenue. In short, his life is neither interesting nor important. Worse, though, is that he is not even a passable prosist. And it's not because he's stretching forms, nor anything near-Joycean, it's that he simply cannot write a compelling sentence, much less a compelling narrative. I am not a believer in Chicken Littleism, that all was better yester, for things ... Read More

3.The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 (The Best American Series (TM)) from: Houghton Mifflin October 10, 2007
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $14.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $11.20 You Save: $2.80 (20%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $1.65
Meh. The idea for Best American Nonrequired Reading is interesting: take a group of bright high school students, have them read everything published during the year, and let them decide what is to be included in the book. Essays, short stories, non-fiction articles, comics - as long as it can fit in 20 pages, it's fair game. Maybe this was a good book; maybe other people would really enjoy reading it. I didn't, mostly. Maybe it's the sort of book that you need to leave next to your reading chair and dip into periodically over a period of weeks. But as a cover-to-cover read it became tedious less than halfway through. I did enjoy the introduction by Dave Eggers, and Conan O'Brian's Stuyvesant High commencement speech was fun. Other than that, there were a couple articles that were vaguely interesting, ... Read More

4.The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008 (Best American Nonrequired Reading) from: Houghton Mifflin October 08, 2008
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $14.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $11.20 You Save: $2.80 (20%) Prices subject to change. Used Price:
Meh. The idea for Best American Nonrequired Reading is interesting: take a group of bright high school students, have them read everything published during the year, and let them decide what is to be included in the book. Essays, short stories, non-fiction articles, comics - as long as it can fit in 20 pages, it's fair game. Maybe this was a good book; maybe other people would really enjoy reading it. I didn't, mostly. Maybe it's the sort of book that you need to leave next to your reading chair and dip into periodically over a period of weeks. But as a cover-to-cover read it became tedious less than halfway through. I did enjoy the introduction by Dave Eggers, and Conan O'Brian's Stuyvesant High commencement speech was fun. Other than that, there were a couple articles that were vaguely interesting, ... Read More

5.You Shall Know Our Velocity by: Dave Eggers July 01, 2003
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $14.95 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $10.17 You Save: $4.78 (32%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $1.90
slight spoliers perhaps below Having just finished Eggers' first novel (the majority of it in one ravenous sitting), I find it lingering urgently in my mind. This sort of intensity is, after all, what the entire book is about. Will, our narrator, is in his mid-twenties and already dragging a psychological mountain around; he is an intensely introspective and wise (though weary) soul which the untimely death of his friend more than helped to accelerate. More than anything, Will is someone who doesn't know what to do anymore, his life has no real sense of direction. He talks about wanting everything (spending a summer learning to be a white water rafting instructor, and other wild lives perhaps appealing to a young man), but all the possibility being more paralyzing than anything: "...for so long I've wanted ... Read More

6.McSweeney's Issue 28 (Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern) from: McSweeney's September 01, 2008
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $24.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $16.32 You Save: $7.68 (32%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $16.47
I'm a relative newcomer to McSweeneys, having started reading about McSweeneys 25 or so. As far as literature periodicals go, it's one of the most consistent and the best in terms of writing craft and interesting stories. This latest one, like so many others, is full of interesting stories in an attractive, unique box with puzzle-matching individual books for each story. The issue is dedicated to fables, and they're all really good. They range from surreal to quite classical. The thing is, though, the eight stories in this collection are all really short, and even with taking the time to read the foreward inside the cover of the case and look at the different illustrations (most of which are fantastic), this edition doesn't take very long to get through. I don't want to stress quantity all that much, because frankly McSweeneys ... Read More

7.Henderson the Rain King by: Saul Bellow April 28, 2009
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $15.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $10.20 You Save: $4.80 (32%) Prices subject to change. Used Price:
The grade reflects my enjoyment rather than the underlying value of this book, which is reputedly a major work by a Nobelist that may well say important things about nineteen-fifties America naively throwing its weight around in the developing world. But I find the title character, a fiftyish millionaire, to be a boor and a blowhard, despite his odd scraps of knowledge and unexpected areas of competence. Yes, he could be a fine comic character if you happen to like him (and you should know after a chapter or so), but I personally resent spending that amount of time with his discursive reflections. And the African country to which he journeys (taking half the book to get there) is as artificial a construct as the locale of Rider Haggard's SHE, so that the improbably eloquent English-speaking King Dahfu who engages Henderson in long philosophical ... Read More

8.Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney's Humor Category from: Vintage June 14, 2005
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $12.95 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $10.36 You Save: $2.59 (20%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $2.68
...Eric J. Baur "Internet Consumer" (for which, see below on the reviews page). Holy mother of comedy, Batman! Could a 'humor' anthology be any less humorous? I'll position myself slightly to the left(?) of Baur and say, I thought there was more than just one worthy entry in this volume, but no more than half a handful. And by 'worthy', I don't mean in the sense that they were laugh-out-loud funny, but that they prompted a giggle or two -- moments of almost ecstatic relief in an otherwise completely dreary reading experience. On the other hand, I'll position myself slightly to the right(?) of Baur and say, much as I, too, despise new-SNL, I'd rather be forced -- Clockwork Orange-style -- to watch new-SNL skit after unending skit -- than be forced to read more Egger picks from the McSweeney's humor archives. Suggestions ... Read More

9.One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box: Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, How the Water Feels to the Fishes, and Minor Robberies by: Dave Eggers, Sarah Manguso, Deb Olin Unferth September 20, 2007
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $25.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $16.50 You Save: $8.50 (34%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $15.59
I enjoy the increasingly popular and demanding form of the short-short and flash and wish there were more collections like these. Deb Olin Unferth's "Minor Robberies" is, far and away, the strongest book of the bunch, and it's this collection I'm focusing on and awarding 5 stars. The other two have their merits, but having read Manguso and Egger's other work, I don't think the flash is their forte. Deb Olin Unferth's pieces are strange, cubist, experimental, funny, frightening. Some of them aren't stories at all, but assemblages of mercurial thought. Others evince the clear influence of Diane Williams and Lydia Davis, among others, but that's not a bad thing. The best of the bunch, in my opinion, are the more narrative-oriented stories, such as The Container, Soap, Managing, and---my favorite---Juan the Cell Phone Salesman. I award the box five ... Read More

10.How We Are Hungry by: Dave Eggers October 11, 2005
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $13.95 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $11.16 You Save: $2.79 (20%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $5.84
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.

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