Dave Eggers
in Conversation with Tom Barbash
April 19th, 2020
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Dave Eggers is known for writing wonderful, gripping stories that tug at the heart. His award-winning body of work consists of several non-fiction, fiction, humor, screenplays, a series on salon.com, several essays and articles. As editor and contributor, he has worked on several works of post-modern literature. Almost all of his works have received significant amount of critical acclaim, not to mention commercial success. This has helped cement his place in the world of post-modern literature. He has thrown the doors open to bridging the divide between ethnic and religious groups through his fresh and honest works of fiction and non-fiction.
He has found more success through his more recent work as a novelist, screenwriter, satirist, album art designer, and a proponent of grassroots journalism and alternative comics. As a philanthropist, he is known for helping students get through college vide monetary and after-school help from his nonprofit foundation and its seven chapters. A visionary and a global thought leader, he is often invited to knowledge forums to deliver keynote addresses and engage eager audiences to fresh forward thinking.
“Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.”
– Dave Eggers
Dave is the author of many books, including The Circle, The Monk of Mokha, What is the What, A Hologram for the King, and The Lifters.
He is founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco that produces books, a humor website, and a journal of new writing, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. McSweeney’s also publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world.
Eggers is the co-founder of 826 National, a network of youth writing and tutoring centers around the United States. Numerous other organizations worldwide operate with inspiration from the 826 National model. Realizing the need for greater college access for low-income students, Eggers founded ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization designed to connect students with resources, schools and donors to make college possible.
Eggers’s novel What Is the What, about the life of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee from the civil war in South Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, run by Mr. Deng. VADF operates secondary schools in South Sudan.
Eggers’s books for young readers include What Can a Citizen Do?, Her Right Foot, This Bridge Will Not Be Gray, and The Wild Things, among others.
Trained as a painter, Eggers’s artworks have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Biennial of the Americas, and numerous other galleries and art spaces. Eggers is winner of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the TED Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In 2018, Eggers co-founded The International Congress of Youth Voices, an annual gathering of 100 extraordinary young writers and activists; their landmark meeting in San Francisco resulted in a youth-written manifesto published by The Guardian.
He lives with his family in Northern California. They have no significant pets.
Visit the Book Passage website to have any of Dave’s books delivered right to your door.
You’re sure to enjoy these Book Passage favorites:
The Captain and the Glory: An Entertainment
Tomorrow Most Likely
The Monk of Mokha
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
A personal note from Dave Eggers.
Sent April 20th, following his Conversations with Authors session.
Friends,
Thanks for watching the experiment Tom Barbash and I tried out on the Book Passage channel.
Multitasking, I have now realized, is hard when it involves drawing pictures of nuns and bell peppers while talking about homeschooling and White House incompetence. But I hope you’ll continue to support Book Passage at this crucial juncture.
We have some control over whether our most cherished businesses survive this pandemic, so I hope you’ll pre-buy your 2020-21 books now, allowing Book Passage to breathe a bit easier.
Here’s what I’ve been reading:
- The Hunters by James Salter
- Apeirogon by Colum McCann
- Heaven by Emerson Whitney
- Letters from Mrs. Grundy by Oneita Jackson
- American War by Omar El Akkad
–Dave