Sunday, September 09, 2007

Dave Eggers: Where you at?


Before he started reading, he was talking about his process
for twisting Deng's voice into his own. This excerpt is one
of the first things he wrote when working on the book.
Moe's Books, Berkeley



There seems to be a suspicious lack of Dave Eggers on television these days. A scant few years ago you couldn't swing an old issue of Might without hitting a mention of the D to the E. He was last sighted at the 2005 Hay Festival of Literature & Arts.*
Upon further investigation we found this at McSweenys.com:

… In 1998, he founded McSweeney's, an independent book-publishing house in San Francisco that puts out the McSweeney's quarterly literary journal; the monthly magazine The Believer; a daily humor website, www.mcsweeneys.net; and Wholphin, a DVD quarterly of short films. In 2002, Eggers opened 826 Valencia, a writing lab for young people located in the Mission District of San Francisco, where he teaches writing to high-school students and runs a summer publishing camp; there are now branches of 826 in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and Ann Arbor, and in 2007 a seventh center will open in Boston. With the help of his workshop students, Eggers edits a collection of fiction, essays, and journalism called The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is also the co-editor of the Voice of Witness series of oral histories.
His fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, Punk Planet, and The New Yorker. He has recently written introductions to new editions of books by Edward Wallant, John Cheever, and Mark Twain.
His most recent work is What Is The What:
Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war-the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath-of the 1980s and 90s. In this fictionalized memoir, Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) makes him an icon of globalization. Separated from his family when Arab militia destroy his village, Valentino joins thousands of other "Lost Boys," beset by starvation, thirst and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where Valentino pieces together a new life. — Publishers Weekly
*In 1988, the festival was described by Bill Clinton in 2001 as "The Woodstock of the mind".

SOURCE: zelo research

No comments: