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Dave Eggers
American magazine editor, memoirist, and novelist.
Date of Humanities Series Lecture: 14 February, 2003.
Founder in 1994 and former editor of Might magazine, Dave Eggers is editor of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, an innovative and widely read quarterly journal and website in existence since 1998. Eggers was only twenty-nine when he published in 2000 to great critical and popular acclaim A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, an autobiographical memoir of a college senior who, in a little over a month, loses both his mother and father to cancer and then assumes care over his eight-year-old brother. The work is both a moving family drama as well as a hilarious and wildly inventive story. In the words of James Poniewozik, in Heartbreaking Work “literary gamesmanship and self-consciousness are trained on life's most unendurable experience, used to examine a memory too scorching to stare at, as one views an eclipse by projecting sunlight onto paper through a pinhole. This is not irony obscuring sincerity. It is, finally, irony in the service of sincerity.” (Time, 7 Feb., 2000). Eggers’s most recent novel is What is the What (2006), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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