Дэйв Эггерс: Жазушы, баспагер және қоғам қайырмашысы

American writer, editor, and publisher
the film score composer

Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the 2000 best selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Eggers is also the founder of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a literary journal; a co founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia, co founder of The Hawkins Project, and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness; and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.

Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, one of four siblings. His father, John K. Eggers (1936–1991), was an attorney, while his mother, Heidi McSweeney Eggers (1940–1992), was a school teacher. His father was Protestant and his mother was Catholic. As a child, the family moved to Lake Forest, Illinois, where he attended public high school and was a classmate of actor Vince Vaughn. Eggers's elder brother William D. Eggers is a researcher who has worked for several conservative think tanks, doing research promoting privatization. Eggers's sister Beth died by suicide in November 2001. Eggers briefly spoke about his sister's death during a 2002 fan interview for McSweeney's. Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, intending to obtain a degree in journalism. However, his studies were interrupted by the deaths of both of his parents: his father in 1991 from brain and lung cancer, and his mother in January 1992 from stomach cancer. These events were chronicled in his first book, the fictionalized A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. At the time, Eggers was age 21, and his youngest sibling, Christopher ("Toph"), was 8 years old. The two elder siblings, William and Beth, were unable to commit to caring for Toph; his oldest sibling, William, had a full time job and his next oldest sibling, Beth, was enrolled in law school. As a result, Eggers took responsibility. He left the University of Illinois and moved to Berkeley, California, with his girlfriend Kirsten and his brother. They initially moved in with Eggers' sibling, Beth, and her roommate, but eventually found a place in another part of town, which they paid for with money left to them by their parents. Toph attended a small private school, and Eggers did temp work and freelance graphic design for a local newspaper. Eventually, with his friend David Moodie, Eggers took over a local free newspaper called Cups. This gradually evolved into the satirical magazine Might.

Eggers began writing as a Salon. com editor and founded Might magazine in San Francisco in 1994 with David Moodie and Marny Requa, while also writing a comic strip called Smarter Feller (originally Swell) for SF Weekly. Might evolved out of the small San Francisco based independent paper Cups, and gathered a loyal following with its irreverent humor and quirky approach to the issues and personalities of the day. The magazine regularly included humour pieces, and a number of essays and non fiction pieces by seminal writers of the 1990s, including "Impediments to Passion", an essay on sex in the AIDS era by David Foster Wallace. As Eggers later recounted in his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius that the magazine consistently struggled to make a profit, and it stopped publication in 1997. An anthology of the best of Might magazine's brief run, Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp' and Other Essays from Might Magazine, was published in late 1998. By this time, Eggers was freelancing for Esquire and continuing to work for Salon. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, published in 2000, was Eggers' first book was a memoir with fictional elements, and it focused on his struggle to raise his younger brother in the San Francisco Bay Area following the deaths of both of their parents. The book quickly became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non Fiction. The memoir was praised for its originality, idiosyncratic self referencing, and for several innovative stylistic elements. Early printings of the 2001 trade paperback edition were published with a lengthy postscript entitled, Mistakes We Knew We Were Making. In 2002, Eggers published his first novel You Shall Know Our Velocity, a story about a frustrating attempt to give away money to deserving people while haphazardly traveling the globe. An expanded and revised version was released as Sacrament in 2003. A version without the new material in Sacrament was created and retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! for a Vintage imprint distribution. He has since published How We Are Hungry, a collection of short stories, and three politically themed serials for Salo. In November 2005, Eggers published Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, a book of interviews with former prisoners sentenced to death and later exonerated. The book was compiled with Lola Vollen, a specialist in the aftermath of major human rights abuses and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of International Studies. Eggers' 2006 novel What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Eggers also edits the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, an annual anthology of short stories, essays, journalism, satire, and alternative comics. Eggers was one of the original contributors to ESPN The Magazine and helped create its section "The Jump". He also acted as the first, anonymous "Answer Guy", a column that continued to run after he stopped working for the publication. On November 7, 2009, he was presented with the "Courage in Media" Award by the Council on American Islamic Relations for his book Zeitoun. Zeitoun was optioned by Jonathan Demme, who considered an animated film rendition of the work. To Demme, it "felt like the first in depth immersion I'd ever had through literature or film into the Muslim American family. The moral was that they are like people of any other faith, and I hope our film, if we can get it made, will also be like that." Demme, quoted in early 2011, expressed confidence that when the script was finished, he would be able to find financing, perhaps even from a major studio. However, in May 2014, The Playlist reported that the film was "percolat[ing] in development". Demme died in April 2017, and the project has not been heard of since. In the early 2010s, after going six years without publishing substantive literary fiction following What is the What, Eggers began a three year streak of back to back novels, each broadly concerned with pressing social and political issues facing the United States and the wider world in the twenty first century. Eggers published his novel of the Great Recession and late 2000s financial crisis, A Hologram for the King, in July 2012. In October of that year, the novel was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award. Eggers followed this with The Circle, released in October 2013, and depicting the life of a young worker at a fictional San Francisco based technology company in the near future, as she faces doubts about her vocation, due to the company's seemingly well intentioned innovations revealing a more sinister underlying agenda. Completing the productive spell, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? was published in June 2014. In November 2015, Your Fathers, Where Are They  was longlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award, Eggers' fifth nomination for the award following earlier nominations for The Circle, A Hologram for the King, The Wild Things, and What is the What. In April 2016, Eggers visited Israel, as part of a project by the "Breaking the Silence" organization, to write an article for a book on the Israeli occupation, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War. The book was edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman and published under the title "Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation" in June 2017. In July 2016, Eggers published Heroes of the Frontier. Earlier the same year, a film adaptation of Eggers' earlier novel A Hologram for the King was released to mixed reviews and middling commercial performance. The Circle, a film version of Eggers' book, starring Emma Watson, John Boyega, and Tom Hanks (who had starred in the Hologram for the King adaptation), was released in April 2017. Eggers followed Heroes of the Frontier with The Monk of Mokha (2018), another nonfiction biography in a similar vein to Zeitoun, billed by the publishers as "the exhilarating true story of a young Yemeni American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee but finds himself trapped in Sana'a by civil war." Eggers ended the decade by publishing two very stylistically different novellas, written concurrently with each other. The Parade, published by Knopf in March 2019, was a spare, minimalist novella reflecting Eggers' long standing concerns with humanitarian issues, global development, and Western perceptions of the developing world. According to the advance blurb from the publisher, the novel concerns "two men, Western contractors sent to work far from home, tasked with paving a road to the capital in a dangerous and largely lawless country." Reviews were mixed: Positive notices included Andrew Motion's writing in The Guardian that "[Eggers'] novel may be sternly reduced in terms of its cast and language, but this leanness doesn't diminish the strength of its argument", and Ron Charles in The Washington Post wrote that The Parade is "a story that conforms to the West's reductive attitudes about the developing world. Writers and politicians have long generalized about those individual cultures. A novel that lumps them together into a nameless, primitive nation only plays into that tendency." The Parade was followed in November 2019 by another short novella, The Captain and the Glory, billed by Eggers himself as an "allegorical satire" of the Trump administration. In an interview with the publishers Knopf published on the McSweeney's website, Eggers described the novel as "an attempt to understand this era by painting it in the gaudy and garish colors it really deserves This is part farce, part parable, and I do hope, though the Captain bears more than a passing resemblance to Trump, that the book will be readable when Trump is gone. That's part of the reason I called it 'An entertainment' on the title page. It's a nod to Graham Greene but also the way I hope people will read it. It was cathartic to write and I hope cathartic to read." Hannah Barekat in The Spectator was critical of the "heavy handed" nature of the book's satire, and The Guardia], The Times Literary Supplement, and Kirkus Reviews also found the book wanting. In 2021, his novella The Museum of Rain was published, and according to the McSweeney's website, the "elegiac" short story concerns "an American Army vet in his 70s who is asked to lead a group of young grand nieces and grand nephews on a walk through the hills of California's Central Coast. Walking toward a setting sun, their destination is a place called The Museum of Rain, which may or may not still exist, and whose origin and meaning are elusive to all." The novel The Every was released in October 2021. The novel is a follow up to his 2013 novel The Circle.

Eggers founded McSweeney's, an independent publishing house, named for his mother's maiden name. The publishing house produces a quarterly literary journal, Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, first published in 1998; the monthly journal The Believer, which debuted in 2003 and is edited by Eggers's wife Vendela Vida; and from 2005 to 2012, the quarterly DVD magazine Wholphin. Other works include The Future Dictionary of America, Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, and "Dr. and Mr. Haggis On Whey", the last being a series of children's books of literary nonsense, which Eggers writes with his younger brother Toph Eggers under a pseudonym. Ahead of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Eggers wrote an essay about the U. S. national team and soccer in the United States for The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, which contained essays about each competing team in the tournament and was published with aid from the journal Granta. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, Eggers was rumored to be a possible candidate to be the new editor of The Paris Review before the Review selected Lorin Stein.

While at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, Eggers attended art classes. After the publication of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he focused mainly on writing, but publicly returned to visual art in 2010, with a solo gallery show at Electric Works in San Francisco, called "It Is Right to Draw Their Fur". The show featured many drawings of animals often paired with phrases, sometimes out of the Bible. In conjunction with that exhibition, McSweeney's published a catalog featuring 25 loose leaf prints of the work featured in the show. In 2015, Eggers had his first solo museum exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art called "The Insufferable Throne of God".

In 2002, Eggers and educator Nínive Clements Calegari co founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for kids ages 6–18 in San Francisco. It since developed into 826 National, and has six chapters across the United States: Los Angeles; New York City; Chicago; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Washington, D. C.; and Boston. In 2006, he appeared at a series of fund raising events, dubbed the Revenge of the Book–Eaters tour, to support these programs. The Chicago show, at the Park West theatre, featured Death Cab for Cutie front man Ben Gibbard. Other performers on the tour included Sufjan Stevens, Jon Stewart, Davy Rothbart, and David Byrne. In September 2007, the Heinz Family Foundation awarded Eggers a $250,000 Heinz Award (given to recognize "extraordinary achievements by individuals") in the Arts and Humanities. In accordance with Eggers's wishes, the award money was given to 826 National and The Teacher Salary Project. In April 2010, under the umbrella of 826 National, Eggers launched ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization that connects donors with students to make college more affordable.

Eggers book The Every was released in 2021, but he refused to sell the hardcover edition on Amazon, limiting the release to independent book stores only. Paperback editions of The Every have been available on Amazon since its release. In 2022, Eggers books were one of several titles banned in South Dakota schools because of sexual content. Eggers went to South Dakota to speak to authorities and students and offered any students who wanted one of the banned books copies for free via his website. In December 2022, Eggers travelled on behalf of PEN America to Kyiv, Ukraine. He published "The Profound Defiance of Daily Life in Kyiv" in The New Yorker based on his time in the war torn country.

Eggers can be heard talking with Spike Jonze during "The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton", the final track on Beck's 2006 album The Information. The third section of the track features Eggers and Jonze responding to Beck's question, "What would the ultimate record that ever could possibly be made sound like?" Eggers contributed lyrics to the song "The Ghost of Rita Gonzolo" on One Ring Zero's album As Smart as We Are (2004).

Eggers was the primary guardian of his youngest brother Toph Eggers. The two later co authored children's books together. Eggers lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he is married to Vendela Vida, also a writer. The couple have two children. Vida and Eggers met in 1998 in San Francisco at a wedding; the couple started dating in 1999. He was one of three 2008 TED Prize recipients. His TED Prize wish was for helping community members to personally engage with local public schools. The same year, he was named one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World" by Utne Reader.

Altes, Liesbeth Korthals (2008) "Sincerity, Reliability, and Other Ironies — Notes on Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" in Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth Century First Person Novel (eds. Elke D'hoker and Gunther Martens). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Boxall, Peter. Twenty First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2013. [contains discussion of What is the What]
D'Amore, Jonathan. American Authorship and Autobiographical Narrative: Mailer, Wideman, Eggers. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. [joint study on works of Norman Mailer, John Edgar Wideman, and Eggers; contains discussion of  Staggering Genius, "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making", You Shall Know Our Velocity, and What is the What]
den Dulk, Allard. Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers and Foer. Bloomsbury, 2014. [joint study on the works of Eggers, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Safran Foer; contains discussion of  Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity and The Circle]
Funk, Wolfgang. The Literature of Reconstruction: American Literature in the New Millennium. Bloomsbury. 2015 [contains a chapter on 'reconstructing the author' in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius]
Galow, Timothy W. Understanding Dave Eggers. University of South Carolina Press. 2014. Giles, Paul. The Global Remapping of American Literature. Princeton University Press, 2011 [contains discussion of  Staggering Genius and What is the What]
Grassian, Daniel. Hybrid Fictions: American Literature and Generation X. McFarland, 2003 [contains discussion of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius]
Hamilton, Caroline D. "Blank Looks: Reality TV and Memoir in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Australasian Journal of American Studies, vol.28, no.2. (December 2009), pp.31 46
Hamilton, Caroline D. One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity. Bloomsbury, 2012. Holland, Mark K. Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature. Bloomsbury, 2013. [contains discussion of  Staggering Genius]
Jensen, Mikkel (2014) "A Note on a Title: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" in The Explicator. Volume 72, Issue 2. Mosseau, Robert. "Connecting Travel Writing, Bildungsroman, and Therapeutic Culture in Dave Eggers's Literature" in Lanzendorfer, Tim [ed.] The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel. Lexington Books, 2015. [contains discussion of You Shall Know Our Velocity and A Hologram for the King]
Nicol, Bran (2006) "'The Memoir as Self Destruction': Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" in Modern Confessional Writing (ed. Jo Gill). New York: Routledge. Peek, Michelle. "Humanitarian Narrative and Posthumanist Critique: Dave Eggers's What is the What. Biography. 35.1 (Winter, 2012), pp.115 136. Pignagnoli, Virginia. "Sincerity, Sharing, and Authorial Discourses on the Fiction/Nonfiction Distinction: The Case of Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity" in Lanzendorfer, Tim [ed.] The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel. Lexington Books, 2015. [contains discussion of You Shall Know Our Velocity and The Circle]
Sommerfeld, Stephanie. "Nature Revisited: Postironic Sublimity in Dave Eggers" in Pierce, Gillian B. [ed.] The Sublime Today: Contemporary Readings in the Aesthetic. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 67 101. Timmer, Nicoline. Do You Feel it Too? The Post Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium. Rodopi, 2010. [contains discussion of  Staggering Genius]
Varvogli, Aliki. Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction. Routledge, 2012. [Contains discussion of What Is the What and You Shall Know Our Velocity]