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“... It’s not hard to describe the editorial career of Dave Eggers: he came to prominence in the late 1990s as founder of the literary magazine McSweeney’s, which is still publishing after 15 years and more than 40 issues. The influence of McSweeney’s on contemporary fiction can’t be overestimated. Its early aesthetic of mild experimentation, monochrome typographic clutter and wilful, crypto-absurdist obscurity launched dozens of careers and spawned many imitators ...”

“... I am owed,’ says Dave Eggers – or ‘Dave Eggers’ – in his much admired A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Owed, that is, the right to publish a memoir in his mid-twenties, because losing both parents to cancer and bringing up your younger brother obviously cuts you quite a bit of slack ...”

“... unreliable demon.co.uk, Internet disservice provider to the unwary). The annual is introduced by Dave Eggers. At least, something he wrote in ‘St Petersburg, Russia, June 2002’ appears under the heading ‘Introduction’ at the front of the book; but then this is Dave Eggers, so it isn’t by any means a ...”

“... his own. What Is the What is both the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng and a novel by Dave Eggers; a collaboration between the two men, as well as between memory and imagination. The book itself makes no attempt to explain how such a hybrid came into being. Readers are twice reassured in small type that ‘all proceeds . . . will go to the ...”

“... The title of Dave Eggers’s book is fair warning: it prepares the reader to put on a happy face. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius comes emulsioned with the kind of compliments and absurd little pronunciamentos that stretch credulity. ‘The force and energy of this book could power a train,’ apparently ...”

“... and Iraq, yet in this spare, harrowing account of one family’s experience of Katrina Time, Dave Eggers does more than just capture the moment when America’s wars came home. Over the last few years, he has shed the notice-me virtuosity of his early writing, and dedicated much of his time to working with the disenfranchised, incarcerated and ...”

“... set in a fictional North London suburb and in New York, bears the impress of American writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, clever, nervy exhibitionists, IQs-with-i-Books, guys who, as Smith has put it, ‘know things’, writers with a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The Autograph Man may indeed be ...”

“... suggestion that this would be ‘no bad thing’. Some of these embellishments are borrowed from Dave Eggers: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius features jaunty chapter summaries, a haywire list of rules and suggestions for enjoyment, a musical score to indicate the rising cadence of a conversation, and the real phone numbers of a few of ...”

“... Even what seem to be cases of extreme translation have a way of coming home, or not leaving home. Dave Eggers ends his version of Kafka’s story ‘The Animal in the Synagogue’ with the words: ‘Look away, look away, look away.’ John Wray and Nathan Englander in English and Alejandro Zambra in Spanish all have a phrase about the impossibility of ...”

“... myth that rape is corrective, a cure.’ In a bewilderingly slight foreword to this collection, Dave Eggers contextualises Vonnegut’s short work like this: The moral story is gone. The fable is gone. They cannot be found in contemporary literature. Not even in children’s literature. Writers do not feel inclined to tell their fellow human beings how ...”

“... his wolf costume and the Wild Things appear. (In the movie-and-novel version by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers, the voyage to the land of the big shaggy beasts also comes just after Max falls out of his broken home.) So perhaps it is a question less of where the wild things are – we have names for those spaces, which we project inward or outward as the ...”

“... of research I was also struck by the way that Winogrand himself looked, for a while, rather like Dave Eggers.) The fact that this picture is not in the current catalogue – it can be seen in The Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand – makes one conscious of the opportunity cost of including so many other well-known ones: the absence of photographs ...”

“... Eugenides’s contemporary Jonathan Franzen and a younger cohort that includes Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers – have come to believe that too much was lost – in moral and emotional engagement, in readership – when realism was thrown over. As Franzen wrote in the New Yorker, ‘in college, I’d admired Derrida and the Marxist and feminist ...”

“... and restraint uncharacteristic of writers of his generation. Whereas his immediate contemporaries Dave Eggers, Colson Whitehead and Mark Danielewski all thrive on – and have in part made themselves known for – work that brims with clever digression, Lennon includes only what advances his plots and broadens our sense of his characters. In an era where ...”

“... pseudo-retro design is reminiscent of McSweeney’s, the literary magazine and website edited by Dave Eggers, which makes the droll pretence of providing barber-shop reading for educated gentlemen. There are other similarities. Like Eggers (whose memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by ...”