"How We Are Hungry" (2004)

"How We Are Hungry" (at left in its original McSweeney's hardcover) concludes of a trio of works of fiction (or memoir that is ostensibly fiction) by Dave Eggers -- including A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and You Shall Know Our Velocity! -- and because it collects short stories written across various years, it is in its own way a fitting capstone to roughly the first decade of Eggers' work in periodicals and books alike.

Its move away from first-person narrative, its range of characters, and (typically enough in modern literary short fiction) its occasional eschewing of overt resolution, How We Are Hungry in its own way it represents a growth in the ambitions of Eggers' work in fiction. But in this excellent 2005 interview with Onion A.V. Club, Eggers notes his discomfort with its artifice -- "I've always been interested in the form itself, so I always feel like I've never been good at going ahead with the artifice and not acknowledging the self in the artistic process, and not acknowledging the absurdity of pretending that's required in fiction. I always had a hard time with fiction. It does feel like driving a car in a clown suit. You're going somewhere, but you're in costume, and you're not really fooling anybody. " -- and also he reflects on his wariness of the personality-centered "hoopla" of the book trade:

O: The decision to initially market You Shall Know Our Velocity solely through your website and through independent bookstores caused a significant ripple in the publishing industry. What are your thoughts now about how that situation played out? 

DE: We thought it was great. I wanted to write and publish a book, but I didn't want any of the hoopla that came with the first book. I didn't do any interviews, but I did tour. I was like, "Is it possible to write a book without everything else that comes with it? Can I just go out and meet my peers, sign books, and go home?" .... I never wanted that kind of [bestseller] attention. I'm not good at that kind of thing. I had come from Might magazine, which had 10,000 readers, tops, any given month, and that was very nice and comfortable for me. This sort of mainstream-whatever is really uncomfortable, and I didn't realize what it would do.

That wariness perhaps another reason why How We Are Hungry seems to marks the end of one era of his work.  In the years and works that will follow, we'll see a shift in both form and subject matter for  work under Eggers' own books -- into nonfiction, and towards themes of social justice and the place of America and Americans adrift in a globalized world economy. These are concerns that had always been operating at least in the margins dating back to Might, but which will now move much more towards the center of his body of work. 

His fiction and playful literary experimentation, though, don't actually disappear: they migrate more fully into his publishing work and, as we'll later see, into what will become his more recent novels.