Dave Eggers has curated a new art show that will go on display starting April 2 at Apexart, 21 Church Street. It's called Lots of Things Like This and will include art by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leonard Cohen, David Berman, David Mamet, William Steig and Kurt Vonnegut, among others. "There were three main people who worked on the show on our end, Jesse Nathan, Jordan Bass, and myself, and we all took a shot at writing essays about the work we’d found and included in this show," Mr. Eggers wrote on the Apexart website. "The first drafts of these essays were a little formal and maybe even pretentious." You, Mr. Eggers, pretentious? Never! He goes on to describe the exhibit:  read more »

London’s Sunday Times yesterday included a gushing essay by author Stephen Amidon about Dave Eggers' massively popular literary brand, McSweeney’s, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. The article praises Mr. Eggers as a “charismatic and indefatigable literary style guru” whose publishing “empire” fuses just the right mix of raw talent, eccentricity and social consciousness to make McSweeney’s, as Granta was before it, the number one “talent-spotter of new American fiction.” " What really sets Eggers’s empire a part, though, is that it possesses that most elusive and valued of modern attributes: a brand," Mr. Amidon writes. His vision of the “ideal McSweeney’s reader”? He (or she) “lives in Brooklyn, wears interesting T-shirts, has a blog he works on in coffee shops, and knows it’s cool to oppose globalisation but uncool to go on too much about it.” In other words, the ideal McSweeney’s reader is the entire population of Williamsburg and Park Slope? Well, that certainly jives with Mr. Amidon’s subsequent suggestion that the San Fransisco-based McSweeney’s “wants to make the world a better place – or at least more like the cooler parts of Brooklyn.”

Sloane Crosley, 29, has shilled for Joan Didion, Jonathan Lethem and—hairball!—Dave Eggers. Now she’s got her own book—and shiny hair that will make you weep!  read more »

The film adaptation of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius will not "see the light of day," according to Dave Eggers, Mcsweeney's founder and superhero head of a literary program with 826 Valencia. The option ran out, he told Entertainment Weekly.

What's the status of the Heartbreaking Work movie that's been in the works forever? And your second book, You Shall Know Our Velocity, just got a movie deal too, right, with Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl's Miguel Arteta set to direct?
With the Velocity movie, we're talking very, very small numbers. It's a small independent production company [Process Media, which bought the rights]. And the other one is not likely to, uh, see the light of day. [Laughs]

The Heartbreaking Work movie is gone now?
Yeah, which is no tragedy for me. The option ran out. So that will probably be the end of that. In the meantime, the 826's were born out of the generosity of the New Line film company. I think everybody sees it that way, and those guys know that they gave birth to that nonprofit, and helped fund it, so I think that everybody should feel good.

You don't seem like a guy who was desperate to cast himself in the movie version of his own life.
[Laughs] Oh, man! It was good news when that option ran out.

The big dogs of publishing might have Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, but the little ones have indie rock. Unclear when the flirtation became a marriage, but the benefit concert held Sunday night at Beacon Theater for 826 NYC, the McSweeney’s-sponsored reading-and-writing program for kids, seems a good indication that independent literature and independent music are happily locked in a warm, wordy bear hug.  read more »

October 18, 1999, p. 212

(L-R: Todd Pruzan, Diane Vadino, Sean Wilsey, Dave Eggers, Kevin Shay.)  read more »

But Dave Eggers did that back in the 90's, man! "Once, after an event aimed at raising money for his upstart magazine"--that would be McSweeney's--"he left his backpack, containing $2,200 in $5 bills, in the cab on the way home," says the Denver Post archives, of a story originally (supposedly) recounted in the New Yorker.