Dave Eggers

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.”

It seems that most urban sophisticates these days, from politicians and celebrities to coworkers, have a profile on Facebook, the social networking Web site. The C.I.A., I.R.S., Time Inc., even MySpace, Facebook’s ostensible competition, have job networks there. To the site’s enthusiasts—and there are many; the site has 60 million users so far, with 200 million projected by the end of the year—there is no reason not to partake.  read more »

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.

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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 »

John Hodgman was drinking a smoothie inside the cavernous Galapagos Art Space in Williamsburg, Brook  read more »

Matt Haber, who has a mind like a thousand flypapers tangled in a black hole, did us the service of finding the old New Yorker tale of Dave Eggers' loss of a benefit's worth of money years before NKotB's n+1 got around to doing the same. Text, plus bonus "Where are they now?" game after the jump.

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

The n+1 boys got ripped off at their benefit over the weekend to the tune of three grand, reports the New York Sun.

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.

Loren Hammonds and Kahlila Robinson   Met: 1982 Engaged: Oct. 9, 2005  read more »

Loren Hammonds and Kahlila Robinson

Met: 1982  read more »

Engaged: Oct. 9, 2005

At 33, James Frey has a humble ambition: He wants to be the greatest literary writer of his generati  read more »

Because no caption accompanied the photo with Heidi Julavits' essay on hot-tubbing it in Northern California yesterday in the New York Times' T magazine, The Transom wondered: who are these nubile young literary folk depicted in the buff?  read more »

Apparently it was supposed to go unnoted that some of the nude party animals were the staff of Ms. Julavits' magazine, The Believer.

Unaccounted for: the dark-haired woman standing in center, back looks a lot like Believer copy editor Sarah Manguso. And goddamn if the guy bottom, right doesn't bear a resemblance to Dave Eggers. — Choire Sicha

Wednesday 25th "We want to put the audience in a good romantic mood so they all go home and ge  read more »

McSweeney's with milk and cookies; host warms up city's icy literary tribe; Plimpton, Bloom figure p  read more »

Like a couple of million other Americans, I've already read Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones -so the  read more »

Heidi Julavits, the 35-year-old co-editor of The Believer , the new Dave Eggers–sponsored literary  read more »

On Monday, Feb.  read more »

At 33, James Frey has a humble ambition: He wants to be the greatest literary writer of his generati  read more »

At 33, James Frey has a humble ambition: He wants to be the greatest literary writer of his generati  read more »

At 33, James Frey has a humble ambition: He wants to be the greatest literary writer of his generati  read more »

On a recent Saturday night, a cocky 21-year-old college sophomore named Zaki was making time with Ro  read more »

When transatlantic friends Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers appeared together for The New Yorker Festival  read more »

Celebrities have had a rough summer.  read more »

It looks a little bit like Oz in the South Bronx: a giant, glittering, brand-new, $250 million print  read more »

House of Leaves , by Mark Z. Danielewski.  read more »

STEVE FORBES TOOK THE PODIUM in Ballroom A of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Washington, D.C., just a fe  read more »

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , by Dave Eggers.  read more »

On Feb.  read more »