How We Are Hungry Author:Dave Eggers How We Are Hungry is a gripping, lyrical, and always intensely soulful group of stories written over the past four years. Though they range from a doomed Irish setter's tales of running and jumping ("After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned") to a bitterly comic meditation on suicide and friendship ("Climbing to the Window, Pr... more »etending to Dance"), the stories share a haunting and haunted sense of mortality. Though full of bursts of levity and humor, the book is deeply informed by the troubled times in which it was written. How We Are Hungry includes many never-before-published stories, along with a number of pieces that first appeared in magazines, both well-known (Zoetrope, The New Yorker) and small and independent (h2s04, Ninth Letter). All previously- published stories have been significantly revised. The urgency and experimentalism of Eggers's earlier work are still present , but are brought to a new level of precision and craft, injecting fresh life into traditional forms. Narratives are often linear, told by distinct and varied voices, and settings stretch from Egypt to Interstate 5. Dave Eggers is the editor of the quarterly journal McSweeney's and of a yearly collection for younger readers, The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He edits that collection with high school students from 826 Valencia, the educational nonprofit he founded in 2002. 826 Valencia seeks to involve the community in after-school and in-school tutoring in English and writing. Eggers is currently at work on It Was Just Boys Walking, a biography of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee from Sudan now living in Atlanta; and Teachers Have It Easy, about the need for higher teacher salaries, coauthored with Ninive Calegari and Daniel Moulthrop. Eggers teaches writing at 826 Valencia and journalism at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.« less