Showing results by author "Dave Eggers" in All Categories

Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Valentino's travels, truly Biblical in scope, bring him in contact with government soldiers, janjaweed-like militias, liberation rebels, hyenas and lions, disease and starvation, and a string of unexpected romances. Ultimately, Valentino finds safety in Kenya and, just after the millennium, is finally resettled in the United States, from where this novel is narrated.

Johannes, a free dog, lives in an urban park by the sea. His job is to be the Eyes—to see everything that happens within the park and report back to the park’s elders, three ancient Bison. His friends—a seagull, a raccoon, a squirrel, and a pelican—work with him as the Assistant Eyes, observing the humans and other animals who share the park and making sure the Equilibrium is in balance. But changes are afoot. More humans arrive in the park. A new building, containing mysterious and hypnotic rectangles, goes up. And then there are the goats.

Josie and her children's father have split up, she's been sued by a former patient and lost her dental practice, and she's grieving the death of a young man senselessly killed. When her ex asks to take the children to meet his new fiancée's family, Josie makes a run for it, figuring Alaska is about as far as she can get without a passport. Josie and her kids, Paul and Ana, rent a rattling old RV named the Chateau, and at first their trip feels like a vacation.

From wild and wacky to knee-slapping, laugh-out-loud fun, these humorous tales represent some of the best of recent seasons of the hit public radio series Selected Shorts. Comedian Wyatt Cenac gives a killer performance of Simon Rich’s hilarious tale of woe from the point of view of a condom in a young man’s wallet. Alec Baldwin gives a delightful over-the-top performance of James Thurber’s wonderfully silly classic tale of the day everybody in a small Ohio town thought the dam broke.

Less a how-to manual than a tribute to an impossible and impossibly rewarding profession, It Won't Be Easy captures the experience of teaching in all its messy glory. Though directed at prospective and newer teachers, It Won't Be Easy is mercifully short on jargon and long on practical wisdom, accessible to anyone - teacher, student, parent, pundit - who is interested in a behind-the-curtain look at teaching and willing to understand that, while there are no simple answers, there is power in learning to ask the right questions.

El día que Mae Holland es contratada para trabajar en el Círculo, la empresa de internet más influyente del mundo, sabe que se le ha concedido la oportunidad de su vida. A través de un innovador sistema operativo, el Círculo unifica direcciones de email, perfiles de redes sociales, operaciones bancarias y contraseñas de usuarios dando lugar a una única identidad virtual y veraz, en pos de una nueva era de civilidad y transparencia.

Dave Eggers scored a worldwide phenomenon with this memoir that topped national best-seller lists and has since become a staple for summer reading and book clubs. A compelling voice for Generation X, Eggers hererecounts his early 20s, caring for his younger brother after their parents’ unexpected deaths and his endeavors in a variety of media.

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.

A million people, a billion, wanted to be where Mae was at this moment, entering this atrium, 30 feet high and shot through with California light, on her first day working for the only company that really mattered at all. A story from The New York Times Magazine, adapted from The Circle, a new novel by Dave Eggers.

Delaney Wells is an unlikely new hire at the Every. A former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic, she charms her way into an entry-level job with one goal in mind: to take down the company from within. With her compatriot, the not-at-all-ambitious Wes Makazian, they look for the Every's weaknesses, hoping to free humanity from all-encompassing surveillance and the emoji-driven infantilization of the species. But does anyone want what Delaney is fighting to save? Does humanity truly want to be free?

A Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, New York Times best-selling author Dave Eggers is the voice of a generation. This stunning collection of his matchless short fiction includes the highly acclaimed “The Only Meaning of Oil-Wet Water.”

Mokhtar Alkhanshali grew up in San Francisco, one of seven siblings raised by Yemeni immigrants in a tiny apartment. At age 24, unable to pay for college, he works as a doorman. Until: a statue of an Arab raising a cup of coffee awakens something in him. He sets out to learn the rich history of coffee in Yemen and the complex art of tasting and identifying varietals. He travels to Yemen, collects samples of beans, eager to bring improved cultivation methods to the farmers. And he is on the verge of success when civil war engulfs Yemen in 2015 and he is trapped in Sana'a.

When HurricaneKatrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun - a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four - chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the eerie days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and rescuing those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared.

In his first novel, Dave Eggers has written a moving and hilarious tale of two friends who fly around the world trying to give away a lot of money and free themselves from a profound loss. It reminds us once again what an important, necessary talent Dave Eggers is.

The highly anticipated follow-up to the Newbery Award-winner The Eyes & the Impossible as half-dog, half-coyote, all hero Johannes ventures into the wild, where new friends and new adventure await.

A Hologram for the King takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy’s gale-force winds. In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter’s college tuition, and finally do something great.

If you had to name a statue, any statue, odds are good you'd mention the Statue of Liberty. Have you seen her? She's in New York. She's holding a torch. And she's in mid-stride, moving forward. But why? In this fascinating and fun take on nonfiction, Dave Eggers investigates a seemingly small trait of America's most emblematic statue. What he finds is about more than history, more than art. What he finds in the Statue of Liberty's right foot is the powerful message of acceptance that is essential of an entire country's creation.

Valentino Achak Deng is just a boy when conflict separates him from his family and forces him to leave his small Sudanese village, joining thousands of other orphans on their long, long walk to Ethiopia, where they find safety for a time. Along the way Valentino encounters enemy soldiers, liberation rebels and deadly militias, hyenas and lions, disease and starvation. But there are experiences ahead that will test his spirit in even greater ways than these....

In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter’s college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy’s gale-force winds. This richly layered novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment.