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Chapter 81: Dave Eggers on surreptitious spying in the snares of surveillance
Description
I discovered Dave Eggers in the late 90s when the Internet was all belts and pinions and the only two comedy websites that I remember reading were The Onion and McSweeney's.
The Onion's site was the notorious outcropping of a campus comedy newspaper from Wisconsin and McSweeney's was founded by a publishing dynamo Whiz Kid named Dave Eggers who'd worked at places like Wired and Might Magazine, which he'd cofounded out in San Francisco.
In 2000 Dave's 'anti-memoir' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius came out and, no big deal, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. I loved the book and the seemingly endless creative fireworks Dave was capable of producing.
What happened in the twenty years since?
Well today Dave Eggers is one of the most celebrated writers in the world — he's written bestsellers like The Circle, A Hologram For The King, Zeitoun and won or been nominated for endless awards including the TED Prize, The Salon Book Award, Time's 100 Most Influential People, The National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the list goes on.
Dave is also co-founder of 826 National which is a non-profit dedicated to tutoring and helping students age 6 - 18 with writing. (The organization helps over 100,000 students a year.) Oh, and Dave's written screenplays like Away We Go, together with his wife Vendela Vida, and The Wild Things, the Spike Jonze-directed adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.
Is that it? No! He's also a painter. His art has been exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, The Nevada Museum of Art, The Biennial of the Americas and many other art galleries around the world. More recently, his training as an artist was put to use in a fabulously quirky book called Ungrateful Mammals.
His latest book The Museum of Rain is about to release. I read it and loved it and was so excited to talk to him about it.
He called in from a landline for our chat because he is known for being off the grid. No wifi and no smartphone!