A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

From Strand Bookstore

As original a memoir as exists in recent American literature - the sheer poignancy of the author's grieving for a mother and father, both succumbing to cancer within a month of each other, and his arduous compassion in assuming the care of his younger brother - the book takes on new life in its present paperback edition: a new appendix correcting and updating the original, an upside-down back cover creating a book that seems to open from either end, and three different versions, each with its own cover illustration. 485p. Pap. 'A merciless book' - David Foster Wallace.

From the Publisher

A respected magazine editor/founder and onetime spokesman for Generation X offers a satiric, eloquent, and thoroughly tradition-shattering memoir that discusses the deaths of his parents from cancer, his raising of his younger brother, and more.

Review

Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
"Mr. Eggers demonstrates in this book that he can pretty much write on anything. He can turn a Frisbee game with his brother into an existential meditation on life. He can convey the wild, caffeinated joy he feels after seeing a friend wake up from a coma. And he can turn his efforts to scatter his mother's ashes in Lake Michigan into a story that's both a lyrical tribute to her passing and a crude, slapstick account of his ineptitude as a mourner, lugging about a canister of ashes that reminds him, creepily, of the Ark of the Covenant in the Spielberg movie. A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS may start off sounding like one of those coy, solipsistic exercises that put everything in little ironic quote marks, but it quickly becomes a virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of book that noisily announces the debut of a talented--yes, staggeringly talented new writer."

Review

Mark Horowitz - New York
"Eggers lays everything out in exquisite, excruciating detail, but he wants to have his tearjerker and deconstruct it, too....[S]ome of the best parts of A. H. W. O. S. G. are in the fine print, literally; they exist on the margins, where Eggers seems to feel most at home....Whether he likes it or not, Eggers has written the kind of book he swears he never wanted to write: a hip tearjerker. It's ANGELA'S ASHES meets ON THE ROAD."

Review

Sara Mosle - New York Times Book Review
"Eggers's book, which goes a surprisingly long way toward delivering on its self-satirizing, hyperbolic title, is a profoundly moving, occasionally angry and often hilarious account....[It] is a furious whirlwind of energy and invention, literally wearing its originality on its sleeve....A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS is, finally, a book of finite jest, which is why it succeeds so brilliantly. Eggers's most powerful prose is often his most straightforward, relying on old-fashioned truth telling for its punch."

Review

Susan Salter Reynolds - Los Angeles Times Book Review
"It's James Joyce, back from the dead!....And he's got some Proust in him, the little 29-year-old-jerk, he's got the trammeling thoroughness of Proust's observation, his honest observations of artifice. The book is fine and different for earnest reasons, too....How generous of him to write this for us, to reveal all this so fearlessly, like Joyce, like Proust."

Review

Adam Mazmanian - Washington Post Book World
"Eggers is a pleasingly complicated writer, constitutionally incapable of simple reflection; he always considers the multiplicity of paradoxical feelings and motivations behind a thing, as though only in descending orbit around this morass of complexity, this chaotic internal dialectic, can he get us closer to what he calls his 'core,' the thing that 'can't be articulated. Only caricatured.' He takes us close, shows us as much as he can bear. At its best, his book is a comic and moving witness that transcends and transgresses formal boundaries."

Review

Ian Sansom - London Review of Books
"[I]t is almost too good to be believed."

More about the book

Undoubtedly one of the most inventive and unorthodox memoirs ever written, A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS became an instant bestseller, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and made Dave Eggers's name as a brilliant, risk-taking young writer. Orphaned in college when his parents both died of cancer in the span of 32 days, Eggers and his kid brother Toph moved to San Francisco and set up a delightfully unorthodox life together, a mix of carefree adolescence and the unexpected responsibilities of adulthood. In between enrolling Toph in school, finding a home, juggling various romances, and auditioning for THE REAL WORLD, Eggers founded MIGHT, an independent magazine featuring a potent blend of commentary, cynicism, and comedy--the same raucous style that would fuel his memoir. Though AHWOSG turns the memoir genre on its head and teems with self-mockery and postmodern trickery, beneath the cleverness it is a remarkable story of youthful hope and zeal, a story that became an instant classic for the youth generation at the dawn of the 21st century.

Excerpt

First you took [the title] at face value, and picked it up immediately. "This is just the sort of book for which I have been looking!" Many of you, particularly those among you who seek out the maudlin and melodramatic, were struck by the "Heartbreaking" part. Others thought the "Staggering Genius" element seemed like a pretty good recommendation. But then you thought, Hey, can these two elements work together? Or might they be like peanut butter and chocolate, plaid and paisley--never to peacefully coexist? Which is to say nothing of the faux (real? No, you beg, please no) boastfulness of the whole title put together. In the end, one's only logical interpretation of the title's intent is as a) a cheap kind of joke b) buttressed by an interest in lamely executed titular innovation (employed, one suspects, only to shock) which is c) undermined of course by the cheap joke aspect, and d) confused by the creeping feeling one gets that the author is dead serious in his feeling that the title is an accurate description of the content, intent, and quality of the book. Oh pshaw--does it even matter now? Hells no. You're here, you're in, we're havin' a party!

First Line

Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is grey and scratchy, the trees calligraphic.