Dave Eggers... Years ago, I read the short story "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned" (which just so happens to be in this collection) in Nick Hornby's collection Speaking With the Angel and enjoyed it. It wasn't my favorite piece in the collection, but I enjoyed it. I had never heard of Dave Eggers at that point.

Shortly after that, I started hearing *a lot* about him. Friends were recommending him to me, I heard interviews on the radio, read reviews and many, many arguments. I read several issues of McSweeney's and enjoyed them. I enjoyed his editorials in The Best American Non Required Reading series. I bought A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and couldn't bring myself to read it. (Don't ask me why, but it is still in my 'to-read' pile. I will get to it this year, I swear, but I still can't explain my reluctance to dive into it.)

When this collection of short stories came out, I snatched it up. I am a huge fan of short story collections, usually preferring them to novels. Of course, it sat in my to-read pile for quite awhile too.

But I finally read it. And I enjoyed it. I particularly liked "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water," and "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly." I think the combination of the intensely personal with the (nicely understated) world politics of class worked very well in these two pieces. I also liked "Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone" for its experimentation. While not the craziest piece I've ever read, it told its own story while pretending to be only a list of possibilities for a story. Many of the other pieces were enjoyable, but also less interesting.

What I feel did not work at all were the flash fiction pieces woven throughout. I've read one flash piece by Eggers before (which I can't remember the title of for the life of me) and loved it, but these fell flat, in my opinion. Typically, I am a fan of the genre. A good flash fiction piece is very powerful -- it has to be to work in such a small timeframe. These just didn't feel like they had that power, that punch to them.

Overall, I enjoyed the collection and will definitely read more Eggers in the future. Once I catch up, perhaps I can join in on the great Dave Eggers debate.

Edit: and p.s. I love the cover, whether the book may be judged by it or not.

‭How We Are Hungry, Dave Eggers
How We Are Hungry is a collection of short stories by Dave Eggers, originally published by McSweeney's in 2004. The hardcover first edition includes the following pieces:
Stories: "Another"; "What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust"; "The Only Meaning of the Oil-wet Water"; "On Wanting to Have Three Walls up Before She Gets Home"; "Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance" = "Measuring the Jump"; "She Waits, Seething, Blooming" ; "Quiet"; "Your Mother and I"; "Naveed"; "Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone"; "About the Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her"; "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly"; "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself"; "When They Learned to Yelp"; "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned".
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز شانزدهم ماه آگوست سال 2012 میلادی
عنوان: چطور گرسنه هستیم؛ نویسنده: دیو اگرز؛ مترجم: بابک مظلومی؛ تهران، نشر نیکا، 1392؛ در 214 ص؛
‏عنوان: چه معنی دارد که دسته‌ ای توی یک مملکت دور افتاده، سرباز مملکت شما را بگیرند، به گلوله ببندند، از خودرو بیرون بکشند و بعد توی خاک بغلتانند و مثله‌‌ اش کنند؛ نویسنده: دیو ایگرز (اگرز)؛ مترجم: اسدالله امرایی؛ ‏مشخصات نشر: تهران: امرود‏‫‬، 1392؛ مشخصات ظاهری: در ‏‫98 ص؛ ‏شابک: 9786005327922؛ یادداشت: کتاب حاضر نخستین‌بار تحت عنوان «چطور گرسنه هستیم» در سال 1391 توسط کتاب «نشر نیکا»‫ با ترجمه «بابک مظلومی» منتشر شده است. ‏عنوان دیگر: «چطور گرسنه هستیم»؛ ‏موضوع: داستان‌های نویسندگان آمریکایی -- سده 21 م
داستان‌های این مجموعه حکایت بی‌قراری، و عطش روح آدمی را دارند. شاید برای همین «اگرز» عنوان: «چطور گرسنه هستیم» را، برای کتاب برگزیده، عنوانی که نام هیچ یک از داستان‌های این مجموعه نیست. از: «یکی دیگر»، و «من و مادرت»، گرفته، تا «وقتی زوزه کشیدن را یاد گرفتند»، و «پس از این که به رودخانه پرت شدم و پیش از این که غرق شوم»، از داستان‌های این مجموعه هستند. «دیو اگرز»، داستان‌ نویس، روزنامه‌ نگار، و ناشر آمریکایی هستند. «دیو اگرز»، در سال 2005 میلادی، موفق به دریافت دکترای افتخاری ادبیات، از دانشگاه براون شدند. ایشان مؤسس انتشارات مک سوئینیز است. ا. شربیانی

I'm never quite sure why people like to bag on Dave Eggers. Maybe it's his style, his occasionally over-inflated sense of self. His writing, however, constantly astounds me. It's alive, bursting with verisimilitude. Not every story in How We Are Hungry is brilliant, but the journey through them, the snapshots of our humanity reflected back at us, is what makes them good. The good stories are intermingled with a few great ones, the kind that draw you in and shift the ground beneath you slightly with their glorious language. Eggers can turn a phrase, he can dig down into the simple truth of an emotion and lay it out with a single line. The stories here are unique and beautiful, both entertaining and provocative. It's certainly staying on my shelf.

By the time I got to "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water" Eggers had cemented himself in my mind as a comrade of DeLillo and Lethem, and thus became part of my mental catalogue of middle-aged white men who probably sleep with Hemingway's bibliography under their pillows. Maybe I just don't get it. Maybe I'm just not tuned into the frequency that these guys are tuned into. But this first pass at Eggers' work just did not do it for me.

Okay, cool, Mr. Eggers, you've got a female main character? Great! She wishes she was Native American so she could get away with things? Uh, what? The whole story is about wanting to sleep with her only remaining unmarried male friend? Haha, what??

You've got other stories about... let's see here, a guy with a suicidal cousin... a vaguely suicidal man who doesn't know how to ride a horse... a guy who wants to impress his wife... another story about a woman who wants to sleep with a male companion?? Yeah, no thanks, Dave. I'm good.

I enjoyed "Your Mother and I" the most out of all of them because of it's got this weird, slightly menacing tone. Even then it doesn't really do anything. The one about yelping was cool, too. But overall, I've read better short stories, and better short story collections.

How We Are Hungry (For More Interesting Prose)

This is an eclectic collection of short stories by McSweeny's Dave Eggers. Many of these stories are spooky and surreal dealing with suicide, climbing mountains, soldiers, a woman with one arm. Some stories were harder to shake and move on to the next than others.

The story that really sold me was "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly". A young woman who hasn't really ever completed anything embarks on a climbing expedition up Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa. It's the longest story in the collection and builds as you wonder whether or not she'll make it to the top and survive the climb.

I admired how Eggers approached every story with a seemingly different narrative style and voice. I felt like I digging through a free pile of someone else's things, all of them good but ultimately nothing I'd really want to take home.

The pull quote from the San Francisco Chronicle on this book's cover reads, "[Eggers] does things that should be impossible." I don't really know what that's supposed to mean, but it suggests a key point: how you feel about this book will depend entirely on how you feel about Dave Eggers. Which, I suppose, is true of all books and authors, but more so here. As is often the case with short story collections, especially collections from novelists, the stories here often meander around a good idea without cohering into a satisfying whole. Many of them feel like setups without punchlines, or ideas for novels that were abandoned at the twenty page mark and shunted into a collection.

What elevates the stories is the strength of Eggers' writing, and his characteristic cleverness/"cleverness." It certainly verges on being a bit too cute -- a one-page story titled, "What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust;" a story consisting entirely of (ostensibly) the author's notes for a story he intends to, but doesn't, write -- but generally things stay on the tolerable side of the clever line. For Eggers fans, that is.

What sold the book for me was the last story, which is written in then first person from the perspective of a dog who loves running around in the woods. Or the first canine, I suppose. If the idea of such a story makes you roll your eyes or throw up in your mouth a little for how obnoxiously cute it is, then by all means do not read this book. But if you enjoy Eggers' novels and/or his general McSweeny's, Best Non-Required Reading aesthetic, then this is certainly a worthy addition to the bibliography.

I loved a few of these stories, but a majority of them felt like I was supposed to solve a riddle, and I royally suck at that, so I am going with 3 stars here, people.

When I started this book of short stories, I was convinced I would love it. Dave Eggers crafts such beautiful sentences. After two days, though, I was longingly looking at my other books, desperate to be finished. I think I may have loved some of the stories if I had read them separately. "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water" was great, invoking such a sandy, sunburned atmosphere that my own skin felt hot and tight. But some of the shorter stories felt meaningless, pasted on more for style than for substance. A strong collection of short stories, in my mind, keeps a steady cadence. "How We Are Hungry" seemed so tacked together that none of the seams matched up.

I always feel duped when a writer takes everything they've written for magazines and journals and dumps them into one book. This is such a book. It certainly wasn't terrible, but I wouldn't want to live in a house built this way.

Sure, not every short story here will move each reader, but even with the ones that make you think "okay...what was the point of that?" its hard to deny Dave Eggers' unique gift with words, his interesting and well-formed characters, and his admirable creativity when it comes to manifesting abstract ideas and emotions into the mind and heart of his readers.

My favorite story, I think, was "Quiet" because it reached deep and resurrected some painfully real emotions on a personal level. I can't promise everyone will feel them, but I did, and I needed it.

There are a few stories which I maybe didn't "get" with the first reading, but will probably re-read in the future and hopefully enjoy.

I also appreciated the various story lengths. They come in all sizes, so you can basically choose one depending on how much time you have to read...just a convenience, really.

i was bored raw the entire time, and i was unreasonably enraged by the [short story?:] "there are some things he should keep to himself" which consists of four blank pages. so enraged, in fact, that i ended up filling up those pages myself with my .005 pigma micron pen. that'll learn ya! i thought. tho, immediately after i had this thought, i felt a sneaking suspicion that i had fallen into some kind of trap, that i had been, somehow, coerced. i began cursing the name of the author, and cursing the tear on page 125 of my first edition copy, which i ordered directly from the mcsweeney's website, and cursing my secondary existence as someone who steals space in someone else's published book. . .

DNF.
A escrita destes contos é fluida, mas o conteúdo é chocho.

I definitely preferred some of the story lines more than others. And for some reason I can never remember the name of this book. I think because the names of the stories inside the book are so intriguing.
For Example: "What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust".

I loved his language and simple technique of writing in 'Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will not Die Alone' I feel like Dave Eggers REALLY can interpret voices well.

And definitely get the hard back version, because the paperback version is missing 1 story.