Like your wardrobe, this book is incohesive, comfortable, curious and cozy. Instead of getting furious because nothing fits together and it's impossible for you to create a suitable outfit, just pause, take a thoughtful second glance, and appreciate that despite it all, you own a collection of hand-selected garments that are individually interesting, eclectic, and varied. Not all of us can show up at the party lookin' all What is the What.

I really liked the way the stories alternate from long, involved tales to brief snapshots. Sometimes the stories don't go anywhere, and that's okay. You just float in a moment. Or glimpse a character's thought process.

Eventually, you let go of the expectation that the story will lead you, over character archs and surprising plot twists, to a place of resolution and finality. Instead, you appreciate the more subtle parts of excellent storytelling, like details and language and descriptions like, "the streamlined, utilitarian body of a tomboy teenager." Any one of Egger's shorter pieces could be performed at a poetry reading. And maybe they should be.

You wonder about his writing methodology. Does he keep a running list of one-line prose poems ("Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance") and later revisit his list, expounding until it becomes a short story or longer piece of prose poetry?

Eggers gets away with things that are hard to pull off, like skipping a description of the setting and instead opting to break from the narrative for a brief dialogue between the clouds and the treetops. Shit, I hadn't even wondered what they were thinking, no less entertained the possibility of these objects as telling, feeling, descriptive characters. It's these little touches that makes it worthwhile to hang on and endure this break from Egger's typical form.

How We Are Hungry is the first time I am reading anything of Dave Eggers.

A few years ago, 'After I Was Thrown in the River And Before I Drowned', the last story in this collection, was recommended reading for one of my classes. I read the first part, thought the person who wrote it was high and moved on.

I was quite glad it was the last story, because the stories preceding it were the ones that convinced me to give it another shot. It really takes a while to get into the rhythm of this book (or maybe that's just me), but once I did, I found it to be quite enjoyable.

It's a bit strange though, because I feel like every seemingly mindless, mundane story is a metaphor for something profound and inexplicable. (Then again, maybe that's still just me.) It's kind of annoying. I loathe authors inserting so many weird symbolisms that they expect everyone to get. It's not like all of us can have epiphanies after every story. The latter stories more than make up for it though.

I fell in love with 'Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone' and 'When They Learned To Yelp'.

As for 'After I Was Thrown in the River,' I'm happy I read through to the end this time.

like eating only a single bite of gelato. favorites: “the only meaning of the oil-wet water,” “quiet,” and “after i was thrown in the river and before i drowned”

A hit or miss collection of short stories. Most stories felt like pure nonsense, relying on gimmicky formats and contrived situations in lieu of having any actual content, almost like an Internet meme masquerading as something real. Still, there were a few stories that were quite fun (e.g., the "After I Was Thrown in the River..." story from the point of view of a dog, complete with ideas about the afterlife). And, there were a couple of stories (including "Climbing to the Window..." and "She Waits...") that felt like they captured something approaching truth or something real about the human experience. Dave Eggers is talented, but he's at his best when he's not enamored with exploring the limits of how talented he might be.

2 1/2 stars.

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.

Lyrical, almost like David Means, but with a (very) slightly lighter touch and a tad more optimism (I think Eggers' characters tend to be younger and have a little more promise). I like this kind of soupy, play-by-play exploration of the characters' motives, how memory and impulse add up to whatever it is they're on the verge of doing at each moment. I was trying to figure out whether he writes realistic women characters, and then just decided that his characters aren't really conscious of or identified with sex, or race for that matter -- other than as implicit physical/social characteristics, these categories don't really exist as a way for people to identify themselves --there is no gender or race, just personality types. But there were definitely about 5 or 6 typos.

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)

I have been reading this book really slowly across this whole year, and now I've come to the end of it I'm still not entirely sure what to think of it. Some of the stories were absolutely wonderful, some seemed like they were trying a bit too hard to be deep and meaningful. I definitely liked the shorter stories better than the longer ones, I think 'Your Mother and I' and 'After I was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned' were my favourites.

There was a line somewhere in 'The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water' which I totally can't find that I'm going back and looking about it, but it was something about how there 'the water wasn't a metaphor'. And that kinda reflected my experience with the book: sometimes you should just stop looking for symbolism/metaphors and read and let the words wash over you and enjoy.

A particularly good experience with a book of short stories, I'd have to say. :]

The only other Eggers book I've read is "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius". I felt that the second half of the this collection of stories was much stronger than the first. There were some unremarkable moments along the way. He is at his best when the story is approached with a conceptual framework, definitely his forte. That being said, Eggers has a unique focus, always the underlying feeling of wishing to be more connected to the human community and exist with an awareness and care for that community. I think that's what makes him most exciting.

This was a very interesting book. I'd seen it listed on things like Amazon, but hadn't seen a hard copy until recently. Physically speaking, the book is small. It's broken into several (40+) short stories that vary from two sentences to (roughly) 300 wds.

Each story is a glimpse into the head of someone different than you. So you see thought processes, justifications, feelings of others. For me, the overall impact of the book was more an impression than a narrative, which provided a unique reading experience.

I'd recommend getting this book from your local library and reading it in one (or two) sittings, while drinking coffee in the a.m.

A criticism I've heard about Dave Eggers is that his stories tend to be gimmicky, overly self-aware, unrealistic, jokey, or filled with dopey sentimentalism. Those criticisms may be true, but that doesn't prevent How We Are Hungry from being an absolutely great collection of short stories.

Having now read three Eggers novels and two short story books, I think his writing style is especially suited toward short stories, where he has a compact space to explore ideas that might otherwise get tired in a long format. I especially enjoyed the final story in How We Are Hungry, written from the perspective of a dog, which turned out to be one of the most contemplative and emotional stories of the dozen-or-so in the book. Recommended.