How We Are Hungry is a gripping, lyrical and soulful collection of stories from the acclaimed author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Ranging from a doomed Irish setter’s tales of running and jumping (“After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned”) to a bitterly comic meditation on suicide and friendship (“Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance”), and from the Egyptian desert to the asphalt of Interstate 5, these stories are Eggers at his finest. By turns devastating, clear-eyed and funn – incredibly funny – this collection is a marvel.

“These tales reinvigorate that staid old form, the short story, with a jittery sense of adventure.... Eggers does things that should be impossible, and he does them gracefully.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“Beautiful stories, anchored in the real world…. How We Are Hungry looks like a classic.”

—The Oregonian

“[The story ‘Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly’ is] a masterpiece ... the narration is magisterial, without a false note.... It may well be the last great twentieth-century short story.”

The Observer (UK)

"'After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned’ is a small tour de force that ratifies [Eggers’s] ability to write about anything with style and vigour and genuine emotion.”

—The New York Times

“There’s plenty in this collection to remind us that, for all his noodling around, Eggers is phenomenally talented.”

Washington Post

Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and You Shall Know Our Velocity, presents his first collection of short stories. The characters are roaming, searching, and often struggling, and revelations do not always arrive on schedule. Precisely crafted and boldly experimental, How We Are Hungry simultaneously embraces and expands the boundaries of the short story.

Dave Eggers and his wife live in Northern California. He edits a magazine, McSweeney's, and teaches at 826 Valencia in San Francisco.

www.mcsweeneys.net