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Dave Eggers' The Wild Things is available for preorder, in regular hardcover and
limited-edition fur-covered.
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- - - - Copyright The Times, 2003
- - - - Title: The misfit
- - - - The misfit Section: Features, pg. 38 - Times Magazine Dave Eggers is not your typical cult novelist - he teaches children to write in the back of a San Francisco pirate store, never reads his reviews, and his journal sells alongside taxidermist supplies in the dusty recesses of a Brooklyn oddity shop. Curiouser and curiouser, says Oliver Bennett In Brooklyn, New York, there is an unnamed, discreet shop. It sells supplies for amateur taxidermists and those preparing prize ferrets for competition, as well as machine parts and veterinary paraphernalia. The proprietor describes it as "a sort of Dada store": the culmination of his dream to run a shop where "the prices never made sense, and nothing was ever really sold, and nothing would ever be desirable: a combination of Christo's wrapped storefronts and Monty Python's dead-parrot pet store." Oh, but it does sell one useful item: a literary journal called Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. McSweeney's, as it is simply known, is the cornerstone in the infectious world of writer Dave Eggers, who has become J.D. Salinger, Ken Kesey and Jack Kerouac rolled into one crumpled 32-year-old. He has just published his second book, You Shall Know Their Velocity, but that's merely part of his far-reaching literary venture, which includes publishing his cultish journal and opening a writing school for underprivileged children called 826 Valencia, in San Francisco's Mission District. Deborah Treisman, literary editor of The New Yorker, says that McSweeney's ethos has rallied a generation. "McSweeney's has done a lot to rejuvenate the New York literary magazine world," she says. "Judging by the fanatical nature of its fans, there was a large crowd of young, literary people just waiting to be galvanised by something like this." Such is Eggers' influence that it divides US critics: one calls it "contagious", another snipes at "Eggersland". With Velocity just released and McSweeney's shortly to be distributed in the UK, the Eggers effect is now on export, and Nick Hornby and Zadie Smith, both friends and fans, are helping to spread the word. Dave Eggers came to attention in 2000 with his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Raised in Chicago, he was in the last year of college when his parents died of cancer within a month of each other. This left Eggers, then 22, in charge of his younger brother Christopher, "Toph". The subsequent rollercoaster was recorded in the book that Eggers calls AHWOSG, and it is now being adapted for film by Nick Hornby and D.V. DeVincentis, who worked on Hornby's High Fidelity. "It's an incredibly strange process," Eggers tells me (antipathetic to media, our entire encounter is by e-mail). "The first thing you note is that in a screenplay, your name isn't Dave any more, it's DAVE. But the only catch so far is Nick continually using his Britishisms in the dialogue. He keeps calling cigarettes 'fags' which is complicated in a story that takes place in San Francisco. But other than that, and Nick's attempts to get his friends - apparently he's very tight with Justin Timberlake - cast in the movie, it's going very well." One might expect Eggers to feel triumphant. But after AHWOSG, he clearly felt ambivalent. He became retiring and, some say, antagonistic. He changed his agent and publisher and although he could have cashed in on Velocity, he published it himself (although in Britain it is published by Penguin). "Publishing the book through McSweeney's in the US kept it much more palatable," he writes. "The publisher of our company is one of my old high-school friends, Barb Bersche, and the company's so tiny that we were able to keep the whole process manageable and fun." These days, Eggers keeps it real and non-corporate. He lives near San Francisco, and goes to 826 Valencia most days. The very place is a child's fantasy. The reading room is a tent and the frontage has been converted into a pirate shop. "The space we rented was zoned for retail, so we had to think of something to sell," explains Eggers. "When I was doing the demolition on the ceilings, there were all these raw beams underneath. It gave the place the look of the hull of an old ship, so we decided we'd sell pirate supplies. We sell a complete line of provisions for the working buccaneer - eye patches, hooks, planks, peglegs, chests, compasses. And for some reason, it does well. Only in San Francisco, we're told." But 826 Valencia is no joke. It has a scholarship programme, places tutors in schools and masses vast numbers of professional volunteers to assist students. Eggers says that the effect has been salutary. "I've yet to meet a student who didn't want to learn, and who wasn't very kind about accepting help. Politicians here often decry how they're getting meaner and more twisted, but that's just sensationalist bullshit. Kids are kids." Velocity is the story of two young men, Will and Hand, who come into some easy money and vow to give it away across the world, hopping from country to country. "There are experiences I share with Will," writes says Eggers. "AHWOSG did very well, so I did find myself in a position of having money, whereas in my twenties we rarely had more than we needed. "When my parents died, my siblings and I realised that they'd never saved a dime. But they did spend everything they made on us. So I have this hardwired instinct that remains ever thankful for any comfort we manage to create, and at the same time distrusts the saving of a lot of wealth. It seems more natural to keep it in circulation. Thus the use of Velocity in the title, which also has to do with the movement of money." This theme has raised a lot of conjecture on the difficulties of altruism, particularly as Will and Hand go to poor countries, including Senegal, Morocco and Latvia. Amazingly, Eggers put in the legwork. "I did go everywhere they did, because I'm no good at making stuff up about real places. I started as a journalist way back when, so there's that impulse to base things closely on reality." Although AHWOSG was a huge success, Eggers claims not to have had Second Album syndrome with Velocity. "I could lie and say it had an effect on me, but that would be a stretch. I don't take all of that seriously any more, expectations or obligations. About a year after AHWOSG came out, I learnt to get some distance and a better sense of humour about the whole process, and since then things have been pretty low-key." As to the reaction, it's "still fairly early. I haven't heard much from readers. And I don't read anything written about me or the book." McSweeney's predates Eggers' renown, but has grown with it. Eclectic, eccentric, humorous; like a Victorian miscellany, with loads of typographic flourishes, Eggers characterises it as a kind of "salon, and a curiosity shop". It publishes unknowns as well as top names including Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Smith and Hornby: indeed, the tenth issue has contributions by airport faves Michael Crichton, Elmore Leonard and Stephen King. "By not taking itself too seriously and publishing some of the most inventive writing around, it has issued a challenge to publications that are inclined to rest on their laurels," says Treisman. Even the name is pure, whimsical Eggers. "It was named after a man named Timothy McSweeney, who used to write letters to my family, claiming to be my mum's long-lost brother," he says. "She was born Adelaide McSweeney, in Boston, and so this man, who spent most of his life in institutions in and around Boston, sought her out, thinking she was a link to his past. So naming the magazine after him made sense - like him, it was sending odd messages through the mail, hoping to connect with strangers." McSweeney's is growing as a publisher too, with a backlist of 11 books. But it remains independent, up to a point. "The independent stores in the US have always been our only means of survival because they enable us to do what we do: publish uncategorisable journals and books on a small scale," writes Eggers. "Everything we do is small, and that's on purpose. We have a staff of four." In any case, he adds, McSweeney's can't compete. "We're too small to make a dent in anyone else's business plan. We sometimes work with the big publishers, because we have to." Funds go directly to 826 Valencia. Eggers' publishing expertise began in 1994 when, after studying art and journalism, he began a satirical magazine called Might. Eggers funded it with freelance design, but it died in 1997, and he moved to Brooklyn with Toph, working briefly for Esquire before establishing McSweeney's in 1998 for "almost no reason other than the inexplicable urge to start something from scratch and lose some money doing it." A writers' grail it may now be, but the point of McSweeney's is to publish anything odd and/or interesting. "Early on, we were called a humour magazine, because a few of the first 30 or so pieces we published were kind of funny," writes Eggers. "Then we were known as a purely experimental journal, because we published a few formally inventive pieces. So for a while we battled against assumptions. But at this point I think people are giving us the chance to do a lot of different things." He still looks at unsolicited manuscripts, and reads about 50 new pieces a month. "This'll sound corny, but it's hard to say no because it's so heartening that these people send you their work in the first place. Having work published is a good feeling - and I want to give that to everyone. "As for the generational angle, we don't really care how old anyone is. Each issue is shaped by what the writers send us - if we got ten good things by Aboriginal authors, the next issue would be the Aboriginal issue." And with such gestures, McSweeney's, Eggers and 826 Valencia have helped to make reading and writing fun again. Eggers himself sloughs off the immense significance now accorded to him. "It's just a book," he says of McSweeney's, "and we're a little group of people who work behind a pirate store. We don't take it too seriously." But his playpower ethos seems to tap into something very powerful, judging by the effect it is having on young literary America. You Shall Know Our Velocity is published by Hamish Hamilton and is available at the Books Direct price of Pounds 13.59 (RRP Pounds 16.99) plus Pounds 1.95 p&p on 0870 160 8080; www.timesdirect.co.uk/booksdirect - - - -
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