Dave Eggers - How We Are Hungry

Table of Contents

THIS BOOK IS FOR CHRIS

Acclaim for Dave Eggerss HOW WE ARE HUNGRY

ASanFranciscoChronicleBest Book of the Year

Full of the raw stuff of lives. The pain and the anger. Emotions that get mixed up and change from one minute to the next. The wonder and the joy. Its all condensed and crafted, working, thats what fiction is. But it feels raw, and its exhilarating.... And thats not even getting into how electrically funny Eggers can be.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned is a small tour de force that ratifies [Eggerss] ability to write about anything with style and vigor and genuine emotion.

The New York Times

Haunting character-driven narratives.... Eggers is a master.

Entertainment Weekly

[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 (London)

One of the many pleasures in reading How We Are Hungry, Eggerss recent collection of stories, is that it reminds you of his abilities as a writer. He can dazzle.... He can move effortlessly between classic storytelling and the more experimental.

Salon

Theres stunning writing here. Subtle, epigrammatic, candid and thoughtful.

Herald (UK)

While some story collections forsake the everyday for the exotic, Dave Eggerss How We Are Hungry finds meaning in the backyards of America as easily as amidst the surf of Costa Ricawith the revelation that sometimes, the heaviest things we carry on a journey are our own thoughts.

Philadelphia City Paper

As always, Eggers finds his place between outrageous humor and disastrous sadness.... [His stories] dont quit resonating until long after the last sentence is finished.

Newscity Chicago

Its not surprising that short stories would turn out to be [Eggerss] best fiction milieu.... He plays with format and content alike, and the results are as remarkable as they are intrepid.

The Onion

[These] stories and sequences... move and disturb in unexpected, even shocking ways.

The Times Literary Supplement (London)

If all writing had the sense of moral purpose Eggers displays, the world would be a sharper, livelier place.

The Journal News

ANOTHER

ID GONE TO EGYPT, as a courier, easy. I gave the package to a guy at the airport and was finished and free by noon on the first day. It was a bad time to be in Cairo, unwise at that juncture, with the poor state of relations between our nation and the entire region, but I did it anyway because, at that point in my life, if there was a window at all, however small and discouraged, I would

Id been having trouble thinking, finishing things. Words like anxiety and depression seemed apt then, in that I wasnt interested in the things I was usually interested in, and couldnt finish a glass of milk without deliberation. But I didnt stop to ruminate or wallow. Diagnosis would have made it all less interesting.

Id been a married man, twice; Id been a man who turned forty among friends; Id had pets, jobs in the foreign service, people working for me. Years after all that, somewhere in May, I found myself in Egypt, against the advice of my government, with mild diarrhea and alone.

There was a new heat there, dry and suffocating and unfamiliar to me. Id lived only in humid placesCincinnati, Hartfordwhere the people I knew felt sorry for each other. Surviving in the Egyptian heat was invigorating, thoughliving under that sun made me lighter and stronger, made of platinum. Id dropped ten pounds in a few days but I felt good.

This was a few weeks after some terrorists had slaughtered seventy tourists at Luxor, and everyone was jittery. And Id just been in New York, on the top of the Empire State Building, a few days after a guy opened fire there, killing one. I wasnt consciously following trouble around, but then what the hell was I doing

On a Tuesday I was by the pyramids, walking, loving the dust, squinting; Id just lost my second pair of sunglasses. The hawkers who work the Gizeh plateaureally some of the least charming charmers the world ownswere trying to sell me anythinglittle scarab toys, Cheops keychains, plastic sandals. They spoke twenty words of a dozen languages, and tried me with German, Spanish, Italian, English. I said no, feigned muteness, got in the habit of just saying Finland! to them all, sure that they didnt know any Finnish, until a man offered me a horseback ride, in American English, hooking his rs obscenely. They really were clever bastards. Id already gotten a brief and expensive camel ride, which was worthless, and though Id never ridden a horse past an amble and hadnt really wanted to, I followed him on foot.

Through the desert, he said, leading me past a silver tourist bus, Swiss seniors unloading. I followed him. We go get horse. We ride to the Red Pyramid, he said. I followed. You have your horse yourself, he said, answering my last unspoken question.

I knew the Red Pyramid had just been reopened, or was about to be reopened, though I didnt know why they called it Red. I wanted to ride on a horse through the desert. I wanted to see if this manslight, with brown teeth, wide-set eyes, a cop mustachewould try to kill me. There were plenty of Egyptians who would love to kill me, I was sure, and I was ready to engage in any way with someone who wanted me dead. I was alone and reckless and both passive and quick to fury. It was a beautiful time, everything electric and hideous. In Egypt I was noticed, I was yelled at by some and embraced by others. One day I was given free sugarcane juice by a well-dressed man who lived under a bridge and wanted to teach at an American boarding school. I couldnt help him but he was sure I could, talking to me loudly by the juice bar, outside, in crowded Cairo, while others eyed me vacantly. I was a star, a heathen, an enemy, a nothing.

At Gizeh I walked with the horse manhe had no smell away from the tourists and buses, and down from the plateau. The hard sand went soft. We passed an ancient man in a cave below ground, and I was told to pay him baksheesh, a tip, because he was a famous man and the keeper of that cave. I gave him a dollar. The first man and I continued walking, for about a mile, and where the desert met a road he introduced me to his partner, a fat man, bursting from a threadbare shirt, who had two horses, both black, Arabian.

They helped me on the smaller of the two. The animal was alive everywhere, restless, its hair marshy with sweat. I didnt tell them that Id only ridden once before, and that time at a roadside Fourth of July fair, walking around a track, half-drunk. I was trying to find dinosaur bones in Arizona I thought, briefly, that I was an archeologist. I still dont know why I was made the way I am.

Hesham, the horse man said, and jerked his thumb at his sternum. I nodded.

I got on the small black horse and we left the fat man. Hesham and I trotted about five miles on the rural road, newly paved, passing farms while cabs shot past us, honking. Always the honking in Cairo!the drivers steering with the left hand to be better able, with their right, to communicate every nuance of their feelings. My saddle was simple and small; I spent a good minute trying to figure out how it was attached to the horse and how I would be attached to it. Under it I could feel every bone and muscle and band of cartilage that bound the horse together. I stroked its neck apologetically and it shook my hand away. It loathed me.