You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers

And then he wrote this one, You Shall Know Our Velocity. But he dropped that one, stopped writing it. where was Dave? Dave was busy working on a novel of his own.

After the success of his memoir/ creative non-fiction/ fictional reality, Eggers funneled the funds into his McSweeney's magazine project, which proved very succesful (and is now attracting names like Michael Chabon and Sherman Alexie.) He used his printing connections in Iceland to produce David Byrne's most excellent The New Sins- but. He later created an appendix to it for his paperback edition. Underneath all these literary defenses was someone just struggling to get by in a world he felt totally unprepared for.ĪHWSG was the story of Dave Eggers' life up to a certain point. Transforming the mundane into the quirky, the fascinating, the hilarious, and the absurd while simultaneously breaking some kind of wall and revealing a true nature of expression that resonated with readers very strongly. Never mind that at all.Įggers was remaking his immediate reality with his own image. Nevermind that the origins of his style, postmodernism in the vein of David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and a touch of Tom Robbins had been going on for some time- nevermind it because it's an underlying process, on some self-determined progression to the art of being. San Francisco was different then, and Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius had the sort of false pomposity that appealed to the stylishly wicked of the Bay Area's newest (and soonest to be dead) working class.

Usually when one is noticing a so-called cultural phenomenon, not so many people are hip on it. Everyone on public transportation was reading them, which is strange. Back in the days of the era of the dot com, in San Francisco one couldn't seem to escape the growing forest of Eggers and David Sedaris.

Have you heard of Dave Eggers? Timothy McSweeney? (just a tomb down in the old cemetery). Backgrounds and Foregroundsĭo you like to read? Chances are that if you are here, you do. I was inside, very warm, walking from door to door. It was a clear and eyeblue day, that day, as was the first day of this story, a few years ago in January, on Chicago's north side, in the opulent shadow of Wrigley and with the wind coming low and searching off the jagged half-frozen lake. And so you step into Powell's City of Books and lo and behold you see a hardcover by Dave Eggers with the following on the cover:Įverything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in east-central Columbia, with forty-two locals we hadn't yet met.

You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers