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List Price: $14.95Amazon.com's Price: $10.17 You Save: $4.78 (32%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.92092
EAN: 9780375725784
ISBN: 0375725784
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 496
Publication Date: February 13, 2001
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: February 13, 2001
Sales Rank: 3070
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
The literary sensation of the year, a book that redefines both family and narrative for the twenty-first century. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an instant classic that will be read in paperback for decades to come. The Vintage edition includes a new appendix by the author.
Amazon.com Review:
Dave Eggers is a terrifically talented writer; don't hold his cleverness against him. What to make of a book called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story? For starters, there's a good bit of staggering genius before you even get to the true story, including a preface, a list of 'Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book,' and a 20-page acknowledgements section complete with special mail-in offer, flow chart of the book's themes, and a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of a stapler (helpfully labeled 'Here is a drawing of a stapler:').
But on to the true story. At the age of 22, Eggers became both an orphan and a 'single mother' when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. In the ensuing sibling division of labor, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his 8-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters, and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swings between making his brother's upbringing manically fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him. (Case in point: his idea of suitable bedtime reading is John Hersey's Hiroshima.)
The book is also, perhaps less successfully, about being young and hip and out to conquer the world (in an ironic, media-savvy, Gen-X way, naturally). In the early '90s, Eggers was one of the founders of the very funny Might Magazine, and he spends a fair amount of time here on Might, the hipster culture of San Francisco's South Park, and his own efforts to get on to MTV's Real World. This sort of thing doesn't age very well--but then, Eggers knows that. There's no criticism you can come up with that he hasn't put into A.H.W.O.S.G. already. 'The book thereafter is kind of uneven,' he tells us regarding the contents after page 109, and while that's true, it's still uneven in a way that is funny and heartfelt and interesting.
All this self-consciousness could have become unbearably arch. It's a testament to Eggers's skill as a writer--and to the heartbreaking particulars of his story--that it doesn't. Currently the editor of the footnote-and-marginalia-intensive journal McSweeney's (the last issue featured an entire story by David Foster Wallace printed tinily on its spine), Eggers comes from the most media-saturated generation in history--so much so that he can't feel an emotion without the sense that it's already been felt for him. What may seem like postmodern noodling is really just Eggers writing about pain in the only honest way available to him. Oddly enough, the effect is one of complete sincerity, and--especially in its concluding pages--this memoir as metafiction is affecting beyond all rational explanation. --Mary Park
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - I really liked it until I didn't...
I admit it. I enjoyed half of this book. The first half. Somewhere along the line, however, Dave Eggers starts sounding a little less bipolar and funny and a lot more whiny and childish. I stopped reading it. That's how bad it is. The first couple hundred pages are okay if not a little self indulgent. Look at me! I'm cool. I knew people from "The Real World." San Francisco... Woo Hoo. It's a bit much, but it's entertaining. That is until it just isn't anymore. His story is completely ... Read More
Rating: - Easily the worst book I've read all year
This is hands down the worst book I've read all year, and I read at least five a month. Thank goodness someone lent it to me and I didn't have to spend money for it. I kept feeling as if the author were trying to manipulate my emotions and not doing such a good job. Reading your immature teenager's diary would probably generate the same feelings.
Rating: - Heartbreaking? Not Really. Staggering? Sure. Genius? No Way! MTV GENERATION HYPE!
Listen, Dave Eggers is a real nice guy. He makes sure you understand that, above all else, by the end of his autobiography. I mean, after nursing his dying mother, he goes & raises his baby brother. A real nice guy. Unfortunately, nice guys don't write good novels. All the greats, & especially my favorites (Miller, Dosty, Camus, Bukowski) were pricks. You have to be a prick to be able to cut through the BS & madness that obscures the truth about life. Eggers story is a sad one, but tragic? ... Read More
Rating: - The Mature Artist...
I've heard it said that the mature artist does not bring attention to his work. Also, it has been said that an intelligent artist not break the rules merely to break the rules, but does so only to underline or add an exclamation point to his art.
There are flashes of brilliance in this, and in his other works. However those flashes are far too infrequent and the writing just too sophomoric for this book to be notable to anyone who cares about literature beyond it's capacity for mindless, ... Read More
Rating:  - A dizzying book
There is an image at the beginning of this book, of two brothers driving along Highway 1. They are flying on the edge of the world, going too fast, with only the guardrail between them and the ocean below, and they feel dizzy and free and reckless. It's an image that captures part of the soul of the book. There is another part of the book, that I think more of as the body, where there are two boys living together, one boy older than the other and trying to be the parent. He feeds the younger boy peanut ... Read More
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Dewey Decimal Number: 973.92092
EAN: 9780375725784
ISBN: 0375725784
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 496
Publication Date: February 13, 2001
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: February 13, 2001
Sales Rank: 3070
Studio: Vintage