A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story

by Dave Eggers (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $3.25

  Well, this was when Bill was sighing a lot. He had decided that after our parents died he just didn't want any more fighting between what was left of us. He was twenty-four, Beth was twenty-three, I was twenty-one, Toph was eight, and all of us were so tried already, from that winter. So when something world come up, any little thing, some bill to pay or decision to make, he would just sigh, his eyes tired, his mouth in a sorry kind of smile. But Beth and I...Jesus, we were fighting with everyone, anyone, each other, with strangers at bars, anywhere -- we were angry people wanting to exact revenge. We came to California and we wanted everything, would take what was ours, anything within reach. And I decided that little Toph and I, he with his backward hat and long hair, living together in our little house in Berkeley, would be world-destroyers. We inherited each other and, we felt, a responsibility to reinvent everything, to scoff and re-create and drive fast while singing loudly and pounding the windows. It was a hopeless sort of exhilaration, a kind of arrogance born of fatalism, I guess, of the feeling that if you could lose a couple of parents in a month, then basically anything could happen, at any time -- all bullets bear your name, all cars are there to crush you, any balcony could give way; more disaster seemed only logical. And then, as in Dorothy's dream, all these people I grew up with were there, too, some of them orphans also, most but not all of us believing that what we had been given was extraordinary, that it was time to tear or break down, ruin, remake, take and devour. This was San Francisco, you know, and everyone had some dumb idea -- I mean, wicca? -- and noone there would tell you yours was doomed. Thus the public nudity, and this ridiculous magazine, and the Real World tryout, all this need, most of it disguised by sneering, but all driven by a hyper-awareness of this window, I guess, a few years when your muscles are taut, coiled up and vibrating. But what to do with the energy? I mean, when we drive, Toph and I, and we drive past people, standing on top of all these hills, part of me wants to stop the car and turn up the radio and have us all dance in formation, and part of me wants to run them all over.

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.25

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $3.25

  Dave Eggers's parents died from cancer within a month of each other when he was twenty-one and his brother, Christopher, was seven. They left the Chicago suburb where they had grown up and moved to San Francisco. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius tells the story of their life together.

  'The story is at once funny, tender, annoying and, yes, heartbreaking - an epic about family and how families fracture and fragment and somehow, through all the tumult and upset, manage to endure . . . A virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of a book that noisily announces the debut of a talented - yes, staggeringly talented new writer' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

  'Eggers is an original new voice, the real thing. When you read his extraordinary memoir you don't laugh, then cry, then laugh again; you somehow experience these emotions all at once - and powerfully'

  David Remnick

  'The force and energy of this book could power a train' David Sedaris

• New

  Paperback
  2007

  $12.57

  'Heartbreaking? Certainly. Staggering? Yes, I'd say so. And if genius is capturing the universal in a fresh and memorable way, call it that too' Anthony Quinn, Sunday Times 'Is this how all orphans would speak -- I am at once pitiful and monstrous, I know -- if they had Dave Eggers's prodigious linguistic gifts? For he does write wonderfully, and this is an extremely impressive debut' John Banville, Irish Times 'A virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of a book that noisily announces the debut of a talented -- yes, staggeringly talented -- new writer' -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times 'Exhilarating ...Profoundly moving, occasionally angry and often hilarious ...A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is, finally, a finite book of jest, which is why it succeeds so brilliantly' -- New York Times Book Review 'What is really shocking and exciting is the book's sheer rage. AHWOSG is truly ferocious, like any work of genius. Eggers -- self-reliant, transcendent, expansive -- is Emerson's ideal Young American. [The book] does itself justice: it is a settling of accounts. And it is almost too good to be believed' -- London Review of Books 'A hilarious book ...In it, literary gamesmanship and self-consciousness are trained on life's most unendurable experience, used to examine a memory too scorching to stare at, as one views an eclipse by projecting sunlight onto paper through a pinhole' -- Time 'Eggers evokes the terrible beauty of youth like a young Bob Dylan, frothing with furious anger ...He takes us close, shows us as much as he can bear ...His book is a comic and moving witness that transcends and transgresses formal boundaries' -- Washington Post