Conversations with Dave Eggers

Parker (Conversations with Joan Didion), a writing professor at Montana State University, collects 34 interviews with author and publisher Dave Eggers from a variety of publications in this eclectic work. The first, with the Daily Illini in 1993, focuses on Eggers’s first magazine project, Might, which aimed “to attack and satirize everything.” Parker then jumps to a 1999 Village Voice conversation, which covers McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and a later email exchange with Willamette Week on Eggers’s memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, about raising his younger brother after the deaths of their parents. The interviews cover Eggers’s many projects, including his nonfiction reportage in Zeitoun and The Monk of Mokha, and close with his more recent fiction, including The Circle and the Trump-era satire The Captain and the Glory. Readers get nuanced treatment of Eggers’s strong beliefs about the importance of both print culture and eschewing cynicism, but in an unfortunate choice, Parker omits a piece that is referenced throughout, a tense interview from 2001 that resulted in Eggers afterward only agreeing to talk with reporters through email; including it, Parker writes, “would have accounted for too great a share of the book,” though its absence makes the collection feel incomplete. McSweeney’s regulars will find this worth a look. (Jan.)