Commentary
Undoubtedly one of the most inventive and unorthodox memoirs ever written, A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS became an instant bestseller, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and made Dave Eggers's name as a brilliant, risk-taking young writer. Orphaned in college when his parents both died of cancer in the span of 32 days, Eggers and his kid brother Toph moved to San Francisco and set up a delightfully unorthodox life together, a mix of carefree adolescence and the unexpected responsibilities of adulthood. In between enrolling Toph in school, finding a home, juggling various romances, and auditioning for THE REAL WORLD, Eggers founded MIGHT, an independent magazine featuring a potent blend of commentary, cynicism, and comedy-the same raucous style that would fuel his memoir. Though AHWOSG turns the memoir genre on its head and teems with self-mockery and postmodern trickery, beneath the cleverness it is a remarkable story of youthful hope and zeal, a story that became an instant classic for the youth generation at the dawn of the 21st century.

Publisher's Notes
A respected magazine editor/founder and onetime spokesman for Generation X offers a satiric, eloquent, and thoroughly tradition-shattering memoir that discusses the deaths of his parents from cancer, his raising of his younger brother, and more.

Reviews
"[I]t is almost too good to be believed."

Ian Sansom

"Eggers is a pleasingly complicated writer, constitutionally incapable of simple reflection; he always considers the multiplicity of paradoxical feelings and motivations behind a thing, as though only in descending orbit around this morass of complexity, this chaotic internal dialectic, can he get us closer to what he calls his 'core,' the thing that 'can't be articulated. Only caricatured.' He takes us close, shows us as much as he can bear. At its best, his book is a comic and moving witness that transcends and transgresses formal boundaries."

Adam Mazmanian

"Eggers lays everything out in exquisite, excruciating detail, but he wants to have his tearjerker and deconstruct it, too....[S]ome of the best parts of A. H. W. O. S. G. are in the fine print, literally; they exist on the margins, where Eggers seems to feel most at home....Whether he likes it or not, Eggers has written the kind of book he swears he never wanted to write: a hip tearjerker. It's ANGELA'S ASHES meets ON THE ROAD."

Mark Horowitz

"Eggers's book, which goes a surprisingly long way toward delivering on its self-satirizing, hyperbolic title, is a profoundly moving, occasionally angry and often hilarious account....[It] is a furious whirlwind of energy and invention, literally wearing its originality on its sleeve....A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS is, finally, a book of finite jest, which is why it succeeds so brilliantly. Eggers's most powerful prose is often his most straightforward, relying on old-fashioned truth telling for its punch."

Sara Mosle

"It's James Joyce, back from the dead!....And he's got some Proust in him, the little 29-year-old-jerk, he's got the trammeling thoroughness of Proust's observation, his honest observations of artifice. The book is fine and different for earnest reasons, too....How generous of him to write this for us, to reveal all this so fearlessly, like Joyce, like Proust."

Susan Salter Reynolds

"Mr. Eggers demonstrates in this book that he can pretty much write on anything. He can turn a Frisbee game with his brother into an existential meditation on life. He can convey the wild, caffeinated joy he feels after seeing a friend wake up from a coma. And he can turn his efforts to scatter his mother's ashes in Lake Michigan into a story that's both a lyrical tribute to her passing and a crude, slapstick account of his ineptitude as a mourner, lugging about a canister of ashes that reminds him, creepily, of the Ark of the Covenant in the Spielberg movie. A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS may start off sounding like one of those coy, solipsistic exercises that put everything in little ironic quote marks, but it quickly becomes a virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of book that noisily announces the debut of a talented--yes, staggeringly talented new writer."

Michiko Kakutani