The increased generosity of Eggers’s worldview has been matched by his backstage efforts as an editor and philanthropist. He is the co-founder of McSweeney’s, the San Francisco publishing house best known for its humorous online journal and its quarterly literary journal, which has evolved from a scrappy collection of ambitious stories into a diverse and immaculately designed outlet for young writers. One recent issue was devoted to Icelandic writers and contained a pullout from one of the country’s gossip rags; another came packaged in a cigar box. The monthly magazine The Believer, also published by McSweeney’s, has found a niche with young writers and readers thanks to its diverse interviews and commentary, all tangentially falling under the realm of literary criticism.
The publishing house is also home to 826 Valencia, a writing program tucked behind a pirate souvenir shop in San Francisco. The shop embodies the McSweeney’s ethic: quirky and eccentric on the surface, funny for the sake of being funny, but with a vision behind the entertainment. Since opening, 826 Valencia has grown into 826 National, a network of free writing programs for teenagers looking to find their voices. The program’s success inspired its Portland offshoot, The Telling Room. Eggers’s upcoming reading at USM’s Hannaford Lecture Hall (in the Abromson Center) will benefit the nonprofit, which holds writing workshops taught by professional writers to assist local teens. Their cornerstone endeavor, the Story House Project, is working to help local refugees tell their stories. Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng, the subject of his new novel, will meet members of the Story House Project and the local Sudanese community before their public discussion on February 25.
Comeuppance
Taken together, Eggers’s projects are a necessary reminder that contemporary fiction is still growing and expanding. Other authors — most notably Jonathan Safran Foer — have paralleled Eggers and McSweeney’s in furthering the possibilities of the novel, adding pictures and experimenting with font and layout as an attempt to express the vitality and aliveness of their characters. Programs like 826 National and The Telling Room look to ensure that this brand of alternative literature can persist as something deeper than a trend.
Eggers’s new novel, What is the What, is a triumphant example of the author’s newfound focus. The book is the slightly fictionalized biography of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the “Lost Boys” of Sudan whose village was ransacked in the country’s civil war. Having lost his home and most of his family and friends, Valentino walks from central Sudan to refugee camps in Ethiopia and then Kenya, spending his adolescence on the run from vultures and lions and both sides of the armed conflict: the corrupt Arab government that seeks to claim the oil-rich land for itself, and the Muslim rebel armies willing to murder and enslave their own people to aid their cause and save their lives.
Valentino’s journey is juxtaposed with his current experience in America. His life in Atlanta is markedly similar to his experience in the war. The book considers the double standards of his refugee peers, who blackmail Valentino as they are being blackmailed by others, and the subtle and overt racism of American blacks and whites.
