The Monk of Mokha

Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101947322
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
The Monk of Mokha is the exhilarating true story of a young Yemeni American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee but finds himself trapped in Sana’a by civil war. Mokhtar Alkhanshali is twenty-four and working as a doorman when he discovers the astonishing history of coffee and Yemen’s central place in it. He leaves San Francisco and travels deep into his ancestral homeland to tour terraced farms high in the country’s rugged mountains and meet beleagured but determined farmers. But when war engulfs the country and Saudi bombs rain down, Mokhtar has to find a way out of Yemen without sacrificing his dreams or abandoning his people.

The Parade

Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 052565531X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Book Description
From the bestselling author of The Circle comes a taut, suspenseful story of two foreigners' role in a nation's fragile peace. With echoes of J. M. Coetzee and Graham Greene, this "darkly funny" novel (The Los Angeles Times) questions whether we can ever understand another nation's war, and what role we have in forging anyone's peace. An unnamed country is leaving the darkness of a decade at war, and to commemorate the armistice the government commissions a new road connecting two halves of the state. Two men, foreign contractors from the same company, are sent to finish the highway. While one is flighty and adventurous, wanting to experience the nightlife and people, the other wants only to do the work and go home. But both men must eventually face the absurdities of their positions, and the dire consequences of their presence.

You Shall Know Our Velocity

Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426084
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
An “entertaining and profoundly original” (San Francisco Chronicle) moving and hilarious tale of two friends who fly around the world trying to give away a lot of money and free themselves from a profound loss. • From the bestselling author of The Circle. “Nobody writes better than Dave Eggers about young men who aspire to be, at the same time, authentic and sincere.” —The New York Times Book Review "You Shall Know Our Velocity! is the work of a wildly talented writer.... Like Kerouac's book, Eggers's could inspire a generation as much as it documents it." —LA Weekly

Essayism

Author: Brian Dillon
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681372835
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
A compelling ode to the essay form and the great essaysists themselves, from Montaigne to Woolf to Sontag. Essayism is a book about essays and essayists, a study of melancholy and depression, a love letter to belle-lettrists, and an account of the indispensable lifelines of reading and writing. Brian Dillon’s style incorporates diverse features of the essay. By turns agglomerative, associative, digressive, curious, passionate, and dispassionate, his is a branching book of possibilities, seeking consolation and direction from Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Susan Sontag, to name just a few of his influences. Whether he is writing on origins, aphorisms, coherence, vulnerability, anxiety, or a number of other subjects, his command of language, his erudition, and his own personal history serve not so much to illuminate or magnify the subject as to discover it anew through a kaleidoscopic alignment of attention, thought, and feeling, a dazzling and momentary suspension of disparate elements, again and again.

What Is the What

Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307371379
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 563

Book Description
What Is the What is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee in war-ravaged southern Sudan who flees from his village in the mid-1980s and becomes one of the so-called Lost Boys. Valentino’s travels bring him in contact with enemy soldiers, with liberation rebels, with hyenas and lions, with disease and starvation, and with deadly murahaleen (militias on horseback)–the same sort who currently terrorize Darfur. Eventually Deng is resettled in the United States with almost 4000 other young Sudanese men, and a very different struggle begins. Based closely on true experiences, What Is the What is heartbreaking and arresting, filled with adventure, suspense, tragedy, and, finally, triumph.

How We Are Hungry

Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426300
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
In this "tour de force" (New York Times Book Review), the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of The Circle demonstrates his mastery of the short story. “These tales reinvigorate … the short story with a jittery sense of adventure.” —San Francisco Chronicle Including the stories:"Another" "What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust" "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water" "On Wanting to Have Three Walls Up Before She Gets Home" "Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance" "She Waits, Seething, Blooming" "Quiet" "Your Mother and I" "Naveed" "Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone" "About the Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her" "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly" "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"

The Captain and the Glory

Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525659080
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Book Description
A savage satire of the United States in the throes of insanity, this blisteringly funny novel tells the story of a noble ship, the Glory, and the loud, clownish, and foul Captain who steers it to the brink of disaster. When the decorated Captain of a great ship descends the gangplank for the final time, a new leader, a man with a yellow feather in his hair, vows to step forward. Though he has no experience, no knowledge of nautical navigation or maritime law, and though he has often remarked he doesn't much like boats, he solemnly swears to shake things up. Together with his band of petty thieves and confidence men known as the Upskirt Boys, the Captain thrills his passengers, writing his dreams and notions on the cafeteria wipe-away board, boasting of his exemplary anatomy, devouring cheeseburgers, and tossing overboard anyone who displeases him. Until one day a famous pirate, long feared by passengers of the Glory but revered by the Captain for how phenomenally masculine he looked without a shirt while riding a horse, appears on the horizon . . . Absurd, hilarious, and all too recognizable, The Captain and the Glory is a wicked farce of contemporary America only Dave Eggers could dream up.

The Lifters

Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 1524764183
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Book Description
From the Newbery Award-winning author of The Eyes and the Impossible come the story of a mysterious underground world where nothing is as it seems. What if the ground beneath your feet was not made of solid earth and stone but had been hollowed into hundreds of tunnels and passageways? What if there were mysterious forces in these tunnels? What would it feel like to know the fate of an entire town rested on your shoulders? Twelve-year-old Gran Flowerpetal is about to find out. When Gran's friend, the difficult-to-impress Catalina Catalan, presses a silver handle into a hillside and opens a doorway underground, Gran knows that she is extraordinary and brave. He will have no choice but to follow her and help save the town (and the known world). With luck on their side, and some discarded hockey sticks for good measure, they might just emerge as heroes.

Zeitoun

Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307399079
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
A riveting account of Hurricane Katrina and a shocking tale of wrongful arrest and racism, Zeitoun is the true story of one Syrian-American, plucked from his home and accused of terrorism, written by one of America's most high-profile literary writers, now available for the first time in paperback from Vintage Canada. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers's riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun's roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy — an American who converted to Islam — and their children, and the surreal atmosphere in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research — in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.

A Hologram for the King

Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 034580760X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
A National Book Award Finalist, a New York Times bestseller and one of the most highly-acclaimed books of the year, A Hologram for the King is a sprawling novel about the decline of American industry from one of the most important, socially-aware novelists of our time. In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman named Alan Clay pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter's college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy's gale-force winds. This taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment--and a moving story of how we got here.