Get to Know Your Dave Eggers

He grew up in Illinois, but moved to, and is most associated with, literary and cultural life in San Francisco.

He really digs comics and graphic novels.

He was an editor at Salon.com.

He and friends started up their own irreverent magazine, Might. One issue’s theme: Are Black People Cooler Than White People? They tried to do a memorial to actor Crispin Glover, but Glover refused to cooperate.

For his first book, a bestselling memoir published in 2000 titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he came with a yin-and-yang mix of sincerity and irreverence that threw some people off but captivated many more, like Time, San Francisco Chronicle and the L.A. Times, all of which named it the Best Book of the Year, and the New York Times Book Review, which named it Editors’ Choice, or the Pulitzer committee, which made it a finalist for its non-fiction prize. It begins with both of Eggers’ parents dying within 5 months of each other, leaving him, at age 22, to raise his younger brother.

Eggers founded McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house that Fast Company named a top ten innovative media company “for proving the value of print publishing.” It’s published lavishly produced books by Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, Nick Hornby, Sarah Vowell, Rebecca Curtis, William T. Vollmann and Amy Tan, among others. A new one, by Hilton Als, is White Girls, which Pulitzer Prize author Junot Diaz calls “The read of the year.”

He founded literary quarterly McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, which has published work by Michael Cera, Wells Tower, Joyce Carol Oates and Jonathan Ames. The issues all have awesome art: Issue 33 was in the form of a newspaper and cost $40.

There’s the near-monthly magazine The Believer, which A.O. Scott described as a “generational struggle against laziness and cynicism, to raise the banners of creative enthusiasm and intellectual engagement.”

Eggers and pals love books. To death. But there is also a website, Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, filled with playful and smart pieces like “Kafka’s Joke Book” and columns like “Open Letters to People or Entities Who Are Unlikely to Respond.”

He publishes Voice of Witness, “a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world.”

Speaking of which, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng is a fact-based novel of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan whose village is wiped out, family killed, and who survives a scary sojourn to an Ethiopia refugee camp before embarking for America. It is not a twee story. Wes Anderson is not doing the film.