Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Heartbreaking? Certainly. Staggering? Yes, I d say so. And if genius is capturing the universal in a fresh and memorable way, call it that too Anthony Quinn, Sunday Times Is this how all orphans would speak I am at once pitiful and monstrous, I know if they had Dave Eggers s prodigious linguistic gifts? For he does write wonderfully, and this is an extremely impressive debut John Banville, Irish Times A virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of a book that noisily announces the debut of a talented yes, staggeringly talented new writer Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Exhilarating . . . Profoundly moving, occasionally angry and often hilarious . . . A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is, finally, a finite book of jest, which is why it succeeds so brilliantly New York Times Book Review What is really shocking and exciting is the book s sheer rage. AHWOSG is truly ferocious, like any work of genius. Eggers self-reliant, transcendent, expansive is Emerson s ideal Young American. [The book] does itself justice: it is a settling of accounts. And it is almost too good to be believed London Review of Books A hilarious book . . . In it, literary gamesmanship and self-consciousness are trained on life s most unendurable experience, used to examine a memory too scorching to stare at, as one views an eclipse by projecting sunlight onto paper through a pinhole Time Eggers evokes the terrible beauty of youth like a young Bob Dylan, frothing with furious anger . . . He takes us close, shows us as much as he can bear . . . His book is a comic and moving witness that transcends and transgresses formal boundaries Washington Post