How We Are Hungry. For Sugary Figs. Ripe and Plump.

Dave Eggers wrote a bunch of short stories. These are them. How We Are Hungry. I'm feeling kind of mixed about this book. The meat of these pages consisted of four long short stories about privileged white people traveling to foreign locales to get away from their problems, only to find that the problems lie within themselves. Great. Yes, they are beautifully written, some even staggeringly so. But I have a feeling Dave Eggers can do better than that. His best stuff comes in these short microburst one-page stories, about a husband who wants to build three walls of a treehouse to impress his wife, or a guy who meets a girl and then becomes interested in flying in lightweight contraptions. But only with her. If she does not drive in the van with the wings carefully folded, he will have to leave, smile and leave, and then he will look again.

The book is filled with wordplay, imagery, beautiful titles: After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned; She Waits, Seething, Blooming; 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.

There's even a story called Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone. And it's literally Dave Eggers' notes about a story he wants to write about an old man who organizes his death to be a wonderful celebration. And it's oddly touching, these random notes for a story. But that's all they are, just his notes, and I couldn't shake the feeling that Dave was just a little too lazy to put in the rest of the work. He looked at his computer and thought, well, this shit is already pretty good, let's just stop and do some more non-profit work.

All that being said, I actually really did like this book. Parts of it, anyway. Dave Eggers is an amazing writer, and it certainly shows, even if he maybe cut some corners in order to do it.