Imagine Charles Dickens, his sentimentality in check but his journalistic eyes wide open, roaming New Orleans after it was buried by Hurricane Katrina. He would find anger and pathos. A dark fable, perhaps. His villains would be evil and incompetent, even without Heckuva-Job-Brownie. In the end, though, he would not be able to constrain himself; his outrage might overwhelm the tale.

In Zeitoun, what Dave Eggers has found in the Katrina mud is the full-fleshed story of a single family, and in telling that story he hits larger targets with more punch than those who have already attacked the thematic and historic giants of this disaster. It’s the stuff of great narrative nonfiction.

Eggers, the boy wonder of good intentions, has given us 21st-century Dickensian storytelling—which is to say, a character-driven potboiler with a point. But here’s the real trick: He does it without any writerly triple-lutzes or winks of postmodern irony. There are no rants against President Bush, no cheap shots at the authorities who let this city drown. He does it the old-fashioned way: with show-not-tell prose, in the most restrained of voices. ... (Read the full review)

For better or worse, Dave Eggers will always be known as the author of the quasi-fictional memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a 2000 bestseller that recounted his experiences raising his little brother after the sudden deaths of their parents. (He began writing it, I should note, while employed as an editor at Salon.) That sudden rise to literary celebrity threatened to turn Eggers into a Generation-X cult figure or avatar of sincerity, but viewed in retrospect he handled the lightning strike of success about as well as anyone could. He has refused to be trapped by the highly self-conscious literary voice of that book and, more impressive still, has tried to turn his success toward real-world ends.

Eggers has founded a magazine and a publishing house, funded a wide range of youth-literacy programs through his 826 Valencia center, and co-directed an oral history program called Voice of Witness, focused on permitting survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuse to tell their stories. Among various other things, Voice of Witness sparked Zeitoun, Eggers’ latest nonfiction volume. You couldn't write a book more different from Heartbreaking Work if you tried. Like his 2006 novel What Is the What, which was based on the life of a Sudanese refugee, this is a work of testimony, and almost of ventriloquism. ... (Read the full review)

Publisher, memoirist, fiction writer and journalist Dave Eggers follows his heart, creating engaged and engaging books. His work has ranged from the intensely personal—A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—to the truly selfless—What Is the What?—a book about Valentino Achak Deng, one of the lost boys of the Sudan, and his journey from the village of Marial Bai to the U.S.

Eggers has written about human rights cases in the McSweeney's Voice of Witness series and has co-authored two screenplays, for Away We Go, one of this summer's hits, and Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze's adaptation of the Maurice Sendak classic, coming this fall.

In Zeitoun, he takes up the post-Katrina odyssey of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the New Orleans painter and contractor, who stayed in his Fontainebleau home during the storm, and in the midst of rising water after it, set out to see what he could do to help others. ... (Read the full review)

Rumpus: This book, Zeitoun, is coming out very close to Away We Go.

Eggers: It’s weird, because they happened over such a long period of time. I don’t know; I was working on Zeitoun back in 2006. That book was pretty slow-going. It took an incredible amount of research. And the first draft of Away We Go was written in 2005. So both have been sort of slow processes. It’s odd that they both landed this summer, but it didn’t seem right to push Zeitoun back to 2010 just because the movie was scheduled this summer.

Rumpus: Zeitoun is nonfiction, set during Katrina in New Orleans and its chaotic aftermath, as seen through the eyes of a Muslim-American family, the Zeitouns, who were living Uptown during the storm. I didn’t hear about Zeitoun until a few weeks ago when you printed a copy for me, which I briefly considered selling on eBay. You were pretty quiet about it.

Eggers: Sometimes we [at McSweeney’s] don’t do galleys for my own books. I always blow the deadline to get galleys done. Usually there’s only a month or so between when the book’s done and when the hardcovers come back from the printer, so we sometimes skip the galley step—galleys cost a lot of money, and we don’t have that kind of budget. So we print a few, and they’re about $20 each to print at Kinko’s or wherever, so it’s hard to justify all that expense when the actual hardcovers are coming back from the printer in a few weeks. And this book was meant to be out back in March or April anyway. I just kept fiddling with it, and it took longer than expected to get finished. ... (Read the full interview)