Nonprofits, Dave Eggers, and You Shall Know Our Velocity
From Saturday, November 16, 2002
I just bought Dave Eggers' new book, YSKOV or You Shall Know Our Velocity and have been laughing out loud at cafes across San Francisco. It is printed beautifully in some northern European/Scandanavian country, I believe, and very tactile, with an unusual cover (or lack thereof) which allows the novel to start on the hardbound casing/cover of the book itself. I'm enjoying it much more than AHWOSG even though some of the reviews on Amazon don't seem as favorable.
Eggers is my favorite contemporary author who I first heard at the recently concluded Litquake. He's not only a brilliant writer but has also taken the proceeds from his first book's success and set up 826 Valencia and is involved with Youth Speaks. The annual Youth Speaks "Friendraiser" is on Monday and I'm hosting a table of 10 with all my friends coming along.
Here's an excerpt from the Time magazine review a few weeks ago (which was read thanks to the Google cache which completely disrupts the premium service offering of Time magazine in some cases):
Even before the success of Heartbreaking Work, a moving and fiercely intelligent account of taking care of his younger brother after the death of their parents, Eggers was a literary Johnny Appleseed who put substantial amounts of his own money into founding the literary journal McSweeney's and starting a publishing imprint, McSweeney's Books. Earlier this year he established 826 Valencia, a non-profit center in San Francisco where students can go for tutoring in writing. At the same time he has slipped into self-imposed obscurity, avoiding the press — he returned Time's phone calls but asked not to be quoted — and staging his readings as cryptic, Andy Kaufman — style happenings. And then there's his jars-of-dirt store. It could just be clever marketing — this kind of behavior discourages media attention the way napalm discourages fire — but even Velocity is being brought out coyly, in an initial printing of a mere 10,000 copies, available only at alternative bookstores. Is Eggers — not to put too fine a point on it — messing with us?
These and other questions are answered in You Shall Know Our Velocity. Like Heartbreaking Work, it is a book about mourning, but it eschews any of the metafictional skylarking of the earlier book; Eggers is through kidding around....