Tom Lynch

If you believe in the short story, the real short story, then you're halfway there. A story can be a paragraph or eighty pages long and deliver the same seizing crescendo of a monstrous text. Even if a collection of shorts doesn't have the power of a Raymond Chandler assembly or the bittersweet hilarity of life like Salinger's "Nine Stories," there's still a hovering mystery that surrounds individual stories crammed together for release. Much like tracking a record album, it's all a matter of pacing and timing, ambition and restraint.

Dave Eggers didn't change the world of fiction with "You Shall Know Our Velocity," his follow-up to the uber-popular "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," though it can be said that "Velocity" stays intriguing even when Eggers rolls the dice. Now he presents "How We Are Hungry," a collection of shorts he's written over the last five years or so. Some of them have appeared elsewhere, like in Zoetrope or The New Yorker, but the majority are brand new tales, and after the first few stories it's apparent that this book is the best thing he's been a part of in a long while, a return to creative form that his following must have been longing for. He can get caught up in his own cleverness, something even he could admit to, but most of his new ideas flow smoothly through the pages and prolonged sentences.

As always, Eggers finds his place between outrageous humor and disastrous sadness, and his settings span the globe. Titles like "After I Was Thrown in a River and Before I Drowned" and "Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance" reveal plots of utter physical or mental breakdown, and much like the rest of the collection, don't quit resonating until long after the last sentence is finished. In "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water," God threatens the ocean with annihilation, but the ocean responds defensively: "You have no idea what's happened to me." In a lot of ways, we still don't know everything that's happened to Eggers, but we're starting to find out.

How We Are Hungry
By Dave Eggers
McSweeney's, $22, 240 pages

(2004-11-17)

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