Dave Eggers
Today I’m going to write about two people that every bookworm and word nerd should know about, if they don’t already. Coincidentally, both of them are former UIUC students. Their names are Dave Eggers and John Warner.
Eggers is a pretty well-known contemporary author of books like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (a memoir), What is the What (an “autobiography” of a refugee during civil war in Sudan), and Zeitoun (an account of one family’s struggles through hurricane Katrina), which was chosen as UIUC’s One Book, One Campus last school year. The issues Eggers writes about give him a journalistic-vibe as a novelist, however, his novels still read like novels: well written and captivating. Along with his books, he has worked with many charities and programs for aiding human rights around the world, and helped found 826 National, a free writing and tutoring center for children in major cities in the U.S.
John Warner is also a former student from Illinois who is less well-known than Eggers, but has more in common with him than just a former university. Warner is a contributor to The Morning News, an online magazine of essays, culture, humor, news, etc. He is also more famously “The Biblioracle”, or the man who, if you send in the last 5 books you have read, will recommend to you your next book. Along with this, John is a co-commentator on the Morning New’s popular Tournament of Books, a bracket-style competition held each year to find the best new books. John Warner has written several books of his own, mostly humor, and his first novel, The Funny Man, has recently been released, for which he came to U of I in October to speak about. I was there at the Illini Union Bookstore to hear him talk, and he had the audience laughing almost the whole time. It was fantastic to hear him speak because he is so funny, and also was right at home back at U of I (although he lamented changes to campus, like the loss of La Bamba, greatly).
John Warner
What these two men also have in common is one of publishing’s little known companies: McSweeney’s (named after the mysterious ‘relative’, Timothy McSweeney, who would send Eggers’ mother letters even though there was no relation). Dave Eggers founded McSweeney’s as a little independent publishing house for releasing a quarterly literary journal. Now it has grown to publish many books and journals on many mediums (including video) and is one of my personal favorite publishers because of its oddities and quirkiness. John Warner was the editor of the McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a humor site that publishes small humor bits that have me loling whenever I visit the site. McSweeney’s is extremely unique, and appeals a lot to the English-major types or those up on the literary world. It would take me a whole other post to explain how much I love McSweeney’s and these writers, and another yet just to attempt to explain the oddness of McSweeney’s and why it so so freakin’ cool. So you’ll just have to go check it out yourselves! The point is: both of these men are extremely talented, and all bibliophiles should be aware of them and the great things that they are doing.
