I'm curious why you hate the fuck out of him. My first encounter was skimming through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and it rubbed me the wrong way. I recall feeling it read like David Sedaris, whom I think is very overrated. Years later, I picked up You Shall Know Our Velocity in an effort to keep up with some current literature. I found it touching and effective. That, and because the book was so pretty, is why I read A Hologram For The King. I thought it was very good, great in some parts. Besides that he runs McSweeny's, I don't know a thing about him.
1) I hate everything in McSweeney's. 2) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a magnum opus of self-fellating glad-handing. In it, we learn that any excuse to celebrate your own smugness is a good excuse. 3) The preamble in HWSG is all about how you shouldn't care that massive corporations run your life and that screenwriters are fucking idiots who deserve to be scoffed at. 4) I had to mix an episode written by Toph Eggers. 5) And then the fucker wrote the screenplay for Where the Wild Things Are. 6) The asshole tried out for Real World San Francisco and then when he didn't get in bitched about MTV in the magazine that he started and ran into the ground. Dave Eggers is why everyone hates Gen X literature. It's self-satisfied, empty, self-aware to the point of irony, ironic to the point of self-aware and completely fucking unreadable. And with McSweeney's, he's created an organ that celebrates that shit. Fuck Dave Eggers.