Dave Eggers's Reading List

"I’m reading a short story collection by Tom Barbash called “Stay Up With Me.” It’s not out yet, and probably won’t be for a year or so, but it’s so good."

"I hope I can mention one recent book we put out called “Inside This Place, Not of It,” edited by Ayelet Waldman and Robin Levi. It’s a book of oral histories from incarcerated women in the U.S., and every story is shocking — women shackled to beds during childbirth, women given hysterectomies against their will and the omnipresent sexual abuse at the hands of guards."

"At a yard sale, I found a collection Hitchcock edited called “Stories Not for the Nervous”; it’s solid all the way through."

"There was one called “21st Century Foss,” full of incredible imaginings of spaceships and future cities, all with radical and organic shapes. I hadn’t seen it in 30 years and recently bought it on eBay. Looking at those pictures again was like reliving dreams I had when I was 8 years old."

"I usually feel too close to whatever book I last wrote, but in this case I have to say that I like “A Hologram for the King” best."

"I really wish Michelle Alexander, who wrote “The New Jim Crow,” about African-American men in prisons, would write a sequel, focusing on the plight of women."

"A few years ago a poet named Arif Gamal gave me his book, “Morning in Serra Mattu: A Nubian Ode,” and after reading and loving the first few pages, I lost it. I found it the other day while cleaning my office, and now am about halfway through it. It’s an epic poem about growing up in northern Sudan, and it’s really beautiful, unlike anything I can remember."

"Every time I read this book I love it more. Terrible things happen to its characters, three young Americans traveling through Morocco, but Bowles’s writing is so hypnotic that the calamities are seen through a certain anodyne haze. And despite its darkness, it’s the most humane of existential novels."