Dave Eggers Books in Order

Eggers recounts how, in his early twenties, he lost both parents to cancer and suddenly became guardian to his younger brother. Their move to California, and the scrappy life they improvise together, becomes a story about grief, responsibility, and restless, dark humor.

Two friends, still reeling from a third friend's death and an absurd windfall of money, race around the world trying to give their cash away to strangers. Their impulsive trip turns into a messy search for purpose, forgiveness, and what generosity really looks like.

This collection gathers stories set in hotel rooms, deserts, and anonymous suburbs, featuring characters who are restless in body and mind. Some pieces are sharply comic, others quietly sad, but all circle the question of what people are hungry for beyond food money, risk, connection.

In this tiny volume Eggers works in flashes, offering very brief tales that might last only a paragraph or a page. The pieces range from jokes to sharp little parables, showing how much feeling and strangeness can fit into the smallest possible space.

This oral history collection presents first person accounts from people who were wrongfully convicted in the United States and later exonerated. Through their stories it shows how tunnel vision, weak evidence, and legal mistakes can destroy lives long after the verdict.

Through reporting, interviews, and personal stories, this book examines the low pay and high expectations faced by American public school teachers. Eggers and his coauthors look at how salaries, respect, and policy affect classrooms, and suggest practical ways communities might treat educators more fairly.

This small, oddball volume speaks directly to young readers with brief stories, questions, and drawings. It feels like sitting in on a conversation where an adult admits how strange the world can be and invites kids to look at it with the same sideways curiosity.

Working closely with Valentino Achak Deng, Eggers tells the story of a boy who flees civil war in Sudan, walks across deserts with the Lost Boys, and eventually resettles in the United States. The book moves between past and present, asking how one life can hold so much loss and endurance.

This boxed set collects dozens of extremely short stories and fragments by Eggers and collaborators, each printed on its own card sized booklet. Read one or several at a time, they build a playful, sometimes haunting collage of voices, ideas, and half glimpsed worlds.

Adapted from the film Eggers co wrote, this story follows expectant couple Verona and Burt as they crisscross North America visiting friends and relatives. Each stop shows a different version of family life, and their trip slowly clarifies what kind of home they want for their child.

Loosely inspired by Maurice Sendak's classic and the film adaptation he co wrote, Eggers's novel follows Max, a boy who sails to an island ruled by enormous, unruly creatures. Living among the Wild Things, Max tests out what it means to be in charge, to be loved, and to come home again.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian American contractor in New Orleans, stays behind during Hurricane Katrina to watch over his properties and help stranded neighbors by canoe. In the storm’s aftermath he is arrested without clear charges, and the book traces how fear, bureaucracy, and rumor can strip an ordinary man of his rights.

Created as part of the project America: Now and Here, this volume brings together images and texts from dozens of contemporary artists and writers. Eggers contributes alongside others to reflect on how the United States looks and feels during a time of rapid cultural and political change.

Presented as a portfolio of large prints, this collection gathers Eggers's grease pencil drawings of animals paired with short, sometimes solemn and sometimes absurd lines of text. It showcases his visual art side and plays with the blurry line between doodle, cartoon, and serious image.

The 2011 installment of this annual anthology gathers short stories, essays, journalism, comics, and oddities chosen by Eggers and a committee of high school readers. It serves as a snapshot of that year's most surprising, funny, or moving pieces that fell outside standard school assignments.

This volume continues the series' mission by collecting standout writing from magazines, zines, blogs, and more published in 2012. The mix of fiction and nonfiction is curated with young readers in mind, but offers plenty of smart, offbeat work for adults as well.

Alan Clay, a middle aged American salesman, travels to Saudi Arabia hoping to land a huge IT contract that could rescue his shaky finances. Waiting in a desert city for a king who never quite appears, he reassesses his past choices in work, family, and faith.

This book serves as a catalog and survey of British artist David Shrigley's show Brain Activity, collecting his deadpan drawings, sculptures, and installations. Essays, including one by Eggers, explore how Shrigley's simple lines and odd captions add up to something sharply funny and unexpectedly serious.

Gathered for 2013, these selections range from short stories and memoir to investigative pieces and graphic work. Eggers and his student board highlight writing that feels urgent, inventive, or just too strange and wonderful to leave unread.

Recent graduate Mae Holland lands her dream job at the Circle, a dazzling tech company that has fused search, social media, and commerce into one system. At first she loves the campus perks and idealism, but the push toward total transparency soon threatens her privacy, relationships, and sense of self.

Retelling Jules Verne for younger readers, Eggers imagines the undersea adventures from the point of view of Consuelo, a fourteen year old girl who joins Professor Aronnax aboard a mysterious submarine. As she comes to know Captain Nemo, the book balances sea monster thrills with questions about exile and vengeance.

In this contemporary novella, a seemingly friendly institution leans on constant surveys, tracking, and social media to know people better than they know themselves. The story gently satirizes how easy it is to trade privacy for convenience, and how affection can slide toward control.

This travel anthology collects stories of naive arrivals and hard won wisdom from journeys gone sideways. Eggers and other contributors describe being out of their depth in unfamiliar cultures, finding both humility and humor in the mistakes travelers inevitably make.

Here the Nonrequired Reading series showcases a fresh batch of stories, essays, and comics that reward curiosity. The 2014 edition leans into variety and surprise, offering everything from quiet personal pieces to big reported features in one generous collection.

In an abandoned military base, a frustrated man kidnaps people from his life a former astronaut, a teacher, a congressman and questions them, one by one, about everything that feels broken in the country. The novel unfolds entirely in conversations, circling faith, failure, and accountability.

An anthology of travel pieces written by novelists, this volume collects journeys that range from funny misadventures to quiet moments of awe. Eggers joins other writers in exploring how leaving home unsettles you just enough to notice the world, and yourself, a bit differently.

In the 2015 volume, Eggers and his teenage editors continue to champion work that falls between categories. The book is ideal for browsing, with each piece chosen for its ability to grab a reader who might think they are not into that kind of writing.

Why is the Golden Gate Bridge bright orange instead of dull gray like most bridges. This illustrated history follows the debates over whether the span should exist at all, how it should look, and how a few stubborn designers kept its unexpected color.

This collection gathers more than a decade of Eggers's travel writing, from long drives across deserts to time spent in war zones and crowded cities. The pieces trace how being a visitor shapes what you see, what you misunderstand, and how stories grow out of those encounters.

Burned out by her work and a lawsuit, dentist Josie packs her two young kids into a battered RV and drives into the Alaskan wilderness. Their rambling road trip becomes a test of courage, parenting, and what it means to build a decent life far from the center.

This edition threads together voices from many backgrounds, bringing together fiction, reportage, and humor that spoke to 2016. It is designed less as a best of canon and more as a yearbook of the pieces that made readers sit up and pay attention.

Beginning as a simple tour of the Statue of Liberty, this picture book zooms in on one overlooked detail her raised right foot. Eggers uses that forward step to talk with kids about movement, welcome, and the idea that a country can keep walking toward greater openness.

By 2017 the series has a long tradition, and this volume continues it with another eclectic mix shaped by young volunteer readers. The anthology offers short, memorable works that can be read between classes, on buses, or late at night when you want just one more story.

In this art book Eggers pairs expressive animal drawings with short, often funny or biblical phrases. The results are odd, thoughtful tableaux that comment on human anxieties and habits, with the sales of the work helping to support his college access nonprofit projects.

In the 2018 collection, Eggers and company assemble writing that reflects a tumultuous year, from sharp political commentary to intimate fiction. The pieces are arranged to keep you turning pages, shifting tone and form so the book never feels predictable.

When Gran's family moves to the struggling town of Carousel, he discovers secret doors leading to tunnels under the streets. Down below, Lifters fight a mysterious force that makes the town literally sink, and Gran must decide whether he will help hold his new community up.

This nonfiction narrative follows Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a young Yemeni American who falls in love with coffee and sets out to revive Yemen's coffee heritage. His quest pulls him into war zones, international cupping competitions, and risky business deals, asking what it costs to chase a dream.

A diverse group of children slowly turns a bare island into a shared community, showing how small acts add up. With rhyming text and bold art, the book explains that citizenship is less about status than about what you do to help others where you live.

Abner the duck and Ian the groundhog are stuck sideways on the page and need the reader's help to get oriented. With each shake and flip of the book, things go comically more wrong, making this a chatty, interactive story about perspective and persistence.

A tiger carries a single dining chair across dramatic landscapes arches, lagoons, canyons, and more while each page names the landform in spare text. By the time the journey ends, readers have toured the planet's geography and glimpsed a quiet story about travel and home.

The final volume under this title gathers an array of stories, essays, and experiments that close out the series on a high note. As in earlier years, the selections show how much vivid, surprising work is being published outside standard classroom anthologies.

On a creaky old ship that stands in for a nation, a vain, impulsive captain takes charge and steers the crew through one self inflicted crisis after another. This slim, allegorical tale uses nautical farce to think about leadership, populism, and the stories countries tell about themselves.

In an unnamed country emerging from civil war, two foreign contractors are hired to pave a road in time for a grand peace parade. One man follows the rule book, the other chases local pleasures, and their assignment gradually exposes how outside help can deepen the damage.

As a child settles into bed, the book imagines all the small wonders tomorrow might bring a blue sky, a lost friend found, a strange stone, a new song. The gentle rhymes turn bedtime toward curiosity and comfort instead of fear of the dark.

From a child's viewpoint along a darkened shoreline, this picture book lingers over the glow of trawlers, ferries, cargo ships, and more. Each spread names a different vessel and the patterns of its lights, turning nighttime shipping lanes into a quiet, almost magical parade.

Lucian, a boy living in a lighthouse, collects mysterious faraway things that wash ashore after storms. When he finds a beautiful cutlass and later meets the ship's captain who lost it, he must decide what to keep, what to return, and what growing up might mean.

In this sequel to The Circle, former park ranger Delaney Wells takes a job at a mega company created by fusing social media and e commerce into one platform. She plans to destroy it from within by pitching terrifyingly invasive features, only to find that users may love them.

In this elegiac short novel, an aging Army veteran leads his grand nieces and nephews along the California coast to a place he calls the Museum of Rain. As they walk, he tells family stories and tries to explain what can and cannot be preserved from a life.

Left alone with an adventurous grandmother, a cautious child pretends to become a jaguar and slips with her into a wild, moonlit world. Their overnight journey through forests and mountains blurs play and dream, celebrating bravery, imagination, and the bond between generations.

Based on a true story from Idaho mining country, this illustrated book follows a family who literally move their house rather than give up their land. With humor and suspense, it shows how ingenuity, stubbornness, and a team of horses can shift even something as heavy as a home.

Johannes, a fast running dog who considers himself free, serves as the Eyes of a large city park, watching over its animals and the captive bison who quietly rule. When humans start building a new art gallery in the park, he and his friends hatch a plan that tests loyalty, bravery, and what freedom really is.

This Forgetters volume takes the idea of a comeback and applies it to ordinary life the chances we get to say the right thing, fix a mistake, or step back into a role we thought we had lost. It is a brief, reflective story about regret and small acts of courage.

One of the compact hardcovers in Eggers's Forgetters series, this story lingers over the objects families haul out each year to mark holidays. As its narrator sorts through fragile ornaments, the book turns into a meditation on memory, inheritance, and what we choose to hang on to.

In another miniature Forgetters book, Eggers starts from a simple household detail the place we store candles for blackouts and celebrations and spins it into a quiet exploration of preparedness, loss, and the rituals that help a family mark passing years.

Picking up after The Eyes and the Impossible, this sequel finds Johannes and his friends shipwrecked in a harsh northern landscape filled with predators. There they encounter prey animals who have learned to wield fire, and must decide how this new power will reshape the balance of their world.