First published in 2001.

Incomplete guide to symbols and metaphors -- Through the small tall bathroom window, etc. -- Please look, can you see us, etc. -- Enemies list, etc. -- Oh I could be going out, sure -- Outside its blue-black-getting darker, etc. -- When we hear the news at First -- Fuck it. Stupid show, etc. -- We can't do anything about the excrement -- Robert Urich says no. We were so close -- Of course it's cold -- Black Sands Beach is.

Heartbreaking? Certainly. Staggering? Yes, I'd say so. And if genius is capturing the universal in a fresh and memorable way, call it that too' Anthony Quinn, Sunday Times 'Is this how all orphans would speak "I am at once pitiful and monstrous, I know" if they had Dave Eggers's prodigious linguistic gifts? For he does write wonderfully, and this is an extremely impressive debut' John Banville, Irish Times 'A virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of a book that noisily announces the debut of a talented yes, staggeringly talented new writer' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times 'Exhilarating ...Profoundly moving, occasionally angry and often hilarious ...A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is, finally, a finite book of jest, which is why it succeeds so brilliantly' New York Times Book Review 'What is really shocking and exciting is the book's sheer rage. AHWOSG is truly ferocious, like any work of genius. Eggers self-reliant, transcendent, expansive is Emerson's ideal Young American. [The book] does itself justice: it is a settling of accounts. And it is almost too good to be believed' London Review of Books 'A hilarious book ...In it, literary gamesmanship and self-consciousness are trained on life's most unendurable experience, used to examine a memory too scorching to stare at, as one views an eclipse by projecting sunlight onto paper through a pinhole' Time 'Eggers evokes the terrible beauty of youth like a young Bob Dylan, frothing with furious anger . ..He takes us close, shows us as much as he can bear ...His book is a comic and moving witness that transcends and transgresses formal boundaries' Washington Post.