How We Are Hungry is a gripping, lyrical, always intensely soulful group of stories. Though they range from a doomed Irish setters tales of running and jumping ("After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned") to a bitterly comic meditation on suicide and friendship ("Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance"), the stories share a haunting and haunted sense of mortality. Though full of bursts of levity and humor, the book is deeply informed by the troubled times in which it was written.
"A tour de force... These pieces demonstrate the same startling geographic range and sly descriptive acuity that animated You Shall Know Our Velocity. ... [Eggers's] prose is supple, transparent and surprising, qualities most evident in "Up the Mountain," in which Eggers casts a sly backward glance at Hemingway's "Snows of Kilimanjaro" and then dares to improve upon it, updating its romanticism for our own guarded, unromantic age."
-A.O. Scott, New York Times Book Review
"These tales reinvigorate that staid old form, the short story, with a jittery sense of adventure."
-John Freeman, San Francisco Chronicle
