and What Is the What, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of France’s Prix Médicis Etranger. He is the founder of McSweeney’s and the cofounder of 826 Valencia, a youth writing center that has inspired similar programs around the world, and of ScholarMatch, which connects donors with students to make college accessible. He is the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and is the cofounder of Voice of Witness, a book series that illuminates human rights crises through oral history. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into forty-two languages.Eggers's new book is The Captain and the Glory, an illustrated novel about an unfit, buffoonish leader.
At The Week magazine he recommended six works of satire, including:
The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek (1921).Read about another entry on the list.
Any lover of Catch-22 should read this book, which does to World War I soldiering what Joseph Heller did to World War II. Hasek was a private in the Austro-Hungarian army, and if this novel is based at all on his own service, he was the worst soldier in the history of armed conflict. A very funny, perfectly absurd book for the most perfectly absurd of wars.
The Good Soldier Svejk is among Michael Honig's top ten satires and Tim Pears's top ten 20th-century political novels.
--Marshal Zeringue
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