Before he embarked on his literary career, Dave Eggers was classically trained as a draftsman and painter. He then spent many years as a professional illustrator and graphic designer before turning to writing full-time. More recently, he returned to visual art and the results have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the country. Usually involving the pairing of an animal with plaintive or biblical text, the results are wry, oddly anthropomorphic tableaus that create a very entertaining and eccentric body of work from one of today’s leading culture makers. Ungrateful Mammals is the first book to collect these drawings.

Dave Eggers is the author of What is the What, winner of France’s Prix Medici and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Zeitoun, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the American Book Award; A Hologram for the King, finalist for the National Book Award; and Heroes of the Frontier, which has won no awards at all, though the author still likes it a lot. Eggers is the founder of McSweeney’s, a publishing company that produces a literary quarterly, and Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. He co-founded 826 National, a network of seven writing and tutoring centers around the United States, and ScholarMatch, a college access nonprofit to which all proceeds from this book are directed.

Hardcover / 144 pages

11 x 8" / 100 color illustrations