The storefront of 826 in Brooklyn.
Dear Mr. Eggers,
My presence at your recent speech here in Little Rock was almost arbitrary; even though I attend the Clinton School’s speaker series more regularly than most any other employed person in the city, I had no desire to fawn with the other quasi-literary irony-smiths of my generation (born since 1970, before 1990) whom I expected to turn out. Yes, those of us who string together words for a living would all love to write books that garner the plaudits of “The Genius Work of a Staggering Heartbreaker” or whatever it was that turned you famous, and would love to adapt “Where the Wild Things Are” with Spike Jonze with a z, and would love a spoken cameo in a Beck album. But some of us are a little turned off when McSweeney’s reads like a running competition between 30-year-olds to see who among them can sound most like a precocious 14-year-old, and when self-reference devolves into navel-gazing. It all feels precious and frivolous and deliberately disposable, as if built to puncture and yet perpetuate the ennui of trustfunded twenty-somethings. Besides, my weekly church gym pick-up basketball game happens to be Wednesdays at 6. You were about to lose out.