Superhero armed with the power of stories

After this interview he is off to a meeting in midtown Manhattan at 2.30pm. Then come more appointments and the following day a long drive to Massachusetts, where he will fund-raise for Word Street, a second tutoring centre inspired by 826. His black travel bag sits at my feet. "I’m trying to cut down on travel," he says. "But with things like this, I really don’t want to say no."

As if his debut novel did not make it clear enough, velocity is a key component to being Dave Eggers. In just 10 years, the tall, curly-haired writer has gone from being a marginal editor of a little-know spoof magazine (Might) to America’s most unpredictable literary star - like Mark Twain, Monty Python and George Plimpton wrapped into one. And for all the press his unconventional live readings garnered - one of which involved Eggers quietly cutting hair - the real engine driving this rise was not a Warholian understanding of celebrity, but talent.

A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius built a fortress of irony around the loss of his two parents to cancer in the space of three months, exploding the sanctities of the memoir genre in the process. Quick on its heels was his inventive first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, which told the story of two high school chums who race around the globe trying to give away money, only to discover how arbitrary their generosity is.

Add to that a few anthologies geared at reinvigorating the short story; a new journal, The Believer, aimed at bringing what Eggers describes as "a level of respect" back into book reviewing; a book on giraffes; the expansion of McSweeney’s into book publishing; two storefronts that sell, respectively, pirate supplies and (like this one) superhero gear, and it becomes clear Eggers has grand, if rather quirky ambitions.

But his grandest ambition is just beginning to become apparent. As we talk about his new book of short stories, How We Are Hungry, I realise Eggers doesn’t just want to make people laugh.

"We absolutely have a responsibility to push people beyond their comfort zones, both in terms of subject matter and style," he says. "I don’t really get up in the morning wanting to write stories in the same way others before have written stories. Literature is strange in that, unlike visual art, the conceptual side of the form isn’t explored anywhere near as much as it could be."

And so, just as A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius sniffed at the memoir’s conventions, and You Shall Know Our Velocity reinvented the road novel, How We Are Hungry comes at short fiction from a new angle. Ranging in settings from Tanzania to Ireland, from Egypt to a long, lonely stretch of Interstate 5 in California, these tales reinvigorate that staid old form, the short story, with a jittery sense of adventure.

ALL OF EGGERS’ characters are seekers, even if most of them are confused about what exactly they are seeking. In many cases it is connection. In ‘Another’, a man gets on a plane and flies to Egypt for a vacation shortly after the American government has told him it’s not safe to be there. He spends the rest of the trip touring the country on a horse, taking what seems to be a ritualistic pounding in the saddle. "I needed to prove to this Egyptian lunatic that I could ride with him," he says, describing his attempt to keep up with his guide.

Since he published his memoir, Eggers has been able to travel like never before, and many of these stories grew out of his trips. But like this horse-riding character, Eggers is not on a pleasure barge. After all, the money which came from the success of his memoir was largely given away.

"Our first commitment was to cancer research," he says, speaking of an agreement his family made to give any "run off" of the book back, "so we donated the first chunks of money to that and to hospice organisations around the country." Much of the rest has gone into funding McSweeney’s and other ventures.

Thanks to Eggers’ profile, the kinds of students who are showing up at the 826 tutoring centre have changed slightly. Parents are becoming clued in to the calibre of talent teaching for free down the block. Daniel Handler, the brain behind Lemony Snicket, is active in the programme, as is Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Chabon.

What’s so fascinating about Eggers as a public figure is that he has found a way to take an existing concern about how to give back to the world and make it both his life’s passion and his artistic obsession. Getting people to join in the campaign seems almost easy for him.

The tutoring centre in New York reaches 500 students. His San Francisco centre offered 7,000 workshop sessions last semester alone. Together, they draw from a pool of some 800 volunteers.

A new chapter was launched recently in Los Angeles and more are on the way in Chicago, Seattle and Ann Arbor. The numbers might sound small now, but you can be sure they are going to grow. Whereas once his book tours were Dada-ist art shows, now they are fundraisers.

Although some early press for Eggers did not suggest he was well suited to working in the public eye, any roughness around the edges is gone now. Over the course of an hour and a half, Eggers is friendly and cheerful, coming back time and again to his projects. Together with Daniel Mouthrop, whom Eggers is quick to note did "the lion’s share of the work", he has written a book about teachers’ pay called Teachers Have It Easy. The book uses teachers’ first-person narratives to make a compelling case for American state schools improving through a huge increase in teacher salaries.

It’s an appropriate metaphor for Eggers’ own story. He suffered a great loss, and though narrative could not bring his parents back, it gave him a container for his grief.

The power of story also got him out of Brooklyn and back to California, where he is happier, and where he now lives with his wife, the novelist Vendela Vida.

The power of story brought McSweeney’s out of the margins and into the mainstream. Story also brought him the power to publish himself and writers he believes in.

And now stories will help Dave Eggers give something back to the world.

How We Are Hungry is published on Tuesday, 12.99