One of San Francisco's favorite writers in residence, Dave Eggers, was on KQED's "Forum" this morning discussing his new book Zeitoun. It's a non-fiction work, just out from McSweeney's press as of last week, about a Syrian-American man named Abdulrahman Zeitoun who stuck around with his American wife and children in his adopted hometown of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina only to be abruptly made to disappear by the U.S. government.
On the program, Eggers discussed how he originally studied journalism and is perhaps most at home writing heavily researched, journalistic works -- and we'd argue, with his penchant for novelistic prose, that he is in line to take up the torch of New Journalism from Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, if that term is even relevant anymore. Zeitoun follows on What Is the What, his "fictionalized memoir" of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Sudanese "Lost Boys" who emigrated to Atlanta in 2001 -- a book in which Eggers took on the voice of Deng to "ghost-write" the memoir of an African refugee.
The full "Forum" broadcast should be available at this link later today or tomorrow.