Dave Eggers Turns to Nonfiction

Dave Eggers has mastered fiction and memoir. And now, with his Indie romantic comedic Away We Go, he’s proven that he has film in the bag, as well. But in a new book, Zeitoun, Eggers transitions into narrative nonfiction, and, according to The Wall Street Journal, “brings a novelist’s eye to the tale but deals largely in grim facts.” The book, which Eggers spent three years researching, tells the story of one Syrian-American family in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It focuses on Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a contractor who paddled through the deserted streets of New Orleans in a canoe to rescue people, until he was mysteriously arrested and transferred to a maximum-security prison. And, as Eggers strove to tell the narrative as “plainly and factually as possible,” at the end of the book, he tracks down the officers who arrested Zeitoun to hear their side of the story