Doing the Wild Thing

Things are about to get even more wild: Dave Eggers will publish a novel, The Wild Things, based on Maurice Sendak’s classic Where The Wild Things Are. Eggers adapted the novel from the screenplay he and Spike Jonze co-authored for the upcoming film. The book will be “an all-ages expansion of the screenplay,” but Eggers says he went in many new directions, as well. As a result, he says, the film has become Jonze’s re-telling of Sendak’s book; the novel is his re-telling. “The great thing is that, in a book, you don’t have to figure out how you’ll actually get something done in the real world,” Eggers told The New Yorker. “I can write about one of the Wild Things jumping 50 feet in the air, and I don’t have to worry about how a dozen technicians in the Australian wilderness are going to accomplish that. That was Spike’s job.” Eggers also reveals his dynamic with Jonze. “He’s still got a lot of boy in him,” Eggers says of his colleague. “The last time I was at his house, he shot me with a BB gun.” Eggers added that he’s planning to package the book in faux fur—“very creepy.”