The frenzy surrounding Dave Eggers and his debut memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, reached a certain kind of climax in late April. Eggers had already been beatified by critics, his book lovingly reviewed as a major breakthrough, and the journal he currently edits, McSweeney's, enshrined as a must-read, when The New York Times's Michiko Kakutani grouped Eggers among the emergent ranks of "pale-reds"--writers who have fused "the cerebral and the visceral, the high and the low, the world of ideas and the world of raw experience" to transcend the distinction Philip Rahv famously drew between the "palefaces" and "redskins" of American literature.