Dave Eggers: Contrapposto, Craft, and the Case Against AI

About this episode

Dave Eggers joins us to discuss his 14th novel, Contrapposto , a six-decade love story between childhood friends Cricket and Olympia, illustrated with his own drawings. Eggers traces the book's twenty-year gestation, the moment Olympia's character unlocked its structure, and why he gave Cricket his own boyhood fantasy of being "apprenticed" as a young artist. The conversation ranges widely: the decline of art-school access and the pier-side art collective he's launched in San Francisco; his literacy nonprofit 826 Valencia and its typewriter-obsessed students; and a candid, sometimes fiery take on AI's effect on writing, translation, and education, including an anecdote from his visit to…