which owns too many things to count or track. “Random House is owned in toto by an absolutely huge German company called Bertelsmann A.G. The copyright page included such flourishes as the author’s height (5’11”) and Kinsey-scale sexual orientation, which he rated as a 3 out of 10, “1 being perfectly straight and 10 being perfectly gay.” As for his publisher Random House, an imprint you might assume needed no introduction, he had this to say: The book was called “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” In case that title didn’t tip you off, this book was clever. Into this perilous moment walked the deeply precocious writer Dave Eggers, or as he identified himself on the copyright page of his memoir, David (“Dave”) K. We had to walk a mile in Birkenstocks just to send a fax. Each time you logged on the Internet - which we called the “World Wide Web,” a phrase that was like sprinkling glitter from your palm - the computer made a catastrophic noise, a sound caught between a mechanical clunking and electric guitar screech. Gather round, young Snapchat and TikTok fans, and attend the tale of GEN X IRONY.
