After
Dave Eggers wrote "
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", he re-released it with an appendix called:
MISTAKES
HORRIBLE ONESWE KNEW
WE MEANTWE WERE
TO MAKEMAKING
subtitled,
NOTES
COMPLAINTSCORRECTIONS
WEASLINGSCLARIFICATIONS
PEDANTRYAPOLOGIES
SHOWBOATINGADDENDA
It is dedicated to, amongst other things, a
flood for
New York. In the
paperback edition of the book, this section is printed upside-down at the back of the book, so once the book is turned upside-down, it is the new front cover. M.W.K.W.W.M. contains a huge rant on the use of the word "
irony", all in small type. The
appendix mainly aims to correct some of the mistakes or changes from the truth that Dave Eggers feels are important enough for us to know about. In doing so, he tells a number of interesting stories and includes a few hand-drawn pictures for good measure. The front cover is full of pictures of tapes (the tape of his personal tape recorder, I guess), tree stumps and axes (the cut down trees in
Lake Forest and the half-moon receptacle, which has written by it: "These drawings are fly and dumb. This is pretty close. I like this one. These drawings are nice."). (The half-moon recptacle is mentioned in M.W.K.W.W.M., and is revealed to in fact have been a quarter-moon receptacle.)
I thouroughly reccomend that if you do not own a copy of A.H.B.W.O.S.G. with this appendix you should buy it. It does not provide anything vital to the original book, but is very interesting. If you finished the book wanting more, here it is, if only 48 p.p.