Dave Eggers Releases Contrapposto, a Novel About Art and a Sixty‑Five‑Year Friendship

The book draws on Eggers’s decades as a visual artist to examine how creative practice is shaped by studios, schools, and the marketplace.

Overview

Contrapposto, published in June 2026 by Alfred A. Knopf, is the product of roughly two decades of notes and development by Dave Eggers.
The novel traces the entwined lives of Cricket and Olympia across about sixty‑five years, revisiting them roughly every decade from childhood into old age.
Eggers incorporates his own training and artwork into the book, including reproduced drawings and detailed scenes of studios, internships, and exhibitions.
A central theme is the tension between making art for craft or meaning and producing work at scale for the market, with the book critiquing contemporary art school training and factory‑like studios.
Early reviewers have called Contrapposto highly anticipated and emotionally affecting, and Eggers says he is next working on a short piece of historical fiction about the 1915 Pan‑Pacific International Exhibition.