In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Dave Eggers — bestselling author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The Circle, and The Every, co-founder of 826 Valencia, and now the author of Contrapposto, a novel that pulls readers through every angle of the art world — for a conversation that is at once a deep literary discussion and a sweeping indictment of everything wrong with how America treats its artists.

Dave traces the roots of Contrapposto back to his own early art education in the Chicagoland area, where he was a painting major before practicality intervened, and forward to his own practice of making art — drawings, paintings, prints — to fund ScholarMatch and the nonprofits at 849 Valencia. He talks about Cricket and Olympia, the novel's two protagonists, and the feral s ...