Excerpt from Contrapposto by Dave Eggers, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

All Cricket wanted in the world was to have her hand again on his knee. How could he ask? He couldn't ask.

"And women getting into bathtubs," she said, and laughed till she coughed. "I think he did about fifty of those. Can't you just picture him getting excited about his next painting? 'Hm, what to do? What. To. Do? I know! How about another chick in a tub?' And always from behind. But does the world need another picture of a woman stepping into a tub? On the one hand, no. On the other hand, he gets to paint a naked lady in a bathtub. Then there's Tolstoy."

She finished her beer and got up. "Another?"

Cricket downed the rest of his first cup and closed his eyes again. Red rings pulsed against his eyelids. Another race began and he fell briefly asleep. Soon Olympia appeared with two more cups of yellow beer. She leaned across his lap to place it in the cup holder to his right. The cup holder to his left was empty but she'd chosen this lap-crossing and he was deeply grateful for this choice. She conveyed her ownership fluently and he loved her madly.

"I'm not saying Degas was some perv," she said, picking up where she'd left off. "Even though a lot of people assume that now. This old man drawing pubescent ballerinas and all. Wasn't I talking about Tolstoy? Did you read his What Is Art? He starts out so strong, talking about how unfun and self-serious artists have become, how art needs to be joyous. I liked that. Made sense. Then he spends another hundred pages writing the most boring, aca¬demic crap, like with footnotes and all. Very strange. You know that phrase, 'Writing about art is like dancing about architecture'? I mean, even Tolstoy couldn't get it right. Maybe it can't be done."

A third race began. The horses seemed to be going even slower now. He'd lost all track of how fast anything should go.

"Sometimes I almost hope for an accident," she said. "Is that sick? Have you read Anna Karenina? That scene where they shoot the horse after Vron¬sky wipes out—wasn't that shattering?"

"It looks so slow," Cricket said. He couldn't get over the way the horses ran. The sound was thunderous and swift, but their movement across his plane of vision was glacial. They seemed to swim before him as if against a roaring tide. They barely moved.

"The horses?" she asked, and laughed a thunderclap laugh. Her laugh had its own echo. Half a dozen people turned to see the source of the sound. Nor¬mally Cricket would have shrunk from the attention but he was overwhelmed by Olympia's life force and her willingness to sit next to him, to lavish him with attention. She was fully a woman, and walked through the world as if everything she'd said and done to date had been met with rapturous approval.

"It's unexpectedly pretty here, right?" she said.

The scene in front of them was a feast of color. It didn't make sense that this would be considered a seedy or dishonorable place. The people around them, scattered through the stands, were haggard and alone, but the scene before them was abundant and lush. It looked like Eden.

"So I think we should start a movement," she said. "You're not antisocial, I hope. Artists need each other. Are you more Impressionist or Dada?"

Cricket had heard of the Impressionists, and wanted to choose them, but there was something in Olympia's eyes, the briefest wrinkle of her nose, that indicated some distaste for their lot.

"Hard to choose," he said, and she nodded while draining a third of her beer.

"Anyway," she said, "part of what I want to do in our movement is to eliminate these simple dichotomies. I want like a big tent where all these genres can mix and bounce off each other and make better things. I still can't draw the way I'd like, and will probably end up being a curator or ringleader, but anyway. We can begin, right?"

"Right," he said, and believed everything she said.

"And look at that one! That shade of purple! And with that white plume! Is it 'plume'? 'Plumage'?" She pointed to a horse being trotted along the track in front of them, and she mimed the feathers extending from the jockey's helmet.

Excerpted from Contrapposto by Dave Eggers. Copyright © 2026 by Dave Eggers. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.