Last heard from in public attacking the personality of a writer who used to work for him in a highly vindictive, and seemingly planted, New York Times report (see the MobyLives column Anatomy of a Hoax) — because that writer had critiqued a lecture by his crony Michael Chabon — Dave Eggers has launched a milder, but considerably longer, attack on Neal Pollack for his New York Times Book Review column yesterday in which he discusses the creation of Pollack’s literary persona (that of “the world’s greatest living writer,” described by some, according to Pollack, as an “ego carnival”). In a McSweeney’s commentary apparently posted hastily yesterday, Eggers accuses Pollack of misquoting him and gives a detailed disavowal of any involvement in the crafting of Pollack’s persona, saying, “The only thing I ever spoke to Neal about that might approach, in some way, this idea of a ‘new age of literary celebrity’ was my hope that whatever came next in the literary world would be different, mellower, less tense, less rivalrous, and thus altogether better . . . We also talked about how writers of previous eras would fight with each other publicly, backstabbing and insulting and generally making the book world look like the playground of too many antisocial and insecure teenage boys . . .It was our hope at McSweeney’s, and continues to be our goal with The Believer, that the literary world could be one of community, of mutual support, of spirited but nonviolent discourse . . . It’s what we teach at 826 Valencia, too: that books are good, that reading is good . . . and that anyone pissing in the very small and fragile ecosystem that is the literary world is mucking it up for everyone — and sending a very poor message to the next generation. “