BRAVADO OF A 'STAGGERING GENIUS' BUZZ ON WEB GIVES AUTHOR A BIG BOOST.

Byline: David Kronke Staff Writer

In much the same way that ``The Blair Witch Project'' became a huge hit due to its Internet component, author Dave Eggers is successfully exploiting the Web to hawk his book, ``A Breathtaking Work of Staggering Genius.''

Eggers' critically acclaimed book offers a most ambivalent, ironic take on the memoir genre: The author spends a lot of time fretting over and making fun of how he's exploiting his own pain for financial gain. Eggers writes of the death of his parents, who both succumbed to cancer within weeks of one another, and how he, as a fresh college graduate, took it upon himself to bring up his 7-year-old brother.

Much to his apparent dismay, Eggers has become a media darling - though the title of his book is jokey, intentional bravado, it has clearly done its work and focused a lot of attention upon him. Since early profiles depicted the writer as reticent and laconic in interviews - one even suggested readers would be doing him a favor by not buying his book - Eggers has been canceling press interviews right and left. No matter: The Internet, which doesn't require face time with actual people, is doing his promotional work for him.

Eggers is also the editor of McSweeneys, a quirky literary magazine (like its editor, it's nearly impossible to get ahold of) whose Internet component (mcsweeneys.net) has been charting the progress of his book-signing tour, which passed through Los Angeles and Pasadena last week. His book signings have taken on the patina of performance art: At one stop, he recruited an Auto Club representative to lecture the assemblage on road rage, and he sometimes takes requests - fans call out numbers, and he'll read from that page in his book.

More ingeniously, McSweeneys has initiated a contest for fans: Whoever submits the best fake ``review'' of ``Breathtaking Work'' to Amazon.com wins a free subscription to the magazine. Participants must adhere to a couple of rules: They must give the book five stars, and their review must be utterly confused and have nothing to do with the actual book. Since the contest began, the overworked editors at Amazon.com have caught on and have begun deleting the most bizarre reviews, but they're still receiving a deluge of contest entries.

Eggers' travails have also been turning up with regularity in the Obscure Store and Reading Room (obscure.com), a daily compendium of oddball and media-related news. And Modern Humorist (modernhumorist.com) has concocted an inspired parody blending the season's biggest literary phenomena, ``Harry Potter and the Breathtaking Work of Staggering Genius,'' which describes, for example, a game of Quidditch in the same luxuriantly florid language Eggers reserves for playing with his Frisbee.

Eggers' book is climbing the New York Times best-seller list, currently at No. 12 in the non-fiction category; it's also put time in in the top 10 of Amazon.com's updated-hourly compendium of top sellers.

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Photo: Dave Eggers, author of ``A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,'' is taking his book up the best-seller list via Internet promotions.

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times