John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead should be hailed not simply as a fabulous piece of writing but as a landmark debut of a new genre, invented by others but perfected here.

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It’s not easy to explain David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, especially to a co-worker or a parent, or your wife or your wife’s friend.

First you have to tell them about the format. Yes: there are brief interviews. But you don’t hear the questions and you don’t know who is doing the interviewing or why. …more

Edouard Levé’s Suicide, a slim, declarative, idea-driven novel, is daring and raw, and packed full of rewards for any reader willing to take a wide step outside of the American mainstream. …more

In this Awl piece, Michelle Dean weighs in on Jonathan Franzen’s declaration that David Foster Wallace “fabricated at least part of—and potentially a large part of—his nonfiction pieces.” The article looks back at Wallace’s statements about his nonfiction, and discusses both “the Franzen paradox” and the dynamics of the “Wallace-Franzen friendship.”

“In a faint echo of the (frequently too academic) debate about the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, the question of whether or not either of these statements are empirically true, as descriptions of Wallace, strikes me as beside the point. The relevant question is to ask whether, as descriptions of Franzen’s agony over his friend, they are honest.”

There are many ways to appreciate the work of David Foster Wallace.

Michael Schur, the man who co-created the tv show, “Parks and Rec,” is reproducing a scene from Infinite Jest in music-video form. Schur’s directorial debut is the coexistence of both his favorite band (the Decemberists) and the novel that most profoundly altered his mind. Today is its internet premiere.

Maud Newton’s NY Times essay, “Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace,” discusses yet another DFW-inspired trend–that is his “slangy approachability.”

He defined a writing style that has permeated through the blogosphere. His ability to combine legal diction with colloquialisms and “slacker lingo,” all to express one highly philosophical argument was indeed a DFW idiosyncrasy—one being reproduced by “a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument.” Newton writes on the evolution of this trend and what has become of irony.

This 2006 interview with David Foster Wallace has been published for the first time in English.

The conversation was part of a larger collection of pieces that highlighted foreign authors, movie directors and artists who were not well known in Russia. DFW applies his insight to the topics of American consumerism, pop culture and the modern state of American literature (a topic that he initially responds to with, “Ugggggghhhhh.”)

Upon finishing Infinite Jest (doing so is like a sacrament, which I say even though I’m Jewish), Chris Ayers created a shining visual memorial/appendage to Infinite Jest. The website Poor Yorick Entertainment is “a visual exploration of the filmography of James O. Incandenza and the world of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.”

About the site: “‘Poor Yorick Entertainment’ is the name of the fictional independent film company started by James O. Incandenza in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest. . . . This project is an attempt to bring some kind of visual life to the fictional filmmaker’s body of work.” …more

Reviewing The Pale King is a difficult process, for a number of reasons. The most obvious of which include that it is a last novel (though we wish it weren’t) whose author isn’t alive to see its publication (though we wish that weren’t true) and it is an unfinished novel, whose author’s own intended shape is unknown. …more

“He left us this book—the people closest to him agree that he wanted us to see it. This is not, in other words, a classic case of Posthumous Great Novel, where scholars have gone into an estate and unearthed a manuscript the author would probably never want read. Wallace seems to have laid this book before us in an all but do-with-it-what-you-will sort of way.”

John Jeremiah Sullivan spends some time with The Pale King.

David Foster Wallace’s “secret life as a philosopher” and the story of how Fate, Time, and Language, his honors theses turned postmortem book, came to be published.

In September 2008, David Foster Wallace stepped out onto his patio and did what most of us occasionally imagine doing, but hopefully never go through with. …more

You read last week in The Rumpus about the new “statistical analysis tool” that tells you who you write like. Coding Robots, a group of software developers, seemingly created I Write Like just for fun; the page analyzes your word choice and writing style and spits back a writer it compares you to (out of a list of 50 writers, according to Dmitry Chestnykh in his interview with The Awl).

I pasted in a recent clip from my food blog Oats, a descriptive (and highly sensual, said a friend) description of corn, to see which author I Write Like would connect me to. …more

I read Robert Walser’s The Tanners by accident—or, to be more precise, I bought it by accident. I’d recently run across an interview with Susan Bernofsky, the translator, and when the bright yellow cover gleamed at me from the table, I had to have it. …more

It was yet another awesome week for Rumpus Books. Click through for links to reviews, rants, interviews, and more. …more

David Foster Wallace speaks to us from beyond the grave in David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself—but should we be listening?

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In 1994, David Foster Wallace published an essay about the difficult-to-pin-down pleasure of watching great athletes during their most intense moments of competition. The essay, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” looks simple on the surface: it is “unaccompanied,” by which I mean there are no numbered footnotes, no preambles, no subtitles and no flow charts framing or attached to the text. …more

“I think avant-garde fiction has already gone the way of poetry. And it’s become involuted and forgotten the reader. Put it this way, there are a few really good poets who suffered because of the desiccation and involution of poetry, but for the most part I think American poetry has gotten what it’s deserved. And, uh, it’ll come awake again when poets start speaking to people who have to pay the rent.”

At Paper Cuts, in a general discussion of poetry’s threatened relevance in the U.S., the words of David Foster Wallace enters the conversation (quoted above.)

“I love you” is a cliché.

I wonder if I’ll use this cliché again.

The lights are out and I’m typing on my elbows and it hurts so I must stop.

I don’t stop. I clutch my t-shirt and try to get my breathing under control but am unable to do so and worry about passing out and suffocating, alone, for no reason other than Lorrie Moore. …more

Jonathan Lethem has been hired for David Foster Wallace’s old teaching post at Pomona. (via @maudnewton)

“Lots of people in Indiana Jones hats today. I approve.” From @WriterDaniel at this Twitter roundup from the LA Times Festival of Books.

GIANT’s got a pretty good summary of what different kinds of editors really do. Thankfully, they forgot to make fun of Sunday Editors.

The NYPL has a really cool looking book-sorting machine. (via Bookninja)

A “subtle,” “brilliant” and “ambitious” post on cliches.

I don’t really care all that much that Danielle Steel’s assistant is going to jail for stealing $750,000, but the fact that Steel barely noticed the money was gone (and seems to like to brag about that) makes me want to break something. Or start writing romance novels. One of the two.

My relationship with the book blogs has hit a snag. Today, we got in a throw-down fight, and I came pretty close to breaking some china.

It’s just that the blogs whine and worry and complain a lot, and they always seem to want to cheat on me with famous writers, like Martin Amis or David Foster Wallace or Marquis de Sade, and then it rubs off on me, and I end up whining and worrying and complaining more than they do, and then I stop liking myself.

So today, the book blog roundup will be made up entirely things that I think are awesome. No Amazon, no “last days” worrying, no whining, no literary celebrity fetishizing. Just things that rock.

If you only click on one link, this roundup at Pank of short stories and poems and things is really phenomenal.

Newspaper blackout poetry is one of my new favorite things. (via Bookslut)

Literary burlesque.

At Vice, a very cool photography/written collaboration between Brian Evenson and John Sellekaers. (via GIANT)

And finally, here’s a final passive-aggressive blow: “This is the title of a typical incindiery blog post.” (via @electriclit)

The filmography of the fictional Wild Turkey drinking filmmaker and visionary tennis instructor at Enfield Academy, James Incandenza, the central character of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, will make an appearance of sorts at the Gallery at The Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies.

Beginning January 29th, the Neiman Center at Columbia University will present A Failed Entertainment: Selections from the Filmography of James O. Incandenza. The filmography is made possible by the contributions of artists and filmmakers who have been commissioned to re-create the seminal works of the storied oeuvre of the avant-garde filmmaker, all of which is included as a footnote in Wallace’s novel.

While the exhibition will be up through February 19th, the spirit of Incandenza will be celebrated at an opening reception, with film screening, on Friday, January 29th from 6:00-8:00pm.

With so many shopping days left until whenever, there is no end to the amount of printed matter out there that is riveting, ravishing and ultimately rewarding.

The book blogs are overwhelming to someone like me who wants to read everything. I’ll try to control myself as we venture through them.

At The Book Bench, the unique rewards of editing David Foster Wallace.

Jason Sanford poses questions as to the efficacy of science fiction in helping us confront our imminent cataclysms. (Via: Ecstatic Days.)

And because I can’t stop linking to Jeff VanDerMeer’s Ecstatic Days, here’s an interesting discussion about the connection between art and social justice.

At The Millions, the joys of writing in trains.

Does self-publishing work? That has been a hot item of dispute at 3:AM magazine. Here’s a counter-argument.

Jacket Copy analyzes our decade of bad reading.

“Nothing can’t be made with wood.” Street legal wooden car!

I don’t know about you, but I could use some good news this Monday morning. Cell phones might not cause brain tumors after all!

Evidently the US Defense Department is way more whimsical than we’d thought.

If you are putting a brooks saddle on your kids tricycle you have way too much money.

Somehow we’ve been out of the loop and totally missed these micro-pigs.

The David Foster Wallace grammar challenge (via Gerrycanavan.)

It’s fall! The air is crisp, the leaves are falling, and I can’t seem to leave my house.  …more

My boyfriend insisted I read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men when we started dating. “It will help you understand the way men think!” he exclaimed. Secrets of those bearing a Y chromosome would be revealed, he promised; David Foster Wallace had explored the shadows of the psyche of his generation and had rendered them on the page in all of their dark, desperate beauty. As a woman who came of age alongside these men, who has a brother, a father, a lover, and friends, I was intrigued. …more

After reviewing the book blogs this week, I’ve decided that if I see the words “Dan Brown” ever again I’m going to punch myself in the eyes with a Da Vinci Code decoder ring.

To save you some time, here’s what they have to say about him: He makes a lot of money. And he’s not the greatest writer.

So today, just to be different, I’m not going to talk about him. I’m not gonna link to a single thing that mentions him. This is a Dan Brown free zone.

Who says creative writing can’t be taught? Hidden inside this article, the tidbit that Dan Brown took a creative writing class with David Foster Wallace. Damn it! OK, no more.

Alan Turing finally gets an apology from Gordon Brown. (via The Elegant Variation)

The new 25th Anniversary Edition of White Noise has some really cool artwork by Michael Cho.

“Humans in every recorded era seem to have had that after-the-end feeling.” Elizabeth Bachner writes about “reading the 60′s” on Bookslut.

A guest writer can be seen by the kids he’s speaking to, but he’s not allowed to see the kids.

An instant book machine from Google.

Reasons to attend the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival: 1) it’s one of the most hip, smart and diverse American literary events, 2)  because Ben Marcus, Sarah Manguso, Thurston Moore, Heidi Julavits and Tao Lin are just some of the stars and emerging writers who will be talking/reading, 3) panels will talk about DFW , rappers and upward mobility, among a lot of other great things read and discussed, and 4) because it’s free (though for some events you need to secure tickets in advance).

While great things will be happening in several venues throughout the day, and you can see a full listing of the events and locations here, here’s a suggested itinerary (a personal cheat sheet with some Tough Draw Alternates). Enjoy! …more

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler takes a crack at the underworld in a hit-and-miss new novel. …more