David Foster Wallace
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What to Read When Your Workplace Is Full of Drama
In honor of the World’s Worst Boss, we’ve put together a list of books full of workplace drama for you to read while we wait to see if we can get that orange guy fired.
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TORCH: My American Playground
I left the car by the roadside and ran up the slope, in tears now, reaching the picnic tables and swings and, as bright and vivid as in my dreams, my purple-shaped climbing frame, exactly as I remembered it.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Suzuki and Kawasaki in the Dominican Republic
We are all punchlines. Projections of projections of projections. But whose joke is it? And where is the bill?
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Notable NYC: 4/1–4/7
Saturday 4/1: Paolo Javier and Jill Magi join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. Sunday 4/2: Robin Myers and translator Ezequiel Zaidenwerg discuss Conflations. Berl’s Poetry Shop, 5:30 p.m., free. Monday 4/3: Fiona Maazel, Alissa Nutting, Robert Lopez,…
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The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos discusses Abandon Me, confessional writing, Billie Holiday, reenacting trauma, cataloguing narratives, and searching for identity.
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This Week in Essays
At Lit Hub, Jonathan Reiber, a former speechwriter for the Obama administration, weighs our souls and our words during this political transition. Chivas Sandage writes for The Rumpus about helping the men in our lives to fully understand the constant state of…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Sometimes, literary magazines fold. It happens all the time because of funding, or manpower, or editorial differences. Usually, print back issues remain for sale and online content is preserved indefinitely, or at least until someone forgets to renew the domain.…
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The Book Must Be Written
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, in an amended excerpt from David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering shares his attempt at tackling the mammoth, labyrinthine task of schematizing DFW’s archival materials into a coherent history of the project that never quite…
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Treatment and Healing
Treatment sometimes looks like hospitalization in an overcrowded psych ward and medication that can dissolve personality. Over at American Short Fiction, Jenna Kahn writes about the depiction of mental illness in literature—as found particularly in “The Depressed Person” by David…
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Computer Programs Make Good Writing Buddies
For The Millions, Philip Hopkins shares what he learned after attempting to co-author a book with a computer program. Through the experience, Hopkins ultimately concludes that “the gap between simple self-awareness and the literary intelligence necessary to compose a worthwhile novel…
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The Desire for Distraction
For The Millions, Mike Broida revisits David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, arguing that the work’s claims about addiction and the media presaged the influence of “television culture” on the digital age: The final “joke” of Infinite Jest is that the book is intended to…
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The Last Book I Loved: Abbott Awaits
Summer works like this. Every day small moments cycle like waves within tides, eroding our opportunities on a geological scale invisible from our point of immersion.