David Foster Wallace
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I Would Have Done That. Instead.
For most readers, Infinite Jest is or was a formidable challenge looming in the future or receding in the past. But in the shadow of greater obstacles, it makes a decent distraction: I was the same depressed, anxious woman I…
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On Writing For Old White Men
At the LA Times, Claire Vaye Watkins recounts her realization that she has been writing to appeal to the white male literary establishment: I am trying to write something urgent, trying to be vulnerable and honest, trying to listen, trying…
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Oldies, Goodies
If great art is supposed to be surprising, do great writers have to change? At The Millions, Drew Nellins Smith wonders whether there can be too much of a good thing: I just get it. However much I admired his work, it had…
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Entirely the Person
More than just a biopic, The End of the Tour is a movie about the interconnected relationships between writer, reader, and subject. The Yale Herald talks to Donald Margulies about these degrees of separation: It’s still an approximation of who…
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The Rumpus Interview with David Lipsky
David Lipsky, whose book was recently adapted into the movie The End of the Tour, discusses his career as a writer and journalist as it’s evolved in the twenty years since his road trip with David Foster Wallace.
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Mary Karr, Queen of the Memoir, on that “Low-Rent Form”
I stopped putting things in quotation marks because I really wanted the reader to continue to understand or believe or think that he or she was in my head. Listen up as Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club, Cherry,…
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The Complexities of Litchat
Laura Miller writes in the New Yorker about litchat and legacy: In fact, litchat has assumed an ever-greater role in criticism because so much of what once happened privately and fleetingly is now public and preserved. Social-media platforms like Facebook…
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Got to Pg. 359 and Stopped Reading
So why has Infinite Jest, supposedly such an influential novel, become a paper weight, a talking point, a bench-mark of high- and low-brow intellectuality? Why has no one (or, more accurately, why does everyone think that no one) has actually…
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Don’t (Blurb) Speak
Wallace coined the helpful term “blurbspeak,” which he defined as “a very special subdialect of English that’s partly hyperbole, but it’s also phrases that sound really good and are very compelling in an advertorial sense, but if you think about…
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David (Foster Wallace) and David (Lipsky) on the Art of Conversation
But actually, part of what I think Lipsky wanted was to have a good, long, conversation, one of those talks that lift you out of your regular life and into another mode of being, the way a really good book…
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Supposedly Fun
The early skepticism for The End of the Tour may have been misguided. David Poland caught up with James Ponsoldt (the film’s director) and Donald Marguiles (its Pulitzer-winning screenwriter) to touch on Wallaces’s legacy, the Lipsky interview, and the process behind what’s since…
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The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Cohen
Novelist Joshua Cohen gives an interview, digital, about his new novel, paper, but also digital, about the Internet, digital, subsuming the novel, even his novel, best on paper, Book of Numbers.