David Foster Wallace
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Grammar Master David Foster Wallace
The interview was a byproduct of an article Wallace started in the late nineties on the grammar wars. Most writers think of grammar as uninteresting, the machine code of literature, but Wallace loved it for many reasons—because his mother did;…
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Notable Chicago 11/10–11/16
Sunday 11/10: Join hosts J.H. Palmer and Angela Benander for That’s All She Wrote, the west side’s favorite BYOB storytelling show. This month’s featured storytellers include Angelina Marie, Xavier Retana, Marta Johnson, and Jasmine Davila. 8 PM, Free, Swim Cafe.…
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Bough Down by Karen Green
Kyle Boelte reviews Karen Green’s BOUGH DOWN today in The Rumpus Book Review.
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Remembering David Foster Wallace
Five years ago today, groundbreaking writer David Foster Wallace took his own life. Maria Popova at Brain Pickings remembers him with a post excerpting Conversations with David Foster Wallace, a “collection of 22 interviews and profiles of the beloved author.” A…
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Words of Wisdom from Writers
It’s commencement speech season, and New York Daily News‘s books blog has a roundup of some of the best graduation advice from literary figures. Like this, from Toni Morrison: …art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond…
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From Alcoholic to Diet Cokehead
In an interview with addiction website The Fix, reprinted at Salon, memoirist and poet Mary Karr discusses getting clean, flouting rules, and how sobriety shaped her relationship with David Foster Wallace. You’re present when you’re not drinking a fifth of Jack…
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“Possibility: Essays Against Despair,” by Patricia Vigderman
I like Patricia Vigderman because she likes jickjacking. She describes in “A Writer’s Harvest”, an earlier piece in Possibility: Essays Against Despair, how the sight of that slangy word, in two distinct (but linked) stories—one by Mary Karr, the other…
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New DFW Books: Both A Good Idea and Not
Both Flesh and Not, the latest posthumous David Foster Wallace book, has been released, and Rumpus pal Andrew Altschul has written an extensively titled essay about it for the Quarterly Conversation. In it, he explores with a springy verbosity not unlike Wallace’s…
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The Course Syllabi of Famous Writers
Imagine if the authors who created these syllabi for their courses were all teaching at the same school at the same time. “Who’d you get for English?” “David Foster Wallace. I hear he’s a hard grader. How about you?” “Donald Barthelme.…
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Happy Birthday, DFW!
Happy Birthday, David Foster Wallace! You would have been 51 today. To celebrate the life of one the most brilliant contemporary writers, re-read Funny Women editor Elissa Bassist’s piece “A Baker’s Dozen on My Feelings About David Foster Wallace’s Infinite…
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Books Elissa Bassist Thinks You Should Read
The Equals Record asks Funny Women editor (and writer/motherfucker) Elissa Bassist what she’s reading offline. She responds with a whole shelf’s worth of books, from David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest to fellow funny woman Tina Fey’s autobiographical comedy Bossypants. Read it,…
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“Both Flesh and Not,” by David Foster Wallace
The ferocity with which scholars, writers, fans, and cultural critics explicate the legacy of David Foster Wallace, or even that a legacy is thought to already exist at all, strikes me as a bit absurd, if inevitable.