The Last Book I Loved: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
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…
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David Foster Wallace
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Death of an Author
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.
The DFW-Franzen Saga
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…
Music Video Appreciation
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…
Maud Newton on a DFW-Inspired Trend
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…
A New Old DFW Interview
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,…
Poor Yorick Entertainment
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…
Boredom as Religious Experience: David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King
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.
Posthumous DFW
“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,…
Wallace-L and the Howling Fantods
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.
Don’t Get Me Down: Reading and Writing Depression
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.