David Foster Wallace
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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 to tell them about the format. Yes: there are brief…
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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.
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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 looks back at Wallace’s statements about his nonfiction, and discusses…
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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 Jest in music-video form. Schur’s directorial debut is the coexistence…
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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 has permeated through the blogosphere. His ability to combine legal…
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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, movie directors and artists who were not well known in…
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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 Yorick Entertainment is “a visual exploration of the filmography of…
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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…
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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, where scholars have gone into an estate and unearthed a…
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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.
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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.