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Infinite Jest (Paperback)
by David Foster Wallace
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Reading for Instructions on How to Live: The Millions Interviews Suzanne Scanlon 0
I feel like various dead writers are dear friends of mine -- from Woolf to Plath to Duras to DFW -- their lives and lessons and warnings and urgings are constantly informing my own, challenging my own.
The Old Corner Bookstore Is Now A Chipotle 19
On the wall behind her, a sign informs me that this is “food with integrity.” A dozen meat strips sizzle on the open stove; Chipotle’s chicken, boasts another sign, “is raised without antibiotics and fed a diet free of animal by-products.”
The Millions Top Ten: November 2012 0
A last hurrah for our number one, and a new collection of essays from a master who is missed.
“The Human Heart is a Chump”: Cataloging The Pale King 21
I am the cataloger of David Foster Wallace's final work, The Pale King, and I'm here to tell you that in cases like these, the rules will only get you so far.
A Supposedly Brief Interview with D.T. Max 1
It’s not really that David had any answers for people. But he never stops taking his life seriously and he never stops taking the reader’s life seriously. And I think that’s the connection: you never stop mattering to him and he never stops mattering to himself.
Excerpt: The Opening Paragraphs of D.T. Max's Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace 18
The first definitive treatment of David Foster Wallace's life arrives next week.
The Great Taxonomy of Literary Tumblrs: Round Two 40
Six months ago, I rounded up a list of my favorite literary Tumblr accounts. Alas, six months in the real world is different from six months online, and Tumblr now has grown by a few million blogs. So with that in mind, I’ve decided it’s time for another list — a better list, a bigger list.
Miles to Go: Notes on Marathon Reading 5
You could feel the love. Here was a group turned out to commemorate the brilliance of one guy’s colossal strivings, his dogged humility, the beautiful nuance and intricate recursions of a mind pushing past the simple given.
Out of Reach: Notes from the David Foster Wallace Symposium 10
I guess this is to say that the symposium had its share of characters one might expect to find in a David Foster Wallace novel.
A Novelist Unmoored from Himself: Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 14
1Q84 is Murakami's finest work: nuanced, brilliant, gripping, philosophical but never tendentious, self-assured, cleverly post-modern yet authentic, and possessed of a haunting surrealism that by this point surely deserves its own adjective: Murakamian?
Staff Pick: Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau 2
By the end of the first page, you have learned everything you are ever going to know about the events on which the book focuses. What Queneau does do, however, is re-narrate this same scenario a further 98 times, in a series of distinct styles.
Oprah, Amazon, and The Rise of Therapeutic Fiction: Timothy Aubry’s Reading as Therapy 6
Why Do People Read Literary Fiction?
D.M.V.: An Incomplete List of Writers Who Met Death by Motor Vehicle 22
Is it my imagination, or do an inordinate number of writers die in motor vehicle accidents?
Kindle-Proof Your Book in Seven Easy Steps! 28
For the Luddite writer who wants to put her royalties where her mouth is, I offer the choicest trade secrets...plus a Top 10 list of eBook-resistant texts.
The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels 107
...and some other observations of doubtful critical merit.
He Was Water: Kenyon Grads Remember David Foster Wallace's Commencement Speech 20
Did Wallace's speech resonate on the hot Ohio morning when he delivered it to the assembled student, or did it get lost amid the hurrah of a graduation weekend?
The Burden of Meaningfulness: David Foster Wallace's The Pale King 9
Certainly Wallace had set himself a problem masochistic or quixotic in its difficulty: how to write an interesting novel about that byword for tedium, the IRS? And how to write a religious novel about the most disenchanted and secular of professions, namely accounting?
Adam Levin's The Instructions and the Cult of the Child 8
Why so much genius? Why now?
Most Anticipated: The Great 2011 Book Preview 58
8,000 words strong and encompassing 76 titles, it's the only 2011 book preview you will ever need.
A Year in Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg 2
The number of novelists with a claim to having published major work this year forms a kind of alphabet: Aira, Amis, Bolaño, Boyd, Carey, Cohen, Cunningam, Donoghue...
Is Big Back? 22
A mini-boom in big books would seem to complicate our assumptions about the Incredible Shrinking Attention Span.
An Infinite Frolic of His Own: Joshua Cohen’s Witz 9
Joshua Cohen’s mammoth Witz is the new 800+ page novel to vie for your entire summer reading schedule; to make half your book club drop out; to inspire annotations, wikis, lexicography cults.
The Worth of the Wasted: Shakespeare and Bradley 7
A. C. Bradley is a better critic in full than he is in bits and pieces, and Shakespearean Tragedy continues to be an exciting book for anyone interested in literature.
Literature is a Manner of Completing Ourselves: A Reader's Year 17
If I were an addict, I would get high and while high, presumably, worry about where I was to get my next fix. Reading is not all that different, I think. As a reader, I am always looking over the binding thinking about the next read, in some instances, longing for it. Some books, like some highs, are better than others. But even with not-so-good books, I will come back to the drug, seeking the next high.
The Millions Top Ten: September 2009 0
Four books move on to the Hall of Fame and six books debut on the list.
The Millions Top Ten: August 2009 0
Pynchon and Bolaño hit the list. Plus, two new Hall of Fame inductees.
Ask a Book Question: #74 (Just One Book) 32
If you could read just one novel, what would it be?