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The David Foster Wallace Reader
'One of the most dazzling luminaries of contemporary American fiction' Sunday Times
'The most commanding and exciting and inventive rhetorical virtuosity of any writer alive... [He] nailed it like nobody else ever had' Jonathan Franzen
'[He was] first among us. The most talented, most daring, most energetic and original, the funniest... This man got inside the world's mind and changed it for the better' George Saunders
'Radical, impassioned, heart-and brain-stretching... His talent was so obviously great it confused people' Zadie Smith
Discover one of the most celebrated writers of our age - the visionary author of Infinite Jest andA Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again
From genre-defining reportage to genre-breaking fiction, David Foster Wallace captured the human experience as no-one else has - in all its multiplicity, sorrow and tenderness, wit and irony and deep, dazzling truth.
Penguin presents the very best of his collected fiction and nonfiction, including extracts from his most famous novels, short stories and iconic essays such as 'Consider the Lobster'. Alongside these classic pieces is exclusive, previously unpublished work, and critical contributions from twelve prominent authors and thinkers, all commissioned specifically for this collection.
'The most commanding and exciting and inventive rhetorical virtuosity of any writer alive... [He] nailed it like nobody else ever had' Jonathan Franzen
'[He was] first among us. The most talented, most daring, most energetic and original, the funniest... This man got inside the world's mind and changed it for the better' George Saunders
'Radical, impassioned, heart-and brain-stretching... His talent was so obviously great it confused people' Zadie Smith
Discover one of the most celebrated writers of our age - the visionary author of Infinite Jest andA Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again
From genre-defining reportage to genre-breaking fiction, David Foster Wallace captured the human experience as no-one else has - in all its multiplicity, sorrow and tenderness, wit and irony and deep, dazzling truth.
Penguin presents the very best of his collected fiction and nonfiction, including extracts from his most famous novels, short stories and iconic essays such as 'Consider the Lobster'. Alongside these classic pieces is exclusive, previously unpublished work, and critical contributions from twelve prominent authors and thinkers, all commissioned specifically for this collection.
976 pages, Paperback
First published November 6, 2014
491 people are currently reading
3532 people want to read
About the author
David Foster Wallace
131 books13.2k followersDavid Foster Wallace was an acclaimed American writer known for his fiction, nonfiction, and critical essays that explored the complexities of consciousness, irony, and the human condition. Widely regarded as one of the most innovative literary voices of his generation, Wallace is perhaps best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. His unfinished final novel, The Pale King, was published posthumously in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was raised in Illinois, where he excelled as both a student and a junior tennis player—a sport he later wrote about with sharp insight and humor. He earned degrees in English and philosophy from Amherst College, then completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona. His early academic work in logic and philosophy informed much of his writing, particularly in his blending of analytical depth with emotional complexity.
Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), established his reputation as a fresh literary talent. Over the next two decades, he published widely in prestigious journals and magazines, producing short stories, essays, and book reviews that earned him critical acclaim. His work was characterized by linguistic virtuosity, inventive structure, and a deep concern for moral and existential questions. In addition to fiction, he tackled topics ranging from tennis and state fairs to cruise ships, politics, and the ethics of food consumption.
Beyond his literary achievements, Wallace had a significant academic career, teaching literature and writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. He was known for his intense engagement with students and commitment to teaching.
Wallace struggled with depression and addiction for much of his adult life, and he was hospitalized multiple times. He died by suicide in 2008 at the age of 46. In the years since his death, his influence has continued to grow, inspiring scholars, conferences, and a dedicated readership. However, his legacy is complicated by posthumous revelations of abusive behavior, particularly during his relationship with writer Mary Karr, which has led to ongoing debate within literary and academic communities.
His distinctive voice—by turns cerebral, comic, and compassionate—remains a defining force in contemporary literature. Wallace once described fiction as a way of making readers feel "less alone inside," and it is that emotional resonance, alongside his formal daring, that continues to define his place in American letters.
Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was raised in Illinois, where he excelled as both a student and a junior tennis player—a sport he later wrote about with sharp insight and humor. He earned degrees in English and philosophy from Amherst College, then completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona. His early academic work in logic and philosophy informed much of his writing, particularly in his blending of analytical depth with emotional complexity.
Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), established his reputation as a fresh literary talent. Over the next two decades, he published widely in prestigious journals and magazines, producing short stories, essays, and book reviews that earned him critical acclaim. His work was characterized by linguistic virtuosity, inventive structure, and a deep concern for moral and existential questions. In addition to fiction, he tackled topics ranging from tennis and state fairs to cruise ships, politics, and the ethics of food consumption.
Beyond his literary achievements, Wallace had a significant academic career, teaching literature and writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. He was known for his intense engagement with students and commitment to teaching.
Wallace struggled with depression and addiction for much of his adult life, and he was hospitalized multiple times. He died by suicide in 2008 at the age of 46. In the years since his death, his influence has continued to grow, inspiring scholars, conferences, and a dedicated readership. However, his legacy is complicated by posthumous revelations of abusive behavior, particularly during his relationship with writer Mary Karr, which has led to ongoing debate within literary and academic communities.
His distinctive voice—by turns cerebral, comic, and compassionate—remains a defining force in contemporary literature. Wallace once described fiction as a way of making readers feel "less alone inside," and it is that emotional resonance, alongside his formal daring, that continues to define his place in American letters.
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July 2, 2023
Those two stars are not a statement about DFW's art (I think the guy was brilliant), they're a statement about the editing of the reader: It's not only way too long, it's also terribly curated, meaning that the texts supposed to give context and additional content to the works printed in the collection are mostly, sorry, complete trash - too short, too superficial. People who are new to this author will struggle to see the main themes of Wallace, the connections between the texts, the web of postmodern references. I don't demand a reader to be a scientific compendium, but to randomly throw together essays, stories, excerpts and Wallace's teaching materials and add some throw-away remarks is just lazy nonsense.
So yes, I consumed the complete reader, but I only worked through it because I knew everything in here already, I also already had further and deeper info, and I enjoyed re-visiting the texts. I advise newbies to stay away though. Just start with his essay collections Consider the Lobster and Other Essays or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments instead and go from there.
So yes, I consumed the complete reader, but I only worked through it because I knew everything in here already, I also already had further and deeper info, and I enjoyed re-visiting the texts. I advise newbies to stay away though. Just start with his essay collections Consider the Lobster and Other Essays or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments instead and go from there.
May 10, 2025
I'm not a David Foster Wallace fanboy. Save for a few short stories I ran across in literary anthologies years ago, I'd never read anything by him; neither am I one of his savage critics, constantly railing against his excesses. I entered The David Foster Wallace Reader as a blank slate and, The Reader, like most of Wallace's works, is a daunting doorstopper of a book, clocking in at nearly 1,100 pages when including the footnotes (and if you read Wallace, you can't leave off the footnotes).
Much like how The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcom Cowley, brought William Faulkner to a wider audience by knitting his stories and novels together as a single piece, The David Foster Wallace Reader can also be viewed as one, albeit weighty, work. Though the players change, the same tone and themes pulse through each entry here with a high-wire performance of verbal jiu-jitsu, intellectual heft and humor.
But I would be negligent to not mention Wallace's pain, his battle against the demons of perfection and depression, that pop up throughout his work. This juggling act — between a magisterial control of the English language and a fight to the death against the black spot on his soul — is at once tragic, considering Wallace's eventual suicide, but also awe-inspiring, realizing he could create so much great work while a dark disturbance refused to leave his side.
The Reader includes stories, novel excerpts, essays and even the syllabus he used in the English classes he taught for decades at various colleges. The texts he required his students to read is an eclectic lot, a list that fits Wallace’s varied tastes:
Renata Adler, Speedboat
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America… In Watermelon Sugar
Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
Paula Fox, Desperate Characters
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
All of the pieces in The Reader are shrewdly chosen from an all-star list of editors, including Sven Birkerts, Deborah Triesman, Anne Fadiman and the author's mother, Sally Foster Wallace, among others. I could write something about every item in here, but then I’d be here all day. So, in typical Wallace fashion, a fellow lover of lists, I give you my thoughts on three of my favorite sections from the book.
1. “E Unibus Pluram Television and U.S. Fiction” -- This essay, about the intersection of the television generation and the "writer's" diminishing role within that growing culture, is nothing short of brilliant. When Wallace wrote the piece in 1990, the digital age was a dim glimmer that had not yet infected mainstream America. We had the boobtube then, but were without our tablets, smartphones and TV binge-watching that was made possible through the advent of Netflix and DVRs. But that doesn’t negate Wallace’s themes of alienation through our digital obsessions and the ironic tones that writers have worn on their sleeves as an act of rebellion to those obsessions.
As Wallace writes, “The next real literary ‘rebels' in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.”
Clearly, as we continue to bend a knee to a culture made up of reality TV stars, we are not there yet, but we can hope, can’t we?
2. “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All” — In this wonderful piece about the Illinois State Fair, Wallace is at once the smartest guy in the room, constantly pointing out the flaws and foibles of bovine-like Midwesterners, while also being the biggest punchline: A sad sack outsider who is afraid to take chances, to let loose, to just freakin’ enjoy life.
The article, which originally appeared in Harper’s under the title “Ticket to the Fair," is a treasure trove of tips on how to write great nonfiction. The language is alive with multi-sensory descriptions. Every paragraph, it seems, is brimming with the pungent smells, sickly sweet tastes and visual punchlines of a State Fair. Try this random sample on for size:
“So along the path there are I.D.C. milkshakes (my lunch), Lemon Shake-Ups, Ice Cold Melon Man booths, Citrus Push-Ups, and Hawaiian Shaved Ice you can suck the syrup out of and then crunch the ice (my dessert). But a lot of what’s getting bought and gobbled is to my mind not hot-weather food at all: bright-yellow popcorn that stinks of salt; onion rings big as leis; Poco Penos Stuffed Jalapeño Peppers; Zorba’s Gyros; shiny fried chicken; Bert’s Burritos—“BIG AS YOU’RE HEAD” (sic); hot Italian beef; hot New York City Beef (?); Jojo’s Quick Fried Donuts (the only booth selling coffee, by the way); pizza by the shingle-sized slice and chitlins and Crab Rangoon and Polish sausage. (Rural Illinois’ complete lack of ethnic identity creates a kind of postmodern embarrassment of riches—foods of every culture and creed become our own, quick-fried and served on cardboard and consumed on foot.) There are towering plates of “Curl Fries,” which are pubic-hair-shaped and make people’s fingers shine in the sun. Cheez-Dip Hot Dogs. Pony Pups. Hot Fritters. Philly Steak. Ribeye BBQ Corral. Joanie’s Original ½-lb Burgers’ booth’s sign says 2 CHOICES—RARE OR MOOIN. I can’t believe people eat this kind of stuff in this kind of heat.”
As Anne Fadiman writes in the afterword, “For the past ten years, I have asked my undergraduate nonfiction class at Yale to read three pages from (Wallace’s story). Other readings for English 469 have changed, but not that one… because (it) contains a mind-bending payload of writing lessons (truly mind-bending, as in 'How could that tiny VW hold all those clowns?'). The very next week, the students write better. It sounds impossible, but it’s true.”
3. “Winter B.S. 1960—Tucson Az” — It may be sacrilege to even attempt to make the comparison, but this section from Wallace’s novel, Infinite Jest, should be placed on a shelf of literary sublimity next to Molly Bloom’s monologue from Ulysses.
The chapter is an extended speech, almost a rant, from a father who’s speaking to his son about life and the pursuit of tennis greatness. I don’t know that I’ve ever laughed while also feeling utter shame so much as I did while reading this selection.
“Son, don’t be that way, now. Don’t get all oversensitive on me, son, when all I’m trying to do is help you. Son, Jim, I hate this when you do this. Your chin just disappears into that bow-tie when your big old overhung lower lip quivers like that. You look chinless, son, and big-lipped. And that cape of mucus that’s coming down on your upper lip, the way it shines, don’t, just don’t, it’s revolting, son, you don’t want to revolt people, you have to learn to control this sort of oversensitivity to hard truths… Jim, I know, you know, we’ve been through this before, leave the book alone, boy, it’s not going anywhere... Jim, well pick it up then if you’re afraid of a little dust, Jim, pick the book up if it’s going to make you all goggle-eyed and chinless honestly Jesus why do I try I try and try… my son, my flesh of my flesh, white slumped flesh of my flesh who wanted to embark on what I predict right now will be a tennis career that’ll put his busted-up used-up old Dad back square in his little place, who wanted to maybe for once be a real boy and learn how to play and have fun and frolic and play around in the unrelieved sunshine...”
I could go on and on about this and other pieces such as "The Depressed Person,” "Good Old Neon,” "§36 from The Pale King, "Consider the Lobster,” and so many others… but I’ll leave you with just one more item, a selection from Wallace’s nonfiction piece, "Federer Both Flesh and Not.”
“There’s also his intelligence, his occult anticipation, his court sense, his ability to read and manipulate opponents, to mix spins and speeds, to misdirect and disguise, to use tactical foresight and peripheral vision and kinesthetic range instead of just rote pace—all this has exposed the limits, and possibilities, of men’s tennis as it’s now played.”
As I read that quote, I couldn’t help but think about Wallace writing not only about tennis great Roger Federer, but also, and more importantly, about himself and the way he sought to expand the use of language through his books.
Much like how The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcom Cowley, brought William Faulkner to a wider audience by knitting his stories and novels together as a single piece, The David Foster Wallace Reader can also be viewed as one, albeit weighty, work. Though the players change, the same tone and themes pulse through each entry here with a high-wire performance of verbal jiu-jitsu, intellectual heft and humor.
But I would be negligent to not mention Wallace's pain, his battle against the demons of perfection and depression, that pop up throughout his work. This juggling act — between a magisterial control of the English language and a fight to the death against the black spot on his soul — is at once tragic, considering Wallace's eventual suicide, but also awe-inspiring, realizing he could create so much great work while a dark disturbance refused to leave his side.
The Reader includes stories, novel excerpts, essays and even the syllabus he used in the English classes he taught for decades at various colleges. The texts he required his students to read is an eclectic lot, a list that fits Wallace’s varied tastes:
Renata Adler, Speedboat
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America… In Watermelon Sugar
Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
Paula Fox, Desperate Characters
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
All of the pieces in The Reader are shrewdly chosen from an all-star list of editors, including Sven Birkerts, Deborah Triesman, Anne Fadiman and the author's mother, Sally Foster Wallace, among others. I could write something about every item in here, but then I’d be here all day. So, in typical Wallace fashion, a fellow lover of lists, I give you my thoughts on three of my favorite sections from the book.
1. “E Unibus Pluram Television and U.S. Fiction” -- This essay, about the intersection of the television generation and the "writer's" diminishing role within that growing culture, is nothing short of brilliant. When Wallace wrote the piece in 1990, the digital age was a dim glimmer that had not yet infected mainstream America. We had the boobtube then, but were without our tablets, smartphones and TV binge-watching that was made possible through the advent of Netflix and DVRs. But that doesn’t negate Wallace’s themes of alienation through our digital obsessions and the ironic tones that writers have worn on their sleeves as an act of rebellion to those obsessions.
As Wallace writes, “The next real literary ‘rebels' in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.”
Clearly, as we continue to bend a knee to a culture made up of reality TV stars, we are not there yet, but we can hope, can’t we?
2. “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All” — In this wonderful piece about the Illinois State Fair, Wallace is at once the smartest guy in the room, constantly pointing out the flaws and foibles of bovine-like Midwesterners, while also being the biggest punchline: A sad sack outsider who is afraid to take chances, to let loose, to just freakin’ enjoy life.
The article, which originally appeared in Harper’s under the title “Ticket to the Fair," is a treasure trove of tips on how to write great nonfiction. The language is alive with multi-sensory descriptions. Every paragraph, it seems, is brimming with the pungent smells, sickly sweet tastes and visual punchlines of a State Fair. Try this random sample on for size:
“So along the path there are I.D.C. milkshakes (my lunch), Lemon Shake-Ups, Ice Cold Melon Man booths, Citrus Push-Ups, and Hawaiian Shaved Ice you can suck the syrup out of and then crunch the ice (my dessert). But a lot of what’s getting bought and gobbled is to my mind not hot-weather food at all: bright-yellow popcorn that stinks of salt; onion rings big as leis; Poco Penos Stuffed Jalapeño Peppers; Zorba’s Gyros; shiny fried chicken; Bert’s Burritos—“BIG AS YOU’RE HEAD” (sic); hot Italian beef; hot New York City Beef (?); Jojo’s Quick Fried Donuts (the only booth selling coffee, by the way); pizza by the shingle-sized slice and chitlins and Crab Rangoon and Polish sausage. (Rural Illinois’ complete lack of ethnic identity creates a kind of postmodern embarrassment of riches—foods of every culture and creed become our own, quick-fried and served on cardboard and consumed on foot.) There are towering plates of “Curl Fries,” which are pubic-hair-shaped and make people’s fingers shine in the sun. Cheez-Dip Hot Dogs. Pony Pups. Hot Fritters. Philly Steak. Ribeye BBQ Corral. Joanie’s Original ½-lb Burgers’ booth’s sign says 2 CHOICES—RARE OR MOOIN. I can’t believe people eat this kind of stuff in this kind of heat.”
As Anne Fadiman writes in the afterword, “For the past ten years, I have asked my undergraduate nonfiction class at Yale to read three pages from (Wallace’s story). Other readings for English 469 have changed, but not that one… because (it) contains a mind-bending payload of writing lessons (truly mind-bending, as in 'How could that tiny VW hold all those clowns?'). The very next week, the students write better. It sounds impossible, but it’s true.”
3. “Winter B.S. 1960—Tucson Az” — It may be sacrilege to even attempt to make the comparison, but this section from Wallace’s novel, Infinite Jest, should be placed on a shelf of literary sublimity next to Molly Bloom’s monologue from Ulysses.
The chapter is an extended speech, almost a rant, from a father who’s speaking to his son about life and the pursuit of tennis greatness. I don’t know that I’ve ever laughed while also feeling utter shame so much as I did while reading this selection.
“Son, don’t be that way, now. Don’t get all oversensitive on me, son, when all I’m trying to do is help you. Son, Jim, I hate this when you do this. Your chin just disappears into that bow-tie when your big old overhung lower lip quivers like that. You look chinless, son, and big-lipped. And that cape of mucus that’s coming down on your upper lip, the way it shines, don’t, just don’t, it’s revolting, son, you don’t want to revolt people, you have to learn to control this sort of oversensitivity to hard truths… Jim, I know, you know, we’ve been through this before, leave the book alone, boy, it’s not going anywhere... Jim, well pick it up then if you’re afraid of a little dust, Jim, pick the book up if it’s going to make you all goggle-eyed and chinless honestly Jesus why do I try I try and try… my son, my flesh of my flesh, white slumped flesh of my flesh who wanted to embark on what I predict right now will be a tennis career that’ll put his busted-up used-up old Dad back square in his little place, who wanted to maybe for once be a real boy and learn how to play and have fun and frolic and play around in the unrelieved sunshine...”
I could go on and on about this and other pieces such as "The Depressed Person,” "Good Old Neon,” "§36 from The Pale King, "Consider the Lobster,” and so many others… but I’ll leave you with just one more item, a selection from Wallace’s nonfiction piece, "Federer Both Flesh and Not.”
“There’s also his intelligence, his occult anticipation, his court sense, his ability to read and manipulate opponents, to mix spins and speeds, to misdirect and disguise, to use tactical foresight and peripheral vision and kinesthetic range instead of just rote pace—all this has exposed the limits, and possibilities, of men’s tennis as it’s now played.”
As I read that quote, I couldn’t help but think about Wallace writing not only about tennis great Roger Federer, but also, and more importantly, about himself and the way he sought to expand the use of language through his books.
Want to read
October 24, 2018Just had a look at this (new) compilation in my local Waterstones - it looks great. Fun-sized best bits from all his scary books. Exactly right for everyone intimidated by DFW and his enormous brain - people like me, that is.
March 15, 2016
Five stars coz this book, contains his teaching materials. The secret of the genius.
discarded
November 30, 2022I enjoyed extracts from the Broom of the System and some stories from The Girl with Curious Hair, but that was it; it soon struck me how he AMPLIFIES everything he writes about, like seeing everything in constant closeup (this is why, I think, I find his non-fiction much more palatable, as it is more mediated). I tried, I really tried, and gave it a fair effort, but I simply didn't want to spend more time in that masculine, silently screaming, white place.
June 18, 2018
This book was so long and so worthwhile. The fiction was stunning, but the non-fiction left me in awe. I had read most of it before, but having his writing all in one place and just reading straight through makes you realize just what a uniquely gifted writer he was. Not only that, but he was a gifted noticer of people. His essay about the cruise and the state fair were just remarkable. If you enjoy writing, this will serve as inspiration AND it will make you realize that you will never create anything that comes close to DFW.
December 25, 2025
Went back to read Consider the Lobster, because it is great preparation for starting fights at the Christmas dinner table. Haven't read the whole volume (obviously) but I think it's pretty cool that you get to see some of his teaching material (and I'm not a fanatic!! annoyed at both camps that I feel the need to say this).
December 23, 2015
I tried reading Infinite Jest about a decade ago and stopped when I got to a passage written out in heavy dialect. I read very quickly, and anything that slows me down tends to put me off the book. (I’m looking at you, text pages in comic books!) By my recollection, the book was interesting but not worth my effort at the time.
I picked up the Reader after watching The End of the Tour with a special interest in the non-fiction piece “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”, Wallace’s take on cruise line vacations. The Reader is broken into three portions: fiction, class materials (syllabi, assignments, etc..), and nonfiction essays. I only read the last two sections. The class materials are engaging (for what they are), but mostly show off Wallace’s fanatical devotion to grammar and some interesting reading choices for his classes.
Of the nonfiction essays, I appreciated most the aforementioned piece on cruises, “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from it All” (a visit to the Illinois State Fair), and “Consider the Lobster” (half travelogue based on the Maine Lobster Festival and half dissertation on whether a boiling lobster feels pain). All the pieces straddle the low brow and high brow parts of American culture --- you have Wallace approaching the events both with his Midwestern upbringing and his East Coast academic eye. What’s engaging is that tension between the two viewpoints is clearly expressed in Wallace himself; he’s an anthropologist clearly uncomfortable with his studies. There’s a great bit at the State Fair where a female friend is ogled by some ride operators, and Wallace throws himself into despair about his response (or, more accurately, his lack of response). Shouldn’t he be doing something? Is his Midwestern friend aware of the sexual harassment? (Quick answers: no (she can handle herself) and yes (aren’t those guys stupid?).) You mix Wallace’s introspection (and sometimes downright paranoia), his baroque writing style (footnotes have footnotes), and a willingness to find the whole thing tragically funny, and the pieces just shine.
Not everything is such sweet reading, however. Two pieces, “E Unibus Pluram” and “Authority and American Usage” are densely packed pieces of rhetoric that are alternately enlightening and maddening. The latter masquerades as a review of a usage guide, but really explicates Wallace’s take on grammar wars --- it’s worth a read for language fans. The former is an exposition on the impact of television (and the phenemenon of us watching television, knowing we are watching television, and coming to grips with knowing we are watching television) on recent (pre-1990, the time the piece was written) American fiction. I would read pages of this, despairing to get anything out of it, and then hit paragraphs that blew me out of the water. There’s a take on irony as an overly dominant part of our national culture (find page 695 and start reading at the last paragraph). Wallace also has an extremely presicent response to those who believe that new technology will make television viewers less “passive” as he describes what we now think of as Web 2.0. “Make no mistake: we are dependent on image-technology; and the better the tech, the harder we’re hooked.” [page 702]
So, what’s the takeaway? I can see myself trying Wallace’s fiction at some point, although his detailed style is exhausting even in small chunks. Thrashing about on the internet, I see that Wallace is now associated with the “New Sincerity” movement, and I’m intrigued by what types of postmodern literary fiction can move beyond the ironic. And, the Reader is a great exposure to Wallace's philosophy and distinctive style.
I picked up the Reader after watching The End of the Tour with a special interest in the non-fiction piece “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”, Wallace’s take on cruise line vacations. The Reader is broken into three portions: fiction, class materials (syllabi, assignments, etc..), and nonfiction essays. I only read the last two sections. The class materials are engaging (for what they are), but mostly show off Wallace’s fanatical devotion to grammar and some interesting reading choices for his classes.
Of the nonfiction essays, I appreciated most the aforementioned piece on cruises, “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from it All” (a visit to the Illinois State Fair), and “Consider the Lobster” (half travelogue based on the Maine Lobster Festival and half dissertation on whether a boiling lobster feels pain). All the pieces straddle the low brow and high brow parts of American culture --- you have Wallace approaching the events both with his Midwestern upbringing and his East Coast academic eye. What’s engaging is that tension between the two viewpoints is clearly expressed in Wallace himself; he’s an anthropologist clearly uncomfortable with his studies. There’s a great bit at the State Fair where a female friend is ogled by some ride operators, and Wallace throws himself into despair about his response (or, more accurately, his lack of response). Shouldn’t he be doing something? Is his Midwestern friend aware of the sexual harassment? (Quick answers: no (she can handle herself) and yes (aren’t those guys stupid?).) You mix Wallace’s introspection (and sometimes downright paranoia), his baroque writing style (footnotes have footnotes), and a willingness to find the whole thing tragically funny, and the pieces just shine.
Not everything is such sweet reading, however. Two pieces, “E Unibus Pluram” and “Authority and American Usage” are densely packed pieces of rhetoric that are alternately enlightening and maddening. The latter masquerades as a review of a usage guide, but really explicates Wallace’s take on grammar wars --- it’s worth a read for language fans. The former is an exposition on the impact of television (and the phenemenon of us watching television, knowing we are watching television, and coming to grips with knowing we are watching television) on recent (pre-1990, the time the piece was written) American fiction. I would read pages of this, despairing to get anything out of it, and then hit paragraphs that blew me out of the water. There’s a take on irony as an overly dominant part of our national culture (find page 695 and start reading at the last paragraph). Wallace also has an extremely presicent response to those who believe that new technology will make television viewers less “passive” as he describes what we now think of as Web 2.0. “Make no mistake: we are dependent on image-technology; and the better the tech, the harder we’re hooked.” [page 702]
So, what’s the takeaway? I can see myself trying Wallace’s fiction at some point, although his detailed style is exhausting even in small chunks. Thrashing about on the internet, I see that Wallace is now associated with the “New Sincerity” movement, and I’m intrigued by what types of postmodern literary fiction can move beyond the ironic. And, the Reader is a great exposure to Wallace's philosophy and distinctive style.
August 5, 2020
[N.B.: Goodreads reviews have a word limit. TIL. Read the full review here, or just skip to the bottom for the "Conclusion". Have removed some sections and italicizing for this shorter version of the review. Really short on space here; this thing is like 3,000 words.]
Background
Here you go: Here is Nicole’s first (and perhaps last) bona fide, full-effort Goodreads review.
As just a quick note, I think David Foster Wallace was a talented writer and is an undeniably space-occupying cultural figure. I’m not sure I’d go as far to say I love him or his work, but I do think it is captivating to study and read his nonetheless interesting work in the way one might study, say, Ian Curtis or André Gide. He also has interesting takes on mental illness, which is an area of literature in which—and by which—I am both interested and affected. (Just wanted to clarify this for the people who have seen a torrent of DFW on my feed recently.)
The Method
I’ve listed the parts of the Reader and my brief thoughts on each of them below. For length reasons, I’ve truncated the selections from his novels (Broom, Infinite Jest, and Pale King) and the Teaching Materials” section (I’m sure you don’t care about the difference between his “English 64A First-Day Pop Quiz” vs. his “English 183D, Spring 2008 Syllabus”) into one entry each. I hope this is at least semi-comprehensive, given the whole tome is almost 1,000 pages and comprises over fifty excerpts. Only going to give summaries/premises if the review truly needs it.
If you want a Cliff Notes version, skip below to the “Conclusion”. It’s like a couple sentences.
The Content Itself
Fiction
“The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” (1984):
Wallace’s first short story (ever, if I remember correctly), and never really published till now. Really devastating and gut-wrenching little piece. Very Salingerian (and as Kevin J. H. Dettmar notes in the Afterword, inconsistent) voice-wise, upsetting in the context of Wallace’s life. If nothing else, an important precursor to a lot of the content and themes DFW would explore in his later fiction. “Trillaphon”, though, exhibits Wallace’s great skill: communicating beauty and pathos even in (and through) the most upsetting, mortifying situations: suicide attempts, friends dying, face-mutilation… and more, all lit from within by beautiful explanations of mental illness and the state of in-betweenness. One of the strongest pieces in this book. A really strong start.
Girl with Curious Hair (1989; henceforth GWCH): “Little Expressionless Animals”:
It seems that, at the time of its release, Girl with Curious Hair was largely regarded by critics as sort of a Pynchon/DeLillo ripoff. Which I get, I guess, but what famous writer hasn’t emulated their literary heroes? I do agree with the critics, though, in that this volume is underwhelming in itself (Reader aside). It’s DFW at his most pretentious—and that’s a word I try to employ sparingly. But, truly, most of this book has such a mismatch of content and style it’s almost saddening to read. By that I mean: I don’t personally believe that there is content in this book meaningful or complicated enough to necessitate the neurotic and convoluted narration and voice Wallace employs in almost every story in Girl. (And that’s not to mention his tasteless and often incomprehensible use of dialect; I’m thinking “John Billy” here. None of this, problematicness-wise, augurs particularly well for his future writings.) I think this was the stage in DFW’s life and writing, where he was still stuck in his “self-obsessed MFA grad” persona and not yet at his “snowboarder with a PhD”, as Peter Grier described him in a review of Consider the Lobster.
This story, though: It’s fine. I like it more than the other stories in the collection. It doesn’t try as hard and is honest and sincerely emotional in a similar way to “Good Old Neon” and “Trillaphon.” The frequent perspective-switching, though, is symptomatic of that “trying-too-hard”; I just don’t think the story is complex or dense enough to necessitate that narrative gimmick. But queer themes—so, like, cool. He’s also pretty good at describing clouds.
(GWCH): “My Appearance”:
Much of the same almost-there feeling as “Little Expressionless Animals” above, though this time a different, more yuppie and McInerneyified version of corporate America. Ties in well thematically with “E Unibus Pluram” and is an early (if not the first) full exposition on Wallace’s thoughts on entertainment. Obviously going to become a theme with him. And though I strongly disliked much about GWCH, DFW does really funny and unrealistic portrayals of celebrities in both this story (Letterman) and “Animals” (Alex Trebek, Pat Sajak, and whoever Bert Convy was).
Infinite Jest (1996):
Don’t know what to say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times over. It seems impossible to give any opinion about this book and not come off as cliché. In terms of the selections from the text, I’m glad the eds chose what they did. I’d recommend reading the book first instead of diving into these excerpts—but if you’ve already finished it, these excerpts do serve as nice little thoughtfully curated reminders. Though if you want a good introduction to the book, I’d guess you can read the “If, by the…” excerpt out of context. It runs from pp. 200–211 in IJ and is one of my favorite passages of any book ever. I even have the pages memorized; it’s the reason why I tell people, somewhat facetiously, that “the book really picks up around page 200.” Reminiscent of the best parts of “Trillaphon,” “Good Old Neon,” and “Incarnations of Burned Children,” but there’s truly nothing like it in all of Wallace’s writings. I believe that this is the most crushing section of IJ and also the most unique and moving, perhaps in competition only with some of the sections involving Joelle’s drug history (cf. pp. 234–240, 736–747 in original volume).
(BIWHM): “B.I. #14 & #40”:
I’ve always been very conflicted when thinking about how I feel about these “interviews.” On one hand, they’re lively and animated and lifelike—almost like a real screenplay, I guess. (John Krasinski made it into a movie in 2009 so I guess that makes sense.) On the other hand, much of what DFW says and illustrates here is symptomatic of the exact kind of thing he’s trying to critique in this collection.
(BIWHM): “Forever Overhead”:
D. T. Max had noted that this story “received great praise” when Wallace wrote it in grad school at the University of Arizona; though it was later chosen for Best American Short Stories 1992, but Wallace “dismissed it in his contributor note as ‘straining to make a personal trauma sound way deeper and prettier and Big than anything true could ever really be’” (Love Story, p. 90, 313). I think this conflict is representative. “Forever Overhead” is undoubtedly one of DFW’s more candid pieces, not as shrouded in layers of irony as are Girl with Curious Hair and portions of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Definitely a weirder one, though. Something something Freud.
(BIWHM): “The Depressed Person”:
So I only later learned, after reading Max’s biography, that this story is meant to be satire? It seemed sincere enough to me, and—Every Love Story in mind—parallel enough with Wallace’s life to be autobiographical. I don’t know; I enjoyed it, though it felt like a more diluted, somewhat more self-conscious and cagey version of “Good Old Neon”.
Oblivion (2004): “Good Old Neon”:
D. T. Max was right when he noted that this story “is the most uncomfortable of the stories in an uncomfortable volume” (Love Story, p. 277); it is, and very much so. Usually I’m the first one to lambast DFW’s self-indulgent rambling—but in this story it just works, self-referentially and stylistically. I think it’s one of Wallace’s best pieces, both in terms of personal enjoyment and also in the context of his output. It’s hard-hitting, really funny, cringey, and mind-boggling. Premise: A man writes about taking his own life after he took his own life.
(Oblivion): “The Suffering Channel”:
In much the same way the consistent and polarizing voice worked with “Neon” and “Incarnations”, it pretty much fell flat (for me!) here. I just don’t think Wallace’s “Dickensian scope” (as Max described it; Love Story p. 279) works in these short stories/novellas. Too much to process, too many people to meet, too little space. Same goes for his “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” from Girl with Curious Hair, which suffers the same issue. And the story itself felt thinly veiled, which is something I rarely ever feel with DFW. It felt almost like low-hanging fruit. Which is sad. Not a great choice for the Reader, I don’t think.
Teaching Materials
This was just really fascinating. The whole § contains both a selection of his emails, presumably verbatim, to his mother, Sally Foster Wallace (who also wrote the §’s Introduction) and a listing/transcribing of some of his course syllabi from over the years of his teaching at various colleges. What is, I think, coolest about this is just that it’s a biographical itch that most information with which we try to get a look into DFW’s life (short stories, interviews, biography) can’t scratch. Very interesting to look at what books he’d teach, how he’d teach, what the classroom praxis of his grammar anality looked like. This 36-page stretch of the book is perhaps its best part—both because it’s wholly original material, but also because it’s only interesting to people interested enough in DFW to archive-dig, who are as it happens the only people who’d probably even be interested in buying this huge Reader.
Nonfiction
“Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” (1990):
Not a huge tennis fan, as I’ll get into below in the “Federer” essay review, but this one is, at least for me personally, anodized by the tie-in of math. But even then this feels like the disingenuous aw-shucks persona Wallace was known to put on throughout his life. This essay felt just very cutesy and hyperbolized in a way that I: A.) Just don’t enjoy, personally, and B.) Cannot relate to, having been brought up in the Midwest, OK at math, and semi-OK at tennis, and having never thought about any of this. If there is such a thing as unrealistic Midwest fetishization, I’d gander this is it.
“E Unibus Pluram” (1990):
More the Business District of DFW’s corpus: the body of texts for which he’s most well known. And for this essay, as with Infinite Jest, it’s difficult to come up with anything at all that hasn’t already been said. I mean: What he was is true (or, at least, was true, as David L. Ulin wryly notes in the Afterword). And this piece is definitely where Wallace puts forth his thoughts on entertainment-and-fiction most directly and lucidly (as opposed to his fiction and other, similar, essays, like his 1988 “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young”, part of which I guess is also in this essay?). But I’m no real elegant writer, and I don’t possess some fancy cultural-/media-studies degree, so I won’t pretend to be able to comment on the salience of “E Unibus Pluram”. But it surely was riveting, if only just as a window into the world that birthed Infinite Jest.
“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” (1995):
In the introduction to the mass-market edition of David Foster Wallace’s senior philosophy thesis, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, James Ryerson quotes out of context (of course) a dense line from said thesis, and then quips after doing so: “There are reasons that he’s better known for an essay about a cruise ship” (Fate, p. 2). That, he is: known for that essay, but also known for his relative lucidity within that essay. Though that’s not to say his encyclopedic narrative quality is lost in this piece: Oh it’s there, and with a vengeance. As I noted elsewhere in this review, my lukewarm reaction to a lot of DFW’s nonfiction is just a taste thing. For a lot of people, the human-camera thing is a real kicker. But for me it just works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t. And this is one of those times. Perhaps that’s because I’ve never once in my life wanted to know—nor cared—what cruise ships are like, but also probably because there are other times in Wallace’s writings (I’m thinking “Good Old Neon,” “Trillaphon”) where that voice, that narrative thing he does, works much better. But alas, the essay is a classic, and I do not blame the editors for including the piece.
“Authority and American Usage” (1999):
Mostly apt and comprehensive overview of the ongoing “Usage Wars,” but begins to fall flat, miss the point, and generally guarantee its own eventual irrelevance once it begins to bring race and AAVE-vs.-SWE into the discussion. No fault of the eds here, though; this essay is also fairly well known. But if you want some more good commentary on DFW, grammar, and race/racism, check out Chapter VIII (“Persuasion and Pretension”) of Cecelia Watson’s Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark (citation below; as an aside, that is my all-time favorite book, and I highly recommend it).
In Conclusion (and How the Reader Actually Is)
Though at times flawed and slightly misrepresentative, the Reader more or less hits the DFW nail on the head. The selections were across-the-board and wide-ranging, but I think the incorporation of more secondary sources (e.g. Max’s Love Story and Lipsky’s Although of Course…; or even also Wallace’s philosophy senior thesis, which was despite its abstruseness interesting and philosophically significant) would have been worthwhile.
Perhaps I wasn’t as claim-making or straightforward as I should have been in a review of this size and ambition. That seems to have been inevitable, though. Maybe I’ll expand this more in the future and add some more thoughts to each review as they come to me.
Sources
Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway Books, 2010.
Max, D. T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. New York: Penguin, 2012.
Wallace, David Foster. The David Foster Wallace Reader. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014.
Wallace, David Foster. Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Watson, Cecelia. Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. New York: Ecco, 2019.
Background
Here you go: Here is Nicole’s first (and perhaps last) bona fide, full-effort Goodreads review.
As just a quick note, I think David Foster Wallace was a talented writer and is an undeniably space-occupying cultural figure. I’m not sure I’d go as far to say I love him or his work, but I do think it is captivating to study and read his nonetheless interesting work in the way one might study, say, Ian Curtis or André Gide. He also has interesting takes on mental illness, which is an area of literature in which—and by which—I am both interested and affected. (Just wanted to clarify this for the people who have seen a torrent of DFW on my feed recently.)
The Method
I’ve listed the parts of the Reader and my brief thoughts on each of them below. For length reasons, I’ve truncated the selections from his novels (Broom, Infinite Jest, and Pale King) and the Teaching Materials” section (I’m sure you don’t care about the difference between his “English 64A First-Day Pop Quiz” vs. his “English 183D, Spring 2008 Syllabus”) into one entry each. I hope this is at least semi-comprehensive, given the whole tome is almost 1,000 pages and comprises over fifty excerpts. Only going to give summaries/premises if the review truly needs it.
If you want a Cliff Notes version, skip below to the “Conclusion”. It’s like a couple sentences.
The Content Itself
Fiction
“The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” (1984):
Wallace’s first short story (ever, if I remember correctly), and never really published till now. Really devastating and gut-wrenching little piece. Very Salingerian (and as Kevin J. H. Dettmar notes in the Afterword, inconsistent) voice-wise, upsetting in the context of Wallace’s life. If nothing else, an important precursor to a lot of the content and themes DFW would explore in his later fiction. “Trillaphon”, though, exhibits Wallace’s great skill: communicating beauty and pathos even in (and through) the most upsetting, mortifying situations: suicide attempts, friends dying, face-mutilation… and more, all lit from within by beautiful explanations of mental illness and the state of in-betweenness. One of the strongest pieces in this book. A really strong start.
Girl with Curious Hair (1989; henceforth GWCH): “Little Expressionless Animals”:
It seems that, at the time of its release, Girl with Curious Hair was largely regarded by critics as sort of a Pynchon/DeLillo ripoff. Which I get, I guess, but what famous writer hasn’t emulated their literary heroes? I do agree with the critics, though, in that this volume is underwhelming in itself (Reader aside). It’s DFW at his most pretentious—and that’s a word I try to employ sparingly. But, truly, most of this book has such a mismatch of content and style it’s almost saddening to read. By that I mean: I don’t personally believe that there is content in this book meaningful or complicated enough to necessitate the neurotic and convoluted narration and voice Wallace employs in almost every story in Girl. (And that’s not to mention his tasteless and often incomprehensible use of dialect; I’m thinking “John Billy” here. None of this, problematicness-wise, augurs particularly well for his future writings.) I think this was the stage in DFW’s life and writing, where he was still stuck in his “self-obsessed MFA grad” persona and not yet at his “snowboarder with a PhD”, as Peter Grier described him in a review of Consider the Lobster.
This story, though: It’s fine. I like it more than the other stories in the collection. It doesn’t try as hard and is honest and sincerely emotional in a similar way to “Good Old Neon” and “Trillaphon.” The frequent perspective-switching, though, is symptomatic of that “trying-too-hard”; I just don’t think the story is complex or dense enough to necessitate that narrative gimmick. But queer themes—so, like, cool. He’s also pretty good at describing clouds.
(GWCH): “My Appearance”:
Much of the same almost-there feeling as “Little Expressionless Animals” above, though this time a different, more yuppie and McInerneyified version of corporate America. Ties in well thematically with “E Unibus Pluram” and is an early (if not the first) full exposition on Wallace’s thoughts on entertainment. Obviously going to become a theme with him. And though I strongly disliked much about GWCH, DFW does really funny and unrealistic portrayals of celebrities in both this story (Letterman) and “Animals” (Alex Trebek, Pat Sajak, and whoever Bert Convy was).
Infinite Jest (1996):
Don’t know what to say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times over. It seems impossible to give any opinion about this book and not come off as cliché. In terms of the selections from the text, I’m glad the eds chose what they did. I’d recommend reading the book first instead of diving into these excerpts—but if you’ve already finished it, these excerpts do serve as nice little thoughtfully curated reminders. Though if you want a good introduction to the book, I’d guess you can read the “If, by the…” excerpt out of context. It runs from pp. 200–211 in IJ and is one of my favorite passages of any book ever. I even have the pages memorized; it’s the reason why I tell people, somewhat facetiously, that “the book really picks up around page 200.” Reminiscent of the best parts of “Trillaphon,” “Good Old Neon,” and “Incarnations of Burned Children,” but there’s truly nothing like it in all of Wallace’s writings. I believe that this is the most crushing section of IJ and also the most unique and moving, perhaps in competition only with some of the sections involving Joelle’s drug history (cf. pp. 234–240, 736–747 in original volume).
(BIWHM): “B.I. #14 & #40”:
I’ve always been very conflicted when thinking about how I feel about these “interviews.” On one hand, they’re lively and animated and lifelike—almost like a real screenplay, I guess. (John Krasinski made it into a movie in 2009 so I guess that makes sense.) On the other hand, much of what DFW says and illustrates here is symptomatic of the exact kind of thing he’s trying to critique in this collection.
(BIWHM): “Forever Overhead”:
D. T. Max had noted that this story “received great praise” when Wallace wrote it in grad school at the University of Arizona; though it was later chosen for Best American Short Stories 1992, but Wallace “dismissed it in his contributor note as ‘straining to make a personal trauma sound way deeper and prettier and Big than anything true could ever really be’” (Love Story, p. 90, 313). I think this conflict is representative. “Forever Overhead” is undoubtedly one of DFW’s more candid pieces, not as shrouded in layers of irony as are Girl with Curious Hair and portions of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Definitely a weirder one, though. Something something Freud.
(BIWHM): “The Depressed Person”:
So I only later learned, after reading Max’s biography, that this story is meant to be satire? It seemed sincere enough to me, and—Every Love Story in mind—parallel enough with Wallace’s life to be autobiographical. I don’t know; I enjoyed it, though it felt like a more diluted, somewhat more self-conscious and cagey version of “Good Old Neon”.
Oblivion (2004): “Good Old Neon”:
D. T. Max was right when he noted that this story “is the most uncomfortable of the stories in an uncomfortable volume” (Love Story, p. 277); it is, and very much so. Usually I’m the first one to lambast DFW’s self-indulgent rambling—but in this story it just works, self-referentially and stylistically. I think it’s one of Wallace’s best pieces, both in terms of personal enjoyment and also in the context of his output. It’s hard-hitting, really funny, cringey, and mind-boggling. Premise: A man writes about taking his own life after he took his own life.
(Oblivion): “The Suffering Channel”:
In much the same way the consistent and polarizing voice worked with “Neon” and “Incarnations”, it pretty much fell flat (for me!) here. I just don’t think Wallace’s “Dickensian scope” (as Max described it; Love Story p. 279) works in these short stories/novellas. Too much to process, too many people to meet, too little space. Same goes for his “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” from Girl with Curious Hair, which suffers the same issue. And the story itself felt thinly veiled, which is something I rarely ever feel with DFW. It felt almost like low-hanging fruit. Which is sad. Not a great choice for the Reader, I don’t think.
Teaching Materials
This was just really fascinating. The whole § contains both a selection of his emails, presumably verbatim, to his mother, Sally Foster Wallace (who also wrote the §’s Introduction) and a listing/transcribing of some of his course syllabi from over the years of his teaching at various colleges. What is, I think, coolest about this is just that it’s a biographical itch that most information with which we try to get a look into DFW’s life (short stories, interviews, biography) can’t scratch. Very interesting to look at what books he’d teach, how he’d teach, what the classroom praxis of his grammar anality looked like. This 36-page stretch of the book is perhaps its best part—both because it’s wholly original material, but also because it’s only interesting to people interested enough in DFW to archive-dig, who are as it happens the only people who’d probably even be interested in buying this huge Reader.
Nonfiction
“Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” (1990):
Not a huge tennis fan, as I’ll get into below in the “Federer” essay review, but this one is, at least for me personally, anodized by the tie-in of math. But even then this feels like the disingenuous aw-shucks persona Wallace was known to put on throughout his life. This essay felt just very cutesy and hyperbolized in a way that I: A.) Just don’t enjoy, personally, and B.) Cannot relate to, having been brought up in the Midwest, OK at math, and semi-OK at tennis, and having never thought about any of this. If there is such a thing as unrealistic Midwest fetishization, I’d gander this is it.
“E Unibus Pluram” (1990):
More the Business District of DFW’s corpus: the body of texts for which he’s most well known. And for this essay, as with Infinite Jest, it’s difficult to come up with anything at all that hasn’t already been said. I mean: What he was is true (or, at least, was true, as David L. Ulin wryly notes in the Afterword). And this piece is definitely where Wallace puts forth his thoughts on entertainment-and-fiction most directly and lucidly (as opposed to his fiction and other, similar, essays, like his 1988 “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young”, part of which I guess is also in this essay?). But I’m no real elegant writer, and I don’t possess some fancy cultural-/media-studies degree, so I won’t pretend to be able to comment on the salience of “E Unibus Pluram”. But it surely was riveting, if only just as a window into the world that birthed Infinite Jest.
“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” (1995):
In the introduction to the mass-market edition of David Foster Wallace’s senior philosophy thesis, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, James Ryerson quotes out of context (of course) a dense line from said thesis, and then quips after doing so: “There are reasons that he’s better known for an essay about a cruise ship” (Fate, p. 2). That, he is: known for that essay, but also known for his relative lucidity within that essay. Though that’s not to say his encyclopedic narrative quality is lost in this piece: Oh it’s there, and with a vengeance. As I noted elsewhere in this review, my lukewarm reaction to a lot of DFW’s nonfiction is just a taste thing. For a lot of people, the human-camera thing is a real kicker. But for me it just works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t. And this is one of those times. Perhaps that’s because I’ve never once in my life wanted to know—nor cared—what cruise ships are like, but also probably because there are other times in Wallace’s writings (I’m thinking “Good Old Neon,” “Trillaphon”) where that voice, that narrative thing he does, works much better. But alas, the essay is a classic, and I do not blame the editors for including the piece.
“Authority and American Usage” (1999):
Mostly apt and comprehensive overview of the ongoing “Usage Wars,” but begins to fall flat, miss the point, and generally guarantee its own eventual irrelevance once it begins to bring race and AAVE-vs.-SWE into the discussion. No fault of the eds here, though; this essay is also fairly well known. But if you want some more good commentary on DFW, grammar, and race/racism, check out Chapter VIII (“Persuasion and Pretension”) of Cecelia Watson’s Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark (citation below; as an aside, that is my all-time favorite book, and I highly recommend it).
In Conclusion (and How the Reader Actually Is)
Though at times flawed and slightly misrepresentative, the Reader more or less hits the DFW nail on the head. The selections were across-the-board and wide-ranging, but I think the incorporation of more secondary sources (e.g. Max’s Love Story and Lipsky’s Although of Course…; or even also Wallace’s philosophy senior thesis, which was despite its abstruseness interesting and philosophically significant) would have been worthwhile.
Perhaps I wasn’t as claim-making or straightforward as I should have been in a review of this size and ambition. That seems to have been inevitable, though. Maybe I’ll expand this more in the future and add some more thoughts to each review as they come to me.
Sources
Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway Books, 2010.
Max, D. T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. New York: Penguin, 2012.
Wallace, David Foster. The David Foster Wallace Reader. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014.
Wallace, David Foster. Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Watson, Cecelia. Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. New York: Ecco, 2019.
November 21, 2018
Está aquí mi libro favorito de todo 2018. En sus casi 800 páginas hay algunas de las líneas más brillantes, desesperadas y acrobáticas que haya visto la literatura norteamericana en décadas. "Es irrepetible, es un puto genio y no conozco a nadie que logre hacer esto", es la sensación constante que te da mientras lo lees.
Ya sea un cuento, un ensayo o hasta su puta correspondencia. Foster Wallace tenía una forma brutal, extraordinaria y única de ver el mundo. De procesar todo, entre el vómito, la belleza y la agonía. De pintar un paisaje aparente donde debajo late algo más primitivo y peligroso. Con pulsiones de muerte. Logrando siempre textos tan kilométricos como imbatibles.
Es un genio, y resulta muy pero muy triste que no haya seguido adelante. Pero este libro en especial, junto a toda su demás obra, queda como testimonio de su verdadera genialidad.
Ya sea un cuento, un ensayo o hasta su puta correspondencia. Foster Wallace tenía una forma brutal, extraordinaria y única de ver el mundo. De procesar todo, entre el vómito, la belleza y la agonía. De pintar un paisaje aparente donde debajo late algo más primitivo y peligroso. Con pulsiones de muerte. Logrando siempre textos tan kilométricos como imbatibles.
Es un genio, y resulta muy pero muy triste que no haya seguido adelante. Pero este libro en especial, junto a toda su demás obra, queda como testimonio de su verdadera genialidad.
September 11, 2024
This is a really excellent collection. I think every DFW fan should own a copy. I especially appreciate the collection of nonfiction essay that are included late in the collection. Before reading through this reader, I had not read DFW's essays on language (Authority and American Usage) and irony/television (E Unibus Pluram).
This collection could have been made even better through additional commentary and annotation of the selections. I would love to find writing like that collected somewhere. Additionally, I increasingly see discussion of DFW's writing dealing with DFW himself as the meme. It is all very meta and there is often only superficial engagement with the actual writing. Some of the better commentary I've stumbled across came from a podcast called "Very Bad Wizards." They do several shows on different DFW pieces, which are all excellent.
This collection could have been made even better through additional commentary and annotation of the selections. I would love to find writing like that collected somewhere. Additionally, I increasingly see discussion of DFW's writing dealing with DFW himself as the meme. It is all very meta and there is often only superficial engagement with the actual writing. Some of the better commentary I've stumbled across came from a podcast called "Very Bad Wizards." They do several shows on different DFW pieces, which are all excellent.
November 25, 2025
According to the publisher and contributors, the purpose of this collection is to “delight readers” and provide teachers “an ideal introduction for students.” The criteria for selections were most celebrated, most enjoyable, funniest, and most remarkable. The only new selections I hadn’t read prior were “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” (1984), Teaching Materials (with a beautiful introduction by David’s mother, Sally), as well as selected Afterwards coinciding with the selections.
Gerald Howard, the editor of THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM was 36 at the time.
“So I left the brainy big-picture stuff to David’s big brain and concentrated on the intense local pleasures to be experiences in his virtuoso deployment of linguistic facility and narrative velocity, of which this tree toad episode is such an outstanding example.” (63)
“David once told me that one of his favorite movies was the 1989 cult film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, starring Richard Grant as an advertising copywriter blocked on an ad for pimple cream.” (63-64)
Selections from INFINITE JEST are: 3-17, 17-27, 38-39, 49-54, 55-60, 63-65, 157-169, 172-176, 176-181, 200-211, 234-240, 299-306, 343-367, 491-503, 538-547, 601-619, 692-698, 736-747, 755-774, and 809-827. The corresponding Notes and Errata span pages 362-380.
According to Nam Le, Mario is “searching for the real” (339) and “Mario exists without irony or self-consciousness; his notion of realness reflects this.” (340)
Nick Maniatis’ favorite Wallace story is the short, “Incarnations of Burned Children.” In reference to THE PALE KING, Maniatis writes, “I’ll leave it to you to figure out which character this burned child may have grown up to be…)” (455)
THE PALE KING samples sections 1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 33, and 36.
Without a doubt, the most interesting and unique section of this whole book is the TEACHING MATERIALS. According to his mother, “David seldom met a word he didn’t enjoy playing with, making it jump through flaming hoops and perform feats of derring-do. (Or, as he might have said, daring-don’t).” (601) She also describes her son as an “engaging, appreciative, bandanna-wearing magpie.” (601)
SFW’s mantra is: “CLARITY, COURTESY, CONSCIOUSNESS.”
“David adopted this practice and read each student three times, too, but he made marginal comments each time through, using different colored pens to differentiate.” (601)
“His syllabi and teaching materials offer insight into a thoughtful, caring, funny, generous teacher who probably felt a bit guilty about doing something he so enjoyed.” (602)
In a letter to his mother, Wallace writes: “On the East Coast, stilted, and phonily formal prose is more a problem than aint’s and where-at’s, it seems, so I am adopting the personal of the minimalist, which is a hoot.” (602)
David starts an e-mail to his mother with “Yo.” And calls her “Queen of R”, signing off with /dw/.
She responds with “However, your question triggered these synapses” and sends her love as the “Scullery Maid of R”
Wallace’s mother took yoga classes in 2007 (perhaps a true key to maintaining?).
David uses fun phrases such as “LYL, Ma” (love you lots) and “har d har” (604).
Sally maintains in e-mail, “Italics don’t often make it through cyberspace successfully, so I’ve capitalized instead.” (605)
As Professor DW, his e-mail address was: ocapmycap@ca.rr.com (622), a definite nod to Whitman.
“Schedules and energies vary: please drop this course if you anticipate having difficulty keeping up when things get heavy.” (610)
“This class operates on the belief that you’ll improve as a writer not just by writing a lot and receiving detailed criticism but also by becoming a more sophisticated and articulate critic of other writer’s work.” (624)
Wallace’s specs and guides (“YOUR LIBERAL-ARTS $ AT WORK”) are now a valued resource.
The NONFICTION section offers valuable responses. David L. Ulin on “E Unibus Pluram,” “Make no mistake, indeed, for we now live the world that Wallace, and not Gilder, envisioned, in which ‘image technology,’ better and more ubiquitous screens, has transformed how we interact. It has become our water (to borrow a metaphor from Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address), interchangeably medium and message. Even our language is degraded: What do friend and like mean anymore?” (708)
David was kind with his time and generous with his words. Anne Fadiman, a Writer-In-Residence at Yale establishes that “Creative nonfiction has no one-size-fits-all template.” (759) “You can imagine what it was like for a nineteen-year-old DFW fan to get a response- and not just a line or two but a 645-word mini-essay that opened with ‘Dear Mr. Fromson et al.’ and close with ‘Tally Ho, David Wallace.’” (761)
On the subject of criticism, Wallace writes, “Still, I must also admit that I got some pissed-off letters indeed from Midwesterners, along with some aggrieved press mentions in the Midwest-” (761) while also establishing the concept of “The Asshole Problem,” a now common term in Fadiman’s classes.
“The Asshole Problem! What a magnificent concept! If you make fun of other people, you’ll sound like an asshole unless you also make fun of yourself.” (761) “They use self-deprecation to avoid the Asshole Problem- a term they employ so frequently one might assume it was a staple of literary criticism.” (762)
“The View From Mrs. Thompson’s,” Wallace nonfiction account of 9/11 (“the Horror”) begins on page 910. I wonder if this was a coincidence or intentional. The fact that David had to display a homemade flag of the United States because he couldn’t find one to buy is humbling. He was also listening to Sports Radio in Chicago regarding the Bear’s football team while he was in the shower the morning of the tragedy.
“Most of the people I know well enough to ask if I can come over and watch their TV are members of my church. It’s not one of those churches where people throw Jesus’ name around a lot or talk about the End Times, but it’s fairly serious, and people in the congregation get to know each other well and to be pretty tight.” (915)
“Something called SLIPNOT” (918) is a band with members that wear masks on stage.
Wallace was certainly proud to be American. Americana echoes throughout his writing as he exercised his First Amendment rights to the fullest. “I’m trying, rather, to explain how some part of the horror of the Horror was knowing, deep in my heart, that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America, and F—‘s and poor loathsome Duane’s, than it was these ladies.” (919)
I still can’t help but notice some sort of synaptic connection between Wallace’s Broom novel, his college philosophy thesis, this account, and the day he finally decided to take his own life. I wish D.T. Max had delved further into this in his biography on Wallace, EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY.
“The Planet Trillaphon,” may be at the beginning of this collection, but it was a fitting way to end my reading and bring everything full circle, I suppose. Wallace truly was gifted at a young age and this story demonstrates his deep interest in the human condition.
“This noise was sort of a high, glittery, metallic, spangly hum that really for some reason scared the living daylights out of me and just about drove me crazy when I heard it, the way a mosquito in your ear in bed at night in summer will just about drive you crazy when you hear it.” (8) sounds like something that could have been in THE PALE KING.
“A really lovely poet named Sylvia Plath, who unfortunately isn’t living anymore, said that it’s like having a jar covering you and having all the air pumped out of the jar, so you can’t breathe any good air (and imagine the moment when your movement is invisibly stopped by the glass and you realize you’re under the glass…).” (10) could possibly have germinated into the image of Orin and the roaches in INFINITE JEST.
“Now imagine that every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick like that, sick, intolerably sick…” (11)
“I’ve called it ‘Trillaphon’ instead of ‘Toffanil’ because “Trillaphon’ is more trilly and electrical, and it just sounds more like what it’s like to be there. But the electricalness of the planet Trillaphon is not just a noise. I guess if I were all glib like May is I’d say that ‘the planet Trillaphon is simply characterized by a more electrical way of life.’” (18)
“It is very hard to read on the planet Trillaphon, but that is not too inconvenient, because I hardly ever read anymore, except for ‘Newsweek’ magazine, a subscription which I got for my birthday.” (18)
The radio waves of “the brain” at MIT is a powerful metaphor in INFINITE JEST, but this collection doesn't reproduce the CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS’ REVENUE ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED TIME™, BY YEAR.
Could Wallace perhaps communicate electronically beyond the grave? Would he choose to be a wraith or a ghost?
THE DAVID FOSTER WALLACE READER is the type of book that collects dust on wooden shelves made of rich mahogany, just to give the allusion of intelligence. Crack open one of his books and don’t be afraid to play!
The pen is mightier than the-
Gerald Howard, the editor of THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM was 36 at the time.
“So I left the brainy big-picture stuff to David’s big brain and concentrated on the intense local pleasures to be experiences in his virtuoso deployment of linguistic facility and narrative velocity, of which this tree toad episode is such an outstanding example.” (63)
“David once told me that one of his favorite movies was the 1989 cult film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, starring Richard Grant as an advertising copywriter blocked on an ad for pimple cream.” (63-64)
Selections from INFINITE JEST are: 3-17, 17-27, 38-39, 49-54, 55-60, 63-65, 157-169, 172-176, 176-181, 200-211, 234-240, 299-306, 343-367, 491-503, 538-547, 601-619, 692-698, 736-747, 755-774, and 809-827. The corresponding Notes and Errata span pages 362-380.
According to Nam Le, Mario is “searching for the real” (339) and “Mario exists without irony or self-consciousness; his notion of realness reflects this.” (340)
Nick Maniatis’ favorite Wallace story is the short, “Incarnations of Burned Children.” In reference to THE PALE KING, Maniatis writes, “I’ll leave it to you to figure out which character this burned child may have grown up to be…)” (455)
THE PALE KING samples sections 1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 33, and 36.
Without a doubt, the most interesting and unique section of this whole book is the TEACHING MATERIALS. According to his mother, “David seldom met a word he didn’t enjoy playing with, making it jump through flaming hoops and perform feats of derring-do. (Or, as he might have said, daring-don’t).” (601) She also describes her son as an “engaging, appreciative, bandanna-wearing magpie.” (601)
SFW’s mantra is: “CLARITY, COURTESY, CONSCIOUSNESS.”
“David adopted this practice and read each student three times, too, but he made marginal comments each time through, using different colored pens to differentiate.” (601)
“His syllabi and teaching materials offer insight into a thoughtful, caring, funny, generous teacher who probably felt a bit guilty about doing something he so enjoyed.” (602)
In a letter to his mother, Wallace writes: “On the East Coast, stilted, and phonily formal prose is more a problem than aint’s and where-at’s, it seems, so I am adopting the personal of the minimalist, which is a hoot.” (602)
David starts an e-mail to his mother with “Yo.” And calls her “Queen of R”, signing off with /dw/.
She responds with “However, your question triggered these synapses” and sends her love as the “Scullery Maid of R”
Wallace’s mother took yoga classes in 2007 (perhaps a true key to maintaining?).
David uses fun phrases such as “LYL, Ma” (love you lots) and “har d har” (604).
Sally maintains in e-mail, “Italics don’t often make it through cyberspace successfully, so I’ve capitalized instead.” (605)
As Professor DW, his e-mail address was: ocapmycap@ca.rr.com (622), a definite nod to Whitman.
“Schedules and energies vary: please drop this course if you anticipate having difficulty keeping up when things get heavy.” (610)
“This class operates on the belief that you’ll improve as a writer not just by writing a lot and receiving detailed criticism but also by becoming a more sophisticated and articulate critic of other writer’s work.” (624)
Wallace’s specs and guides (“YOUR LIBERAL-ARTS $ AT WORK”) are now a valued resource.
The NONFICTION section offers valuable responses. David L. Ulin on “E Unibus Pluram,” “Make no mistake, indeed, for we now live the world that Wallace, and not Gilder, envisioned, in which ‘image technology,’ better and more ubiquitous screens, has transformed how we interact. It has become our water (to borrow a metaphor from Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address), interchangeably medium and message. Even our language is degraded: What do friend and like mean anymore?” (708)
David was kind with his time and generous with his words. Anne Fadiman, a Writer-In-Residence at Yale establishes that “Creative nonfiction has no one-size-fits-all template.” (759) “You can imagine what it was like for a nineteen-year-old DFW fan to get a response- and not just a line or two but a 645-word mini-essay that opened with ‘Dear Mr. Fromson et al.’ and close with ‘Tally Ho, David Wallace.’” (761)
On the subject of criticism, Wallace writes, “Still, I must also admit that I got some pissed-off letters indeed from Midwesterners, along with some aggrieved press mentions in the Midwest-” (761) while also establishing the concept of “The Asshole Problem,” a now common term in Fadiman’s classes.
“The Asshole Problem! What a magnificent concept! If you make fun of other people, you’ll sound like an asshole unless you also make fun of yourself.” (761) “They use self-deprecation to avoid the Asshole Problem- a term they employ so frequently one might assume it was a staple of literary criticism.” (762)
“The View From Mrs. Thompson’s,” Wallace nonfiction account of 9/11 (“the Horror”) begins on page 910. I wonder if this was a coincidence or intentional. The fact that David had to display a homemade flag of the United States because he couldn’t find one to buy is humbling. He was also listening to Sports Radio in Chicago regarding the Bear’s football team while he was in the shower the morning of the tragedy.
“Most of the people I know well enough to ask if I can come over and watch their TV are members of my church. It’s not one of those churches where people throw Jesus’ name around a lot or talk about the End Times, but it’s fairly serious, and people in the congregation get to know each other well and to be pretty tight.” (915)
“Something called SLIPNOT” (918) is a band with members that wear masks on stage.
Wallace was certainly proud to be American. Americana echoes throughout his writing as he exercised his First Amendment rights to the fullest. “I’m trying, rather, to explain how some part of the horror of the Horror was knowing, deep in my heart, that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America, and F—‘s and poor loathsome Duane’s, than it was these ladies.” (919)
I still can’t help but notice some sort of synaptic connection between Wallace’s Broom novel, his college philosophy thesis, this account, and the day he finally decided to take his own life. I wish D.T. Max had delved further into this in his biography on Wallace, EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY.
“The Planet Trillaphon,” may be at the beginning of this collection, but it was a fitting way to end my reading and bring everything full circle, I suppose. Wallace truly was gifted at a young age and this story demonstrates his deep interest in the human condition.
“This noise was sort of a high, glittery, metallic, spangly hum that really for some reason scared the living daylights out of me and just about drove me crazy when I heard it, the way a mosquito in your ear in bed at night in summer will just about drive you crazy when you hear it.” (8) sounds like something that could have been in THE PALE KING.
“A really lovely poet named Sylvia Plath, who unfortunately isn’t living anymore, said that it’s like having a jar covering you and having all the air pumped out of the jar, so you can’t breathe any good air (and imagine the moment when your movement is invisibly stopped by the glass and you realize you’re under the glass…).” (10) could possibly have germinated into the image of Orin and the roaches in INFINITE JEST.
“Now imagine that every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick like that, sick, intolerably sick…” (11)
“I’ve called it ‘Trillaphon’ instead of ‘Toffanil’ because “Trillaphon’ is more trilly and electrical, and it just sounds more like what it’s like to be there. But the electricalness of the planet Trillaphon is not just a noise. I guess if I were all glib like May is I’d say that ‘the planet Trillaphon is simply characterized by a more electrical way of life.’” (18)
“It is very hard to read on the planet Trillaphon, but that is not too inconvenient, because I hardly ever read anymore, except for ‘Newsweek’ magazine, a subscription which I got for my birthday.” (18)
The radio waves of “the brain” at MIT is a powerful metaphor in INFINITE JEST, but this collection doesn't reproduce the CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS’ REVENUE ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED TIME™, BY YEAR.
Could Wallace perhaps communicate electronically beyond the grave? Would he choose to be a wraith or a ghost?
THE DAVID FOSTER WALLACE READER is the type of book that collects dust on wooden shelves made of rich mahogany, just to give the allusion of intelligence. Crack open one of his books and don’t be afraid to play!
The pen is mightier than the-
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 3, 2018
I generally only read fiction that is at least 100+ years old (history is a filter for great literature). Wallace is an exception. His writing is philosophical and ridiculous. This is a long book but an incredible curated collection of his writings. And his work is so engaging that you don’t really notice it’s length. Wallace provides insight into depression, disconnection and connection, human behavior, meaning, the desire to understand and be understood, and much more. A pleasant surprise is his non-fiction. I need to read his insights again.
March 23, 2016
The David Foster Wallace Reader is a distillation of the author's best fiction and nonfiction. It is,simply, the finest writing I have ever encountered in a lifetime of reading. I have included a few of my favourite excerpts here. (These are a small sample.of his brilliance). Incarnations of a Burned Child is not included but is you are interested, look it up. It is a masterpiece. I have included 2 examples from his fiction.The first from his piece, The Suffering Channel where journalist Skip Atwater from Style Magazine interviews Amber Moltke …
Mrs. Amber Moltke, the artist’s young spouse, wore a billowing pastel housedress and was, for better or worse, the sexiest morbidly obese woman Atwater had ever seen. Eastern Indiana was not short on big pretty girls, but this was less a person than a vista, a quarter ton of sheer Midwest pulchritude, and Atwater had already filled several narrow pages of his notebook with descriptions and analogies and abstract encomia to Mrs. Moltke, none of which could be used in the compressed piece he was even then conceiving how to pitch and submit. Some of it was atavistic, he acknowledged. Some was simply contrast, a relief from the sucking cheeks and starved eyes of Manhattan’s women. He had personally seen Style interns weighing their food on small pharmaceutical scales before they consumed it. In one of the more abstract notebook entries, Atwater had theorized that Mrs. Moltke’s was perhaps a sort of negative beauty that consisted mainly in her failure to be repellant. In another, he had compared her face and throat to whatever canids see in the full moon that makes them howl.
The next piece is from Good Old Neon ...
My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people….
In the dream, I was in the town commons in Aurora, over by the Pershing tank memorial by the clock tower, and what I’m doing in the dream is sculpting an enormous marble or granite statue of myself, using a huge iron chisel and a hammer the size of those ones they give you to try to hit the bell at the top of the big thermometer-like thing at carnivals, and when the statue’s finally done I put it up on a big bandstand or platform and spend all my time polishing it and keeping birds from sitting on it or doing their business on it, and cleaning up litter and keeping the grass neat all around the bandstand. And in the dream my whole life flashes by like that, the sun and moon go back and forth across the sky like windshield wipers over and over, and I never seem to sleep or eat or take a shower, meaning I’m condemned to a whole life of being nothing but a sort of custodian to the statue.
The non- fiction work is of equal calibre to DFW's fiction. Here is a selection from his article for Harpers Magazine on the Illinois State Fair.
The horses are in their own individual stalls, with half half-height doors and owners and grooms on stools by the doors, a lot of them dozing. The horses stand in hay. Billy Ray Cyrus plays loudly on some stable boy’s boom box. The horses have tight hides and apple size eyes that are set on the sides of their heads, like fish. I’ve rarely been this close to fine livestock. The horse’s faces are long and somehow suggestive of coffins. The racers are lanky, velvet over bone. The draft and show horses are mammoth and spotlessly groomed and more or less odorless- the acrid smell in here is just the horse’s pee. All their muscles are beautiful the hides enhance them. Their tails whip around in sophisticated double- jointed ways, keeping the flies from mounting any kind of co- ordinated attack. The horses all make farty noises when they sigh, heads hanging over the short doors. They’re not for petting, though. When you come close they flatten their ears and show big teeth. The grooms laugh to themselves as we jump back. These are special competitive horses, intricately bred, w/high-strung, artistic temperaments. I wish I’d brought carrots: animals can be bought, emotionally. Stall after stall of horses. Standard horse- type colors. They eat the same hay they stand in. Occasional feedbags look like gas masks. A sudden clattering spray-sound like somebody hosing down siding turns out to be a glossy chocolate stallion, peeing. He’s at the back of his stall getting combed, and the door’s wide open, and we watch him pee. The steam’s an inch in diameter and throws up dust and hay and little chips of wood from the floor. We hunker down and have a look upward, and I suddenly for the first time understand a certain expression describing certain human males, an expression I’d heard but never truly understood till just now, prone and gazing upward in some blend of horror and awe.
Thank you, David Foster Wallace.
Mrs. Amber Moltke, the artist’s young spouse, wore a billowing pastel housedress and was, for better or worse, the sexiest morbidly obese woman Atwater had ever seen. Eastern Indiana was not short on big pretty girls, but this was less a person than a vista, a quarter ton of sheer Midwest pulchritude, and Atwater had already filled several narrow pages of his notebook with descriptions and analogies and abstract encomia to Mrs. Moltke, none of which could be used in the compressed piece he was even then conceiving how to pitch and submit. Some of it was atavistic, he acknowledged. Some was simply contrast, a relief from the sucking cheeks and starved eyes of Manhattan’s women. He had personally seen Style interns weighing their food on small pharmaceutical scales before they consumed it. In one of the more abstract notebook entries, Atwater had theorized that Mrs. Moltke’s was perhaps a sort of negative beauty that consisted mainly in her failure to be repellant. In another, he had compared her face and throat to whatever canids see in the full moon that makes them howl.
The next piece is from Good Old Neon ...
My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people….
In the dream, I was in the town commons in Aurora, over by the Pershing tank memorial by the clock tower, and what I’m doing in the dream is sculpting an enormous marble or granite statue of myself, using a huge iron chisel and a hammer the size of those ones they give you to try to hit the bell at the top of the big thermometer-like thing at carnivals, and when the statue’s finally done I put it up on a big bandstand or platform and spend all my time polishing it and keeping birds from sitting on it or doing their business on it, and cleaning up litter and keeping the grass neat all around the bandstand. And in the dream my whole life flashes by like that, the sun and moon go back and forth across the sky like windshield wipers over and over, and I never seem to sleep or eat or take a shower, meaning I’m condemned to a whole life of being nothing but a sort of custodian to the statue.
The non- fiction work is of equal calibre to DFW's fiction. Here is a selection from his article for Harpers Magazine on the Illinois State Fair.
The horses are in their own individual stalls, with half half-height doors and owners and grooms on stools by the doors, a lot of them dozing. The horses stand in hay. Billy Ray Cyrus plays loudly on some stable boy’s boom box. The horses have tight hides and apple size eyes that are set on the sides of their heads, like fish. I’ve rarely been this close to fine livestock. The horse’s faces are long and somehow suggestive of coffins. The racers are lanky, velvet over bone. The draft and show horses are mammoth and spotlessly groomed and more or less odorless- the acrid smell in here is just the horse’s pee. All their muscles are beautiful the hides enhance them. Their tails whip around in sophisticated double- jointed ways, keeping the flies from mounting any kind of co- ordinated attack. The horses all make farty noises when they sigh, heads hanging over the short doors. They’re not for petting, though. When you come close they flatten their ears and show big teeth. The grooms laugh to themselves as we jump back. These are special competitive horses, intricately bred, w/high-strung, artistic temperaments. I wish I’d brought carrots: animals can be bought, emotionally. Stall after stall of horses. Standard horse- type colors. They eat the same hay they stand in. Occasional feedbags look like gas masks. A sudden clattering spray-sound like somebody hosing down siding turns out to be a glossy chocolate stallion, peeing. He’s at the back of his stall getting combed, and the door’s wide open, and we watch him pee. The steam’s an inch in diameter and throws up dust and hay and little chips of wood from the floor. We hunker down and have a look upward, and I suddenly for the first time understand a certain expression describing certain human males, an expression I’d heard but never truly understood till just now, prone and gazing upward in some blend of horror and awe.
Thank you, David Foster Wallace.
January 7, 2015
Re-reading these shorts stories and excepts from DFW's books reminds me of what a unique voice he had and how much I enjoyed reading his work. Of course it also makes me sad that he is dead. The notes from his teaching days were incredibly interesting and showed how strict he was as a professor.
November 13, 2022
I see from the electronic book that the print book was 1000 pages. The audible book is 49 hours. Substantial to say the least. This book is selections from many if not most of the authors lifetime works apparently assembled by a informed group of experts, evidently.
Whether the book is covering the many picayune points of standard English, or a trip to an Illinois state fair or a Roger Federer tennis match, the author is multi talented and shows the flair and skill of a wordsmith. He can be way over your head, or I should say more humbly way over my head. Or he can be down in whatever covers the floor of the Hog pen at the state fair.
When I imagine Wallace writing, I do not imagine him, sitting calmly spinning out the words. I imagine him fighting with the words and struggling both to separate them, and to tie them together in the most artistic way possible. He was also a teacher at the college level , and it must’ve been an honor and a challenge to be a part of one of his classes where he would be more willing to challenge you than to complement you. He writes of those moments as a teacher as well.
I was surprised to find the audible book ending when the indicator at the bottom of the page is still read 92%. This was because the last nearly 10% of the book was the footnotes that had already been read during the reading of the full text. Wallace includes very significant material in his footnotes, and they are effectively read right along with the rest of the essays and stories.
Whether the book is covering the many picayune points of standard English, or a trip to an Illinois state fair or a Roger Federer tennis match, the author is multi talented and shows the flair and skill of a wordsmith. He can be way over your head, or I should say more humbly way over my head. Or he can be down in whatever covers the floor of the Hog pen at the state fair.
When I imagine Wallace writing, I do not imagine him, sitting calmly spinning out the words. I imagine him fighting with the words and struggling both to separate them, and to tie them together in the most artistic way possible. He was also a teacher at the college level , and it must’ve been an honor and a challenge to be a part of one of his classes where he would be more willing to challenge you than to complement you. He writes of those moments as a teacher as well.
I was surprised to find the audible book ending when the indicator at the bottom of the page is still read 92%. This was because the last nearly 10% of the book was the footnotes that had already been read during the reading of the full text. Wallace includes very significant material in his footnotes, and they are effectively read right along with the rest of the essays and stories.
Read
January 18, 2022Wow. I'm definitely not smart enough to write an eloquent review of this, so I'll just keep it really simple and mention my "favourite" pieces from this long, long collection. This was really, really good. I liked the non-fiction section the best, but it feels strange to be reading all this stuff that was so cutting edge, and now isn't. My favourite fiction piece was The Suffering Channel, but I know there are many pieces from here that I'll come back to. This was a challenging read. But I now understand just why DFW is considered such a master. Wow.
February 16, 2016
Here's a conversation I had with my good book buddy, RAC:
RAC: "I'm not saying Harold is gospel.... He detests one of my favorite writers, but his is an interesting opinion on DFW, worth something or nothing: http://wwd.com/eye/people/the-full-bl..." ... so I go and read that, and excerpt some of it below, and respond:
ND: A few thoughts that came up while reading The DFW Reader, with reflection on your linked article:
"Whitman, he notes, “reinvented poetry, not so much the outer form, which doesn’t count for much, but the way he puts himself into the poem. The tactile intensity of it is astonishing. In his poem, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,’ he all but literally reaches out to you and hugs you.”"
ND:... I THINK THIS is exactly what DFW does, he puts himself inexorably IN. Only he isn't hugging. He's sidling, sideways looking, and shying away with his corporeal body, while boldface opining with his words.
Then:
"But ‘Infinite Jest’ [regarded by many as Wallace’s masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.”
"It’s all a clear indication, Bloom notes, of the decline of literary standards. He was upset in 2003 when the National Book Award gave a special award to Stephen King. “But Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left. [Wallace] seems to have been a very sincere and troubled person, but that doesn’t mean I have to endure reading him. I even resented the use of the term from Shakespeare, when Hamlet calls the king’s jester Yorick, ‘a fellow of infinite jest.’"
ND: HARSH!!! No talent - DFW was technically very much above - that may be what bugs HB, the art is lost sometimes in the grammar and perfect word choice. Not enough holes in the work for HB to put himself into... AND I see why Harold is saying this - the problem with DFW is he can't edit. And he knew it - his editor for Infinite Jest says that was his primary ask of him (the editor) when they worked on IJ together. It is clear that everything said editor wanted to cut was argued against, vehemently, except one thing. The chapter that introduces three main characters and lays out the plot. THAT went. I know this because I'm obsessed with DFW right now and watched a YouTube on this. Crazy.
THINKING, in Harold's case, means (I have found) a kind of elegance - like in math - of being able to say more with less, and DFW doesn't do that, so it assaults Harold's sensibilities. I mean, he loves Dickinson! That alone says it. He wants clarity and no jumble. For a person of this generation, the cacophonic confusion of DFW's work is a sort of testament to who he was in THIS milieu, which I appreciate and can sort through and even find sort of deep-gut hilarious. It is sad, wrenchingly so, to *see* someone so well through and in his (DFWs) work, he IS ALLOWING HIMSELF TO BE SEEN, doesn't edit himself out for aesthetic cleanliness. And he is and is not posturing - when he is, he acknowledges he is. (I feel Harold is ALWAYS posturing and will not own up... or I could just not be as smart as him). I mean, look at this:
“I’m tired of being accused of being an elitist, which simply means that one wants people to read what’s worth reading and write in a proper response to it,” he adds. “I thought that the function of a critic was to read accurately and plainly to propound what one had apprehended. I wasn’t aware that there was going to be this cultural inundation.”
ND: DFW would *think* and maybe decide to write (probably, unedited) something this outrageous, then double back on it and globally realize how it would sound to others, caring deeply, then revise his position for you, fully and owningly (word?), cagily, self-loathingly, and you don't hate him for actually yes being elitist... you identify that he doesn't set himself above (or if he does, feels bad about it, humanly) which I think Harold does (set himself above), and therefore ignores something very very important to me at least, that piece of connection we all share whether he likes it or not.
Yeah, so be a critic Harold, but being an accessible human being may be worthwhile for at least some of your time too. But I do love love love Harold - he's the best, THE BEST, and funny, and I resonate with his political views. He makes sense and is pitch perfect in so many ways. And I can't leave *him* alone either. Obsessed. I think what it comes down to is, what artist touches you? Who do you share sensibility with?
"...the poet Hart Crane, of whom he says, “In terms of sheer gift, sheer endowment, I’m not sure that any poet in Europe or America is his equal.”
ND: and that's because Hart Crane touched HB at a formative age. That's really what it is about. His JOB is to be a critic so he has to publicly weigh and announce and be critical but I don't think his pronouncements are anything more than deeply held invitations to imbibe the wine he savors. To share, evangelically, the word that touches(d) him searingly. When I'm hit that way be being outside with my plants, I am reinvigorated to help my clients see what 'nature' has for them, and to try to get them out in it, to invite plants into their lives more fully, to see, smell, taste them, EXPERIENCE them. That's what I imagine HB is about with his favorites.
RAC: "I'm not saying Harold is gospel.... He detests one of my favorite writers, but his is an interesting opinion on DFW, worth something or nothing: http://wwd.com/eye/people/the-full-bl..." ... so I go and read that, and excerpt some of it below, and respond:
ND: A few thoughts that came up while reading The DFW Reader, with reflection on your linked article:
"Whitman, he notes, “reinvented poetry, not so much the outer form, which doesn’t count for much, but the way he puts himself into the poem. The tactile intensity of it is astonishing. In his poem, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,’ he all but literally reaches out to you and hugs you.”"
ND:... I THINK THIS is exactly what DFW does, he puts himself inexorably IN. Only he isn't hugging. He's sidling, sideways looking, and shying away with his corporeal body, while boldface opining with his words.
Then:
"But ‘Infinite Jest’ [regarded by many as Wallace’s masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.”
"It’s all a clear indication, Bloom notes, of the decline of literary standards. He was upset in 2003 when the National Book Award gave a special award to Stephen King. “But Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left. [Wallace] seems to have been a very sincere and troubled person, but that doesn’t mean I have to endure reading him. I even resented the use of the term from Shakespeare, when Hamlet calls the king’s jester Yorick, ‘a fellow of infinite jest.’"
ND: HARSH!!! No talent - DFW was technically very much above - that may be what bugs HB, the art is lost sometimes in the grammar and perfect word choice. Not enough holes in the work for HB to put himself into... AND I see why Harold is saying this - the problem with DFW is he can't edit. And he knew it - his editor for Infinite Jest says that was his primary ask of him (the editor) when they worked on IJ together. It is clear that everything said editor wanted to cut was argued against, vehemently, except one thing. The chapter that introduces three main characters and lays out the plot. THAT went. I know this because I'm obsessed with DFW right now and watched a YouTube on this. Crazy.
THINKING, in Harold's case, means (I have found) a kind of elegance - like in math - of being able to say more with less, and DFW doesn't do that, so it assaults Harold's sensibilities. I mean, he loves Dickinson! That alone says it. He wants clarity and no jumble. For a person of this generation, the cacophonic confusion of DFW's work is a sort of testament to who he was in THIS milieu, which I appreciate and can sort through and even find sort of deep-gut hilarious. It is sad, wrenchingly so, to *see* someone so well through and in his (DFWs) work, he IS ALLOWING HIMSELF TO BE SEEN, doesn't edit himself out for aesthetic cleanliness. And he is and is not posturing - when he is, he acknowledges he is. (I feel Harold is ALWAYS posturing and will not own up... or I could just not be as smart as him). I mean, look at this:
“I’m tired of being accused of being an elitist, which simply means that one wants people to read what’s worth reading and write in a proper response to it,” he adds. “I thought that the function of a critic was to read accurately and plainly to propound what one had apprehended. I wasn’t aware that there was going to be this cultural inundation.”
ND: DFW would *think* and maybe decide to write (probably, unedited) something this outrageous, then double back on it and globally realize how it would sound to others, caring deeply, then revise his position for you, fully and owningly (word?), cagily, self-loathingly, and you don't hate him for actually yes being elitist... you identify that he doesn't set himself above (or if he does, feels bad about it, humanly) which I think Harold does (set himself above), and therefore ignores something very very important to me at least, that piece of connection we all share whether he likes it or not.
Yeah, so be a critic Harold, but being an accessible human being may be worthwhile for at least some of your time too. But I do love love love Harold - he's the best, THE BEST, and funny, and I resonate with his political views. He makes sense and is pitch perfect in so many ways. And I can't leave *him* alone either. Obsessed. I think what it comes down to is, what artist touches you? Who do you share sensibility with?
"...the poet Hart Crane, of whom he says, “In terms of sheer gift, sheer endowment, I’m not sure that any poet in Europe or America is his equal.”
ND: and that's because Hart Crane touched HB at a formative age. That's really what it is about. His JOB is to be a critic so he has to publicly weigh and announce and be critical but I don't think his pronouncements are anything more than deeply held invitations to imbibe the wine he savors. To share, evangelically, the word that touches(d) him searingly. When I'm hit that way be being outside with my plants, I am reinvigorated to help my clients see what 'nature' has for them, and to try to get them out in it, to invite plants into their lives more fully, to see, smell, taste them, EXPERIENCE them. That's what I imagine HB is about with his favorites.
February 7, 2023
As a general rule I don’t abandon books before finishing them but we have to make an exception here. I’ve read a lot of depressing stuff but David Foster Wallace seemingly operates on an unforeseen level of desolation… four stars. Someday I’ll finish this.
December 6, 2020
4.5/5
Una antología de textos muy buena e interesante. Casi todo el material incluido es de lectura obligatoria para cualquier aficionado al autor. Sin embargo no le doy las 5 estrellas porque echo en falta algunos de mis textos favoritos de DFW:
- David Lynch conserva la cabeza
- E Unibus Pluram: Televisión y narrativa norteamericana
- El talento profesional del tenista Michael Joyce como paradigma de ciertas ideas sobre el libre albedrío, la libertad, las limitaciones, el gozo, el esperpento y la realización humana
- Federer, en cuerpo y en lo otro
- Democracia y comercio en el Open de Estados Unidos
- Gran Hijo Rojo
- El Dostoievski de Joseph Frank
- La autoridad y el uso del inglés americano
Considero que al menos la mitad de ellos se encuentran entre lo mejor que escribió este escritor.
Como curiosidad y como queda patente en mi selección, me gustan mucho los textos de no ficción de este autor pero no me atrae tanto su ficción. De hecho aunque algunos de sus cuentos me encantan, El neón de siempre, Animalitos inexpresivos, ... no me he animado a leer ninguna de sus novelas ya que siempre me ha parecido un autor que se maneja muy bien en las distancias cortas y sus novelas son gigantes (La escoba del sistema, La broma infinita y Rey pálido).
Por último, los textos que aparecen al final de la selección de cada libro son en general curiosos para cualquier fan y están muy bien escritos. Los que más me han gustado han sido: Hombre que mira de Leila Guerreiro y El genio que no supo divertirse de Inés Martín Rodrigo.
Una antología de textos muy buena e interesante. Casi todo el material incluido es de lectura obligatoria para cualquier aficionado al autor. Sin embargo no le doy las 5 estrellas porque echo en falta algunos de mis textos favoritos de DFW:
- David Lynch conserva la cabeza
- E Unibus Pluram: Televisión y narrativa norteamericana
- El talento profesional del tenista Michael Joyce como paradigma de ciertas ideas sobre el libre albedrío, la libertad, las limitaciones, el gozo, el esperpento y la realización humana
- Federer, en cuerpo y en lo otro
- Democracia y comercio en el Open de Estados Unidos
- Gran Hijo Rojo
- El Dostoievski de Joseph Frank
- La autoridad y el uso del inglés americano
Considero que al menos la mitad de ellos se encuentran entre lo mejor que escribió este escritor.
Como curiosidad y como queda patente en mi selección, me gustan mucho los textos de no ficción de este autor pero no me atrae tanto su ficción. De hecho aunque algunos de sus cuentos me encantan, El neón de siempre, Animalitos inexpresivos, ... no me he animado a leer ninguna de sus novelas ya que siempre me ha parecido un autor que se maneja muy bien en las distancias cortas y sus novelas son gigantes (La escoba del sistema, La broma infinita y Rey pálido).
Por último, los textos que aparecen al final de la selección de cada libro son en general curiosos para cualquier fan y están muy bien escritos. Los que más me han gustado han sido: Hombre que mira de Leila Guerreiro y El genio que no supo divertirse de Inés Martín Rodrigo.
Read
December 21, 2021Less Than Zero, wait, that's a different book but aptly describes how I felt about this one. After hearing so many times that David Foster Wallace was one of the greatest American writers ever, I wanted to dip my toe into his work and thought this compilation would be a good way to explore it. However, Wallace read to me like a cross between Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski but not as imaginative as Vonnegut or as fun as Bukowski. Disjointed, random, abhorrent, boring, and stupid; made me rip my earbuds out of my ears violently. This makes it easy to keep my New Year's Book Resolution that I won't continue to read books I don't like; they don't get better. Maybe I just don't get it, but I tried.
February 14, 2015
The David Foster Wallace Reader was the best introduction to DFW that I could imagine. The reader gets a taste of his fiction and non fiction in a nicely curated volume.
I was surprised how much I liked the email correspondence with his mother and the syllabi for courses he taught. I was equally surprised that the excerpt from The Infinite Jest didn't excite me as much as I had expected it to.
This is a book worth reading.
I was surprised how much I liked the email correspondence with his mother and the syllabi for courses he taught. I was equally surprised that the excerpt from The Infinite Jest didn't excite me as much as I had expected it to.
This is a book worth reading.
February 4, 2022
I love swimming through this giant, genius book. I don't think I could ever exhaust it. The highlight for me was a collection of the author's course outlines for his writing classes at Pomona University. There are so many highlights it wouldn't make sense to mention them all here. There are highlights from DFW's best writing from all his novels and non-fiction books and interesting journalism career, too.
February 10, 2016
*Review gestating*
October 21, 2024
DNF. I have struggled for years to read (and enjoy) Infinite Jest. When I read the first story “The Planet Trillaphone”, I was entranced. DFW was obviously a very smart, observant writer, and to hear a youthful version of himself narrate with such surreal nervous chatter, was amazingly heartfelt when reflected upon.
I found the next stories also funny, and the authorial voice came off as positively upbeat and self aware. I was so glad to have shaken off my DFW-DNF condition, but alas 260 pages of excerpts from Infinite Jest caught up to me.
At some point, perhaps when one of the characters committed repeated acts of animal torture, I began to realize that DFW’s bit runs thin, and what’s left bare is an obviously disturbed man. I couldn’t stomach any more of his mental health porn and the following selections of “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” offered no release from that either.
Reading this also caused me to ask the question “What the f*ck was wrong with male authors in the 90s?” I guess I didn’t realize that writers like DFW and Chuck Palahniuk (of “Fight Club” fame), who fueled my angsty teenage years, were actually full grown men incapable of dealing with their own weird death spasms of unprocessed male fragility.
I found the next stories also funny, and the authorial voice came off as positively upbeat and self aware. I was so glad to have shaken off my DFW-DNF condition, but alas 260 pages of excerpts from Infinite Jest caught up to me.
At some point, perhaps when one of the characters committed repeated acts of animal torture, I began to realize that DFW’s bit runs thin, and what’s left bare is an obviously disturbed man. I couldn’t stomach any more of his mental health porn and the following selections of “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” offered no release from that either.
Reading this also caused me to ask the question “What the f*ck was wrong with male authors in the 90s?” I guess I didn’t realize that writers like DFW and Chuck Palahniuk (of “Fight Club” fame), who fueled my angsty teenage years, were actually full grown men incapable of dealing with their own weird death spasms of unprocessed male fragility.
July 31, 2021
After having never read a single word of DFW before this year, I spent about six months reading some of his best work, and I really enjoyed the experience. For one, the format is great. After reading samples of every one of DFW's fiction books, I have a good sense of the ones I'll definitely pick up (IJ, Oblivion) and the ones I won't (Pale King, Oblivion). The non-fiction essays are all great (favorites were Authority and American Usage, which is somehow more relevant today than it was when it was published, The View from Mrs. Thompson's, can and - of course - A Supposedly Fun Thing I Won't Do Again), though some selections from his book-length non-fiction would've been nice. And finally, the lecture notes are a fascinating little curiosity - and a sweet window into Wallace's relationship with his mom - that would never get collected if this book was put together by a dispassionate academic. More authors who perhaps aren't suited to the full Library of America treatment could benefit from an anthology like this.
March 1, 2024
This one took a long time but was worth it. I still need to finish Infinite Jest but the Reader actually gave a great cross section of his writing including his nonfiction. The experience of his writing about the Illinois State Fair in 1993 could just as well provide the same insights today about the different experiences of America. A deep dive into his own personal neuroses was nearly half of his essay on cruises. Really glad that I picked this one to get that sampling beyond the few most well known novels.
April 26, 2018
I was already a DFW fan, but after listening to audiobook versions of numerous of his stories, I’m even more impressed. His works sound incredibly, impossibly natural read out loud. The dialogue is spot on. Even the five-dollar-words don’t seem out of place. The downside is that his subject matter is famously depressing, and holy shit, when read aloud it really hits home. I didn’t listen to the entire 48 hours or whatever of this volume all at once; I could keep picking off this for years. The audiobook format, however, suuuuuuucks in chapter naming. It’s all numbers. Numbers! There’s no table of contents for the audiobook at all. I had to find a table of contents for the print edition to be able to navigate this book.
October 29, 2017
The fact that the "Reader" will leave you wanting more is a testament to both the collected works and Wallace's talent as a writer. It's fantastic.
Read
February 5, 2024not good to identify this much with man who killed himself
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