With a new book of essays out—and every magazine writer in the city aping his trademark verbosity more than ever—the departed nonfiction writer and novelist David Foster Wallace is experiencing a seemingly unending vogue. Tonight, New Yorker staffer and Wallace biographer D.T. Max and Gerry Howard, Doubleday editor at large, discuss the work and life Read More
After David Foster Wallace’s death, once the dust settled on the extraordinary eulogies by Zadie Smith, John Jeremiah Sullivan, David Lipsky and many others who stood in awe before their titanic subject, another school of writing about Wallace emerged. His suicide in 2008 provoked the minute dissection of parts of Wallace’s life that the author Read More
In his 2008 essay “The Chinese Puffin,” reprinted in his second essay collection, Farther Away (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $26.00), Jonathan Franzen contemplates the apparently limitless carpet of lights unfurling from the center of Shanghai, and asks, “Does anybody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?” In a rare moment in these essays, he answers “yes,” but is unwilling to drag us there. In fact, steering clear of the really deep shit—certain kinds of hard truths—is Mr. Franzen’s m.o. throughout this collection. Read More
When Hugo Lindgren poached GQ story editor Joel Lovell for his revamp of The New York Times Magazine late last year, one bonus was that John Jeremiah Sullivan’s byline migrated alongside him. A”Southern editor” and essayist with a National Magazine Award under his belt, Mr. Sullivan was seen as a rising star among GQ Read More
When David Foster Wallace hanged himself with a black belt and his arms bound by duct tape on the patio of his home in Claremont, Calif., on Sept. 12, 2008, he had published a history of the concept of infinity, three collections of short stories, two books of essays and two novels. The last of Read More
One of the most important people in finance was overlooking Central Park from his Fifth Avenue apartment, enjoying the Bach that his twin teenage daughters were playing on violin and speaking to the young Fulbright scholars from Iraq and China he’d invited for a reception. “In everything I do, I always ask myself, ‘Am I Read More
The University of Texas at Austin is set to release David Foster Wallace’s papers to the public. The Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin acquired Wallace’s manuscripts, stories and essays as well as items from the author’s personal library last March. The books from Wallace’s collection are particularly fascinating, as they are filled Read More
The University of Texas at Austin has bought the David Foster Wallace archive. His papers will reside in the University’s Harry Ransom Center, which blogged today about how the acquisition came to be. They had their eye on Wallace, it seems:
Because of the Ransom Center’s strong collections in contemporary literature, Read More
Earlier this month, editors at publishing houses across New York received two separate book proposals for biographies of the late David Foster Wallace. One came from the journalist and critic D. T. Max, the other from Rolling Stone contributing editor David Lipsky. Both writers had published intimate, reported profiles of Wallace in the months following Read More
This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
By David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown, 137 pp. $14.99
Three years before he hanged himself at age 46 on the patio of the ranch house in Claremont, Calif., that he shared with his wife, Karen Green, David Foster Wallace gave Read More
