
	Where results make sense

Topic: David Foster Wallace

Related Topics

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Pomona College

Illinois State University

Bloomington, Illinois

Postmodern condition

Consider the Lobster

Bill Amend

Amherst College

John Barth

United States Department of Education

United States

Metaphysical subjectivism

Solipsism

Natalie Gulbis

Normal, Illinois

In the News (Sun 20 Dec 09)

Northern Trust

Marvin Harrison

Peter Chernin

Gary Locke

Match Play

Penelope Cruz

Mickey Rourke

AR Rahman

Danny Boyle

Hugh Jackman

	'Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays,' by David Foster Wallace - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times
		Reading David Foster Wallace's new collection of magazine articles, you could be forgiven for thinking that the author of such defiantly experimental fictions as "Infinite Jest" (1996) and "Oblivion" (2004) has been an old-fashioned moralist in postmodern disguise all along.
		In an earlier essay titled "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," Wallace claimed that television in its more sophisticated phase had appropriated the "rebellious irony" of the first postmodern writers (Pynchon, Barthelme, Gaddis, Barth), thereby pre-empting and defusing the "critical negation" that was the literary and moral responsibility of his generation of writers.
		For it is Wallace's nostalgia for a lost meaningfulness — as distinct from meaning — that gives his essays their particular urgency, their attractive mix of mordancy and humorous ruefulness.
	www.nytimes.com /2006/03/12/books/review/12mishra.html?ex=1299819600&en=13e6e54a73d5ac6e&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss (765 words)

	Oblivion by David Foster Wallace: Reviews
		Wallace is a writer who still believes in asking readers to participate actively in the experience of literature, even when he's being aneurysm-inducingly funny.
		Wallace may be torn between desiring the ordinary satisfactions of readerly connection and disdaining their very ordinariness.
		David Foster Wallace's style may be convoluted, but at least his collection of short stories, Oblivion, has some decent jokes.
	www.metacritic.com /books/authors/wallacedavidfoster/oblivion (887 words)

	Amazon.ca: Oblivion: Stories: Books: David Foster Wallace (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Modernism, the tradition David Foster Wallace belongs to with what used to be called a vengeance, was supposed to have been wiped away long ago by Postmodernism, with its shifting styles and its deadpan assurances that surface is depth and skin is just another way of saying soul.
		Wallace’s genius for anatomizing convoluted contemporary situations is large, but such staggeringly complete inquiries into characters’ thoughts and meta-thoughts, his massing of the mobile vectors of intent and trajectory in situations, brings a numbing sensory overload with them.
		Wallace is in the higher ranks of modern writers, often mentioned in the same breath with postmodernist icons Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.
	www.amazon.ca /Oblivion-Stories-David-Foster-Wallace/dp/0316919810 (2629 words)

	David Foster Wallace
		David Foster Wallace did not expect to be the Spring '96 literary posterboy.
		Wallace showed up, sans bandanna, showing a broad expanse of normal human forehead, and appeared more terrified of me than I was of him.
		Not mistaken, however, was my conviction that Wallace, with his yarn of drug addicts and devotees, was engaged in a denouement of the human condition in a media-saturated, entertainment-mediated world.
	www.stim.com /Stim-x/0596May/Verbal/dfwmain.html (715 words)

	The horror, the horror - Salon
		David Foster Wallace delves into the heart of human darkness in his chilling new story collection.
		With his new story collection, David Foster Wallace has perfected a particularly subtle form of horror story -- so subtle, in fact, that to judge from the book's reviews, few of his readers even realize that's what these stories are.
		Wallace revels in professional jargon and takes a transparent, boyish delight in knowing how things work, which is why "Mr.
	dir.salon.com /story/books/review/2004/06/30/wallace/index.html (506 words)

	David Foster Wallace: Loving to Hear Yourself Write (Site not responding. Last check: )
		David Foster Wallace is an interesting writer who is in dire need of a vicious but fair editor.
		He notices everything that is odd and potentially wonderful of ponder in his world, but he's able to organize his perceptions; he lacks the ability to discriminate what's actually interesting to a reader from that which is worth only a smirk and a snort for himself.
		It's been offered that Wallace's particular genius, his contribution to what written language can do, is the extension of the details a sentence can sustain, however long the length required for the feat, and still be grammatically comprehensible.
	tedburke2.tripod.com /davidfosterwallace.html (633 words)

	Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant » Operation DFW
		DFW was asked about the notion of people crying or not crying, according to their abilities, in reaction to the September 11th coverage.
		DFW then noted that some of the people on the cruise were very nice, while also resembling without question âJackie Gleason in drag.â He had exchanged postcard correspondence with some of the people.
		But DFW suggested that most people listening to this in their cars, lacking high-end digital audio, would likely not be able to tell the difference and that likely a different voice would be required.
	www.edrants.com /?p=2583 (2936 words)

	David Foster Wallace (Site not responding. Last check: )
		David Foster Wallace's essays -- pointed and diffuse, offhand and studied -- achieve brilliance by accretion
		Wallace follows Michael Joyce, the 79th-ranked player in the world, through the qualifying rounds of the tournament, with forays into the evolution of tennis styles, the question of free will for child athletes, Wallace's own junior-tennis career, the inevitable snobbery when intellectuals write about athletes, and so on.
		Wallace's hope -- and it's a sincere, serious, hopelessly uncool hope -- is that all this is worthwhile because the isolation of writer from reader can hereby, at least for a second, be bridged.
	www.bostonphoenix.com /alt1/archive/books/reviews/02-97/david_foster_wallace.html (974 words)

	David Foster Wallace Considers the Lobster
		Wallace admits that his “own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing.” However, upon arrival at the Maine Lobster Festival, he found that “there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.”
		Wallace’s article explores the excruciating pain that lobsters feel when they are boiled alive, taking both scientific evidence and his own observations into account.
		Wallace graduated from Amherst College and Arizona State University, and he received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, also known as a “genius grant.” In 1998 and 1999, he received the Outstanding University Researcher Award for his work as a professor at Illinois State University.
	www.lobsterlib.com /feat/davidwallace/index.asp (293 words)

	Amazon.ca: Infinite Jest: Books: David Foster Wallace (Site not responding. Last check: )
		In a sprawling, wild, super-hyped magnum opus, David Foster Wallace fulfills the promise of his precocious novel The Broom of the System.
		Wallace's primary theme is that America is slowly amusing itself to death.
		Wallace seems to think so, constantly emphasizing the need to balance freedom with authority (his admiration for AA is obvious).
	www.amazon.ca /Infinite-Jest-David-Foster-Wallace/dp/0316920045 (2318 words)

	Metroactive Books \| David Foster Wallace
		Wallace has become the spokesman for a generation of writers raised not on literature but on television and academic theories (mostly French, in translation) of literature.
		Wallace is ready with a defense of writers from his own generation and their lousy writing: "It won't do for the literary establishment simply to complain that...
		If Wallace truly wants to be a great novelist, he might start by ditching the sterile word games and realizing that having your friends laugh at you is a small price to pay for being Dostoevski.
	www.metroactive.com /papers/metro/03.06.97/books-9710.html (627 words)

	Fictionwise eBooks: David Foster Wallace
		Wallace has received the Whiting Award, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Paris Review Prize for humor, the QPB Joe Savago New Voices Award, and an O. Henry Award.
		Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy").
		For this collection, David Foster Wallace immerses himself in the three-ring circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of the most vicious campaigns in recent history.
	www.fictionwise.com /eBooks/DavidFosterWallaceeBooks.htm (407 words)

	The Reading Experience: David Foster Wallace
		Wallace abandons his usual style and tells the tale in a single telegraphic and breathless paragraph, appropriate to the panic of the young mother and father who tend to their scalded infant.
		Wallace is frustrating at times, and I’m contending that here, in Oblivion, he frustrates by focusing so intently on the dark and stupid that he all but denies the existence of the human and magical.
		What Wallace is doing seems to me a further development of this kind of psychological realism, although he finds himself writing in an era when even human mental processes can't really be trusted as authentic, determined as they are by culture, by genetics, by forces beyond conscious human control.
	noggs.typepad.com /the_reading_experience/2004/08/reviewers_of_da.html (3679 words)

	The Believer - Interview with David Foster Wallace
		David Foster Wallace is from east-central Illinois, and this is a large part of his appeal.
		Wallace and his interviewer were traveling a lot in the weeks before this issue went to press, so we did our best.
		DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it.
	www.believermag.com /issues/200311/?read=interview_wallace (840 words)

	Amazon.co.uk: Consider the Lobster: Essays and Arguments: Books: David Foster Wallace (Site not responding. Last check: )
		David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in his new book of hilarious non-fiction.
		For this collection, David Foster Wallace immerses himself in the three- ring circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of the most vicious campaigns in recent history.
		As one reads of the mysterious sprouting of flags, Wallace's hunt for a flag of his own, and his spending the day watching the footage with old ladies who've never been to New York, his mounting alienation from his neighbors is fascinating.
	www.amazon.co.uk /Consider-Lobster-David-Foster-Wallace/dp/0349119511 (1338 words)

	Infinite Jest: Reviews, Articles, & Miscellany
		DFW is clearly uncomfortable with the medium, however, and you can sense him trying to edit and rewrite his remarks while he's talking.
		Wallace's scorched-earth attack on John Updike's latest, Toward the End of Time, in the October 13, 1997 edition of the New York Observer is pure agitprop, signaling Wallace's arrival as a Maileresque pugilist in the dumbed-down lit-crit mainstream.
		Wallace is interviewed by Chris O'Connor and Rob Elder in the March '98 issue of the Oregon Voice, a publication of the University of Oregon.
	www.smallbytes.net /~bobkat/jesterlist.html (3193 words)

	David Foster Wallace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Wallace moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard but later abandoned them.
		On the Charlie Rose Show in 1997, Wallace claimed that the notes were used to help dis-lineate the flow of the narrative to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the entire structure.
		In 1997 Wallace was awarded the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by editors of The Paris Review for one of the stories in Brief Interviews — “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6” — which had appeared in the magazine.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/David_Foster_Wallace (1567 words)

	The Modern Word - David Foster Wallace's "Oblivion"
		Wallace intentionally attempts to disorient the reader through a variety of techniques: switching narrative POV mid-paragraph, extended internal dialogs, technical marketing jargon, math (even the name of the marketing group, Delta-Y, evokes complicated mathematical formula).
		He is so precise in his prose that he overuses quotes (the quote marks are single quotes, which Wallace has used previously in prose, and seem to indicate that the entire story is enclosed in a set of double quotes).
		David Foster Wallace Page – Currently just a page of Wallace links, Marie Mundaca will expand this into a full Scriptorium page in late 2004.
	www.themodernword.com /reviews/wallace_oblivion.html (1106 words)

	Dalkey Archive Press: An Interview with David Foster Wallace
		DFW: I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
		DFW: I suppose it's people more or less like me, in their twenties and thirties, maybe, with enough experience or good education to have realized that the hard work serious fiction requires of a reader sometimes has a payoff.
		DFW: For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party.
	www.centerforbookculture.org /interviews/interview_wallace.html (10674 words)

	NPR : David Foster Wallace's 'Federer Moment'
		David Foster Wallace's piece on Roger Federer appears this Sunday in The New York Times magazine Play.
		Weekend Edition Saturday, August 19, 2006 · David Foster Wallace, a fiction writer and essayist who was a serious junior tennis player, has a well-documented love of the sport.
		Now, Wallace is waxing rhapsodic about the skills of the greatest tennis player alive.
	www.npr.org /templates/story/story.php?storyId=5666358 (533 words)

	Paste Magazine :: Review :: David Foster Wallace :: Consider the Lobster (Page 1) (Site not responding. Last check: )
		For all the filigrees, Wallace is writing from his gut, in a way that’s impossible to mimic or mock.
		David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster is a big, irresistible shaggy dog of a book—muddy-pawed, it never stops barking, but it’s abounding with enthusiasm and love.
		In other words, Wallace makes you feel as if it’s OK to disagree with him, even though it might hurt his feelings.
	www.pastemagazine.com /action/article?article_id=2497 (589 words)

	Y.P.R.: David Foster Wallace and Gromit
		David Foster Wallace sits in a second old armchair reading the Evening Post, ironically.
		D.F. Wallace clumsily exits the room and enters the kitchen, walking almost how one would expect a loose glob of protoplasm, or even simple clay, to walk, if one were inclined to think about such things.
		Wallace puts on a British-looking cap in a manner that might or might not be construed as deeply ironic, grabs his wallet, and heads for the door.
	www.yankeepotroast.org /archives/2004/06/david_foster_wa_1.html (599 words)

	My Actual David Foster Wallace Dreams (Site not responding. Last check: )
		I’m David Foster Wallace, the ex-enfant terrible of contemporary American literature, driving on a gray day along an industrial/railroad strip I live near in real life.
		The drive is from my P.O.V. (point of view), and I narrate the whole drive as him.
		David V. Matthews is a writer and artist in Pittsburgh, PA. He has previously published articles and reviews in City Paper.
	www.inkburns.com /html/my_actual_david_foster_wallace.html (386 words)

	Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant » Wallace, David Foster
		Phoning it in, as Wallace did with the recent Federer essay, is simply too whorish for a man of his obvious talents.
		One looks upon the strange irony of Wallace touring the country for a book while ignoring virtually all interviews and wonders if Wallace is only putting out these books or accepting these gigs to keep a little extra cash coming in.
		To be listened to later: David Foster Wallace and Scott Simon on NPR, talking about tennis superstar Roger Federer.
	www.edrants.com /?cat=74 (1485 words)

	Lannan Foundation - David Foster Wallace with John O'Brien, December 06, 2000
		David Foster Wallace is the author of the novel Infinite Jest; three short story collections, The Broom of the System, The Girl with Curious Hair, and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; and a collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
		Wallace, who received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 1996, teaches at Illinois State University in Bloomington.
		Wallace worked on his new fiction during his residency.
	www.lannan.org /lf/rc/event/david-foster-wallace (224 words)

	Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20 \| The Onion - America's Finest News Source
		BLOOMINGTON, IL—Claire Thompson, author David Foster Wallace's girlfriend of two years, stopped reading his 67-page breakup letter at page 20, she admitted Monday.
		Foster, the award-winning author of The Broom Of The System and the 1,079-page Infinite Jest, met Thompson in March 2001 through mutual friends.
		Thompson said she believes Wallace penned the breakup opus during a January lecture trip to the University of New England in Biddeford, ME.
	www.theonion.com /content/node/27769 (778 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)