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Selections from One-Star Amazon Reviews of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
[Ed. note: I usually don’t preface these one-star Amazon selection riffs with much, other than to note the occasion for the post. In this case, the occasion is my coming to the end of a second reading...
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The Garden of Eden, Ernest Hemingway’s Tale of Doomed Polyamory
In general, I dislike reviews that frontload context—get to the book, right? So here’s a short review of Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: it is stranger than most of what Hemingway wrote, by...
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David Foster Wallace: “I’d need some kind of cogent explanation of what...
Today, I somehow ended up listening to a “rare” 1996 David Foster Wallace interview on Boston’s The Connection (I was purging a bunch of old stuff, student work, in my office, and, as I often do, put...
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Phantoms and ghosts in David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King
The narrator of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King assures us at one point that “phantoms are not the same as real ghosts.” Okay. So what’s a phantom then, at least in the universe...
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Civics and selfishness (David Foster Wallace)
Chapter 19 David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (or, §19, if you prefer the book’s conceit) begins with this paragraph— ‘There’s something very interesting about civics and selfishness, and we get to...
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A U.S.A. that would die for the so-called perfect Entertainment (Infinite Jest)
The sky of U.S.A.’s desert was clotted with blue stars. Now it was deep at night. Only above the U.S.A. city was the sky blank of stars; its color was pearly and blank. Marathe shrugged. ‘Perhaps in...
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A note to readers new to Infinite Jest
A note to readers new to Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest poses rhetorical, formal, and verbal challenges that will confound many readers new to the text. The abundance of...
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The Never-Ending Torture of Unrest | Georg Büchner’s Lenz Reviewed
Composed in 1836, Georg Büchner’s novella-fragment Lenz still seems ahead of its time. While Lenz’s themes of madness, art, and ennui can be found throughout literature, Büchner’s strange, wonderful...
View ArticleCivics and selfishness (David Foster Wallace)
Chapter 19 David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (or, §19, if you prefer the book’s conceit) begins with this paragraph— ‘There’s something very interesting about civics and selfishness, and we get to...
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Thomas S. Klise’s The Last Western (Book acquired, 3 Jan. 2018)
So after maybe one tumbler of scotch too many, I finally broke down and just ordered a copy of Thomas S. Klise’s out-of-print cult novel The Last Western (1974) online. I’d been looking for it in used...
View ArticleBlog about “The Silvery Veil” allegory in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The...
This afternoon I got to Ch. XIII of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Blithedale Romance. Titled “Zenobia’s Legend,” most of the chapter is given over to the titular heroine’s tale “The Silvery Veil,” a...
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The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Book acquired,...
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies is a peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the work of David Foster Wallace. The Journal is published by the DFW Society. Here is the table of contents...
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The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (Book acquired,...
I finally had a bit of time to properly dip into the second issue of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies this afternoon. (I brought it to work with me and read from it between classes.) This...
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A note to readers new to Infinite Jest
A note to readers new to Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest poses rhetorical, formal, and verbal challenges that will confound many readers new to the text. The abundance of...
View ArticleI still think American Psycho is a very sincere book | Bret Easton Ellis
HARI KUNZRU: In the great irony-sincerity wars of the ’90s, you and David Foster Wallace came to represent opposite poles, and in literary terms the struggle between the two modes paid off in all sorts...
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A review of Trey Ellis’s polyglossic satire Platitudes
Trey Ellis’s 1988 debut novel Platitudes begins with a typical metatextual conceit: the novel-within-a-novel gambit. Our story starts with Earle, a nerdy, idealistic high school sophomore who lusts...
View ArticleJust asking | David Foster Wallace
“Just Asking” by David Foster Wallace First published in The Atlantic, 2007 Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we...
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