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Publications Due in 2012
Upcoming Publications
Thursday, 09 February 2012
Probably time to get all these in the one place as there are so many of them, rather than all over the site (and prompted by Matt's list over at wallace-l. Cheers, Matt).
1st April 2012
Conversations with David Foster Wallace, edited by Stephen Burn. 208 pages.
10th April 2012
The Pale King, paperback, with four previously unpublished scenes, by David Foster Wallace 592 pages.

31st May 2012 (Or possibly 1st May from galley cover?)
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, edited by Sam Cohen and Lee Konstantinou. 224 pages.

6th September 2012 UK, Early Sep U.S.
Spring (N. Hemisphere) 2012
Both Flesh and Not Uncollected Non-fiction of David Foster Wallace
Later this year
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Stephen J. Burn and Marshall Boswell. (alternate cache link)
 
 
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
DFW Biography
Wednesday, 08 February 2012
D.T. Max's long awaited biography of David Foster Wallace is due on the 6th of September in the UK , (and early Sep U.S. - clarification soon) and you can pre-order it from Amazon UK right now.
 
 
Most intruiging aspect of the title? The line, "Every love story is a ghost story." can be found in §25 of The Pale King - one of my favourite sections - and in the story Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
 
 
[Thanks to Dan for the Amazon info and Noelia for the memory jog re: §25)
 
 
Pomona PSU Event - Consider DFW His Work and Legacy
Conferences
Wednesday, 08 February 2012
Updated info about the Pomona event via Joey Glickman:
 
 
 
The event is on February 18th, at 5PM.  It will be held in Pomona College's Edmunds Ballroom, 170 East 6th St, Claremont CA.  (If you can't make it, the event will be posted online at psu.pomona.edu)

The panel includes;
• JONATHAN LETHEM (novelist, essayist, and Pomona's Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing and English)
• LAURA MILLER (author, writer for Salon and the NYT Book Review)
• D.T. Max (author, Wallace's biographer)
 
Facebook event page here.
 
 
 
Website Transition Update
General Updates
Wednesday, 08 February 2012
Once again, so about the slow performance of The Fantods for the last couple of weeks. The php hack to ensure we stay up while the upgrade is finalised has a significant performance hit. What is slowing everyhting down is the tedious job of ensuring the search engine friendly urls are retained on the new build...
 
We'll be done soon.
 
Possible Downtime
General Updates
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
My webhost has some planned downtime scheduled in the next 24/48hrs so the site may be up and down over the next few days.
Keep an eye on my twitter feed for updates.
 
UPDATE 1:
The update WILL break the site. Unfortunately, I will not be able to apply the fix until the site breaks...
 
UPDATE 2:
To ease the downtime I'm performing some updates and database migrations. If you can read this things are going well so far! I've disabled registration for commenting (and thus logins) for the time being. I'll re-enable them once we're up and running again. Later in the week things will look a little different/worse while I update/tinker/change the template.
 
I've also moved to a newer, nicer and more efficient comments system which will has some neat features once I enable it after testing. (There should be a comment appended to this post as a test shortly)
 
The RSS feed will also deliver more than just a 1 line summary next week if all goes well, but you'll probably need to subscribe to a new feed.
 
And yes, I have backups. :)
 
UPDATE 3: Nearly there...
 
UPDATE 4: Things are slower, but it's all working for the time being. The migrated site is performing very well - just got to configure the SEF urls... and clean it up a bit and we'll go live. But that's a job for the weekend.
 
The David Foster Wallace Symposium - April 2012
Conferences
Sunday, 08 January 2012
 
This looks super exciting. Live webcast too! 
 
 
April 5–6, 2012  Writers, editors, journalists, and critics will gather to discuss David Foster Wallace's life and work. The David Foster Wallace papers reside at the Harry Ransom Center.
 
Registration is limited and opens Monday, January 23, 2012 at 11 a.m. (CST). For details, see Registration section.
 
 
Uncollected Non-Fiction Later This Year - Both Flesh and Not
Upcoming Publications
Wednesday, 18 January 2012
Word just in via Hamish Hamilton news over at Five Dials about the under the radar uncollected non-fiction of David Foster Wallace, apparently titled, Both Flesh and Not:
 
David Foster Wallace’s previously uncollected non-fiction has just arrived, for publication as Both Flesh and Not later this year, as have four new scenes to be included in our paperback of The Pale King this Spring.
 

(Thanks, Jan)

 
Update: New Material in The Pale King Paperback
The Pale King
Sunday, 15 January 2012
I posted back on the 4th of Jan about the updated cover of The Pale King that appeared on Amazon with the added, "With Four Previously Unpublished Scenes" text on it.
 
I can now confirm, after contacting David Foster Wallace's literary agent and Little Brown, that the upcoming paperback will indeed have 10-ish pages of new material.
 
 
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace
Upcoming Publications
Tuesday, 06 December 2011
 
Another collection of essays about David Foster Wallace! This one is due in May 2012 and is from the University of Iowa Press:
 
 
Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace was at the height of his creative powers when he committed suicide in 2008. In a sweeping portrait of Wallace’s writing and thought and as a measure of his importance in literary history, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace gathers cutting-edge, field-defining scholarship by critics alongside remembrances by many of his writer friends, who include some of the world’s most influential authors.
In this elegant volume, literary critics scrutinize the existing Wallace scholarship and at the same time pioneer new ways of understanding Wallace’s fiction and journalism. In critical essays exploring a variety of topics—including Wallace’s relationship to American literary history, his place in literary journalism, his complicated relationship to his postmodernist predecessors, the formal difficulties of his 1996 magnum opus Infinite Jest, his environmental imagination, and the “social life” of his fiction and nonfiction—contributors plumb sources as diverse as Amazon.com reader recommendations, professional book reviews, the 2009 Infinite Summer project, and the David Foster Wallace archive at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center.
 
The creative writers—including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and David Lipsky—and Wallace’s Little, Brown editor, Michael Pietsch, reflect on the person behind the volumes of fiction and nonfiction created during the author’s too-short life.
 
All of the essays, critical and creative alike, are written in an accessible style that does not presume any background in Wallace criticism. Whether the reader is an expert in all things David Foster Wallace, a casual fan of his fiction and nonfiction, or completely new to Wallace, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace will reveal the power and innovation that defined his contribution to literary life and to self-understanding. This illuminating volume is destined to shape our understanding of Wallace, his writing, and his place in history. 
 
Contributors: 
Don DeLillo
Dave Eggers
Ed Finn
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Franzen
Paul Giles
Heather Houser
David Lipsky
Rick Moody
Ira B. Nadel
Michael Pietsch
Josh Roiland
George Saunders
Molly Schwartzburg
 
 
David Lipsky on DFW 13th Dec
Appearances/Readings
Saturday, 10 December 2011
Update: Video from the event Part 1  and Part 2.
 
David Lipsky will be speaking about David Foster Wallace at The Center for Fiction in Manhattan at 7pm on the 13th of December, sounds like it is going to be a good night.
 
(Thanks to everyone who got in touch, somehow I missed this one!) 
 
And somewhat related, here's a fantastic (and really insightful) review of Lipsky's Although of Course You End  Up Becoming Yourself by Tim Personn, The Dave Show:
 
AOCYEUBY makes a similar focus possible by a peculiar doubling of its author across time and space. The book showcases two different Lipskys: one version of the man in 1996, on the road with Wallace, and an older Lipsky in 2008, sitting at home, listening to the recordings made a decade before. Sometimes this older Lipsky mutters something [intrusions that, in the text, are set in brackets] and, like a commentary track on The Dave Show, you hear his remarks against the backdrop of Wallace’s soft Midwestern speech: less bubbly, less ebullient, but also warm and observant. Lipsky 2008 is, above all, a good reader of character. His mind is anything but dulled by the tragic events of the preceding weeks. To the contrary, it is acute and, like any engaged reader’s, empathetic. He is like you, humbled by the reality of loss, and trying to figure this man out – to intuit the big something that seemed to be missing from all previous writing on David Foster Wallace.
 

 
How to Read Infinite Jest Chronologically
Infinite Jest
Wednesday, 04 January 2012
PDF Updated now ver 1.1 1.2 1.3
 
Drew Cordes has put together a neat guide for reading Infinite Jest chronologically and she's given permission for it to be available here for Howling Fantods readers. If you have not read Infinite Jest there are major spoilers to be found.
 
For reference while working on the project Drew used the IJ scene by scene guide, and Stephen Burn's David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide.
 
(But not, it appears, Greg Carlisle's, Elegant Complexity, which also has a number of different chronologies in its appendices, including some that focus on individual characters.)
 
If you notice any errors or corrections you can email drew at the address in the pdf to let her know, and we'll get any corrections up ASAP.
 
Over to Drew:
 
A couple quick acknowledgments. This project was fun but also quite maddening. It would’ve taken three times as long if not for two sources that aided me. The basic layout of IJ’s scenes I used as a template is here: http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/Infinite.htm. And Stephen Burn’s Reader’s Guide to Infinite Jest was helpful, too. However both sources ultimately are incomplete and sometimes erroneous in their dating. That being said, they still both helped tremendously.

Some final advice before you embark. If this is your first time reading Infinite Jest – stop. Read it the way Wallace intended first. Hell, you should probably read it at least twice as it is before opting for this route. Wallace had very good reasons for ordering the book the way he did. The book’s sequencing is just as big a part of its artistic/philosophical statement as any sentence or character. (Also, this guide has spoilers.) If you have read it already and you are looking to experience the book in a new way, I think you’ll find this approach enlightening. Seeing when scenes play out in relation to the other things that are going on sheds a lot of light on the characters as well as some scenes you may have found more cryptic in your other go-arounds. Gaudeamus Igitur!

Drew Cordes
Vassar College
Class of 2004
 
 
 
 
 
 
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