Irish Times interview with Bret Easton Ellis, End of the novel, end of the empire , turns to David Foster Wallace:

 

“Never met him. Never responded to the work. I pretty much read everything he wrote because you were kind of supposed to. He is a big deal in American letters and . . . I never really liked anything he wrote. I tried to read Infinite Jest three or four times and never cracked it. I found the stories didn’t interest me. And I am in the minority: I didn’t like the essays either. He suffers from a kind of midwestern earnestness that I found unbearable. And I don’t think it is too soon . . . but I find his earnestness very irritating. I just finished reading this long book of interviews he did and . . . you can be too smart for fiction.

“The way he spoke about a lot of things is just not my school of thought. And yes, he was probably a genius. And yes, I was very moved by his death. I was very touched by his pain. I really was. It was a shock. And there was a really moving account of it by I think it was DT Max in the New Yorker . And, you know, I was in tears. But! Let’s just get real and separate the man, who I did not know, and the work.”

 

Bret Easton Ellis on DFW previously.

 

[via @writing_novels]

After some discussion on wallace-l (led by good friend of mine, George Carr) a number of David Foster Wallace enthusiasts decided it might be fun to write about things they'd experienced with the same kind of eye that DFW used in his non-fiction collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again. Ryan Blanck (of Letters to DFW - check out his latest about The Depressed Person) jumped on board and set up a blog to host it all on and now there are a number of 'Supposedly Fun Things...' to read about.

 

I've been waiting until there's a bit of content to post about, but they are also after submissions. So please help them out and submit your supposedly fun things. Thanks George and Ryan!

Update: I've been told, "there is no official cover yet for the Pale King" and enough to be able to post that the tweets below are most likely related to mock-ups for possible covers.

 

(I'm glad I put a question mark in the title of this post!)

 

---

 

Sounds like Jon Gray is the cover artist for The Pale King! I've always loved the covers of the Jonathan Safran Foer novels. This news thanks to a couple of tweets from Joe Pickering (@Joethepublicist) and Matt Clacher (@mattclacher) from Penguin books in London:

 

I'm moving The Howling Fantods to a new host in the near future (hopefully nothing will change at your end apart from possibly a few days downtime) so I thought I make sure things were in good shape before the move.

 

Part I has been to look at the dedicated pages for David Foster Wallace's oldest book publications:

 

The Broom of the System

 

Girl With Curious Hair

 

&

 

 

I think I've caught all the broken links, and added a few more reviews or resources (so you might find something new in the links above if you have not visited for a while), but they are still pretty light on content compared to the rest of the site. 

 

That's where you all come in! Have you got links to any reviews or resources for these texts? If so please let me know.

 

Over the next few weeks I'll be looking at other parts of the site but feel free to let me know about anything before I get to those sections.

 

This is also a good time to contact me if you've been having any difficulties logging in to leave comments. I've noticed a few users have had their accounts disabled as a result of a bug (I think I've resolved the issue), so I'm keen to know if you've had any issues recently.

 

Thanks, everyone.

Brad Fest over at The Hyperarchival Parallax has posted an article title: Repackaging the Archive (Part IV): Some Notes on Sincerity in David Foster Wallace’s Uncollected and Less-Well-Known Work. He's looking forward to the upcoming publication of the critical collection, Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays (it's great btw, read about it here and here), and gives some explanation of why:

 

 

Read the whole piece here.

You can read the original version of David Foster Wallace's and Mark Costello's (highly underrated - I love it) non-fiction book Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (Amazon link) at The Missouri Review.

 

[via Matt Bucher]