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David Foster Wallace News and Resources Since March 97

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Home News by Category DFW Biography Mac Weekly Review of Wallace Lipsky Bio

Mac Weekly Review of Wallace Lipsky Bio

Zac Farber (author of the excellent Editing DFW article contributed to the Fantods last year) let me know about his review of David Lipsky's book about David Foster Wallace, A road trip through the mind of David Foster Wallace.
 
As a book, "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace" is extremely odd and occasionally mesmerizing. It may be a valuable resource for scholarly appreciation of Wallace's work, but it is often tedious to read. Consumed, as it is, with Lipsky's reportorial needs--to nail down facts, to elicit colorful quotations, etc.--the transcript is as much an exploration of the exigencies of magazine journalism as of the contours of Wallace's mind.
 
His review is a more much more critical of the format that I am (after I adjusted I found it compeling) but I do agree when Farber writes:
 
Lipsky's transcript makes pleasant reading for academics, the literati, and hard-core Wallace disciples, but the more casual reader may be better served by reading Lipsky's Rolling Stone profile.
 
I'm guessing a lot of Fantods readers might be part of the DFW hard-core...I loved it.
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Last Updated on Saturday, 13 March 2010 05:09  

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