The Howling Fantods

Jon Gray Cover Art for The Pale King?

Thursday, 29 July 2010 21:11 The Pale King

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!)

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~~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:

Joethepublicist Tremendous excitement here on getting to see sneak peaks at the copy and jacket for David Foster Wallace's The Pale King

mattclacher I had a cheeky sneak peak at the cover art for David Foster Wallace's The Pale King. Jon Gray has done a killer job on it.

[Follow me on twitter @nick_maniatis]

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Last Updated on Friday, 30 July 2010 20:02

Winter Cleaning Part I

Thursday, 29 July 2010 18:30 General Updates

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

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race In the Urban Present

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.

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Last Updated on Thursday, 29 July 2010 18:34

Some Notes on Sincerity in David Foster Wallaces Uncollected and Less-Well-Known Work

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 14:01 Critical Analysis

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:

I am currently quite eager to read one of the first collections of essays on DFW coming out next month, Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, edited by David Hering, specifically an essay on what is being called the “new sincerity” by Adam Kelly. I feel the DFW that gets read the most—his novel(s) and his journalism—continually hint at or give great meaningful gestures toward sincerity, but perhaps b/c of their form never really achieve what so many of his short stories do so devastatingly, howling-fantod-inspiringly well: they are un-dauntingly sincere. Painful sincerity. So sincere that reading the deep ironies of something like John Barth’s much anthologized “Lost in the Funhouse” acts like a kind of balm. For the sensitive summer soul, the cold analysis of Wittgenstein is far preferable to the at times crushing-lack-of-irony in some of DFW’s short fiction. Esp. when one reads story after story of people who simply cannot connect w/ one another, for every reason under the sun; or else people who are almost supernaturally connected and subsequently get dramatically, heart-wrenchingly sundered from one another. Basically, where’s Paul de Man when you need him?

Read the whole piece here.

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Original Version of Signifying Rappers

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 10:39 Articles or Essays

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]

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Student Evaluation by DFW

Tuesday, 27 July 2010 19:43 General Updates

Ever wondered what an end of course evaluation would look like if your teacher was David Foster Wallace? 22 years ago this was the case for Jessamyn, and she's posted an image of the evaluation to flickr! Thanks for sharing this, Jessamyn.

(Cheers, Adam)

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Big Red Son's Harold Hecuba

Tuesday, 27 July 2010 06:06 General Updates

Glenn Kenny [previously] writes a bit more about 'Harold Hecuba' from Big Red Son over at his blog, Some Came Running:

The real person who appears in Wallace's essay under the pseudonym "Harold Hecuba" was/is my friend Evan Wright, who gives a brief account of how he came to meet Wallace in the introduction to his latest collection of journalism, Hella Nation. [...] Wright, who at the time of this meeting was on the staff of Hustler magazine, and trying rather desperately to get leave the staff of Hustler magazine, also discusses his initial befuddlement at some of Wallace's references (the two in fact became pretty fast friends not too long after first meeting, though) ...

Continue reading over at Some Came Running.

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Consider the Archive - An Evening of David Foster Wallace

Thursday, 22 July 2010 14:21 General Updates

Consider the Archive: An Evening of David Foster Wallace, 9/14, UT Jessen Auditorium, reception at Harry Ransom Center.

Readers include: Elizabeth Crane, Jake Silverstein, Owen Egerton, Doug Dorst, and Chris Gibson. Readings from the DFW archive at the University of Texas' Harry Ransom Center.

[via And But So]

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