The paperback of The David Foster Wallace Reader is due for release on December 1 2015. You can pre-order it over at Amazon.com now.
Check out some reviews of the hardback release last year here and here.
(P.S. / disclosure: The super short afterword for Incarnations of Burned Children was written by me...)
Note: Thanks to @AlexSinclairNFL for pointing out a Penguin imprint of the paper has been available for ages from the UK.
Last Updated on Friday, 09 October 2015 01:08
I like this type of thing. Check out the filmography endnote in Infinite Jest and compare it to the album from The Kickback, Sorry All Over the Place...
From the Huffington Post, The Kickback Gears Up for Their Full-Length Debut, Sorry All Over the Place:
[...] You are a fan of the late, great David Foster Wallace, whose Infinite Jest provided the title for your album. He spoke of contrasts and layers in his book, which influenced contrasts and layers in your music. Could you tell me more about this literary connection to your music? I went home to work a summer camp job in South Dakota after I had moved to Chicago and brought Infinite Jest with me. My parents wound up getting divorced and I was sort of stuck at home while it all went down. The book weighs, like, three paperweights and a German shepard, so I'm pretty sure that trying to avoid the divorce stuff was about the only thing that helped me get through it. I'm sure a lot of other people have experienced [that situation], and I sort of became transfixed with Wallace's work. There's this hour-and-a-half interview he did on Youtube where he spends most of his responses either visibly frustrated at his own ability to express himself or mildly annoyed at the questions. He grits his teeth a lot and winces. It's sort of entrancing. He hurt a lot of the time and seemed like kind of a shitty person sometimes and was absolutely brilliant and fought the urge to be recognized for his work. I find a lot of our songs indirectly channel him and try to remember how sick he would be if some band he'd never heard of name-dropped him in their bio. [...] See also:
The Kickback's debut album Sorry All Over the Place is a tapestry of references.
The Kickback - Sorry All Over the Place - Review
The Kickback - Sorry All Over the Place - Amazon
(Cheers, Billy!)
Last Updated on Monday, 21 September 2015 14:43
Last Updated on Sunday, 13 September 2015 03:05
Caleb Brooks' piece for Not Mad earlier this week is worth a read, David Foster Wallace, "The End of the Tour", and the Thoughtful Labor of the Wordsmith:
[...]So when I left the theatre that night I did the only thing I knew to do: walk back across the college by the light of a moon that was almost super to the dorm room that was my temporary home and dig out my travel-worn Kindle. I hopped back and forth from Although Of Course You Ended Up Becoming Yourself and Infinite Jest for the next few hours, from the peeling-tape hum of the frozen Illinois interstate captured by voice recorder to the antics of Lenz terrorizing the cat populations around Ennet House. What a pleasure it is to be invited into the deepest wrinkles of someone else’s mind, what a gift it is be reminded that we are really not alone. [...]
Continue reading, David Foster Wallace, "The End of the Tour", and the Thoughtful Labor of the Wordsmith.
|
There's a pretty interesting article by Laura Miller (@magiciansbook also the 1996 DFW Interview) over at The New Yorker today, David Foster Wallace and the Perils of “Litchat”.
I think Miller makes some interesting observations about the role of 'Litchat' in defining the reception of an author. But I also reacted negatively to the representation (stereotype?) of Wallace fans/enthusiasts etc, but then again, I am a 40 year old white male. Hmmm...
[...] This stuff—let’s call it litchat—may be ephemeral, but it absolutely shapes the formal reception of a writer’s work. If everyone in your M.F.A. workshop or the last book party you went to mentions an established author’s name with reverence, you’ll be that much more likely to lay it on thick should you ever be asked to review her new book. Or, conversely, if you decide to prove your independence of mind and go contrarian on her, you’ll be aware of the inertia of all that acclaim and feel the imperative to push back with corresponding force. Reviewers don’t like to admit that they’re influenced by such factors, but unless they live cut off from other readers, writers, and critics entirely, they can’t really help it. [...]
Continue reading David Foster Wallace and the Perils of “Litchat” here.
Last Updated on Thursday, 10 September 2015 08:12
|
|
|
|