Yesterday I received a galley copy of Sideshow Media Group's David Foster Wallace paper collection edited by David Hering, Consider David Foster Wallace. (Available for pre-order now at Amazon.com).

 

The collection stems from the papers delivered at the Liverpool DFW conference organised by David Hering last year.

 

It opens with a preface by David Hering and leads into an updated version of Greg Carlisle's (author of Sideshow Media Group's IJ guide Elegant Complexity) Liverpool Keynote (which you can read the original version of by scrolling down, here).

 

David has ordered the papers broadly chronologically in relation to DFW's output, so of course I jumped around the collection and read what caught my eye.

 

Highlights so far:

 

Adam Kelly's —David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction. A fantastic paper that considers DFW's place in the current movement of American Fiction.

 

David Hering's —Infinite Jest: Triangles, Cycles, Choices, & Chases. David Hering literally maps the movements of Poor Tony Krause's and Randy Lenz's movements from a pivotal moment in Infinite Jest, with surprising results.

 

Clare Hayes-Bradys's - The Book, the Broom and the Ladder: Philosophical Groundings in the Work of David Foster Wallace. This paper is a great overview and introduction to the philosophical underpinnings of DFW's first novel, The Broom of the System, as well as some of his short fiction. As I don't have a particularly broad understanding of the philosophy in this novel I found this paper particularly engaging.

 

Gregory Phipps'—The Ideal Athlete: John Wayne in Infinite Jest. This paper is dedicated to the most detailed (and only) analysis I've read of the character of John Wayne from Infinite Jest. It is amazing.

 

[Big thanks to Matt Bucher of Sideshow Media Group Press and wallace-l. Also a big hello to David and Adam, both of whom I had the pleasure to meet at the NY conference last year.]

 

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