David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries)
KR Blog (Free subscription) | 19 hours ago
A month ago I wrote a post on re-reading (and also re-listening). The premise was simple: books and records stay the same, while we — the readers, the listeners — change. But then something happened: I spent a week teaching David Foster Wallace — something I do most years, but hadn’t done since his suicide [...]
The Art of Fiction (Free subscription) | yesterday
Writing in the Guardian Zadie Smith speaks of her own novel-nausea, a recognisable imaginative writers block, in response to a polemic that has just come out in America asking that novels should be more full of the "real" and less of the made-up. A novelist who has been having a sabbatical reading other peoples' novels, and writing essays about them, Smith, as so often in her non-fiction...
The Millions (A Blog About Books) (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
The Howling Fantods live-blogged last week’s DFW conference at CUNY.
Conversational Reading (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
The current Tin House has fiction by David Foster Wallace: "THE PLANET TRILLAPHON AS IT STANDS IN RELATION TO THE BAD THING." Not sure what this is.
Bostonist (Free subscription) | 11/16/2009
Photo by Clayton Hauck Chicagoist occupied itself with Twilight and pillow fights . Seattlest reminded us that we don't watch Mariners baseball for the game, we watch it for the player-on-player bromance . Phillyist got personal this week, calling the man who stole a staffer's purse their official asshole of the week . Torontoist thought about personal blogging , with special guest Lauren White (known...
Austinist (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
John Krasinski directs Julianne Nicholson in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Almost completely unadaptable for the silver screen, David Foster Wallace's work has been something that most screenwriters wouldn't dare touch, what with the monolithic footnotes and the complicated structure of his prose. This precedent, however, was not enough to deter a young John Krasinski (who you may know as Jim...
Blog Town, PDX (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
The popularity of Cute Overload (and the more than 150 other cute-animal sites catalogued by the recommendation engine StumbleUpon, including Stuff on My Cat, Cute Things Falling Asleep, Kittenwar, and I Can Has Cheezburger) reflects a growing self-infantilization that is also in evidence at the social-networking site Facebook, where countless subscribers have posted photos of themselves as babies...
BookPeople's Blog (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
ohn Krasinski (better known as Jim Halpert on THE OFFICE) will be in Austin this weekend to promote his new movie and directorial debut, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The movie is based on the book of short stories by influential and recently deceased author David Foster Wallace.
The Waterglass (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
The following is a review of Infinite Jest, a novel by David Foster Wallace published in 1996 and clocking in at 1,079 pages. It took me two months to read it. Do I recommend it? There’s a big caveat to reading this book that I feel people should know, but I save it for my [...]
Flavorwire (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
The wait for Nabokov’s unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, is almost over (countdown to November 17th, people). The story, if you hadn’t heard, is that before his death the grand master ordered his son, Dmitri, to destroy the notecards on which he had been crafting his newest novel. Dmitri, after much struggle (both in [...] Related posts: The New Yorker ’s More than 10,000 on...
Flavorwire (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
We've heard that nobody reads anymore. At his New Yorker Festival reading this fall, Gary Shteyngart described his upcoming novel as a view of a futuristic, totally illiterate New York - "So, next Tuesday," he quipped. Ouch. Here at Flavorpill, we know that a healthy dose of legitimate literature is essential to offset all the twittering and facebooking we do every day, so fight the good...
this is sippey.typepad.com (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
The Office's John Krasinski has written and directed a film adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I had no idea. Two quick notes: Actually, I had no idea until learned about it via the always helpful...
The Joy of Sox (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
It may be a mess, but it's a very careful mess. A lot of work went into making it look like that. ... I wanted to write something that would make somebody say, "Holy, shit, I've got to read this," and then seduce them into doing a certain amount of work. David Foster Wallace, March 1996 The JoS IJ read begins today .
33 1/3 (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
Many congratulations to Carl Wilson - his book for the series on Celine Dion has made it on to Paste magazine's list of the 20 Best Books of the Decade. If you haven't read it yet, perhaps this might nudge you over the cliff. 20. Chuck Klosterman - Killing Yourself to Live 19. Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point 18. Donald Miller - Blue Like Jazz 17. Carl Wilson - Let's Talk About Love 16. Joseph...
The Guardian Books Blog (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
It's sobering to think about how small the world of American letters will look without him Despite having two novels coming out in the next 18 months , the memorialisation of Philip Roth has already begun. The towering American novelist has recently had his works published by the Library of America, giving him an immortal status usually reserved for dead authors. At age 76, his birthdays are now "...
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