Wallace, David Foster Books

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 353 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Too long, too self absorbed 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

David Wallace may have been a genius, but even geniuses need good editors. This 1000 page book needed a TEAM of editors. It is way too long and self involved a novel to be given anything more than a couple of stars.

If you are interested in what all the fuss is about, be sure you know you will be reading it for a while, and may find it less frustrating to take it out of your local library.

Infinite Jest 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I had read David Foster Wallce previously. He had authored pieces in Harper's for years. I was saddened by his taking his own life, but upon his death I decided to read as much of his that I could. I.J., as his fans call it, is the first actual example of post modernism that I can relate to another person and explain its basis. I have read all the post mod classics, "White Noise" "Underworld" et al, but until I.J. I was unable to relate it to anyone.

I.J. is an experience in reading. It is unlike any novel that I recall reading in the last 20 years. I describe it as reading on the internet. All the footnotes the author puts in are so many hyper links to other textual treasures. It's intense reading. I liken it to Pynchon in its rapidity and sentence structure. Foster Wallace doesn't have the gift of word choice like Pynchon, but I.J. is just as sad, funny, and exhausting as "Gravity's Rainbow".
Buy this to read at different times of the day. Don't sit down at period of time and try to consume it. I don't believe that was his intent.

David Foster Wallace was a talented artist that will be greatly missed.

Editorial Review:

In a sprawling, wild, super-hyped magnum opus, David Foster Wallace fulfills the promise of his precocious novelThe Broom of the System.Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction, features a huge cast and multilevel narrative, and questions essential elements of American culture - our entertainments, our addictions, our relationships, our pleasures, our abilities to define ourselves.

Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

David Foster Wallace

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 48 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Smart, eclectic, and hilariously funny. 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Full disclosure: I have a major intellectual crush on David Foster Wallace. Yes, yes, I know about his weaknesses - the digressions, the rampant footnote abuse, the flaunting of his amazing erudition, the mess that is 'Infinite Jest'. I know all this, and I don't care. Because when he is in top form, there's nobody else I would rather read. The man is hilarious; I think he's a mensch, and I don't believe he parades his erudition just to prove how smart he is. I think he can't help himself - it's a consequence of his wide-ranging curiosity. At heart he's a geek, but a charming, hyper-articulate geek. Who is almost frighteningly intelligent.

The pieces in "Consider the Lobster" have appeared previously in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Observer, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Harper's, Gourmet, and Premiere magazines. Among them are short meditations on Updike's `Toward the end of Time', on Dostoyevsky, on Kafka's humor, and on the `breathtakingly insipid autobiography' of tennis player Tracy Austin. An intermediate length piece describes Foster Wallace's (eminently sane) reaction to the attacks of September 11th. Each of these shorter essays is interesting, but the meat and potatoes of the book is in the remaining five, considerably longer, pieces. They are:

Big Red Son: a report on the 1998 Adult Video News awards (the Oscars of porn) in Las Vegas.
Consider the Lobster: a report on a visit to the annual Maine Lobster Festival (for Gourmet magazine).
Host: a report on conservative talk radio, based on extensive interviews conducted with John Ziegler, host of "Live and Local" on Southern California's KFI.
Up Simba: an account of seven days on the campaign trail with John McCain in his 2000 presidential bid (for Rolling Stone).
Authority and American Usage: a review of Bryan Garner's "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage" , which serves as a springboard for a terrific exegesis of usage questions and controversies.

Here's what I like about David Foster Wallace's writing: I know of nobody else who writes as thoughtfully and intelligently. That he manages to write so informatively, with humor and genuine wit, on almost any subject under the sun is mind-blowing - it's also why I am willing to forgive his occasional stylistic excesses. (Can you spell `footnote'?) You may not have a strong interest in lobsters or pornography, but the essays in question are terrific. The reporting on Ziegler and McCain is amazingly good, heartbreakingly so, because it makes the relative shallowness of most reporting painfully evident. Finally, the article on usage is a tour de force - when it first appeared in Harper's, upon finishing it, I was immediately moved to go online and order a copy of Garner's book (which is just as good as DFW promised).

How can you not enjoy an essay that begins as follows?

"Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near Lewinskian scale?

....... (several other rhetorical questions) ......

Did you know that US lexicography even *had* a seamy underbelly?"

And which later contains sentences such as:
"Teachers who do this are dumb."
"This argument is not quite the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was, but it's still vulnerable to objections."
and - my personal favorite -
"This is so stupid it practically drools."

Not everyone will give this collection 5 stars, but I do.

Editorial Review:

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

David Foster Wallace

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 94 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Wallace on a Cruise Ship? 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

There are some great essays in the late(tragically) Prof. Wallace's book but the winner is the eponymous " A Supposedly Fun Thing----". OMG! He goes on a seven day luxury Caribbean Cruise--not his idea of course but an assignment from a magazine. I know I would rather die than go on a cruise but to be reminded in this hilarious essay just why that is the case was a delightful experience Do not miss it! The book, I mean, not the cruise---

Confusion Mistaken for Genius 2 out of 5 stars.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Critics often cry "genius" when they don't understand something, especially when it is presented in such a serious academic way, it can't possibly be trash. It must be so good, we're just not on the same level to appreciate it.

Right after I finished this book, I read the Rolling Stone article on his death by hanging, where almost from the first thing he wrote, he was declared the voice of his generation. Alas, a very hard thing to live with. How do you go anywhere but down after that?

I tried to read every essay in this book, but some of them were just so dense with nothingness disguised in tight cocoons of words, I couldn't fight through it. It's no surprise he has a fascination with David Lynch, the subject of one of his essays and another "genius" I don't appreciate. The essay which lends itself to the book's title, the long discourse on his luxury cruise, is the most accessible. The State Fair essay is the second most accessible. But it seems that Wallace's overall theme is that all people are stupid, and woe on him for being mentally superior to everyone else, and thus, a lonely stranger in a strange land.

But in a way, I understand that since I sometimes feel that way myself. And yeah, it leads to the noose because the stupid people turn out to be the happiest ones.

Reading Wallace is like being adrift at sea on a raft, and debris keeps passing by, and you're supposed to be able to tell from each piece of debris the story behind it and where it came from, even though most of the time you will have no idea. It's just debris. Yet if Wallace were on your raft, he would provide the history of each piece of debris, he just wouldn't tell you.

Editorial Review:

This exuberantly praised--and uproariously funny--first collection of nonfiction pieces by one of the most acclaimed and adventurous writers of our time--the author of "Infinite Jest"--"reconfirms Mr. Wallace's stature as one of his generation's preeminent talents" ("New York Times") 5-city author tour. Print ads .

The Broom of the System

David Foster Wallace

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 44 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Disappointing 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

As a raving fanatic of DFW, I was surprisingly and to all contrary expectations let down quite thoroughly by his first novel. People say it's a mini Infinite Jest, but that's really not true at all. I mean there are budding and teasing similarities, but they are, in my opinion, very different novels concerned with different issues. First, The Broom of the System is mostly in dialogue without the sharp wit and rolling-on-the-floor-funny humor and the trademark myriad lengthy footnotes you see in his later works. Second, it is a hell of a lot less pretentious; i.e. I didn't have to consult the OED, not even once, which is unthinkable in his later works, fiction or essays. In this sense, the book is much easier to read, but then for a seasoned DFW fan/reader, it felt lightweight, paltry, and very unsatisfying indeed. In other words, I felt cheated.

Indulge me with a little rant. The quintessential DFW experience is a menagerie of pretentiousness, sophistication, and killer humor blended together with the right amount of direction or plot. And here I say pretentiousness in its most possible sense. People tend to say, "Oh that's pretentious!" in the spirit of angry and dismissive criticism, but if you look at it more carefully, what's wrong with being pretentious? You know a lot of stuff, and you show off what you know. And what's wrong with that? Does it make you feel stupid? Ignorant? Inadequate? Well then, big guy, maybe you should sit, look up those words, learn them, and delve in further. Be a little more patient when reading books. It's literature, not popular fiction. It offers you an opportunity to be more educated, more knowledgeable, and perhaps - God forbid - more pretentious. Anyway, DFW's pretentiousness is by no means a malicious or harmful kind where he's trying to put you down or show he's a hundred times smarter than you. On the contrary, it seems to be informed by a desire to just play around with words (e.g. Hey, this word sounds cool, why not use it?).

But I digress. The point is that The Broom of the System didn't offer the full range and depth of DFW experience. It wasn't pretentious (which can be a good thing for some readers), it wasn't that sophisticated (no footnotes? Come on. And any cool plot? Like a film that makes people watch until they die and is being hunted by a Canadian wheelchair terrorist group to give the big terrorizing finger to the US?), and it wasn't that funny (I can recall only three, at most four, instances when I laughed out loud). The plot, too, was pretty bland and wasn't exciting. It also kept going off on tremendous tangents that weren't 1) funny or 2)relevant to the main story.

So all in all, it was such a let down that it almost hurt when the book ended as it did. Read his essays and his magnum opus, but this one isn't that worth it.

Editorial Review:

Published when Wallace was just twenty-four years old, The Broom of the System stunned critics and marked the emergence of an extraordinary new talent. At the center of this outlandishly funny, fiercely intelligent novel is the bewitching heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio. Lenore’s great-grandmother has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home. Her beau, and boss, Rick Vigorous, is insanely jealous, and her cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler, has suddenly started spouting a mixture of psycho- babble, Auden, and the King James Bible. Ingenious and entertaining, this debut from one of the most innovative writers of his generation brilliantly explores the paradoxes of language, storytelling, and reality.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 68 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Talented writer will be missed 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I am still absorbing the news that David Foster Wallace apparently took his own life this weekend. He was 46.

I vividly recall my experience reading "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," because these short short stories are both insightful and laugh out loud funny. Wallace had a keen understanding of the often reptilian and repellent motivations of human beings. He knew that for all our intelligence compared to other animals, we are maddeningly flawed. I would have loved to read his take on recent political news, such as the claim by a presidential candidate that his opponent called his running mate a pig. Wallace's insight will live on.

Fragments of modernism not as compelling as his essays 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I am a huge fan of DFW's non fiction. His essays are amongst the choicest examples of the modern form. But his fiction I'm not so sure. I keep gearing up for a shot at his mammoth Infinite Jest, but reading these trickles from his stream of consciousness mind puts me off. I can see the talent there, but these come across as flicked off the wrist exercises in craft. Neither particularly stylish nor funny. I think I'll stick to the non fiction.

Editorial Review:

An exuberantly acclaimed collection -- twenty-two stories that combine hilarity and an escalating disquiet as they expand our ideas of the pleasures fiction can afford.

Girl With Curious Hair

David Foster Wallace

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

DFW, Fiction and DFW and Fiction 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Okay, so here's the deal w/ DFW: the guy is extremely intelligent. he is also overtly aware of his intelligence and displays it all over the place. this bothers people. some things to remember and know about DFW: he was a philo. major as an undergrad; his first book was an investigation of the theories of ludwig wittgenstein, also an overly intelligent fellow and very hard to follow. Something else: in this collection of short-stories, the one titled "the girl w/ curious hair," DFW displays that he also knows one thing or another about fiction and that he has read a lot of it and doesn't like most of it. the title story, "girl w cur..." is a cool story is you think you like punks and nihilists and sado-masochism and other stuff, but it helps to know something about bret easton ellis's stuff, and to know that DFW hates (HATES!) BEE w/ some serious passion. Then there's the two stories about real-world characters, "little expressionless animals"--the opening piece, and i think it's pretty damn cool--and "lyndon" are investigations/explorations of using "real-world characters" (which for legal reasons has to be roundly denied) that was pioneered by the exceedingly weird and totally fun robert coover who wrote "the public burning" whose main character was richard milhouse nixon and was the first book to use a "RWC" as a protagonist. so there's that. then there's the piece of cathartic/psyhological diaglogue, in which DFW dips his fingers, there's "john billy" which is kind of a stab at faulkner but is also pretty cool and a really great read near the end (which i find is pretty true of most of DFW's stuff, it takes a while to build up and the guy is a straight-up bonafide (a word he hates) genius at bringing it all together and making you feel good when you finish a story). there's some other stuff in there (like "everything's green" which is only two pages but still isn't his shortest piece which was only like five lines, and both of those are cool). finally, there's the final fiction, a novella of about like 150 pages or something and it's all-over john barth (author of "the floating opera," "giles goat-boy" (which is way weird), "the sot-weed factor" and others) principally his exlposive collection of shorts, "lost in the funhouse." ytou should read that entire book (it's short) in order to really get what DFW is after in "westward the course of empire makes its way," and he's really after "metafiction," look it up. so this is all to say that DFW is writing fiction, and it's way cool fiction, well written and crafted, with interesting characters and solid "stories," but it is way helpful to know his sources. this kind of fiction--intertexual and in some ways needing a well-literary-read reader--is not for all. it's some damn fun stuff on it's own though. i recommend DFW to those w/ an interest in where "serious literary fiction" might be making it's way; to those who also enjoy and appreciate vollmann, powers, pynchon (seriously pynchon), gaddis, barth, maybe updike a little but not totally, and some other guys, yeah, mostly white males, but also cynthia ozick, whose fiction is slamming, especially her shorts which are hard to come by. so there's that, which is nice.

Editorial Review:

This collection could possibly represent the first flowering of post-postmoderism: visions of the world that re-imagine reality as more realistic than we can imagine. A compelling presence of a holograph and the up-to-the-second feeling of the most advanced art.

Oblivion: Stories

David Foster Wallace

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Missing Something 3 out of 5 stars.
7 of 9 people found this review helpful.

First, let me say I absolutely LOVE reading David Foster Wallace. This collection showcases one of his strengths: the attention to detail - or, more accurately - the minutiae - of everyday thoughts; how, for example, three minutes of a day can only be captured by pages & pages & pages of prose, because the human brain simultaneously functions on so many levels (best illustrated when you find yourself listening to someone attempting to explain 'the dream I had last night' but use so many qualifiers that a dream that lasts for probably no more than one minute absorbs the conversation of an entire lunch - or as least smoke break).

Ultimately, though, I found myself wishing a strong editorial voice would have confronted Wallace on several counts prior to the publishing of 'Oblivion.' This is especially true with the first story, 'Mister Squishy,' which seems to build up to a crescendo that is never reached. Wallace weaves together several different narratives into what the reader expects to come together at some point, but instead the story just...ends.

'The Suffering Channel' is a lost opportunity of amazing proportions. In this story, a highly engaging tale begins - and the reader falls into it helplessly, increasingly curious as to what it all means and where it's all going. Yet, instead of reaching a conclusion, or really any sort of resting point, the story abruptly ends. I wondered if the printer had left out pages & pages of the book, and I fought against the urge to hurl it across the room.

I absolutely love Wallace's amazing & rare gifts. But what 'Oblivion' shows is a 'writer's writer.' These stories are partial projects, not stories. They are, at best, extremely well fleshed-out beginnings.

It's a joy to read the words of someone with such innate talent, with such incredible gifts with the written word, but to me what we're left with is just one-half of a whole. Most of these stories end so abruptly, one can scarcely even call them a 'slice of life' because they consistently refer to past or future events that are never quite clear or explained. It's not that I'm left frustrated because 'I want to know what happened.' I'm frustrated because what could have been three or four great full-length novels were robbed.

I will always read Wallace because it is an incredibly intense & enjoyable experience. But I probably would not recommend this book to anyone I know because it is so unfulfilling and ultimately disappointing.

I guess 'Oblivion' can be classified as 'experimental' fiction or non-narrative storytelling, but Wallace is capable of so much more than that, as we have seen in the past, as we will hopefully see in the future, & as even 'Oblivion' attests.

Editorial Review:

'Stunning......Wallace is an astonishing storyteller whose fiction reminds us why we learned how to read in the first place.' -San Francisco Chronicle OBLIVION is an arresting, hilarious new creation from a writer universally regarded as one of the most prodigious and original talents in contemporary letters. In the stories that make up this exuberantly praised collection, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness-a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his.

The Best American Essays 2007 (Edition 001)

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The twenty-two essays in this powerful collection -- perhaps the most diverse in the entire series -- come from a wide variety of periodicals, ranging from n + 1 and PMS to the New Republic and The New Yorker, and showcase a remarkable range of forms. Read on for narrative -- in first and third person -- opinion, memoir, argument, the essay-review, confession, reportage, even a dispatch from Iraq. The philosopher Peter Singer makes a case for philanthropy; the poet Molly Peacock constructs a mosaic tribute to a little-known but remarkable eighteenth-century woman artist; the novelist Marilynne Robinson explores what has happened to holiness in contemporary Christianity; the essayist Richard Rodriguez wonders if California has anything left to say to America; and the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson attempts to find common ground with the evangelical community.

In his introduction, David Foster Wallace makes the spirited case that "many of these essays are valuable simply as exhibits of what a first-rate artistic mind can make of particular fact-sets -- whether these involve the 17-kHz ring tones of some kids' cell phones, the language of movement as parsed by dogs, the near-infinity of ways to experience and describe an earthquake, the existential synecdoche of stagefright, or the revelation that most of what you've believed and revered turns out to be self-indulgent crap."

Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 1996): The Future of Fiction, A Forum Edited by David Foster Wallace

John O'Brien, David Foster Wallace

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Open City Number Five : Change or Die (Open City)

David Foster Wallace, Mary Gaitskill, Delmore Schwartz, Helen Thorpe, Irvine Welsh, Jerome Badanes

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The most important new literary journal to emerge since Granta, Open City has published some of the best work by major writers and artists such as Mary Gaitskill, Denis Johnson, Jeff Koons, David Foster Wallace, Irvine Welsh, Terry Southern, Patrick McCabe, Sam Lipsyte, and David Berman. Edited by the writers Thomas Beller and Daniel Pinchbeck and originally published by the late Robert Bingham, writing from Open City has been included in many prestigious anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Known for launching the careers of today's best new writers, the editors are also committed to printing important unpublished work by writers from past eras, such as Richard Yates, Delmore Schwartz, Jim Thompson, Cyril Connolly, Edvard Munch, and Gregor von Rezzori. With its innovative and daring mix of the old and the new, Open City combines undiscovered writing by classic authors with a fascinating portrait of a literary generation in the making. Open City #12 includes "After the Wall", a special section on Berlin's new generation of fiction writers; a story by Lewis Cole on the end of radicalism; and debut fiction by Sam Brumbaugh and Heather Lorimer. This issue features a previously unpublished story by Ford Maddox Ford.