My Metonym for Self-Reference Weighs a Ton

Since 2008, the year that David Foster Wallace committed suicide, there has been a steady stream of posthumous publications, none of which, as a matter of strict biblio-taxonomy, would have any business occupying the same section of your local ink-and-paper bookseller. We’ve had This Is Water (inspirational commencement speech), The Pale King (unfinished novel), Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (undergraduate philosophy thesis), and Both Flesh and Not (essays and criticism). Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you still bought physical books from that local bookseller: You’d have to do some considerable legwork around the place just to get your hands on all these posthumous Wallace books. There aren’t many figures in the landscape of contemporary literature who as fully embody Susan Sontag’s memorable definition of a writer as “someone interested in everything.” Wallace really was interested in everything: madly, distractedly, encyclopedically interested. (He wrote a book on that topic, too: Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, for which, I suppose, you might want to look in “popular science.”) Continue reading at 'Slate'

[ Slate | 2013-08-09 00:00:00 UTC ]

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