Across two decades of intense creativity, David Foster Wallace
(1962-2008) crafted a remarkable body of work that ranged from
unclassifiable essays, to a book about transfinite mathematics, to
vertiginous fictions. Whether through essay volumes ("A Supposedly
Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster"), short story
collections ("Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous
Men, Oblivion"), or his novels ("Infinite Jest, The Broom of the
System"), the luminous qualities of Wallace's work recalibrated our
measures of modern literary achievement. "Conversations with David
Foster Wallace" gathers twenty-two interviews and profiles that
trace the arc of Wallace's career, shedding light on his omnivorous
talent.Jonathan Franzen has argued that, for Wallace, an interview
provided a formal enclosure in which the writer "could safely draw
on his enormous native store of kindness and wisdom and expertise."
Wallace's interviews create a wormhole in which an author's private
theorizing about art spill into the public record. Wallace's best
interviews are vital extra-literary documents, in which we catch
him thinking aloud about his signature concerns--irony's magnetic
hold on contemporary language, the pale last days of postmodernism,
the delicate exchange that exists between reader and writer. At the
same time, his acute focus moves across MFA programs, his
negotiations with religious belief, the role of footnotes in his
writing, and his multifaceted conception of his work's
architecture. "Conversations with David Foster Wallace" includes a
previously unpublished interview from 2005, and a version of Larry
McCaffery's influential "Review of Contemporary Fiction" interview
with Wallace that has been expanded with new material drawn from
the original raw transcript.
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