In David Foster Wallace’s cringe-inducing book, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he writes, “Or like just another manipulative pseudopomo Bullshit artist who’s trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a metadimension and commenting on the fiasco itself.”
Yeah, I thought that headline might get your attention. Also, possibly the most hateful man in the world has died. Let’s get to this week’s stories that struck my interest:
There are certain books that people like to pretend they have read, although very few actually have. Ulysses is one of them, and I never got my head around that one. With Infinite Jest, I persevered, and it was worth it.
I got interested in reading Every Story Is a Ghost Story, the biography of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max,* after Bret Easton Ellis kept complaining about it on Twitter. I don’t actually follow Ellis on Twitter, but one hears things.
“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.” -David Foster Wallace
Over Christmas vacation I read only one book, which is far fewer than I normally consume on long, lazy days, but it was the best book I’ve read in a very long time–Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, which is a rare gem in that I loved it, but it didn’t elicit the usual “book envy” my […]
Despite the holidays being a huge, routine-shattering annual occurrence, relatively few books (for adults anyway) mine everyone’s favorite time of the year for wider themes without resorting to gimmicks or sticky sentimentalism. While classics like A Christmas Carol or O. Henry’s short story A Gift of the Magi live on as near-perfect embodiments of the […]