L.O.C. #20 - Top Authors
David Foster Wallace
ThoughtsI love David Foster Wallace. I love his novels, his short fiction, and his essays as well. The word genius does get thrown around quite a bit, but I truly consider this man to be a genius. The first book of his I read was The Broom of the System and I was pretty blown away at how smart and talented a writer he was. And then along comes Infinite Jest. What a masterpiece. It's so good on so many levels. The multiple parallel and converging narratives, the ninety-eight pages of notes and errata (some of which span several pages), and the incredibly meticulous and at times incredibly dense use of language really forces you to bring your brain to the book. His sense of humor and his ability to project our current commercial-driven culture to ridiculous hypothetical extremes makes you literally laugh out loud. I can remember reading the book in public and just bursting into laughter, not even bothering to look up and see if people were looking because I just wanted to keep reading. It takes an incredible talent to create something so engrossing, intellectually stimulating, hilarious, tragic, and genuine. It's such a shame he's gone. What a huge loss for literature and our culture as a whole.
The WikiDavid Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list (covering the period 1923–2006). Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years". Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.
Wallace's first novel, 1987's The Broom of the System, garnered national attention and critical praise. Caryn James of The New York Times called it a successful "manic, human, flawed extravaganza", "emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin's Franchiser, Thomas Pynchon's V., John Irving's World According to Garp." He had begun work on his second novel, Infinite Jest, in 1991. Wallace published short fiction in Might, GQ, Playboy, The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, Mid-American Review, Conjunctions, Esquire, Open City, Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The New Yorker, and Science.
Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself on September 12, 2008. In an interview with The New York Times, Wallace's father reported that Wallace had suffered from depression for more than 20 years.
<![CDATA[<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/cj0JgqOnK2M?version=3&amp;hl=en_US" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/cj0JgqOnK2M?version=3&amp;hl=en_US</a>]]> P.S. The original list was, um, interesting to say the least.
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