David Foster

David Foster Wallace, the author best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” was found dead in his home, according to police. He was 46. Wallace’s wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m. Friday, said Jackie Morales, a records clerk with the Claremont Police Department. Wallace taught creative writing and English at nearby Pomona College. “He cared deeply for his students and transformed the lives of many young people,” said Dean Gary Kates. “It’s a great loss to our teaching faculty.” Wallace’s first novel, “The Broom of the System,” gained national attention in 1987 for its ambition ... Read Full Story

September 15, 2008 Brilliant. Sardonic. Humorist. Experimenter with prose. Award winning writer. Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday. “He was one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years,” Ulin said. He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late ’80s and early 1990s,” Ulin said. “And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can ... Read Full Story

We were walking about the church grounds of St. Mary of the Angels , to escape the sickly-sweet cloying lilies at the wake, when we came upon people discussing how a robed Franciscan monk had berated them for throwing coins into the water feature. This is not a wishing well, he'd said. A clash of subjective realities, or as David Foster Wallace termed it, of "default settings": There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim ... Read Full Story

What follows are some of the better recordings I’ve collected over the years of DFW reading his work and being interviewed. Links take you to a site where you can download the mp3s. You can find most of these recordings dispersed over the net, but I thought I’d try to collate it all here. If you like what you hear, get a hold of DFW reading his own work in the audiobook version of Consider the Lobster (his handling of footnotes is pretty cool). Enjoy. http://www.sendspace.com/file/lmp4ny">David Foster Wallace reads some unpublished stuff . December 6, 2000, Lannan Foundation. The middle section, beginning around 12:50 ... Read Full Story

I feel like a bit of a Johnny-Come-Lately in my appreciation of David Foster Wallace. I tried to read Infinite Jest back in high school but was too intimidated by it to make substantial progress. Since his suicide, I’ve gone back and read many of the essays and short stories, discovering an intense poignancy that I haven’t found with other contemporary writers. He writes for a generation of readers struggling to remain sane in a world overburdened with information and lacking in human depth or sincerity. As he has explained in interviews, there is a constant battle in his work between the desire to ... Read Full Story