There’s a symposium (of sorts) over at the Quarterly Conversation about David Foster Wallace’s work, with my essay on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The essay was a lot of fun to write, revisiting this specific book, which I had not read in years, and thinking about DFW’s “legacy” as it were.
More than most, DFW has a tendency (I believe) towards stratifying the audience, creating rabid, dueling camps of the devoted and the non-devoted. He’s not a writer that people just “like” or “dislike” which is one of the things that makes him most fascinating. Even now, removed from even his death, major publications seem incapable of actually discussing his work as complex, and at times flawed, and at times unequaled. It’s nice to be a part of an effort to counteract this overly simplified narrative.