david foster wallace

Here’s an Infinite Jest infographic (via Kottke).

David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King 4/15/11

Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King gets a cover and a release date: April 15, 2011. [via NY Times]

Author News / 41 Comments
September 14th, 2010 / 7:28 pm

HTMLGIANT Features

Interview with Cool Famous Hot Literary Agent Erin Hosier

http://htmlgiant.com/q-a/interview-with-cool-famous-hot-literary-agent-erin-hosier/

Hey. I interviewed Erin Hosier. She’s a literary agent to a couple of fiction writers (Shya Scanlon, Brad Listi) and a lot of memoirists. Okay. I have a doctor’s appointment soon. I think that there is something wrong with me. Interview.

You mostly represent non-fiction writers, but a few fiction writers too, right? What kind of fiction manuscripts catch your eye? Do you want fiction that resembles memoir?

You should ask me more glamorous questions, like what kind of shampoo I use, or who my favorite designers are. I currently represent four literary fiction writers: Paul Jaskunas, Edan Lepucki, Brad Listi, and Shya Scanlon. I represent more illustrators than fiction writers. And more rock stars. Furthermore, these four writers are very different from each other, but I expect great things from each of them. I have represented other fiction writers over the years, but fiction writers tend to switch agents when I can’t sell their work. This is why I don’t handle more of it. My strengths are in writing, editing and pitching non-fiction. That’s my comfort zone. I even prefer documentaries to other movies, and I see way more movies than read books. Also, I’m a slow reader, and fiction comes in long manuscripts. I’ve noticed too that even if a novel is brilliant in so many ways – it makes you laugh or cry or it haunts your dreams or makes you look at the world in a new way, if it entertains – but it has just ONE fatal flaw in the marketing or manuscript department, it’s not going to sell.

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82 Comments
August 10th, 2010 / 12:39 pm

Further from Jessamyn West on David Foster Wallace as a teacher: her remembrance of him @ librarian.net, including his quote, “Just because it really happened, doesn’t make it good fiction.” Thanks again to her.

1987 David Foster Wallace student evaluation

[Used with permission of Jessamyn West. Thank you to her.]

Behind the Scenes / 139 Comments
July 27th, 2010 / 4:20 pm

Ellis on Wallace

Everybody’s innovator-buddy Bret Easton Ellis, during a q/a in Hackney:
Question: David Foster Wallace – as an American writer, what is your opinion now that he has died?

Answer: Is it too soon? It’s too soon right? Well i don’t rate him. The journalism is pedestrian, the stories scattered and full of that Mid-Western faux-sentimentality and Infinite Jest is unreadable. His life story and his battle with depression however is really quite touching…

[via The Howling Fantods]

Behind the Scenes / 207 Comments
July 16th, 2010 / 10:51 am

5 moth-beaten mumblings

14. Flash, prose, short thing? This is your last day to enter the Fineline contest.

2. There is a Gordon Lish Facebook page.

7. Ten best short story collections? Maybe…

5. Here is that David Foster Wallace piece about Federer you should read every year around Wimbledon.

1. Sexcast # 8: Interview/podcast with Roxana Shirazi, author of The last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage.

Author Spotlight & Contests / 13 Comments
July 1st, 2010 / 10:36 am

4 cups of world

14. Sometimes people write stupid shit just hoping for a response. Example, at Huff: Comparing Dave Barry and David Foster Wallace…right. (Next week David Stoesz will examine a midnight dinner of two bottles of white wine [fling cork into air, don’t need it]/rooftop blanket making out/grappling versus a quick lunch at Cracker Barrel.)

2. Over at The Short Review: Richard Yates Collected Stories.

4. June 30 is Indy Underground Reading Series. Donald Ray Pollock, Andrew Scott, The Brick Windows. Music, words, alcohol–what do you need in life?

7. Ernaux’s autobiographical books are breathtaking in their level of disclosure and unflinching as they rehash real-life experiences—obsessive love, bereavement, abortion, marriage, illness, sexual jealousy—that are not bizarre or uncommonly tragic, nor by any stretch uplifting or inspirational in the Eat, Pray, Love vein.

Amazing expose of Annie Ernaux at The Second Pass. Do you know her well? You should. Summer is here–get to jumping.

Author News & Author Spotlight / 18 Comments
June 22nd, 2010 / 8:43 am

Jonathan Franzen on David Foster Wallace:

Somebody could write a whole monograph on how deliberately and artfully he deploys the modifier ‘sort of.’