On Demand movie picks Nov 21, 2009
(Comcast Movies and Events) For his first film as a director, actor John Krasinski has strip-mined David Foster Wallace s 10-year-old story collection. What was once a disturbance of the literary peace is now just a painful date-night literalization: He s Just Not That Into You - for Now. (Boston Globe)
Mobbed by fans -- in a good way Nov 9, 2009
Fans packed Brookline Booksmith to see John Krasinski, who read excerpts from David Foster Wallace s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men ... After spending Friday afternoon at the Globe on , Newton-bred actor John Krasinski stopped by Brookline Booksmith on Saturday to read excerpts from David Foster Wallace s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, on which Krasinski s new movie (his directorial debut) is based. (Boston Globe)
Movie review capsules Nov 7, 2009
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men For his first film as a director, the actor John Krasinski has strip-mined David Foster Wallace s 10-year-old story collection. What was once a disturbance of the literary peace is now just a painful date-night literalization: He s Just Not That into You - for Now. (Boston Globe)
John Krasinski stops by Boston Globe office Nov 7, 2009
(The movie is based on the David Foster Wallace book of the same name. Though his Office costars couldn t make it to last night s screening at the Kendall Square Cinema - I ll forgive them just this once, he joked - his parents, brothers, and assorted Brown buddies were expected to be there. (Boston Globe)
‘Brief Interviews With Hideous Men’ ranges from soaring scenes to screen tests Nov 6, 2009
In reading David Foster Wallace s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, it may never have crossed your mind that his assault on a particular type of gender politics would make a cute little movie ... David Foster Wallace. (Boston Globe)
Gourmet, 3 other magazines to close Oct 6, 2009
It was known for more than just recipes: It dived into extended discourse about travel, wine and food, such as the 2004 piece in which David Foster Wallace argued against the practice of boiling lobsters to death. Now, Conde Nast said, Gourmet's brand will live on in books and TV programming. (AZCentral -- Business)
After 70 Years 'Gourmet' Magazine Goes Bust Oct 6, 2009
Gourmet, edited by Ruth Reichl and revered by many culinary aficionados, was launched in 1941 by Earle R. MacAusland as "the magazine of good living." It was known for more than just recipes: It dived into extended discourse about travel, wine and food, such as the 2004 piece in which David Foster Wallace argued against the practice of boiling lobsters to death. Now, Conde Nast said, Gourmet's brand will live on in books and TV programming. (Fox News)
Life without Miss Manners Oct 3, 2009
In his speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College, the late writer David Foster Wallace illustrated the perspective we develop when culture panders to egocentrism. "Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe," Wallace said, and thus we can't help but lose sight of social contracts passed down for centuries. (San Francisco Chronicle -- Opinion)
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Heavy on the Hideous Sep 26, 2009
" One hopes not, Professor Adams, although here? Yes, they do sound shallow, and that's painful for anyone who believes men have more dimensions than hideousness. Wallace was a writer who pieced together such complicated crazy quilts of words that you had to take his essays and prose in slowly, inch by inch (or in the case of me and , absorb over the course of a leisurely decade. Or two). You hope for that same richness in Krasinski's film. Instead I found myself thinking of those... (Time.com)
Author Hopes 'genius Grant' Will Shine On Haiti Sep 23, 2009
Previous authors to win the MacArthur grant include Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Andrea Barrett. Paul Farmer, the recently named U.N. deputy special envoy for Haiti, was picked in 1993 in large part for his work as a physician in Haiti. (CBS News -- World)
From pages to film Sep 20, 2009
John Krasinski owes his acting career to novelist David Foster Wallace ... Q: So what is it about David Foster Wallace that appeals to you ... John Krasinski in 'Brief Interviews' Articles John Krasinski owes his acting career to novelist David Foster Wallace. (San Francisco Chronicle -- Entertainment)
A look at this fall’s movies Sep 13, 2009
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men A year after the suicide of writer David Foster Wallace - the worst blow to American letters in a generation - a film of one of his unfilmable books arrives onscreen. Directed by actor and The Office star John Krasinski, Interviews arranges Wallace s meditations on misogyny into a string of monologues delivered to researcher Julianne Nicholson. (Boston Globe)
Thom Pain (Based On Nothing) Aug 4, 2009
There s a contemporary American-lit feel to Eno s hip-to-the-inner-hurt verbal gymnastics melancholy brainiac David Foster Wallace s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men springs to mind but his instincts for theatrical mischief and the limits of an audience s tolerance for such things are always tangible. Sam Strong s production is a very careful orchestration of minimal elements: Claude Marcos s nothing-is-everything set; Danny Pettingill s interplay of light and dark; Kelly Ryall s cautiously... (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
A supremely low point for the law Jul 19, 2009
An Infinite summer read Infinite Summer is an online effort to get as many people as possible to read David Foster Wallace s magnum opus, Infinite Jest, by Sept. 22. Here s how the math looked when the starting gun went off on June 21: 1,000 pages divided by 92 days = 75 pages a week. (Boston Globe)
OPEN COURT: Summer reading club Jul 5, 2009
I came up with the idea while I was sitting down with David Foster Wallace s epic novel Infinite Jest. A friend of mine came across a Web site called , where thousands of people from across the world decided to form the Internet s largest interactive book club. (Green Valley News & Sun, AZ)
James Howard Kunstler on Michael Jackson as America Jul 2, 2009
The Man in the Mirror - Clusterfuck Nation. Clusterfuck Nation Comment on Current Events by the Author of "The Long Emergency". (Harper's Magazine)
Summer of 'Infinite Jest': 3 months, 1,079 pages Jun 20, 2009
It's a bibliophile's version of beach reading: Take the summer to tackle "Infinite Jest," the acclaimed but daunting David Foster Wallace novel known for its inventive structure, its elastic style and its 1,000 pages. More than a decade after acquiring a reputation for being one of literature's lesser-read best-sellers, "Infinite Jest" is primed for a new moment in the sun. (San Francisco Chronicle -- Entertainment)
The Phenom From Tehran Jun 20, 2009
The Times on TennisWhether or not Raphael Nadal will go down as greater than his idol and rival Roger Federer, the Times Magazine's (very good) on Nadal cannot compete with the now-defunct Times sports magazine Play's 2006 article on Federer, "," by the late David Foster Wallace. That you must read. (Slate)
GREATEST: Federer still has plenty of time to cement G.O.A.T. status Jun 16, 2009
(If you've never read by the late, great David Foster Wallace, there's no better time. . (SportsIllustrated.CNN -- Tennis)
America Needs More Insane Tennis Parents Jun 3, 2009
Florida-based sports psychologist John F. Murray likens the stress of the game to combat, and the late David Foster Wallace once wrote that tennis "is to artillery and airstrikes what football is to infantry and attrition." It's no coincidence that three notorious tennis fathersStefano Capriati, Mike Agassi, and Roland Jaegerwere trained as boxers. Great players reduce their opponents to targets that must be eliminated. (Slate)
Six Missoulian staffers win SPJ awards Jun 1, 2009
- General Column: Michael Moore, first place, for three columns: one about a deer he watched throughout the winter, another about the death of novelist David Foster Wallace, and one about his trip to Paws Up Resort. - Photopage: Kurt Wilson, second place, Game of Beauty, for the photographs in a Sunday Territory section feature on Amish schoolchildren playing baseball at their community in St. Ignatius. (Missoulian, MT)
This Is Water May 27, 2009
By David Foster Wallace, Little, Brown, 134pp, $24. 99. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
Missing John Updike May 26, 2009
Were he and his characters too self-absorbed, as David Foster Wallace wrote. Probably. (Boston Globe)
Editorial: Congratulations, graduates; make your lessons count May 23, 2009
We begin with an excerpt from the late author David Foster Wallace s speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005. Our own present culture has harnessed (fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self) in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. (Georgetown Record, MA)
Top 10 Commencement Speeches May 15, 2009
David Foster Wallace, Kenyon, 2005. Janette Beckman / Redferns / Getty Article Tools. (Time.com)
STELLAR SPEECHES: Top 10 favorites May 13, 2009
David Foster Wallace, novelist, Kenyon College, 2005. 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 on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?". (USA Today)
The price and worth of a degree May 5, 2009
In a remarkable address to Kenyon College graduates in 2005, the late novelist David Foster Wallace rejected such bromides. So let s talk about the single most pervasive cliche in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about, quote, teaching you how to think. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- Opinion)
San Francisco Chronicle Best-Sellers April 19 / Apr 20, 2009
THIS IS WATER, David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown; 144 pages; $14. 99): A reprinted commencement speech by the late author. (San Francisco Chronicle)
Paper Tigers Apr 6, 2009
The Wall Street Journal and the Invention of Modern Journalism (St. 95), Richard J. Tofel, The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (Broadway; 29. (New Yorker)
Letter from India Mar 27, 2009
But it came at the price of increasing isolation: vast high rises, far-flung and atomized suburbs, long commutes, a withering civic life, families separated by the pursuit of careers, fraying marriages and, above all, what the late novelist David Foster Wallace called "a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself.". That does not mean villages are ideal. (International Herald Tribune)
Finding material from New Mexico idyll - Antonya Nelson says teaching full-time is best remove to create her art Mar 14, 2009
Nelson s work has long been admired by many of our finest writers Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace (who attended the University of Arizona master of fine arts program with her), Michael Chabon. Her first book, The Expendables, won the Flannery O Connor Award for Short Fiction; she has also won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, the Rea Award, the O. Henry, the Pushcart, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim. (Missoulian, MT)
BOOK REVIEW: John Wray's 'Lowboy' Mar 10, 2009
His first novel, "The Right Hand of Sleep" (2001), earned him a Whiting Award, a very pretty feather in any young novelist's cap (David Foster Wallace and William Vollmann were both recipients). In 2007, two years after his second novel, "Canaan's Tongue," was published, Granta listed him among America's best novelists under 35. (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
Hear the blessed sound of silence Mar 9, 2009
When the writer David Foster Wallace took his own life last September, he was working on what would surely have been another much-discussed novel. The unfinished manuscript was excerpted in the March 9 issue of The New Yorker. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PA)
Iceland Melts Down Mar 7, 2009
Best Culture PieceThe New Yorker's at the life and work of David Foster Wallace is almost unreadable because of the tragedy it describes, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Iceland's CharmsMichael Lewis reports that Alcoa had to receive government certification that an aluminum smelter it was constructing in Iceland would not kill or destroy the habitats of any "hidden people," aka elves. (Slate)
The Enemy of My Enemy Mar 4, 2009
The New Yorker, March 9A retrospective at David Foster Wallace, who killed himself last September, also looks forward to The Pale King, his incomplete final novel, which will be published next year. (The magazine has an. (Slate)
Anthony Lane: “Watchmen” as adolescent vision. Mar 4, 2009
A look into the world of David Foster Wallace. Steve Coll discusses recent tensions in Kashmir. (New Yorker)
Yolande Moreau, U2, Boris Becker, Hannah Montana Mar 3, 2009
A long, unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace is scheduled for a posthumous release next year. "The Pale King," excerpted in the latest issue of The New Yorker magazine, is set in an Internal Revenue Service office in Illinois in the 1980s. (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
Final Foster Wallace work found Mar 3, 2009
An unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace, the American author of Infinite Jest who committed suicide in 2008, has been found among his papers. The Pale King is set in an American tax office full of bored employees. (BBC News -- Entertainment)
Three Detective Novels That Made Me Love Reading Again Mar 3, 2009
Take the example of the late David Foster Wallace. There is no one on the planet who could be a more devoted admirer of his nonfiction, precisely because of the pleasure of his voice and the pleasure of watching his insanely brilliant mind at work. (Slate)
Twist and Shout Feb 27, 2009
Similarly, David Foster Wallace, mathematical mind that he was, : "Tornadoes were, in our part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met and whirled and blew up." And in his , journalist Mark Levine concisely defined the sublime appeal of "the archetypal American natural disaster." The fascination with tornadoes is "beyond rational accounting," he wrote. "They are the weather-watcher's equivalent of charismatic megafauna." At its best, Tornado Week gives us... (Slate)
The Importance of Word Choice Feb 22, 2009
David Foster Wallace uses the expression in his masterpiece Infinite Jest (Brown & Company, 1996) in this way: "There'd been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he'd refused to go to, as a child. Roaches gave him the howling fantods". Later in the novel, character Remy Marathe defines fantods as "fear, confusion, standing hair". (Suite101.com)
From the margins to the mainstream Feb 21, 2009
The late David Foster Wallace formed with Van Sant a mutual admiration society. In fact, dating back to 1998, there exists online a transcription of a weird telephone conversation they once had, their shared sensibilities warily circling each other, the director recording the dialogue, the writer as self-conscious as ever one fated to survive and the other, sadly, to die by his own hand. (Globe and Mail)
A Humble Opinion Feb 18, 2009
David Foster Wallace is dead, and most recently, baseball-lauding American writer John Updike died, leaving us - a generation of readers and writers who experienced the work of these men - alone ... III. David Foster Wallace, September 2008 ... "David Foster Wallace killed himself.". (GW Hatchet, Washington DC)
Arts » Feb 12, 2009
David Foster Wallace is dead, and most recently, baseball-lauding American writer John Updike died, leaving us - a generation of readers and writers who experienced the work of these men - alone. Now we stand in the inevitable shadow of literary schools that we, as consumers and creators of art, will readjust, reshape or fully overturn. (GW Hatchet, Washington DC)
The Super Bowl Special Feb 8, 2009
The late great David Foster Wallace once described a tactic he dubbed the "Carson Maneuver." This refers to Johnny Carson's habit of inoculating himself against making bad jokes by letting on that he knew darn well the jokes were bad. Conanperhaps inspired by the fact that he'll soon be taking over Johnny's old showhas apparently been studying this technique. (Slate)
Iconic writer John Updike dead at age 76 Feb 7, 2009
His characters, complained one younger author David Foster Wallace had no passion but for themselves. The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self, Wallace wrote in 1997. (MSNBC -- Lifestyle)
