David Foster Wallace

So everyone’s claiming to have been real tight with David Foster Wallace because they played tennis with him, had a class with him, got a book signed by him, did the naughty with him. Seems thousands of people were “pretty tight” with him and they want to make sure you know it.

I’ve hauled my copy of Infinite Jest, published in 1996, in and out of seven apartments I’ve lived in. Never made it past page 3. A few phone numbers scribbled in the back. Never wore a do-rag but had an earring in 10th grade. Took it out after someone made fun of me.  read more »

Jocelyn Zuckerman's original idea was to send David Foster Wallace to the Oxford Food Symposium, an academic conference for wonky food historians. Mr. Wallace couldn't go because the thing was being held in September and thus interfered with his teaching schedule at Pomona College. Determined to get him into the pages of Gourmet, Ms. Zuckerman came back with another pitch-the Scotch Whiskey Festival—only to find out that Mr. Wallace didn't drink. So she suggested the Maine Lobster Festival.

Mr. Wallace took the assignment.

The first thing he did, Ms. Zuckerman said this afternoon from a hotel room in Berlin, was ask for an assistant to send him everything that Gourmet had ever published on the subject of lobsters.  read more »

The last book David Foster Wallace published before his suicide last Friday was McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express, a souped-up edition of the classic piece on the 2000 election originally published in Rolling Stone and later anthologized in Consider the Lobster along with a thorough, at points severe foreword about how the piece almost didn't happen because the editors at Rolling Stone couldn't make up their mind about whether they wanted it or not:

At first I was supposed to follow McCain around in New Hampshire as he campaigned for 1 February's big primary there. Then, around Christmastime, Rolling Stone decided that they wanted to abort the assignment because Governor Bush was way ahead in the polls and outspending McCain ten to one and they thought McCain was going to get flattened in New Hampshire and that his campaign would be over by the time anything could come out in Rolling Stone and that they'd look stupid.  read more »

Earlier this week Media Mob spoke to Gerry Howard, who acquired David Foster Wallace’s first novel and published it as a trade paperback original as part of Penguin’s Contemporary American Fiction line. Wallace stayed with Mr. Howard for his second book, a collection of short stories called Girl With Curious Hair, but when it came time to do something with his second novel, Infinite Jest, his agent Bonnie Nadell—an interview with her can be found here—decided the responsible thing to do was to submit the manuscript to several editors and see how much it could draw. Thus David Foster Wallace came to Little, Brown & Company, where he remained until his death last Friday night.  read more »

The David Lynch piece that David Foster Wallace wrote for Premiere, about life on the set of Lost Highway, was commissioned well before the world met Infinite Jest. This was in late 1995, and it was Susan Lyne, Premiere's founding editor, who made the prescient assignment. Not long after Wallace turned in his first draft, however, Ms. Lyne left the magazine for a job at Disney, and the piece fell to her successor, Chris Connelly, who gave it to an editor named Kristin von Ogtrop. Ms. von Ogtrop -- now the editor-in-chief of homemaking magazine Real Simple -- went to town on the thing, cutting huge chunks out of it for space and thus inspiring Wallace to nickname her "The Blunt Machette" in the acknowledgments page at the end of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, in which the piece was anthologized.  read more »

On May 17, 1996, Charlie Rose assembled a panel of writers on his PBS talk show to discuss "The Future of American Fiction." Sitting around Mr. Rose's circular table on his signature all-black set were Mark Leyner, Jonathan Franzen, and David Foster Wallace. At the time, Mr. Leyner, was the best known of the bunch, having appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in advance of the release of his novel Et, Tu, Babe in 1992. Mr. Franzen was promoting Strong Motion, his second novel. Mr. Wallace was just coming to prominence for Infinite Jest, his 1,079-page novel.  read more »

One thing we're going to try to do here this week at Media Mob is talk to some of the people who got the chance to edit David Foster Wallace over the course of his career.

Who knows how many of them we'll actually track down—there are lots, because DFW wrote pieces for so many different magazines—but we begin today with Doubleday editor-at-large Gerry Howard, who acquired and edited Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System when he was at Penguin in the mid-1980s, and his first collection of short stories, Girl With Curious Hair, a few years later at Norton.  read more »

In Pub Crawl today we have an item about the book David Foster Wallace was working on at the time of his death. Bonnie Nadell, the literary agent who discovered Mr. Wallace in the slush pile when she was a 25-year-old rookie and who continued representing him until the end of his life, told us what little she knew about this unfinished work, but explained that Wallace never really showed anyone anything until he was done with it.

She told us a lot of other things too, and because we couldn't fit it all into the paper, we thought we'd share it here.  read more »

Felix Gillette writes that "On the morning of Sept. 14, during a Sunday morning Palin-palooza, George Will sized up the made-for-TV story line thusly: “We had the tech bubble. The housing bubble. Now we have the Palin bubble. Sooner or later bubbles do what bubbles do. But not yet. This is still going strong.” And for the time being, it remains a seller’s market. (A few days after Mr. Will’s assessment, CBS News announced that Katie Couric had landed the second broadcast-news interview with the in-demand governor.)."

Does print journalism matter in this election, wonders John Koblin, now that "in-boxes crammed with New York Times articles and Huffington Post hyperlinks do not advertise their relative value or importance. Everything is equal, everything is a tie and nothing, it seems, is important anymore."

Leon Neyfakh talks to David Foster Wallace's agent and editor about whether or not fans can expect new work from the late author. "When we put together the 10th anniversary for Infinite Jest two years ago, we had an event in New York and an event in Los Angeles, and I talked with him about whether he would like to come be part of them," says Mr. Wallace's editor, Michael Pietsch. "I was not surprised to hear that he was wary of that idea. 'I'll do anything you want me to do,' he said, 'but please don't ask me to do this, please, please, please. I'm working on something long and it takes me a long time to get back into it after I'm pulled away from it.'" Plus: Carrie Bradshaw, the Teenage Years.

Plus: NBC News... Dexter Filkins... Two and a Half Sitcom Wriers Left in Hollywood... Graydon Carter.

“People are asking us, ‘Is there anything unpublished? Is there anything sitting in a drawer?’ But David was very fortunate, in that everything he wrote got published and published well.” Bonnie Nadell, the literary agent who found David Foster Wallace’s first novel in a slush pile 23 years ago, was speaking from her office in San Francisco. It was within the first few months of her job as a junior agent at a firm there that she came across the first chapter of The Broom of the System, the novel Wallace wrote while an M.F.A. student at the University of Arizona. Before long she sold it to Gerry Howard at Penguin; she remained Wallace’s agent until his death last Friday.  read more »

Blogger Ed Champion posts a tall pile of tributes to the late David Foster Wallace today from literary figures of all stripes. At the top of the pile, the critic James Wood, who is not known as DFW's biggest fan, who had this to say:

I was terribly saddened to hear this news. Whatever one felt about his work, it was hard to imagine any serious reader of fiction not being intensely interested in what he was going to do next. I had been looking forward to witnessing his literary journey, and to adjusting my own opinions and prejudices — or rather, being forced by the quality of the work to do so.

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As a tribute to the late David Foster Wallace, Harper's Magazine, where the writer was a contributing editor, has made his work available on the Web to non-subscribers. Included in the collection of PDFs is Mr. Wallace's "Shipping Out," which formed the basis for his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The January 1996 piece follows Mr. Wallace on an exceedingly miserable luxury cruise to the Caribbean.

Here is Mr. Wallace's bravura description of his cabin's bathroom:

The sink is huge, and its bowl is deep without seeming precipitous or ungentle of grade. Good plate mirror covers the whole wall over the sink.  read more »

A dozen years ago, I spent three weeks with David Foster Wallace. Not the guy—not the man who hanged himself, age 46, on Sept.12—but the writer, the novelist who invaded my house with a huge, wonderful, impossible book, Infinite Jest. For 20 days or so I did virtually nothing but read and re-read the 1,079 pages of a novel that thrilled and infuriated me. There were long hours, pinned on the couch under his 3-pound, 5-ounce tome, when I hated him with a pure and righteous rage—my wrist hurt from holding the thing, my brain was weary from the footnotes and the cleverness and the strangeness of the world he’d plunged me into.  read more »

Infinite Jest author David Foster Wallace is dead of an apparent suicide, according to reports from the Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, and others.

According to AP:

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.

Mr. Wallace, who received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1997, just saw the release of McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express David Foster Wallace, a book-length expansion of his 2000 campaign report about Republican presidential nominee John McCain. A film version of his book Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is in production with The Office's John Krasinski adapting and directing.

Expect updates as more info is known.

The New York Times ran an incendiary letter over the weekend, written by a 17-year-old from Birmingham, Ala., named Alec Niedenthal, who wanted to tell the editors of the Sunday Book Review that the future of literature belongs to him. Mr. Niedenthal, who graduated from high school last week and is preparing to attend the New College of Florida, used dramatic language to express this idea. This made him sound like a passionate, big-brained visionary.

"You've heard it straight from the tropical mouth of a teenager who is entirely conscientious of the metamorphoses in ideas, principles (or lack thereof) and influences being undergone right under your collective noses," Mr. Niedenthal wrote in his letter. "The next Great American Novel will come not from Pynchon, Wallace, DeLillo (he’s already had his turn anyway) or any other of your literary heroes."

He went on: "It will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam, from those who see and comprehend, still to the delirious ignorance of the villainous Powers That Be, incalculable brands of grade-A terror being perpetrated unabashedly both by those whom we trust and those whom we loathe."

Mr. Niedenthal's rhetoric has not gone unnoticed: In the days since his letter appeared, he has received e-mails from editors at Grove/Atlantic and HarperCollins interested in seeing his work. (His father has also expressed his interest.)

Media Mob thought we should get familiar now, before he gets any more famous. Below, excerpts from our Q&A with the sad young literary man.

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