Comments on: David Foster Wallace

By: Shane Hoversten

Shane Hoversten — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:08:51 +0000

Eggers' latest is the new It book. It's called "What is the What?" and it's garnered huge acclaim. My impression is that it's his rejection of naval gazing and showing that he can be A Serious Author writing about Big Issues outside his own immediate experience. But I haven't read it. I do own it, though.

I didn't particularly like HWoSG, for reasons you can probably intuit, but I like Eggers. He's been good for literature, I think. Made it okay to be interested in stuff that real people are interested in (see The Best American Non-Required Reading for examples) like comics and offbeat literary fiction. He has own his press, which just published a book that's nothing more than the collected names of every Heavy Metal band in the world, for fuck's sake!

Anyway.

By: shanusmagnus

shanusmagnus — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:08:51 +0000

By: houlios

houlios — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:32:07 +0000

Thanks for the titles. Have you – or anyone else – read anything by Eggers besides aHWoSG? I loved that one and I know he has at least one other book floating around out there but I've never gotten around to it.

By: shanusmagnus

shanusmagnus — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:05:15 +0000

The iconic work is Infinite Jest. It's DFW's answer to the massive
post-modern epics like Gravity's Rainbow, Underworld, and Ulysses, though
it's somewhat different from these in that it's intended that people
actually READ it. But there's no doubt it's his magnum opus.

If you don't want to invest that time, his first novel is called The Broom
of the System and it's also supposed to be super mighty.

By: houlios

houlios — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:14:37 +0000

Wow. I'd heard of the guy but never read anything. This week almost all the blogs I read had a nugget about his death though. Now I definitely have to read something of his – does anyone know if there is a single “iconic” DFW work?