David Wallace

Covering Geoffrey Chaucer's life and work, David Wallace considers the influence and enduring appeal of his body of writing, explores the wide ranging geography and iconic characters in his stories, and discusses how Chaucer's own experiences contributed to his literature.

For this collection, Wallace immerses himself in the three-ring circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of the most vicious campaigns in recent history. Later he strolls from booth to booth at a lobster festival in Maine and risks life and limb to get to the bottom of the lobster question. Then he wheedles his way into an L.A. radio studio, armed with tubs of chicken, to get the behind-the-scenes view of a conservative talk show...

The character David Foster Wallace is introduced to the banal world of the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, and the host of strange people who work there, in a novel that was unfinished at the time of the author's death.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again collects David Foster Wallace's writings on a range of subjects that only he could bring together. From personal narratives to tennis, film, philosophy, and postmodern literary theory, no subject is outside the play of his imagination. In "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All", a finalist for the 1995 National Magazine Award, Wallace gorges himself on corn dogs, gawks at baton twirlers,...

The "breathtakingly brilliant" novel by the author of Infinite Jest (New York Times) is a deeply compelling and satisfying story, as hilarious and fearless and original as anything Wallace ever wrote. 
The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive...

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness — a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his.
These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy")....

The Director's Cut (three times longer than the RS article) is an incisive, funny, thoughtful piece about life on "Bullshit One" — the nickname for the press bus that followed McCain's Straight Talk Express.
This piece becomes ever more relevant, as we discuss what we know, don't know, and don't want to know about the way our political campaigns work.

Published when David Foster Wallace was just twenty-four years old, The Broom of the System stunned critics and marked the emergence of an extraordinary new talent. At the centre of this outlandishly funny, fiercely intelligent novel is the bewitching heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place if a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio. Lenore's great-grandmother has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights...