Just under two years ago, David Foster Wallace killed himself, leaving behind a legacy that included—and perhaps unfairly focused on—his magnum opus, the 1’000+ page Infinite Jest. Though I happened to appreciate Wallace’s nonfiction (see Consider the Lobster) even more than his fiction, he was equally adept at both forms—at any form, to be honest. [...]
¶ Hitch-22
Christopher Hitchens is hard to get a handle on. The same people who gleefully forward me his scathing review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 would of course be aghast at his most controversial book, God is Not Great; similarly, those who would cheer No One Left to Lie To: the triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton [...]
¶ Grendel
I read Beowulf in high school, as is the case for a great number of young adults, and was unlikely at that time to be able to appreciate it. The book is, after all, critically easy to misunderstand, misinterpret, underappreciate, or otherwise abuse. J.R.R. Tolkien famously wrote that Beowulf‘s importance as a poetic work far [...]
I like to think of myself as widely-read, though—paradoxically—the more I read, the more I find I haven’t read. Russian literature is an area of particular paucity for me, and it’s somewhat galling because writers like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky are such fixtures in our literary culture. I have a feeling, though, that I am not [...]
Every issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern comes with a sort of prompt given to its writers. In some cases, the theme is more generic; in other cases, it’s a more limiting construct. In the case of Issue #31, writers were either given or allowed to select (I’m not sure which) an old cultural form of [...]
I read this book previously in 2007. There’s something particular about debut novels; sure, some authors start small and refine their craft, becoming better authors later in life. But there’s a particular kind of new author—the brash, young literate authors—whose first novels are fireworks displays, the pent-up combustive energies of potentially years worth of frustrated [...]
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