Across two decades of intense creativity, David Foster Wallace
(1962-2008) crafted a remarkable body of work that ranged from
unclassifiable essays to a book about transfinite mathematics to
vertiginous fictions. Whether through essay volumes (A Supposedly Fun
Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster), short story
collections (Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,
Oblivion), or his novels (Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System),
the luminous qualities of Wallace's work recalibrated our measures of
modern literary achievement. Conversations with David Foster Wallace
gathers twenty-two interviews and profiles that trace the arc of
Wallace's career, shedding light on his omnivorous talent.
Jonathan Franzen has argued that, for Wallace, an interview provided a
formal enclosure in which the writer "could safely draw on his enormous
native store of kindness and wisdom and expertise." Wallace's interviews
create a wormhole in which an author's private theorizing about art
spill into the public record. Wallace's best interviews are vital
extra-literary documents, in which we catch him thinking aloud about his
signature concerns--irony's magnetic hold on contemporary language, the
pale last days of postmodernism, the delicate exchange that exists
between reader and writer. At the same time, his acute focus moves
across MFA programs, his negotiations with religious belief, the role of
footnotes in his writing, and his multifaceted conception of his work's
architecture. Conversations with David Foster Wallace includes a
previously unpublished interview from 2005, and a version of Larry
McCaffery's influential Review of Contemporary Fiction interview with
Wallace that has been expanded with new material drawn from the original
raw transcript.
