You wouldn’t run a marathon without stretching beforehand. And perhaps the mammoth tome that is Infinite Jest ought not be your first exposure to David Foster Wallace.
DFW’s shorter works are collected into a number of bound volumes:
Non-Fiction Collections
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1998)
- Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays (2007)
Single (albeit lengthy) essays
- Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (with Mark Costello, 1997)
- Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2004)
- This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (2009)
Short Stories
- Girl With Curious Hair (1996)
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2000)
- Oblivion: Stories (2005)
Much of his writing is also freely available on the web. Here is a smattering:
- It’s hard to know what Gourmet Magazine had in mind when they dispatched Wallace to the Maine Lobster Festival, but Consider the Lobster–an 8,000 words treatise (complete with footnotes) that grapples with the ethical quandary of boiling sentient creatures alive for the sake of culinary enjoyment–was probably not it.
- Also found in the Consider the Lobster anthology, Host is Wallace’s examination of talk radio and one of its most prominent practitioners.
- After his untimely death, Harpers Magazine made several (all?) of the David Foster Wallace pieces that had previous appeared in their pages available as PDFs. Of particular note are Shipping Out (rechristened “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” when published in book form), in which Wallace chronicles the week he spent on a luxury Caribbean Cruise, and Interviews with Hideous Men, which served as the foundation for his subsequent collection of the same name.
- In The View from Mrs. Thompson’s, Wallace recounts his experiences on September 11, 2001.
- Wallace gave the Commencement Address at Kenyon College’s 2005 graduation ceremony. A transcription of the speech is currently available here.
- The story Incarnations of Burned Children is brief, and mercifully so. While wonderfully written, I do not recommend reading it if you have, have been, or have ever known a child.
For a breathtakingly exhaustive rundown of David Foster Wallace’s collected and uncollecting writing, please see this page at the The Howling Fantods (a site of which we will speak again, and often).
Comments
12 responses to “Warming Up”
This one’s probably there somewhere. David Lynch makes more sense to me now…not that his movies fully make sense.
http://www.geocities.com/~mikehartmann/papers/wallace.html
I read Incarnations of Burned Children by accident shortly after my first son was born. Short as the story is, I shut the book in horror about a quarter of the way through and vowed to be careful in the kitchen. About a week later I worked up the courage to finish the story and the whole scene is still clear in my mind almost three years later.
Several excerpts from DFW’s forthcoming “The Pale King” are also available online:
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/02/05/070205fi_fiction_wallace
http://www.harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-2008-02-0081893.pdf
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/03/09/090309fi_fiction_wallace
In addition to the wonderful list above, the New Yorker recently published a excerpt from DFW’s unfinished Pale King called Wiggle Room.
[…] of the Infinte Summer commence, our friends at ISHQ (Infinite Summer Head Quarters) have provided a list of various essays and short stories by David Foster Wallace, freely available on the interwebs, to […]
Not a DFW primary source but very amusing:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27769
Not exactly on topic, but–Oh God, I just bought it. It’s far heavier than ever I imagined.
More on point, thanks for these. I had heard about he Harper’s PDFs but had been unable to locate them.
I had not read any DFW before deciding to join InfSum. I read “Consider The Lobster” — just the essay, not the book — last night, and it really helped whet the appetite. So, thanks for posting these!
[…] feel the need to do it again but want something else to read, the Infinite Summer blog has a nice collection of DFW’s shorter essays that are freely available online now. Although I generally hate […]
There’s also his NYT essay on Roger Federer – also a timely read as Wimbledon 2009 starts today, with Federer gunning for his sixth title.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?ei=5090&en=716968175e36505e&ex=1313726400&pagewanted=all
two nights ago i watched kenneth branaugh’s amazing full (over 4 hrs) length version of hamlet and buried there in the (ophelia) grave scene (no pun intended) was a reference to “infinite jest.” in conversation with the grave digger, hamlet examines the skull of the former court jester and finds the term useful in rationalizing and philosophizing about mortal life & death. so we can probably thank shakespeare for the title?
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