DFW

>>8662239
>about him
I meant by him, not about him. I'm not sure why I used the wrong word there.

Not that book. Either Supposedly Fun Thing or Consider the Lobster. Both are great.

>>8662245
But which of the two is better ?

>>8662245
I hate his essays but Supposedly Fun Thing was the only one I enjoyed.

Are his reviews worth reading if I haven't read the works that are reviewed ?

>>8662252
They're both about equally good.

Consider the Lobster has essays the porn awards, American English usage, 9/11, John McCain's presidential campaign trail, Dostoevsky, and conservative talk radio.

A Supposedly Fun Thing has two tennis essays, his famous essay about TV and fiction, an essay about David Lynch and "Lost Highway," and two very funny essays, one about the Illinois State Fair and another about a week on a cruise, which are his most famous and created the "Wallacean essay": hyperobservational, brainy, funny, heavily footnoted, self-deprecating, and anxious.

Choose whichever sounds better to you. Personally, the essays in Lobster are less "quintessential Wallace," but I like t better as a collection, overall. You can't go wrong with either.

>>8662291
OK, thanks. Consider the Lobster sounds more interesting to myself, since I'm looking for his more serious arguments and tennis doesn't interest me.

>>8662278
Yeah, his book reviews, at least the collected ones, are always much more than book reviews. His review of an American English usage dictionary becomes a long essay about prescriptivism vs. descriptivism; a review of a sports biography becomes a meditation on why the genre is so bad and why readers expect more; a review of a Dostoevsky biography grows (perhaps unnaturally) into a recap of Dostoevsky's life, what Wallace thinks about him and his books, why we should read him today, and how he can serve as a model for today's fiction writers. The Updike review isn't like these, it's short, but it was probably includes in Lobster just because it's so pointed.

>>8662310
Yeah, I'll go with Consider the Lobster, then. Thanks.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is one of his highest points, he's a genuinely good experimental writer. Really reminiscent of Updike too; if you like one, you'll probably like the other.

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How the fuck is this book over 100 pages ? The speech was only about 20 minutes long. Is the book version significantly expanded or is it just a massive font on microscopic pages ?

>>8664520

I believe it's one sentence per page, so lots of whitespace and presentation in keeping with the complete cash-grab that it is

>>8664568
Oh my god, you weren't kidding. This is fucking stupid.

>>8664570

Published six months after he died. Surely he would've been horrified