Works by
David Foster Wallace
(Writer)
[February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008]

Fiction

• Infinite Jest (1996)
  In a sprawling, wild, super-hyped magnum opus, David Foster Wallace fulfills the promise of his precocious novelThe Broom of the System.Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction, features a huge cast and multilevel narrative, and questions essential elements of American culture - our entertainments, our addictions, our relationships, our pleasures, our abilities to define ourselves.

• The Broom of the System (1987)
  Published when 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 center of this outlandishly funny, fiercely intelligent novel is the bewitching heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio. Lenore’s great-grandmother has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home. Her beau, and boss, Rick Vigorous, is insanely jealous, and her cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler, has suddenly started spouting a mixture of psycho- babble, Auden, and the King James Bible. Ingenious and entertaining, this debut from one of the most innovative writers of his generation brilliantly explores the paradoxes of language, storytelling, and reality.

Non-fiction

• McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope (June 2008)
  Is John McCain "For Real?"
  
  That's the question David Foster Wallace set out to explore when he first climbed aboard Senator McCain's campaign caravan in February 2000. It was a moment when Mccain was increasingly perceived as a harbinger of change, the anticandidate whose goal was "to inspire young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest." And many young Americans were beginning to take notice.
  
  To get at "something riveting and unspinnable and true" about John McCain, Wallace finds he must pierce the smoke screen of spin doctors and media manipulators. And he succeeds-in a characteristically potent blast of journalistic brio that not only captures the lunatic rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign but also delivers a compelling inquiry into John McCain himself: the senator, the POW, the campaign finance reformer, the candidate, the man.

• Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays (2005)
  Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.

• Everything and More (2003)
  One of the outstanding voices of his generation, David Foster Wallace has won a large and devoted following for the intellectual ambition and bravura style of his fiction and essays. Now he brings his considerable talents to the history of one of math's most enduring puzzles: the seemingly paradoxical nature of infinity.
  
  Is infinity a valid mathematical property or a meaningless abstraction? The nineteenth-century mathematical genius Georg Cantor's answer to this question not only surprised him but also shook the very foundations upon which math had been built. Cantor's counterintuitive discovery of a progression of larger and larger infinities created controversy in his time and may have hastened his mental breakdown, but it also helped lead to the development of set theory, analytic philosophy, and even computer technology.
  
  Smart, challenging, and thoroughly rewarding, Wallace's tour de force brings immediate and high-profile recognition to the bizarre and fascinating world of higher mathematics.

• Up, Simba! (2000)
  In February 2000, Rolling Stone magazine sent David Foster Wallace, "NOT A POLITICAL JOURNALIST," on the road for a week with Senator John McCain's campaign to win the Republican nomination for the presidency. They wanted to know why McCain appealed so much to so many Americans, and particularly why he appealed to the "Young Voters" of America who generally show nothing but apathy. iPublish is bringing out the "Director's Cut" (three times longer than the RS article) of this incisive, funny, thoughtful piece about life on "Bullshit One" (the nickname for the press bus that followed McCain's Straight Talk Express. Election 2000 is (finally) over, and this eBook; with its information about what we know, don't know, and don't want to know about the way our political campaigns work; is more relevant than ever.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997)
  David Foster Wallace made quite a splash in 1996 with his massive novel, Infinite Jest. Now he's back with a collection of essays entitled A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. In addition to a razor-sharp writing style, Wallace has a mercurial mind that lights on many subjects. His seven essays travel from a state fair in Illinois to a cruise ship in the Caribbean, explore how television affects literature and what makes film auteur David Lynch tick, and deconstruct deconstructionism and find the intersection between tornadoes and tennis. These eclectic interests are enhanced by an eye (and nose) for detail: "I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue.I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21,000 pounds of hot flesh . . ." It's evident that Wallace revels in both the life of the mind and the peculiarities of his fellows; in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again he celebrates both.

• Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race In the Urban Present (1990) with Mark Costello

Short Fiction

• Oblivion: Stories (2004)
  Oblivion is an arresting, hilarious new creation from a writer universally regarded as one of the most prodigious and original talents in contemporary letters. In the stories that make up this exuberantly praised collection, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness-a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his.

• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
  David Foster Wallace has made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets hear. In this new collection, the author extends his range and craft in twenty-two stories that intertwine hilarity with an escalating disquiet to create almost unbearable tensions. These stories venture inside minds and landscapes that are at once recognizable and utterly strange: a boy paralyzed by fear atop a high diving board ("Forever Overhead"), a poet lounging contented beside his pool ("Death Is Not the End"), a young couple experiencing sexual uncertainties ("Adult World"), a depressed woman soliciting comfort from her threadbare support network ("The Depressed Person," chosen for Prize Stories 1999: The O. Henry Awards). The series of stories from which the book takes its title is a tour de force sequence of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women. These portraits of men at their most self-justifying, loquacious, and benighted explore poignantly and hilariously the agonies of sexual connection.

• Girl With Curious Hair (1989)

Other

• The Best American Essays 2007 (2007) with Robert Atwan, co-editor
  The twenty-two essays in this powerful collection -- perhaps the most diverse in the entire series -- come from a wide variety of periodicals, ranging from n + 1 and PMS to the New Republic and The New Yorker, and showcase a remarkable range of forms. Read on for narrative -- in first and third person -- opinion, memoir, argument, the essay-review, confession, reportage, even a dispatch from Iraq. The philosopher Peter Singer makes a case for philanthropy; the poet Molly Peacock constructs a mosaic tribute to a little-known but remarkable eighteenth-century woman artist; the novelist Marilynne Robinson explores what has happened to holiness in contemporary Christianity; the essayist Richard Rodriguez wonders if California has anything left to say to America; and the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson attempts to find common ground with the evangelical community.
  
  In his introduction, David Foster Wallace makes the spirited case that "many of these essays are valuable simply as exhibits of what a first-rate artistic mind can make of particular fact-sets -- whether these involve the 17-kHz ring tones of some kids' cell phones, the language of movement as parsed by dogs, the near-infinity of ways to experience and describe an earthquake, the existential synecdoche of stagefright, or the revelation that most of what you've believed and revered turns out to be self-indulgent crap."

• Review of Contemporary Fiction: A Forum Edited by David Foster Wallace (1996)
  Includes essays by Bradford Morrow, Carole Maso, Curtis White, Janice Galloway, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Caponegro, Sven Birkerts, William T. Vollmann, and others.

See also:

• Becoming the New Man in Post-Postmodernist Fiction: Portrayals of Masculinities in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (2008) by Andrew Steven Delfino
  While scholars have analyzed the masculinity crisis portrayed in American fiction, few have focused on postmodernist fiction, few have examined masculinity without using feminist theory, and no articles propose a solution for ending traditional masculinity's dominance. I examine the masculinity crisis as it is portrayed in two postmodernist novels, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest and Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club. Both novels have male characters that ran the gamut of masculinities, but those that are the most successful at avoiding gender stereotypes develop a masculinity which incorporates strong, phallic masculinity and nurturing, testicular masculinity, creating a balanced masculinity. Also, both novels examine postmodernist fiction's future. Wallace and Palahniuk help reveal the future of postmodernist fiction: a post-postmodernist fiction that, like well-rounded masculinity, seeks to be more emotionally open while still using irony and innovation for meaningful effects, not just to be clever. This book aims to help gender scholars further develop their theories about masculinity, and show literature scholars the future of postmodernist fiction.

• Elegant Complexity (2007) by Greg Carlisle
  Elegant Complexity is the first critical work to provide detailed and thorough commentary on each of the 192 sections of David Foster Wallace's masterful Infinite Jest. No other commentary on Infinite Jest recognizes that Wallace clearly divided the book into 28 chapters that are thematically unified. A chronology at the end of the study reorders each section of the novel into a sequential timeline that orients the reader and that could be used to support a chronological reading of the novel. Other helpful reference materials include a thematic outline, more chronologies, a map of one the novel's settings, lists of characters grouped by association, and an indexed list of references. Elegant Complexity orients the reader at the beginning of each section and keeps commentary separate for those readers who only want orientation. The researcher looking for specific characters or themes is provided a key at the beginning of each commentary. Carlisle explains the novel's complex plot threads (and discrepancies) with expert insight and clear commentary. The book is 99% spoiler-free for first-time readers of Infinite Jest.

• The Mechanics' Institute Review (2007) David Bezmozgis, Jaime Herandez, Joyce Carol Oates, Rose Tremain, Tom Gauld, Wallace David Foster, and Zoe Fairbairns

• Thomas Demand: L'Esprit d'Escalier (2007) by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Rachael Thomas, and Ulrich Baer, and Thomas Demand, Photographer
  Stairs, ladders and lifts are the motifs of Thomas Demand's latest monograph, L'Esprit d'Escalier, which is published on the occasion of his show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. The title actually refers to so-called "staircase wit," that concise French expression for the chagrin of missed retorts--those hapless comebacks one only ever thinks up belatedly (i.e. when already descending the stairs): "I should've said (fill in blank)!" etc. One of Demand's ironic allusions to his title is a new work titled "Landing," which shows the shards of broken Qing vases on a staircase--a mishap caused by a visitor to The Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge in January 2006, who stumbled on his shoelaces and crashed into the three eighteenth-century vases, smashing them to pieces. As ever, Demand combines conceptual rigor and exacting craft in his painstakingly re-created sets, with their eerie edge of artifice. L'Esprit d'Escalier presents an overview of his current work in 23 large photographs, plus a film project and an architectural installation specially prepared for his Irish Museum exhibition. Alongside an excerpt from David Foster Wallace's Girl with Curious Hair, it also includes commissioned writings by Dave Eggers, Paul Oliver, Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, Rachael Thomas and Enrique Juncosa.

• David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guides (2003) by Stephen Burn
  This is an excellent guide to 'Infinite Jest'. It features a biography of the author, a full-length analysis of the novel, and a great deal more. If you’re studying this novel, reading it for your book club, or if you simply want to know more about it, you’ll find this guide informative, intelligent, and helpful.

• Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003) by Marshall Boswell, Matthew Joseph Bruccoli
  In Understanding David Foster Wallace, Marshall Boswell examines the four major works of fiction Wallace has published thus far: the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. In his readings of these works, Boswell affirms that Wallace, though still young, compels our attention not only for the singular excellence of his work but, perhaps more important, for his groundbreaking effort to chart a fruitful and affirmative new direction for the literary novel at a time of bleak prospects.

  In addition to providing self-contained readings of each text, Boswell places Wallace within a trajectory of literary innovation that begins with James Joyce and continues through Wallace's most important postmodern forebears, John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. Although Wallace is sometimes labeled a postmodern writer, Boswell argues that he should be regarded as the nervous leader of some still unnamed--and perhaps unnameable--third wave of modernism. Boswell contends that in charting an innovative course for literary practice, Wallace does not seek merely to overturn postmodernism, nor simply to return to modernism. Instead he moves resolutely forward as his writing hoists the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back.

• Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace (1999) by Enid Blyton

• Open City Number Five: Change or Die (1997) by David Foster Wallace, Delmore Schwartz, Helen Thorpe, Irvine Welsh, Jerome Badanes, and Mary Gaitskill

• The Review of Contemporary Fiction Younger Writers Issue (Summer 1993) (1993), John O'Brien and Larry McCaffery, eds.

• Grand Street 42 (1992), Jean Stein, ed. with contributions by David Foster Wallace, Eduardo Galeano, and Sherrie Levine