David Foster Wallace | Resources

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow. of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy“

RESOURCES:

David Foster Wallace Bibliography

By David Foster Wallace

Novels:

1. The Boom of the System (1987) Written as Masters Thesis
2. Infinite Jest (1996) Excerpts from Infinite Jest first appeared in Grand Street, 1992.
3. The Pale King (2011) Published posthumously—his unfinished novel.

Short Story Collections:

1. Girl With Curious Hair (1989) published in Europe as: Westward the Course of Empire Tales Its Way
2. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (19(99)
3. Oblivion: Stories (2004)

Non-Fiction / Essays

1. Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (1990), coauthored with Mark Costello
2. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997)
3. Up, Simba (2000)
4. Everything and More (2003)
5. Consider the Lobster (2005)
6. McCain’s Promise (2008 paperback reprint of Up, Simba)
7. This is Water (2009) Transcript of Convocation Speech
8. Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (2011)
9. Both Flesh and Not (2012)
10. String Theory: David Foster Wallace Essays on Tennis (2016) published posthumously

About David Foster Wallace—Biography/ Interviews

1. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky (2010) Mostly a transcript of an interview between David Lispky and David Foster Wallace back in 1996 near the end of the tour for Infinite Jest. Recent film The End of the Tour featuring Jason Segal as DFW is based on this transcript.
2. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max – Biography of DFW
3. Conversations with David Foster Wallace edited by Stephen J. Burn (2012) A compilation of several interviews with David Foster Wallace/ The transcripts
4. The Last Interview Series: David Foster Wallace (2012)
5. “Farther Away” Essay by Jonathan Franzen

Academic Works about Wallace’s Work

1. Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (2007) Greg Carlisle
2. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide by Stephen J. Burn (2012)
3. The David Foster Wallace Reader (2014) This 976 page book contains almost every other aspect of David Foster Wallace’s work, for instance it has the syllabus he designed as a professor for writing/reading courses at Pomona College, and additional excerpts not present in the texts above.

Online Resources/Forums/Archives

• Audible and Downpour have great Audiobooks for Infinite Jest, and all his other works are there as well. I found that the audiobook really kept me going the first time.
• Most of David Foster Wallace’s Archives are at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin Texas
• The Howling Fantods – largest DFW fan group promoting News, Resources, and updates about DFW since 1997.
• Several Facebook Groups: The Broom of the System being a dominant one
• Goodreads Groups
• Several interviews with DFW have been placed on YouTube
• Two Films have come out based on 1. His life: The End of the Tour (based on Lipsky’s perspective of Wallace in 1996) and 2. His Work: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
• Don’t forget your public library! Both academic libraries in universities and public libraries will have most of Wallace’s works. If you prefer the online forum, OverDrive is connected through your library card and you can access most of the works mentioned.
• In 2015 another group kept detailed records of their reading in a blog called Infinite Summer
• A great Video Book Review of Infinite Jest by “FortheloveofRyan“

How to Read Nature | Book Review

This year I started my reading journey with an attempt to learn more about nature. I ended up picking Tristan Gooley’s book The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs, for which I wrote a very passionate review at the beginning of April. I also got a hold of Gooley’s book How to Read Water which has been on my TBR for a while but I got the chance to browse through it. Naturally I requested How to Read Nature as soon as I was notified that it will be published this year on August 22. I came to this book with knowledge of Gooley’s previous works and having watched a few lectures of his on YouTube. Gooley is a natural navigator and teaches classes on navigating through nature. This book read like being in one of his classes and receiving an introduction to the course. His previous works are much more detailed and go in-depth for each topic like navigating the sky, understanding fungi, trees, reading water (which has its own 400 page book) etc. I think this book will become the best place to start with Gooley’s works and an important starting place for readers of nature books.

This book very much resembles a course syllabus and gives readers a glimpse into each topic with exercises attached. Gooley focuses in this book on building a relationship with nature and the ways in which every person can begin to do so in a world that is very much detached from the natural realm. It’s almost as if Gooley is a relationship therapist here to fix the miscommunication between us and nature. He writes:

“a connection with nature allows us to see the roots that sustain and explain everything around us.”

He focuses on Maslow’s pyramid of needs and points to how lacking our society is in its foundation: physical needs. We take better care of everything else on the pyramid and neglect the most important one of all.

I learned a lot from this book about colour and time. Tristan Gooley spends a long time in this book focusing on the senses, colours, and timekeeping. One small example is the way he talks about plants:

“plants react to colours…if we are dressed in blue we can change the way a plant grows, while if we wear red we will influence its timekeeping”

What I particularly enjoyed is that the book is accompanied by images and exercises (which go hand in hand) helping the reader act on each section and practice. At the end of the book Gooley also provides readers with a bibliography of other nature books they can read on the topics he covers in this book. My reading list just grew ten-fold.

Many thanks to The Experiment for sending me an ARC. You can now purchase this book here.