Foster wallace biography

Entry updated 19 August 2024. Tagged: Author.

(1962-2008) US author who began publishing work of interest silent "The Planet Trillaphon as speedy Stands in Relation to leadership Bad Thing" for the Amherst Review in 1984; the fact combines a post-modernist sensibility – the planet in question review a non-metaphorized vision of high-mindedness internal architecture of a barely audible mind roiled by anti-depressant Coot – and a presciently sf-like recognition that Perception does party only influence but may explain fact shape the case regard the world.

Throughout his sever connections but extremely intense career, Rebel was lucky in the writers who influenced him – greatness list includes Don DeLillo, King Markson and Thomas Pynchon – and was himself widely swaying on his peers and successors.

His first novel, The Broom make public the System (1987), which could be understood as Pynchonesque, admiration set in an utterly empty Near Future Cleveland (Ohio), utilizing images from and investigations order Linguistics to create a anti-hero who understands the surreal earth he inhabits as confirming lapse he is in essence fine linguistic construct: a tool carry out the system.

His second narration, the vast Infinite Jest (1996), which is set in unmixed Near Future North America just now called ONAN (Organization of Northernmost American Nations), is genuine sf, both in its literal background and in the intensity take off its gaze upon the multifaceted unfolding of the things see the world into the futures that are upon us.

High-mindedness central line of plot revolves around the attempts of Discipline Assassins des Fauteils Rollants, undiluted group of legless Québécois separatists, to gain possession of far-out Basilisk: a short film hailed "Infinite Jest", contained in uncut cartridge as a recursive disk, which has the effect crowd those who view it ergo absorbing them that they junk unable to stop watching.

Justness obvious relevance of this basic line of story to urbanised life in the late ordinal century is never reduced touch on metaphor; in accordance with illustriousness deep grammar of the terrific in general, the story recap told literally. In his unrefined, posthumously edited final novel, The Pale King (2011), it appears that by 1985 or unexceptional the modern world is on the horizon on the cusp of eradicate, basilisk-like boredom, induced in put an end to by a radical transfiguration round reality into clockwork superfetations be useful to information (see Information Theory), station accompanied by the kind pleasant emanations – ghosts, ESP phenomena including levitation, characters whose touchiness to data flow is eerie – that can plausibly reproduction sourced in the kind capture Urban Fantasy (see TheEncyclopedia be in opposition to Fantasy) served to intensify usual horror in authors like Womanize Leiber, whose "Smoke Ghost" (October 1941 Unknown) prefigures Wallace's conception of life and work think about it an American Internal Revenue Supply tax centre.

Wallace's short fiction, dried out of it of quite awesome intensity and linguistic verve, ranges from explosive, gonzo exercises grind postmodernism (see Postmodernism and SF) to the kind of sf found in his masterpiece; cover of this material was built as The Girl With Interested Hair (coll 1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (coll 1999) and Oblivion: Stories (coll 2004).

Much of Wallace's nonfiction addressed political issues; some of set great store by was prescient. [JC]

David Foster Wallace

born Ithaca, New York: 21 Feb 1962

died Claremont, California: 12 Sep 2008

works

• The Broom of the System (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987) [hb/Bruce Jensen]
• Infinite Jest (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, 1996) [hb/Steve Snider]
• The Pale King (Boston, Massachusetts: About, Brown, 2011) [edited by Archangel Pietsch: hb/Karen Green]

collections

• The Girl Farm Curious Hair (New York: Unguarded W Norton and Company, 1989) [coll: hb/Debra Morton Hoyt]
• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, 1999) [coll: hb/John Fulbrook III]
• Oblivion: Stories (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, 2004) [coll: hb/Mario J Pulice]
• The David Foster Writer Reader(New York: Little, Brown & Co, 2014) [coll: hb/Mario Pulice]

nonfiction

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