Saturday, October 25, 2008

Rolling Stone on David Foster Wallace

Another clutch of articles on David Foster Wallace, this time from Rolling Stone.

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace

An interview with David Lipsky, who wrote the piece, with ruminations on the writer:

There's no way of knowing what his legacy is but I know he changed prose. And prose gets changed not that often in a century. Hemingway changed prose, so did Salinger and Nabokov. David changed it too. He did an amazing thing. One the things that writing and speech can do is express what we're thinking one thought at a time. But we think a thousand things at a time, and David found a way to get all that across in a way that's incredibly true and incredibly entertaining at the same time...He ended a piece for our magazine with the words "Try to stay awake." That open-eyeness is the giant thing he leaves behind.

Also included are a couple of reprints of his Rolling Stone articles:

The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub: Seven Days in the Life of the Late, Great John McCain from the 2000 campaign.

The View From Mrs. Thompson's, reflections on 9/11 as perceived from a Midwestern living room.

No comments: