David Foster Wallace

There are many reasons why you should check out the work
of David Foster Wallace, but suffice it to say that he is
arguably one of the best writers working today.

His bibliography is vast, he has done work for many
magazines (Harpers, Esquire, etc.),written a number of
prolific books, and can be found quietly featured all over
the web.  Paste Magazine said of his most recent book:

"David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster is a big, irresistible shaggy dog of a book—muddy-pawed, it never stops barking, but it’s abounding with enthusiasm and love. And just when you think it’s more trouble than it’s worth, it surprises you with a noble act or tender gesture."

Also quite recently, Mr Wallace was selected as editor of The Best American Essays, and his amazing introductory piece "Deciderization 2007" really reveals so much about culture, self, and the process of editing. I couldn't recommend it more.

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Excerpt:

Part of our emergency is that it's so tempting to do this sort
of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed
positions, rigid filters, the 'moral clarity' of the immature.
The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy
amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it's
continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance
and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and
literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to
need help. That's about as clearly as I can put it. I'm aware
that some of the collection's writers could spell all this out
better and in much less space. At any rate, the service part
of what I mean by 'value' refers to all this stuff, and extends
as well to essays that have nothing to do with politics or
wedge issues. Many 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 stage fright, or the revelation that
most of what you've believed and revered turns out to be
self- indulgent crap.


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