DFWs Essays that are available online

Most of you probably know that Both Flesh and Not: Essays came out recently. What you may not know is that several of the essays published in this collection were already available online. I'd of bought it, of course, being somewhat of a completist, but upon scanning its table of contents, I realized that I'd already read almost every piece in it, so I set it back down and moved on.

One of the longer essays collected in Both Flesh and Not, "The Empty Plenum," critiques the novel, Wittgenstein's Mistress, by David Markson. You can read the essay in its entirety here.

According to the D.T. Max bio, it took Wallace the better part of a year to wrap his mind around Markson's novel enough so that he could finally finish his thoughts on it, wrapping the piece up just prior to beginning work on Infinite Jest in '91.

The following story was excerpted from the first draft of Infinite Jest and published by Harpers in Sept. '93 as "The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems".

I'm pretty sure it has yet to be collected in any of his short story volumes, unless it was retitled and I've overlooked it?? If anyone knows for sure I'd sure like to know. Also, I don't think there's much from the story that made it into the published version of IJ, at least not long word-for-word passages. The ideas ("The Man from Glad," etc.) and some of the characters are there, but it's certainly not Infinite Jest as we now know it. But I think it's pretty interesting, seeing a certain stage in the novel's evolution.

Should've titled this thread ...Essays & Stories... Oh well. Here's another story. I like this one -- "Nothing Happened" -- a lot. This version was originally published in Open City Number 5, in '97, and then collected two years later in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, under its new title, "Signifying Nothing".

Okay I converted the latter to a PDF and saved them both to my Nook. I hope to read them someday. If you see a copy of the review of D.T. Max's life from the December 6 New York Review of Books as a PDF, please let us know.

Robert

I'll do that if I find it, Mister D.

In post 1 I mentioned that almost all of the essays in the recent Both Flesh and Not: Essays are already available online. Below is another from that posthumous collection, originally published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, going way back to 1988 ...

"Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young"

Perhaps this essay is the genesis of the feud between Wallace and Bret Easton Ellis?

In early '96, Village Voice began publishing a serial novel in which fifteen writers wrote a single chapter and began writing their chapter where the previous writer left off. DFW had week 11 (or chapter 11) of what became The Fifth Column: A Novel.

Listed below are the rest of the contributors.

01. Franz
02. Rick Moody
03. A.M. Homes
04. Randall Kenan
05. Jim Lewis
06. Susan Daitch
07. Matthew Stadler
08. Claire Messud
09. Dale Peck
10. Iva Pekárková
12. Carol Anshaw
13. Irvine Welsh
14. Gary Indiana
15. Neil Gordon

"The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing"

This is Wallace's first published short story, from The Amherst Review, Vol. XII (1984), his college literary journal. The content is remarkably familiar, solely because of D.T. Max's biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. I can't think of any other story or essay of Wallace's that dealt as directly and as personally with the experiences of his depression as with what he wrote here.

Thanks for posting that. To say that piece was incredibly moving would be a masterpiece of understatement.

Happy to, Bubba. And it's especially poignant now, painfully so, in light of his death. Interesting that he ended his first story in mid-sentence as he would his first two novels.

Oh, so sad. Yes, the bio discussed this feeling he had quite a bit and went into some depth about the essay, so that it seemed strangely familiar.

"/Solomon Silverfish/"

This is an uncollected, unanthologized short story first published by Sonora Review in '87.

Unreleased, unseen, uncollected, unanthologized

Just reread the monologue of Hal's grandfather to his father as a boy, that and the woman who wanted shock treatment to make her forget the pain are the saddest so far for me.

That monologue is so quotable, isn't it, and sad, yes. More on that sad aspect here -- http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/0596May/Verbal/dfwtalk.html

Suicide as a Sort of Present, read by David Foster Wallace, from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Crash of '69

Uncollected fiction. Originally published in the now defunct Between C & D in their winter '89 issue.

> Should've titled this thread ...Essays & Stories...

and syllabi? e.g. ”David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: How to Teach Serious Literature with Lightweight Books,” where you can see scans of some of his teaching materials archived at Univ. of Texas-Austin.