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Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
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About Consider The Lobster: And Other Essays
Product Description This celebrated collection of essays from the author of Infinite Jest is "brilliantly entertaining...Consider the Lobster proves once more why Wallace should be regarded as this generation's best comic writer" (Cleveland Plain Dealer). Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of John McCain's 2000 presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters. "Wallace can do sad, funny, silly, heartbreaking, and absurd with equal ease; he can even do them all at once." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times From Publishers Weekly Novelist Wallace ( Infinite Jest) might just be the smartest essayist writing today. His topics are various—this new collection treats porn, sports autobiographies and the vagaries of English usage, among others—his perspective always slightly askew and his observations on point. Wallace is also frustrating to read. This arises from a few habits that have elevated him to the level of both cause célèbre and enfant terrible in the world of letters. For one thing, he uses abbrs. w/r/t just about everything without warning or, most of the time, context. For another, he inserts long footnotes and parenthetical asides that by all rights should be part of the main texts (N.B.: These usually occur in the middle of phrases, so that the reader cannot recall the context by the time the parentheses are wrapped up) but never are. These tricks are adequately postmodern (a term Wallace is intelligent enough to question) to prove his cleverness. But a writer this gifted doesn't need such cleverness. Wallace's words and ideas, as well as a wonderful sense of observation that makes even the most shopworn themes seem fresh, should suffice. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks Magazine Its a well-accepted proposition that Wallace, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant recipient, is one of the most brilliant essayists alive. But its another matter altogether whether his workat once luminous, provocative, digressive, and frustratingfinds the audience it deserves. Like Infinite Jest (1996) and A Supposedly Fun Thing Ill Never Do Again (1997), this collection showcases Wallaces love of language, emotional IQ, and curiosity about the world (and the starlets who populate it). His trademark footnotes, essays in themselves, rarely fail to entertainif you can follow them. But a few critics ask whether this collection exhibits more high jinks than actual intellectual insight; the arrows and boxed comments in the essay "Host," for example, may just obscure a Very Important Point. But that may be the pointto get you thinking about much more than the lobster. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. From Booklist In his latest essay collection, Wallace, known best for his expansive metafiction, traverses a wide swathe of territory, swinging from a consideration of pornography to a reading of John Updike (perhaps not such a stretch), from the 2000 campaign trail of Republican John McClain to reflections on Kafka and Dostoyevsky, and from Bloomington, Illinois, to lobster-trawling Maine. The uberliterate Wallace is a subtle Hunter Thompson, pointed, yet sly, in directing transitions to reveal his true intention--that is, he misleads, then opens up. Humorous, engaging, albeit a bit perplexing in his style, he is a little too trendy in his postmodern use of boxes, arrows, footnotes, and so on. But when Wallace is on the mark, few ca
