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David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview Expanded with New Introduction: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)
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About David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview Expanded
Product Description An expanded edition featuring new interviews and an introduction by the editor, a New York Times journalist and friend of the author A unique selection of the best interviews given by David Foster Wallace, including the last he gave before his suicide in 2008. Complete with an introduction by Foster Wallace's friend and NY Times journalist, David Streitfeld. And including a new, never-before-published interview between Streitfeld and Wallace. About the Author David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. He is best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest. Frequently referred to as the voice of his generation, he won a multitude of prizes and accolades before committing suicide in 2008. Editor David Streitfeld is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has written extensively on books, business, and technology for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. He is currently a columnist for the New York Times. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview Expanded with New Introduction INTRODUCTION DAVID STREITFELD I was David Foster Wallace’s worst friend. He would send me letters and I wouldn’t answer them. He would send works in progress with forlorn notes. “You’re under no obligation to read or to pretend you’ve read the enclosed,” he wrote on one piece. I didn’t. That particular manuscript was, I see now, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” which he was revising for a book. It is one of the most influential literary essays of the last thirty years. One day Wallace sent me a chain letter. People under the age of forty probably have no idea what this is. In essence, it was paper going viral. A chain letter included an original letter promising good luck to everyone who kept the chain going, copies of letters from every subsequent recipient, and finally a note from the friend or acquaintance who got it most recently, exhorting you to keep the good luck flowing by sending the whole thing on to five more friends. Chain letters were made possible by the invention of the photocopier and were rendered superfluous by the internet, which could copy and forward things effortlessly. Wallace sent me his in 1996, right as email was beginning to take off. It might have been the last chain letter ever. When I opened the thick envelope and saw what it contained, I groaned. “This letter originated in the Netherlands, and has been passed around the world at least 20 times,” the original letter at the bottom of the stack proclaimed. “The one who breaks the chain will have bad luck. This is not a joke.” Wallace got his packet from his best friend and onetime collaborator, Mark Costello, a lawyer who was sent it by another lawyer. “I don’t normally circulate these things,” Costello wrote Wallace in his cover note, “but this chain letter is just too funny—there’s five senior federal judges here, one United States congressmen, a bunch of DOJ prosecutors and lawyers, lawyers, lawyers. The idea of lawyers hedging their bets like this is fitting somehow.” — You can see how all this might have appealed to the novelist hailed as the one true heir of Thomas Pynchon, whose The Crying of Lot 49 is about a secret postal system. Wallace was so heavily influenced by Pynchon he tended to get cranky when reviewers brought it up, but he always loved Crying. Chain letters were like a Pynchon novel come to life. The only message in Wallace’s cover note was in Latin, which was typical of his correspondence. He once sent me a card with only two words on it, both in Russian. To this day, I have no idea what it says. The chain letter said: “Nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit.” Thanks to Google, I now know this means: “No man is wise at all hours.” In other words, “I need all the good luck I can get so I’m taking this seriously.” Which is how Wallace felt pretty much all the time. Me too. But I als
