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“... attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David FosterWallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the already canonised Americans a grave threat. ‘We cannot be all the writers all the time,’ she wrote. ‘We can only be who we are ...”

“... Baker somewhere on a line of descent between Donald Barthelme, with whom he briefly studied, and David FosterWallace. Yet Howie isn’t void-struck or an object of satire. Like Mike, the narrator of Baker’s second novel, Room Temperature (1990), he just wants to get things ‘correctly situated in the felt ...”

“... adhere to the mandates of identity politics or the constrictions of literary genre. Writing with David FosterWallace-level verbal firepower, he was prepared to subvert the simplistic clichés attached to blackness – and the impulse towards sentimentality that goes along with them. At the height of black rapture ...”

“... is to blame?’ The crime itself is oddly anachronistic. It’s more than twenty years since David FosterWallace placed a lethally entertaining video cartridge at the centre of Infinite Jest. Who records a videotape these days? Who sends out dozens of copies of that tape by mail? When the first tape surfaces, at ...”

“... not have written The Corrections to be optioned by HBO – the chamber music of our time, with David Simon our Mendelssohn – but he agreed to the option, and so the only thing that prevented his book’s debasement was an inept script that died in development. Kraus writes in Franzen’s translation: ‘To be responsive to literature, you cannot be ...”

“... tough keeping track of all the debutantes promenading into print and creating a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer ...”

“... Now that Updike’s an elder statesman in the world of letters, an elfin figure pared down to a David Levine caricature of himself, a newer generation of detractors (replacing the ones that died off) has reserved him a room at the retirement home and seems irritated that he won’t take the hint. In recent interviews and articles he acknowledges the testy ...”

“... of sex (see innumerable campus novels and many of the works of the postwar American writers whom David FosterWallace derided as ‘the Great Male Narcissists’). On the page, though, the resulting hybrid is anything but ungainly, and in any case the narrator is out ahead of both types of reader, pointing to Disgrace ...”

“... would have enjoyed the different ways contemporary writers climb over or slither round him. David FosterWallace claimed ‘The Balloon’ made him want to be a writer; Miranda July keeps Flying to America on her bedside table; Jenny Offill returns regularly to ‘Not-Knowing’; and George Saunders has filled ...”

“... so on. Then he returns with elliptical reports from which the tribe’s younger storytellers, from David FosterWallace on, set about extracting a style and a tone attuned to new ways of feeling and not feeling. One constant throughout these risk-filled spirit voyages has been DeLillo’s superbly take-it-or-leave-it ...”

“... He’s invariably linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David FosterWallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald ...”

“... the Paris Review, McSweeney’s and the New Yorker. He is also a journalist, specialising, like David FosterWallace, in first-person-singular expeditions into curious reaches of American culture. Tower’s non-fiction adventures have included a bicycle odyssey along the New Orleans levee a year after Hurricane ...”

“... a one-tome definition of what the American novel (for good or ill) so often seeks to be nowadays. David FosterWallace and Kurt Anderson step aside: today’s big novel is the type of book which aims at bigness with the notion that all other big books are folded inside. The example is not War and Peace but the World ...”

“... North London suburb and in New York, bears the impress of American writers like Dave Eggers and David FosterWallace, clever, nervy exhibitionists, IQs-with-i-Books, guys who, as Smith has put it, ‘know things’, writers with a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The ...”

“... and he would return to the displacement over and over (and over) in his fiction. Here are the boy David Kern’s parents, George and Elsie, fighting about it in the early story ‘Pigeon Feathers’: Mother’s anger touched David’s face; his cheeks burned guiltily. Just by staying in the living room he associated ...”