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“... Franzen, an apostate from their ranks, helped make the ex-theorist schlub a stock character. David FosterWallace, a true believer of sorts, envied Dostoevsky’s pre-postmodern sincerity. Then everything seemed to get turned round and I was suddenly too old to be able to speak with confidence about the totality ...”

“... back to back. In mainstream cinema, performers mainly ‘go about feigning genuine humanity’, as David FosterWallace wrote in his marvellous essay on pornography, ‘Big Red Son’. In porn, however, defences sometimes slip, and what Wallace has a porn fan characterise as the ...”

“... Like Eggers (whose memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by Moody), David FosterWallace and William T. Vollmann, Moody spurns the eye-dropper technique of minimalism that was fashionable when he was a nervous colt in the 1980s in favour of a bachelor-guy pack-rat approach where everything ...”

“... well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David FosterWallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies ...”

“... David FosterWallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands. Jim read David and his younger sister Amy Moby-Dick as a bedtime story. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to write an epic novel, but it wasn’t accidental ...”

“... jokes and puns, and farcical escapism: Rushdie, Grass, Pynchon in his most recent novel, David FosterWallace, even Zadie Smith. In novels by those writers, we have lately encountered terrorist groups with silly names, a genetically engineered mouse, two clocks having a conversation with each other, a giant ...”

“... by the CIA, are a familiar plot device across the spectrum, from literary fiction (Thomas Pynchon, David FosterWallace) to mass-market movies (The Ipcress File, The Parallax View, Jacob’s Ladder, the Bourne franchise) and TV (The X-Files, Stranger Things). The story is always the same: mind control is real, and those ...”

“... first as a friend of Leigh Hunt and then as a friend of Walter Savage Landor), but cites instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David FosterWallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce ...”

“... David Wallace​ ’s Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 contains 82 chapters by an enormous team of international contributors spanning what Wallace describes as nine ‘itineraries’: Paris to Béarn; Calais to London; St Andrews to Finistère; Basel to Danzig; Avignon to Naples; Palermo to Tunis; Cairo to Constantinople; Mount Athos to Muscovy; Venice to Prague ...”

“... essays – during the period of composition the world does nothing but give you gifts.They love David FosterWallace here, and I have read no one but him for months. His books are everywhere in tall voluble stacks – a writer is always everywhere when you are working on them. I feel partially disrobed when I see his ...”

“... a taste for the sleazy, is named Beet Queen, the first Beet Queen. Her election has been rigged: Wallace, Dot’s godfather, first convinced his townspeople that Argus ought to have a beet festival and elect a beet queen, and then falsified the votes so that Dot would win. Dot’s name would even be sky-written above the town: ‘Queen Wallacette’. This ...”

“... parents, and Acker was clearly eager to do both. In San Diego she finished her BA and started at David Antin’s poetry seminar, where she met another student called Len Neufeld. The pair of them ran away from their respective spouses to New York City, with the idea of making it big as writers, just as Patti Smith had a couple of years before.On arriving in ...”

“... writes, an oddly passive wording) and crafty tactician (although the romantic advice he gave David Hare sounds like something from a cut-rate campus Casanova). He also took in troubled lambs gone astray whom he could counsel and Pygmalionise, such as Brigit (a pseudonym). Roth met her when she was still grief-struck over the death of her mother. When at ...”

“... and with different timbres, this refrain has been part of the Joe McCarthy movement, the George Wallace campaign and every Republican surge from Nixon to Gingrich. (But let’s not be too partisan about it; the rhetoric evolved from the days when the Ku Klux Klan and the Southern Democratic Party were each other’s official and provisional wings.) As ...”

“... the Communist Party as a career move: ‘You will meet big people.’ By the end of that year, David Platt, the Daily Worker’s movie reviewer (a witness frequently summoned by Hoberman for counterpoint), announced that ‘never before in the history of the screen have there been so many forward-looking people in positions of responsibility as in ...”