Site of the Week: David Foster Wallace

I love David Foster Wallace, and I am still angry that he took his own life four years ago. Infinite Jest changed the way I thought about fiction and was the first book I read outside of college that required serious study to understand (I kept a vocabulary list; in addition to words I initially thought were made up, the book has 150 pages of endnotes, including an entire fictitious movie catalog).

I saw him read in Seattle twelve years ago, and I think I realized then that he was not long for this world; a sweaty, shaking, nervous mess, he took frequent gulps of water as he read and barely made eye contact. His reading voice was sure and steady though, as if his own words propped him up. He disappeared into the back of the store immediately after the reading. He reminded me of a mouse - skittish and shy.

So the Site of the Week is an unfinished story about the Internet. And as a bonus, one of my favorite essays of his, "Consider the Lobster."

This September 8th DFW would have been 50. I miss him.