Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

O’Connor’s “Good Country People,”

William Vollmann, whose collection The Rainbow Stories

The layers of asserting and then hedging those assertions to assert slightly more emphatically and imaginatively that would constitute Wallace’s style are beginning to form.

“the head throb heartlike”:

“basically an enormous eyeball floating around something, reporting what it sees.”

Baldwin

Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight,

Gus Van Sant wanted to option Infinite Jest.

Wallace’s fictional manuscript and the philosophy thesis were also of a piece: both asked whether language depicted the world or in some deeper way defined it and even altered it.