David Foster Wallace - The David Foster Wallace Reader

The purpose of this David Foster Wallace Reader is simple: to gather in one volume a selection of the most celebrated, most enjoyable, funniest, and most remarkable work by this always-remarkable writer. It is a Greatest Hits collection of novel excerpts, short fiction, and essays that we hope will delight readers who know Wallaces work already and show those new to him the amazing breadth of subjects, characters, ideas, interiors, landscapes, emotions, and human interaction in his writing. We also believe that teachers will find here an ideal introduction for students.

Assembling this book was a collaboration between the executors of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust and Wallaces editor at Little, Brown and Company. We agreed on a core group of excerpts, stories, and essays that were essential to any collection of Wallaces work, argued over others, and sought broader suggestions from writers, critics, and colleagues. Those who kindly aided in the process are listed below. A few took the further step of writing an afterword to a piece they recommended. Brief biographies of these contributors appear at the books end.

Nearly everything in this Reader has been published previously in Wallaces novels, story collections, and essay collections, and the versions here are the original, full texts, rather than the shortened versions that were sometimes created for magazine publication. There are two new works. One is the first story in the book, The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing, which was published in the Amherst Review when Wallace was an undergraduate there. It is an astonishing exploration of psychological pain and self-consciousness. The other is a selection of teaching materials. Wallace taught undergraduate creative writing classes at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and poured enormous care into creating syllabi, reading lists, and pop quizzes to help his students learn to write well. This section is introduced by his mother, Sally Foster Wallace, with whom he shared a boundless love of grammar and linguistic rigor.

We hope we have gathered here a representation of the range, depth, and layers of Wallaces creationsthe complexity of thought and emotion, and the desire to disturb and tickle and demolish and annoy, even to break hearts, that lived alongside his intent to astonish and entertain. This collection could easily have been two or three times as long as it is, and we forced ourselves to leave out many excellent works in an effort to keep to a manageable length. There is writing in all of Wallaces books that is every bit as powerful as whats included here, and we hope you will be moved to read those books in full.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Sam Freilich, Victoria Matsui, and Mario J. Pulice for their work and care in creating this book, and Marlena Bittner for her kindness and support in everything connected with David and his books.

Bonnie Nadell