The name David Foster Wallace refers to three distinct writers. The first was a highbrow, encyclopaedic novelist; the second was an essayist of the first rank; and the third was the giver of a famous inspirational talk (“This is Water”) quoted frequently on the internet. I confess to having little interest in the first of these figures, and none whatsoever in the third. For me, Wallace was almost exclusively the author of the pieces collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), Consider the Lobster (2005), and, most recently, Both Flesh and Not.
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