David Foster Wallace

A collection of essays by the award-winning author of Infinite Jest shares whimsical and biting observations about such topics as the Bush-Kerry presidential race, the pain experienced by lobsters while they are being prepared for the feast, and Franz Kafka's questionable sense of humor. Reprint.

And Other Essays

Consider the Lobster

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.

Gavin

Ah, ah. Postmodern and prescriptivist, enthusiastically wise, Wallace was the one, as loveable as intellectual, as iconoclastic as judicious. He’s a model of finding meaning in places beyond sanctioned loci (like Dostoevsky and 9/11, which he also finds meaning in): in for example an old sincere conservative, in tennis, and arthropods. 

Not that he ‘found’ meaning: he generated it, erupting bittersweet priority over parts of the world held to be artless or empty. Theoretically rococo and colloquially concentrated. Our loss is marked. 

It’s disappointing that ‘Consider the Lobster’, his more or less honest analysis of vegetarianism, founders and shrinks from responsibility. (In short, the piece says “they feel: so why do we do this?”. But he asks: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental?” without actually discounting the latter weaselly ad hominem aspersion.) 

Tensions: he insisted on 'democratic' clarity and yet wrote wilfully distracting pieces. But he’s one of the ones.

Andrew Louis

Reading this two decades after most of the essays were written is a good way to notice which parts of culture have shifted (most jarringly in the audiobook, the third-person pronoun "he" which is used everywhere).

linda

I started reading Consider the Lobster because one of my friends recommended it to me. Well, actually, it was a misunderstanding. He said he had read Consider the Lobster, when in fact he only read the titular essay. So I ended up reading a fifth of the book before he clarified that he was referring to the essay, not the book. But I love David Foster Wallace’s writing style. There are few authors who make non-fiction engaging (Malcolm Gladwell is another writer who comes to mind). Wallace is intellectual and funny, like a cool, nerdy, best friend who is fun to hang out with but doesn’t make you feel stupid (that’s also pretty rare to come by). I think it’s fascinating how Wallace does these ethnographic sketches about unconventional settings, from the Annual AVN Awards to the Maine Lobster Festival. And he raises some really interesting questions along the way: in “Consider the Lobster,” Wallace asks the reader to consider the questions of whether and how different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them. I wasn’t expecting this when I first read the essay. I also love his witty commentary throughout: “At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale.” (107-108); “the CES itself treats [this] tradeshow kind of like the crazy relative in the family and keeps it way out in what used to be the parking garage of the Sands hotel”; “the Maine Lobster Festival’s democratization of lobster comes with all the massed inconvenience and aesthetic compromise of real democracy.” So hopefully, I will finish this book over break.

Emma Friedheim

I have never enjoyed an author's voice more than David Foster Wallace's. I want (and plan) to read everything he has ever published, and only wish he was still with us to write even more. Favorite essays are Authority and American Usage and the McCain piece, but everything was written beautifully and hilariously. I respectfully suggest that everyone read this immediately.

Christopher McCaffery

Basically enjoyed the whole thing. Some parts were dull, some were quite moving. Not life-changing or anything, but I know that I will tear up reading about John McCain now. Nothing as good in here as “Federer as Religious Experience”. A few essays wind up in a weird logic puzzle that is mysteriously consistent but I can't pin down or describe just yet. “Host” is better found online than waded through here. Title essay disappointingly vague and non-committal. Perhaps like most of them, actually...

Melody Izard

I love footnote abuse and I love David Foster Wallace!

I'm going to have to read the actual book too - it seems the audio book does not include all the essays. 

These are the ones in the audio version (which didn't indicate that it was abridged I might huffily add:
Big Red Son (porn industry)
The View from Mrs. Thompson's (Sept 11)
How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart (Tracy Austin's autobiography)
Consider the Lobster (ethics of boiling a creature alive)

I can't say anything that DFW fans have not already said. He is the keen observer who notices and comments on the same thing that we may have noticed and commented on - but maybe not out loud and certainly not so perfectly,

Simon Elliott Stegall

Currently, one of my more tattered bookmarks suffocates between pp 418 and 419 of DFW's 1079 pg tragedy americana, Infinite Jest. It is an adventure and a delight (review forthcoming, I am sure) but I have to say I was pleased that his essays and journalism don't read like that infamous novel, which is to say, slowly, with much brow-furrowing and dictionary-ruffling. In other words, I read this collection of essays in the time it takes me to read 50 pages of Infinite Jest. 

Besides being easier to read and engage with than his fiction (and I mean that absolutely non-pejoratively, regarding his fiction) this book is totally interesting. I.e. even the weaker essays in the book are just fascinating to read. It seems to me that DFW's maybe second strongest asset as a writer was his sheer writerly élan and charm, his ability to inhabit a voice or rhetoric (or whatever) that is (at least for me) just plain fun to read. 

His writing's first strongest asset, or the one that appeals to me the most, is its candor. Always while reading his work one feels confided in, or at least spoken openly to, trusted with a writer's thoughts (and feelings!) and his questions regarding those thoughts (and feelings!), and his awareness of his own limitations. For me, his sheer no-BS attitude toward writing wins me over.

Probably the most significant and interesting piece here is "Authority and American Usage (or, "Politics and the English Language" is Redundant)" which is also my favorite essay (next favorite is the one about tennis) and deals (among sundry other topics) with disagreements among authors of dictionaries about which contemporary words and dialects should be given paper in modern dictionaries. It's just as snooty as it sounds, but if you're reading David Foster Wallace at all then you're probably predisposed to find that kind of stuff sort of arousing (in a totally lexical way) anyway. Worth a read, though be warned: after the eponymous essay, you will probably never want to eat lobster again.

Gabe Cortez

brie

Taylor Murphy

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a sick sense of humour? What is John Updike's deal anyway? And who won the Adult Video News' Female Performer of the Year Award the same year Gwyneth Paltrow won her Oscar? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in his new book of hilarious non-fiction. For this collection, David Foster Wallace immerses himself in the three-ring circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of the most vicious campaigns in recent history. Later he strolls from booth to booth at a lobster festival in Maine and risks life and limb to get to the bottom of the lobster question. Then he wheedles his way into an L.A. radio studio, armed with tubs of chicken, to get the behind-the-scenes view of a conservative talkshow featuring a host with an unnatural penchant for clothing that only looks good on the radio. In what is sure to be a much-talked-about exploration of distinctly modern subjects, one of the sharpest minds of our time delves into some of life's most delicious topics.

Consider the Lobster And Other Essays

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