Why are his essays so much more enjoyable than his fiction?

Why are his essays so much more enjoyable than his fiction?

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Just finished Big Red Son, one of the more enjoyable essays I have ever read. What are some other good ones?

You had better put down that lobster

Because they're actually funny and truthful. He also doesn't try to shoehorn formal metaliterature into them. Just writes all of it in a straightforward, funny and witty way.

Read Shipping Out, it's his best. Get the version on 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again', though. And after you're done reading it try 'Getting Away From Pretty Much Being Away From It All".

this is why Oblivion is his best work

>Getting Away From Pretty Much Being Away From It All
how can he make every sound so sad?

Life is sad, my friend. Once I nearly had a nervous breakdown while walking through a mall during Christmas time while a string quartet played and nobody listened to it. I guess he had this very accute sense of his ennui and knew how to articulate it better than you could yourself;

It contains his best stories and his worst stories, sure

I think BIWHM is more consistent, even if it gets a bit played out by the end

the cruise ship hit so many notes. kinda adventurous, informative, interesting, and it wound up leaving me with a few hours of post book depression with that ending which is something i feel almost never nowadays

I've read it several times over the span of two years and I get sad we won't ever get to read anything new by DFW. Such a shame. I can even imagine him going to one of these YouTube conventions and writing about it. God Damn, dude, why did you have to off yourself.

Some are good but some are unbearable (such as "Authority and American Usage")

i feel like he had one more book in him too. his first actually good fiction book. his work makes me feel like he was working up to something big, just never made it. pale king was a work someone makes before they kill themselves or before they reach nirvana. his current books are just good riddled with bad. that's ok though. he made it as far as he did

yea, i was torn with that one. on one hand i didn't stop reading it. on the other hand i got nothin out of it

Pretty much everything in Consider the Lobster

same, I went down to the Wallace archive in Texas just to see more of his content, even if it was mostly unfinished

His syllabi are fascinating, although I'm a teacher so ymmv
hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases/2010/dfw/teaching/
archive.is/FlxWG

Because his place was in philosophy not literature, but he tried anyways because anything in philosophy that isnt linguistic autism is looked down as middlebrow crap nowdays

what interesting stuff did you find that isnt available on the internet?

There are a lot of back-and-forth messages about IJ, fragments that got cut out of it and The Pale King, a few vignettes that he never included in BIWHM, and a bunch of his teaching materials. He would edit students' creative writing pieces multiple times in different colored pens, and you can see some of those too.

nothing mind-blowing, but it was nice to see the more stripped-down content that hadn't been polished to oblivion

They are more enjoyable in that they are less painful because they aren't as long.

david fostee wallace is a fucking meme author

t. SNOOT

Because he used a ghost writer for the fiction.

His essays on tennis are 10/10. It's clear how genuinely passionate he is about the sport.

>Authority and American Usage
Convinced me to read Garner, which makes it the most useful review I've read.

>passionate

Hitch had a theory that to be a good novelist, you had to have a deep appreciation for music and the musicality of things. Haven't read Wallace but it could be that he is a good non-fiction writer trying to be a novelist when he should've just settled for being a good non-fiction writer.