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

the paradox that his attempt to condemn seduction had proven so seductive.

Jacques Derrida’s essays, “The Double Session” and “Plato’s Pharmacy.”

him—the inability to slow down his whirring mind was part of what he felt made his life so hard.

He wrote Forrest Ashby that he was thinking of moving to Canada to be a high school teacher.

O’Connor’s “Good Country People,”

Burgess’s novel showed how to use hyperbolic language to convey deadened emotional states.

William Gass’s novel Omensetter’s Luck.

“My best kids are farm-kids who didn’t even know that they liked to read until I persuaded them they did.”

novelist had to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him or her on an airplane;