Sublime

Wallace wasn’t clear on what he wanted, unless it was to be left alone—except when he didn’t.

His nonfiction persona was, as Wallace told an interviewer, “a little stupider and shmuckier than I am.”

Emma and Wallace had become friends by virtue of the fact that neither of them was a white man in their program.

enfilade

“Wallace does not, in fact, tell the story. Instead he inhabits for extended moments the airspace around his characters.”

Wallace’s cruise ship piece was about the price of failing to choose well.

Costello remembers getting a letter from Wallace announcing that he wanted to write fiction that would still be read “100 years from now.”

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