Word: novelists
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...future when each year is known by the name of its corporate sponsor (e.g., the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar). Infinite Jest was the quintessence of 1990s literary maximalism, and it became instant required reading. Enough with those '80s party-boy writers! Here was a novelist with the industrial-strength intellectual chops to theorize even our resolutely anti-intellectual age. Wallace became a reluctant literary pinup, with his stubbly outsize chin and his shoulder-length hair. He was America's No. 1 literary seed, at the top of a hierarchy that was, one suspects, largely meaningless...
McCracken is a novelist (The Giant's House), and Figment is the story of her pregnancy, her grieving and finally the birth of her second child, a baby boy, a year later. It is, as McCracken writes, "a story so grim and lessonless it's better not to think about at all." But reading it is a mysteriously enlarging experience. It could pair neatly with Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking: it's hard to imagine two more rigorous, unsentimental guides to enduring the very bottom of the scale of human emotion...
...Wallace died on Friday, an apparent suicide in his Claremont, Calif. home. In his 46 years, Wallace fit journalism in. He was a novelist first, but several of his magazine pieces were classics of the form. Here are a few examples of his considerable skill...
...might be remembered as the guy who brought footnotes back (his fiction is full of them), or the person who magnified Thomas Pynchon's reader-reaction paranoia into post-modern mega-epic. He did do those things. But Wallace was also the greatest horror novelist ever. In Infinite Jest a corporation-run unified North America of the near-future (dates have been replaced by sponsor names, such as the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) is being decimated by a videotape so entertaining that people watch it on a loop, mesmerized until they die of dehydration or starvation...
...Russian novelist and dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, died last month at the age of 89. A celebrated author, his series of novels—including his most renowned, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”—meticulously documented the monstrous crimes of Stalin’s regime and eventually won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. The effusive stream of eulogies that poured in from across the world and the political spectrum might lead us to think that Solzhenitsyn ranks with George Orwell as one of the century?...