Word: readerly
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Wallace, who hasn't put out a novel since his brilliant, dense Infinite Jest in 1996 (or any other fiction at all in five years), takes it easy on the reader here. Sure, his three-page-long sentences can make Faulkner look like Hemingway, and even short sentences can require four trips to the dictionary, but he has dropped his numbered footnotes, has cut down on the math formulas and tells linear tales nearly grounded in reality. This is as close as the guy is going to get to beach reading...
...consciousness. In an effort to make his often bizarre endings more powerful, Wallace frequently stops stories before their climax, which sometimes improves them and sometimes makes them seem like an aborted attempt at a novel. When it works, it's part of his Pynchonesque trick of keeping the reader uncomfortable by withholding information and embedding the most devastating facts within long descriptive paragraphs...
...meander in their own cleverness until they are bogged down in Wallace's detail-obsessive word marsh are still breathtakingly smart, like a middling Stoppard play. Strange, then, is the self-doubt that creeps into most of the tales, often in the form of acknowledging potential criticisms before the reader even thinks of them. And Wallace frequently seems to wonder whether his or any art is just a foolish attempt at uniqueness in a world where we're all fundamentally the same. His final story in the collection, The Suffering Channel, is the slightly drawn-out tale of an artist...
...beginning of summer leisure. A quartet of marine-themed comix, one about a whale, one about octopi and two about fish, are hitting comic and bookstore shelves at the same time. As catch of the day, some are better than others. TIME.comix acts as you professional taster, or, uh, reader...
...Ward’s case, the process was smoothed by relationships with faculty members. Ward’s adviser taught a seminar she took, and she works in the lab of her reader, Cabot Professor of Social Ethics Mahzarin Banaji...