My Riff on the rhetorical gambits of David Foster Wallace — and the Internet — appeared in the weekend’s New York Times Magazine. On Facebook, Alexander Chee described the piece this way: “I loved David Foster Wallace. I loathed editing him out of my students — and myself. Maud Newton on how David Foster Wallace made a David Foster Wallace . . .
“Maximus Clarke’s digitally manipulated anaglyph portraits take 3D imaging beyond the bounds of cinematic novelty, and explore the paradox of stereography as a simultaneously hyper-realistic and highly artificial medium.” This Friday, August 19, Devotion Gallery in Williamsburg debuts Max’s 3-D portraits of William Gibson, Lindsey Case, Michael Doyle, Chris Ianuzzi, himself, and me. He’ll be handing out old-fashioned red-and-blue glasses, . . .
The Daily Beast asked some writers — Donna Tartt, Junot Díaz, Chris Adrian, Geoff Dyer, Karen Russell, Sherman Alexie, Siri Hustvedt, Darin Strauss, Téa Obreht, Kathryn Stockett, Alexandra Fuller, Anne Enright, Elisabeth Kostova, Alexander McCall Smith, and me — about our favorite summer books. Mine is John Colapinto’s first (and, so far, only) novel, About the Author. What I said: . . .
My contribution to the “Why’s This So Good?” series — a collaboration between Longreads, Alexis Madrigal, and Nieman Storyboard’s Andrea Pitzer designed to explore “what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading” — is about Raymond Chandler’s 1945 “Writers in Hollywood,” a scathing attack on the motion picture industry. Chandler “brought to bear on his subject all the fury and . . .
“Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing. In this respect every generation begins primitively, has no different task from that of every previous generation, nor does it get further, except in so far as the preceding generation shirked its task and deluded itself. This authentically human factor . . .