11–14 of 14 posts
RIP DFW.
Feeling slightly ashamed that I haven't heard of him earlier, I have a question to the HN crowd: How did you hear of him before? It's a shame to hear of someone people respect this much post-mortem. I wonder if you can infer a body of work that's important today and published recently from a group of similar-minded people like HN.
I think Wallace was the greatest writer of his generation. Period. This news breaks my heart.
I feel like the novel is winding down, actually. There's no great proliferation of ideas any more. The last great author I can think of was Beckett; after him, everybody I've read really seems to be struggling to do something new. Even Murakami (who, not counting Wallace, I think is the greatest of the generation) is less innovative than the authors who preceded him.
Is it possible that a novel as a pure-prose medium can be exhausted in terms of ideas? Because I think (and I've written rather extensively about this) that for the novel to go on, it'll have to evolve to match current technology, in the way that Coupland and Danielewski do it. But that means a departure from pure literature, in a way.
Feeling slightly ashamed that I haven't heard of him earlier, I have a question to the HN crowd: How did you hear of him before? It's a shame to hear of someone people respect this much post-mortem. I wonder if you can infer a body of work that's important today and published recently from a group of similar-minded people like HN.
After reading Infinite Jest, I have struggled to find any author to equal its vitality, and have been frequently disappointed by the flat hollow fakeness of most works I have read since it, by authors both new to me (Paul Auster) and old (William Gibson).
His use of language has a kind of magical... it is hard to get exactly how he does it but his writing brings his characters alive.
I am crushed and saddened by his death and the tragedy of its cause. Depression haunts the people in many of our lives. It is a terrible disease made worse by the mistaken notion that melancholy is somehow noble or simply a fact of creativity, an illness to be proud of. It is certainly not.