Notes & Errata

Boston and Infinite Jest
This site is just one of several which examine the role of Boston in Infinite Jest.  The most notable and comprehensive resource is William Beutler’s Infinite Boston and the Infinite Atlas.  As I told Mr. Beutler, this course owes a lot to the work that he’s done.  In 2008, Danielle Dreilinger and Javier Zarracina also published a map of Infinite Jest’s Boston in The Boston Globe.  You might also consider viewing sites on this topic at The Millions, The New York Daily News and the Harvard Crimson.  Most recently, Radio Open Source produced a program about this very topic in January, 2014.

Reading Infinite Jest

There are countless sites online cataloguing readers’ adventures with Infinite Jest.  Among the most well-known are the Wallace Wiki and Infinite Summer.  Sam Potts, Inc. has created a fascinating character diagram of the novel, and Brain Pickings’ character flowchart is interesting as well.  Keith O’Neill has

written a helpful scene-by-scene guide to the novel, Drew Cordes has created a guide for reading the novel chronologically.  If you’re looking for reviews of the novel, Jay McInerney’s review in the New York Times and Sven Birkert’s review in The Atlantic are good places to start.

David Foster Wallace online

• The Howling Fantods
• David Foster Wallace in the #MeToo Era: A Conversation with Clare Hayes-Brady (LARB)
• The David Foster Wallace Archive (located at the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin)
• David Foster Wallace in Harper’s Magazine
• “The Great Concavity” (a podcast about David Foster Wallace)
• “The Secret History of David Foster Wallace’s Boston” [BDCwire, with a link to a lost 1996 interview with DFW]
• “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” by Adam Kelly
• “David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline,” by Adam Kelly (from the Irish Journal of American Studies)
• “David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46” (from The New York Times)
• “Death is Not the End,” by Jon Baskin
• “The Turbulent Genius of David Foster Wallace,” by Alexander Nazaryan (from Newsweek)
• “The Philosophical Underpinnings of David Foster Wallace’s Fiction,” by James Ry
  erson (from Slate)
• “David Foster Wallace and the Perils of Litchat,” by Laura Miller (from The New Yorker)
• Paul Thomas Anderson speaks about studying with David Foster Wallace (from WTF with Marc Maron)
• “Robinson Crusoe,” David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude,” by Jonathan Franzen (from The New Yorker)
• “The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass Infinite Jest,” by D.T. Max (from The New Yorker)
• “Wittgenstein is Dead and Living in Ohio,” Caryn James’ review of The Broom of the System in the New York Times
• The David Foster Wallace audio project at Emerson College
• “Wittgenstein is Dead and Living in Ohio,” Caryn James’ review of The Broom of the System in the New York Times
• The David Foster Wallace audio project at Emerson College
• The End of the Tour:
  • The End of the Tour official site
  • The End of the Tour Portrays David Foster Wallace on Book Tour (from The Wall Street Journal, 7/23/15)
  • “Jason Segel Makes a Career U-Turn as David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour” (from The New York Times, 7/26/15)
  • The Rumpus Interview with David Lipsky
  • “We do not consider it an homage”: David Foster Wallace’s family isn’t happy about
  • The End of the Tour (from MobyLives, 4/24/14)
• “New Fan-Designed Cover of 20th Anniversary Edition of ‘Infinite Jest’ Plus a Brief Interview with Michael Pietsch” (from The Millions, 12/23/15)
• “Everything About Everything: David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’ at 20,” by Tom Bissell (from The New York Times, 2/1/16)
• “Beyond Infinite Jest,” by D.T. Max (from The New Yorker, 2/19/16)
• Curtis White remembers David Foster Wallace (Moby Lives, 9/14/16)
• “Derivative Sport: The Journalistic Legacy of David Foster Wallace” (Longreads, 12/17)
• “How to Read Infinite Jest” (The New Yorker, 10/18)