Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple are running $4 sale on David Foster Wallace‘s masterpiece, Infinite Jest.
As of this 5:23 p.m. ET writing, the same book currently costs $8.89 on Google Play and $9.99 on Kobo. This week, Hachette dropped the agency model for eBook pricing, allowing digital book marketplaces to price books as they wish. Will we see eBook price wars without these price restrictions?
paidContent has more about the new eBook contracts: “Hachette’s new contracts with ebook retailers following the publisher’s September settlement with the Department of Justice are now place. As of Tuesday, Amazon had begun discounting some Hachette ebooks slightly; today, the discounts are larger, and Google and Barnes & Noble is discounting as well. Apple is not discounting the ebooks yet.” (link via ohhaiworld)
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Author David Foster Wallace‘s iconic book Infinite Jest has been brought to life in map form thanks to the work of D.C.-based artist William Beutler. Infinite Atlas, as the project is called, chronicles all of the locations mentioned in the book, both real and fictional, and pinpoints them on a map. Users can search entires on the map and read footnotes about the locations and how they apply to the various characters in the book.
AppNewser has more about how it works: “Entries on the map include the page number, a description of the place and the characters involved. For example, ‘Marlborough/Marlboro Street’ first appears on page 23. Here is the description: “location of prestigious gallery where the ‘last woman’s old art through / location of brownstone where JOI and Avril lived before Mario and HI were born.” Readers can also search the map based on a list of characters.”
The project was born out of Beutler’s first effort, which he called Infinite Boston, which launched in July. Infinite Boston included about 50 locations around the city of Boston.
A printed version of the Infinite Atlas Map is available for purchase.
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My name is Mia Lipman, and I never made it through Infinite Jest. In fact, you couldn't pay me enough to read most of David Foster Wallace's fiction to the end.
Go ahead—revoke my literary credentials. I'll pretend to understand. But if I've learned anything from working as an editor and critic for the past dozen years, it's that the world is too rich in great writing for me to finish a book I'm not enjoying. The next one in the stack is always right there, batting its Garamond eyes.
That said: The Cult of DFW has a point. Wallace's writing was rich, his brain a diamond mine, and his early death left a gaping hole in modern thought. Many of his essays were masterful, especially this one, and he was hot in the way a man in coveralls with dirt under his nails can melt college girls into butter and sugar.
I have a bias against footnotes, coupled with an inherent distaste for ponderous tomes that extends to the Russian masters and horrified many of my professors—but that doesn't mean I don't get it. Wallace was a mad genius cut from the classical self-destructive mold. He did what poets seek to do: interpret the intangible in a way the rest of us can't begin to imagine but can immediately recognize. I saw him read once in a church in San Francisco; he looked like a lumberjack and seemed to be gently spoiling for a fight. Nobody could stop staring.
Today would have been David Foster Wallace's 50th birthday, and it's a damn shame he's no longer here to practice his craft. Lord knows his work spoke volumes, even if it didn't always speak to me.
As it happens, another mind bender was born the same day DFW shuffled on this mortal coil: Chuck Palahniuk, who's still very much alive. The author of Fight Club and Damned uses one word for every hundred of Wallace's, but their writing shares an inability to be categorized or, thus far, successfully imitated.
Often hailed by adjectives like "eccentric" and "transgressional," Palahniuk's fiction is so bizarre and otherworldly that I've never quite understood its widespread popularity. Except when he pulls off lines like this: "It's green the way a pool table with green felt looks under the yellow 1 ball, not the way it looks under the red 3."
Again with the poetry. Again with a raised glass, even from those of us who earn our keep by finding chinks in the armor.
Happy 50th, David and Chuck. I don't get it, but I absolutely get it.
I’m willing to bet that Harold Bloom is wagging his meaty arthritic fist right now, decrying the declining influence of classical educations and the literary canon. Ah, yes, the classical education. Gone are the days when a crested Exeter boy was considered cultured if he knew his Greeks, could recite some Donne, and laughed at the right moments in As You Like It. I’m not going to say times were simpler then but…actually, yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to say. Times were simpler then.
People weren’t dumber and life wasn’t easier, but literary and cultural knowledge was more limited, because there were obviously limited choices. The average student these days is bombarded with countless opinions on how to feed a healthy brain, and as cultural content flows into the world at an exponential rate, it’s hard to know whether 20 hours are better spent reading Infinite Jest, watching Season 3 of The Wire, memorizing “The Wasteland” or listening to scratchy bootlegs of Robert Johnson.
This argument has surely been made before, and surely better, but as a writer I think it needs to be continuously addressed. Because for all the opportunities writers are afforded today, we are facing increasingly fragmented audiences. There are still perpetually curious folks out there, trying their best to sample everything from the buffet. My wife is one of them and her skills as a prolific devourer of books and media always astounds me. But the majority of people simply taste the king crab legs and decide, “well heck, king crabs are pretty darn good and thanks to those Deadly Catch fellas, we’re swimming in ‘em, so I might as well eat these long-legged SOBS until I go gentle into that good night.”
I speak of course of anyone who’s picked up some Stieg Larsson and decided that kinky and moody thrillers are the be-all-and-end-all, or anyone who’s buried themselves in paranormal romance and decided not to dig out until all the centaurs have found a hooflove, or…well, you get it. Genre has been around for a long time, but it’s more comforting than ever these days. Since there’s no such thing as a classical education anymore–since what’s deemed canonical is so daunting–you might as well become a specialist, an expert, a slavishly devoted fan.
I don’t really have a problem with this sort of fandom because I participate in it to a certain degree and, if I’m lucky enough to find my writing lumped into a zeitgeisty genre, I stand to make a few bucks and find a few readers from it. Yet it can be discouraging to a writer whose work doesn’t necessarily fall into a popular genre and sees his/her books added as #347 on peoples’ Goodreads “to-read” shelves and wonders, “when they heck are they gonna get to me? They still have all the Shopaholics, Tolkien and Dutch Transcendentalists to get through!”
Publishers know this better than anyone and that’s why they turn down some great writing in favor of some not-as-great writing. It’s a business, as you are constantly reminded, and market share ain’t necessarily achieved just because you can string together a better description of butterflies than Nabakov. If they can’t find a place to fit you into the “market,” then you’re left out in the cold.
One genre currently freezing its tuchus off is the comic novel f
While exploring the David Foster Wallace archive, Justine Tal Goldberg unearthed a poem most likely written as a grade school assignment.
According to The Guardian, Goldberg was researching for an article when she found a thick folder labeled “very early DFW.” It also contained illustrated short stories, school reading lists and essays on baseball with smiley faces scribbled on the margins.
The article offers these lines from the adolescent Wallace (pictured, via) poem: “My mother works so hard / so hard and for bread. She needs some lard. / She bakes the bread. And makes / the bed. And when she’s / threw she feels she’s dayd.” What do you think? (via Publisher’s Weekly)
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Or, instead of bumbling back to the wintery Durmstrang-y reads, maybe everyone should just take the summer off and read nothing BUT comic novels for adults! That’d be kind of cool.
Agreed Tiff – Recommendations!?!