In the fourth issue of the new journal, C21: Journal of 21st-Century Writings, Mark West has written a nicely positive review of David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels (2014), edited by Marshall Boswell, in which I have an essay, “‘Then Out of the Rubble’: David Foster Wallace’s Early Fiction.” West also reviews Gesturing Towards Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy (2014), edited by Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (somewhat less positively).
I just published “An Interview with Jonathan Arac” in the most recent issue of boundary 2. I am honored to have had the chance to interview Arac, who has been such a important mentor to me in so many ways. An even further honor is having the interview appear in an issue with work by Tom Eyers, David Golumbia, McKenzie Wark, and others, along with Bruce Robbins’s interview of Orhan Pamuk and Jeffrey J. Williams’s interview of Wai Chee Dimock. What a fantastic issue.
Six more of sonnets from the ongoing project just appeared in Empty Mirror.
A sonnet from an ongoing sequence just appeared in issue 5 of Small Po(r)tions magazine. Check out “2015.02.” More poems from this project are on their way in a couple weeks.
I am happy to announce that I was a finalist for the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize and will be publishing a number of poems–including a twenty page long poem, “The Shape of Things II”–in Verse later this year. Congratulations to Felicia Zamora, whose portfolio, Of Unknowing, was selected as the winner of the prize. The contest was judged by Brian Henry.
Alexander R. Galloway has quite generously and critically responded to a recent review I wrote about his book, The Interface Effect (2012), in “Allegories of Control.”
I just wrote a review of Alexander R. Galloway’s The Interface Effect (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012) for The b2 Review. Check it out.
I am delighted to say that two new poems of mine just went up at the Organism for Poetic Research‘s journal, PELT, in its third volume. The poems are “Oceanic” and “Survival City.”
For anyone in New York (I’m not, sadly), go check out the launch of volume 3 of PELT, a journal published by the Organism for Poetic Research, in which I have two poems. This volume of PELT is a special issue on “Sci-Pulp Poetics.” The launch will be accompanied by a reading at Wendy’s Subway this Friday, September 26th at 7:00 pm. Wendy’s Subway is at 722 Metropolitan Avenue, 2nd Floor, Brooklyn, New York 11206 and can be reached by taking the L train to Graham Ave.
There will be readings and performances by:
The Organism for Poetic Research
Anna Gurton-Wachter
Tiziana LaMelia
& Morgan Vo
Film Screenings by Amie Robinson (Nykur) and Sonia Levy (Pôle)
& more
The movie begins in this flat, journalistic style. A universe with a long natural history, spotted with strange and alluring artifacts of various ‘forerunner’ species. Plaster slides from the walls in the house it rains inside of; he feels for the tissue of sci-fi without the story. So, we invite the dystopian poetics of paranoia and ESP-powered feline-hybrids. “It is as if a cleavage, time, had opened in the floor.”
David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, edited by Marshall Boswell, to which I have contributed an essay, “‘Then Out of the Rubble’: David Foster Wallace’s Early Fiction,” is set to appear 31 July 2014. This volume collects revised versions of essays from two special issues of Studies in the Novel from 2012 (44.3 and 44.4). I am delighted to be included in this excellent collection. See the blurbs at Bloomsbury’s site and read the first review from Publisher’s Weekly. It is reasonably priced right now, and Amazon has it listed in stock (before its release date . . .). Here is a description of the book:
Of the twelve books David Foster Wallace published both during his lifetime and posthumously, only three were novels. Nevertheless, Wallace always thought of himself primarily as a novelist. From his college years at Amherst, when he wrote his first novel as part of a creative honors thesis, to his final days, Wallace was buried in a novel project, which he often referred to as “the Long Thing.” Meanwhile, the short stories and journalistic assignments he worked on during those years he characterized as “playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing.” Wallace was also a specific kind of novelist, devoted to producing a specific kind of novel, namely the omnivorous, culture-consuming “encyclopedic” novel, as described in 1976 by Edward Mendelson in a ground-breaking essay on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing” is a state-of-the art guide through Wallace’s three major works, including the generation-defining Infinite Jest. These essays provide fresh new readings of each of Wallace’s novels as well as thematic essays that trace out patterns and connections across the three works. Most importantly, the collection includes six chapters on Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, which will prove to be foundational for future scholars of this important text.
Table of Contents:
Marshall Boswell, “Preface.”
Part I: Wallace as Novelist
Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas.”
Toon Staes, “Wallace and Empathy: A Narrative Approach.”
Allard den Dulk, “Boredom, Irony, and Anxiety: Wallace and the Kierkegaardian View of the Self.”
Andrew Warren, “Modeling Community and Narrative in Infinite Jest and The Pale King.”
Part II: The Novels
Bradley J. Fest, “‘Then Out of the Rubble’: David Foster Wallace’s Early Fiction.”
Philip Sayers, “Representing the Entertainment in Infinite Jest.”
David Letzler, “Encyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction: Infinite Jest‘s Endnotes.”
Stephen J. Burn, “‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness’: The Pale King.”
Conley Wouters, “‘What Am I, a Machine?’: Humans and Information in The Pale King.”
Ralph Clare, “The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in The Pale King.”
Marshall Boswell, “Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in The Pale King.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 