During his lifetime, David Foster Wallace was one of the leading figures of post-modern literature. Speaking to TTBOOK in 1996, he said that he saw himself as a realist.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Literature
Middle English isn’t what it used to be. Add a back-beat, some high-flying rhymes, and you’ve got a hot new version of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, the madcap transformation of one of literature’s oldest classics from history to hip hop...
There’s no writer who’s hipper, more self-consciously knowing, than David Foster Wallace. But even he can take only so much ironic hipness. He says it is relentlessly corrosive to the soul. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, assessing the state of fiction, with David...
Mark Sundeen tells Anne he accepted an advance to write a travel book about bull-fighting in Spain. What he wrote instead was an over-the-top fake documentary.
As Steve says in this 2005 profile, part of the magic of Nobel Prize-winning short story author Alice Munro was the way she condensed the essence of a life into a short space. Munro passed away on May 13, 2024. She was 92.
Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" graphic novel is now a Netflix series. Gaiman has made a career out of tapping into our unconscious dreams and fears. In 2003, Steve Paulson traveled to Gaiman's home in Wisconsin to talk about where his story ideas come from.
With her decision to step down as the chief book critic for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani sent the book world reeling. In this piece from our archive, authors reflect on the impact of the NYT's' infamous head book critic.
In a conversation from 2003, Toni Morrison reflected on how the civil rights movement had the unintended consequence of magnifying class differences.
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