Wake Up the Dawn and Ask Her Why

Congratulations to Mr. Dan Carlson for correctly naming "Holiday in Spain" by Counting Crows as the Tuesday Song of the Day.

Also, after getting called out by Dan for a lack of fiction selections in yesterday's post, I decided to pick up Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Judging by the following paragraphs, I think it's going to be quite an interesting read.

Among writers of the younger -- which these days means under forty -- generation, David Foster Wallace has a reputation as a wild-card savant. His latest offering, "Infinite Jest," has been moving toward us like an ocean disturbance, pushing increasingly hyperbolic rumors before it: that the author could not stop writing; that the publisher was begging for cuts of hundreds of pages; that it was, qua novel, a very strange piece of business altogether.

Now it's here and, yes, it is strange, not just in its radically cantilevered plot conception but also in its size (more than a thousand pages, one tenth of that bulk taking the form of endnotes): this, mind you, in an era when publishers express very real doubts about whether the younger generation -- presumably a good part of Wallace's target audience -- reads at all.

Review by Sven Birkerts in the February 1996 edition of The Atlantic Monthly.