When Paul Thomas Anderson Talked to David Foster Wallace About Don DeLillo

  You can learn a lot about Paul Thomas Anderson on this week’s WTF Podcast, but maybe the most interesting bit of trivia you could pick up is that P.T.A. took a class taught by David Foster Wallace. Listen to the whole thing, but Anderson calls Wallace the first teacher he fell in love with around the 38 minute mark. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, our Tumblr, and sign up for our mailing list.

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Lessons in Language from David Foster Wallace and Bryan Garner: A Review of “Quack This Way”

Quack this Way: David Foster Wallace and Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing by Brian Andrew Garner Penrose; 146 p. By the looks of it, the book, Quack this Way: David Foster Wallace and Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing, a new offering from the DFW legacy should serve as a footnote, at best, on the acclaimed author’s life. In 2001, The New Republic commissioned a book review from Wallace on Bryan Garner’s then little-known book on modern […]

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#tobyreads: On Book Groups & De Facto Extra Credit

I may have lost track of the number of book groups I’m in at this point. Four? Five? I run one, and am now in the semi-regular position of putting together the reading list for early 2014. (One prediction: the expanded edition of Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love will make an appearance.) It’s something I value a lot — getting to talk about books with smart people is never not time well spent, and in a lot of cases, I’ve […]

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Novelists On Culture, Then and Now: Revisiting the 90s Culture Writing of David Foster Wallace, Dennis Cooper, and William T. Vollmann

The first time I read David Foster Wallace, I didn’t realize that I was reading David Foster Wallace. It took me until I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again — which I came to relatively late in my Wallace-reading — to realize just when it was that I’d first encountered an example of Wallace’s writing. It wasn’t in that collection, nor was it in his Atlantic piece on talk radio, my first encounter with his writing in […]

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Afternoon Bites: Martin Scorsese and NYRB, Matthew Dickman on Mary Ruefle, Baltimore’s Literary History, and More

  “This is a book not just for poets but for anyone interested in the human heart, the inner-life, the breath exhaling a completion of an idea that will make you feel changed in some way.” Matthew Dickman on Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey. Will Sheff makes the case that a televised Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show concert from 1974 is his preferred “cinematic document of a rock and roll band.” Martin Scorsese is making a documentary about the New […]

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