David Foster Wallace
Hardcover | Pages: 343 pages Rating: 4.23 | 37797 Users | 2845 Reviews
Particularize Books Conducive To Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
| Original Title: | Consider the Lobster |
| ISBN: | 0316156116 (ISBN13: 9780316156110) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Explanation Toward Books Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters. Contains: "Big Red Son," "Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think," "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed," "Authority and American Usage," "The View from Mrs. Thompson's," "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," "Up, Simba," "Consider the Lobster," "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" and "Host."List Of Books Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
| Title | : | Consider the Lobster and Other Essays |
| Author | : | David Foster Wallace |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 343 pages |
| Published | : | December 13th 2005 by Little, Brown and Company |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Writing. Essays. Philosophy. Humor. Short Stories. Literature. American |
Rating Of Books Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
Ratings: 4.23 From 37797 Users | 2845 ReviewsJudgment Of Books Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
This book reminds me why I love DFW. The erudition, humility, self-consciousness, and truth-seeking are all on fine display here, as is the extremely personal nature of his prose. He's constantly revealing himself while writing about others, even when such revelations are less than flattering, and is openly unsure about the worthiness of such self-revelation, and is also unsure whether this very open unsureness about the worthiness of his self-revelation is itself another layer of unworthyHaving predictably traversed the 120 first pages of I J I turned to this highly enjoyable readable and fun lobster book. Something I like about DFW and something I find rather young and self-indulgent about him. So before getting back into IJ I have resorted to the Hideous Men book and I am not enjoying it at all. Harold Bloom says to be selective because you can't read all the books anymore... so I think I might go for the completist read of Delillo (apparently DFW's favorite author) and spare
Not his best for the following reasons:1. We know what we know now of how his life was cut short. So why the hell did someone, in retrospect, choose to send the great American writer to a bloody lobster festival? To a pornography awards show? At any rate, all this ended up revealing was that DFW was the real world Buzz Killington- he starts his porn award article with genital mutilation statistics, and implores of the readers of some gourmet food magazine to consider the pain and suffering of
Consider the Lobster was an admirably consistentand frequently entertainingcollection of essays by DFW. In my opinion, it was actually even stronger than his A Supposedly Fun Thing Ill Never Do Again, which was itself certainly no slouch. Thoughts on and ratings for the individual essays can be found below.Big Red Son: 4.5 stars. This essay on the porn industry was peppered liberally with humorous observations and intelligent insights, but really, that industry is so monumentally absurd, the
I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said. DFW is/was amazing, brilliant, and it is so devastating that he won't spend the next several decades casting his genius out to us in small sips, book by book by book. One of my favorite things about reading what I consider to be DFW's best writing is the sheer grace of his phrasing, the joy of getting sucked right in and through paragraph after paragraph of the longest, most convoluted-seeming sentences which nonetheless pull you along
I've long been told by so many to read Infinite Jest, but the problem is, an equal amount of people have said it's not worth the bother. For a book so long, I'm not ready to take the risk. I can't comment on his fiction, but this collection of essays was simply A+ material. I would have given five stars just for the piece on the porn industry. The rest too were also mighty fine. I don't use tour de force that often when it comes to books, but this was precisely that.He's been called a postmodern
What a trip! DFW's fractured narrative feels more like a genuine conversation than anything else. The essays are insightful and thought provoking; but I feel they are aimed mostly at an American audience. I loved DFW's writing, especially the last piece where endnotes were boxed-in and merged with the body of essay itself; but asides from a chapter or two, a big bulk of the content was socio-political issues that hardly matter to a non-American.
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