David Foster Wallace | Frontier Psychiatrist

Finding A Way: A Review of George Saunders, Tenth of December

BY CHRIS LILLIS MEATTO The short fiction of George Saunders has focused almost entirely on how to be a functioning person in contemporary society, and in Tenth of December, his latest collection, Saunders appears at his tender, moving best. The worlds here—his typical smallish, graying suburban strip-mall towns—are populated by characters who will also seem...

George Saunders

The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2011

In the latest Ali Smith novel, a precocious 10-year-old girl asks: “If a story isn’t a fact, but it is a made up version of what happened…what is the point of it?” Her conversational companion, an eccentric middle-aged man, replies: “Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, just sitting there unopened. Then think...

lightning

The Top 10 Videos of July-August 2011

The summer was a slow time for new music releases, but it proved a spectacular time for new music videos. There were so many outstanding releases over the past two months that we had to exclude clips from site favorites like St. Vincent, Fucked Up, and Bon Iver. Given that we did not publish a...

Bored to Death – A Review of The Pale King

The new David Foster Wallace novel sounds like the dullest book of all time. Subject: taxes. Major characters: IRS employees. Setting: Peoria, Illinois. Plot: Minimal. Violence: Minimal. Sex: A blowjob buried in a footnote. Major theme: Boredom. Length: 538 pages, plus addenda. Nevertheless, The Pale King is a masterpiece. Its 50 chapters intersperse “a portrait...

The Pale King

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