Consider The Lobster: Essays and Arguments

Description

Now in B Format. A brilliant and hilarious new collection of essays from the award-winning author of the bestseller INFINITE JEST Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a sick sense of humour? What is John Updike's deal anyway? And who won the Adult Video News' Female Performer of the Year Award the same year Gwyneth Paltrow won her Oscar? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in his new book of hilarious non-fiction. For this collection, David Foster Wallace immerses himself in the three-ring circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of the most vicious campaigns in recent history. Later he strolls from booth to booth at a lobster festival in Maine and risks life and limb to get to the bottom of the lobster question. Then he wheedles his way into an L.A. radio studio, armed with tubs of chicken, to get the behind-the-scenes view of a conservative talkshow featuring a host with an unnatural penchant for clothing that only looks good on the radio. In what is sure to be a much-talked-about exploration of distinctly modern subjects, one of the sharpest minds of our time delves into some of life's most delicious topics.

David Foster Wallace is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Paris Review's Aga Kahn Prize and John Train Prize for Humour, and the O. Henry Award.

'Subversive and hip, with a mind tuned to a different frequency, Wallace is singing a song in a key we've not heard before. Original writers don't fit in boxes and Wallace is sui generis on a stick ... this new collection demonstrates a contemporary American master at work at the extreme edge of the radar, asking question after question about the mad, mad world in which he finds himself' Robert McCrum, OBSERVER 'Amazingly thoughtful and self-deprecating, and, most of all, sincere ... Wallace's voice comes zinging off the page, reinforcing the school of thought that says he's some type of maybe-genius doing something they haven't invented a word for yet' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH '[David Foster Wallace] has the happy skill of being able to write in a fiercely intelligent way whilst being funny and entertaining. Wallace is an original, and that very originality puts you in mind of writers like Hunter S Thompson and Lester Bangs, who also had that strange fusion of an informal tone mixed with a mastery of vocabulary and language ... this is a collection of highly enjoyable and entertaining essays that can be dipped into at will. Just don't forget your dictionary' SUNDAY TRIBUNE